Friday, June 4, 2010

Roundup

Here are a bunch of interesting links I've come across, offered as a service should anyone need any of them in the future. My apologies for not remembering who deserves hat tips for what.

Robert L. Pollock describes mass indoctrination in Turkey. Long live pure hatred.

The Economist reports on AlJazeera, and note the description of a big conference hosted by the station where everyone rejected Israel's right to exist. Across the board.

Do you ever get the feeling the international-law-brigade is pulling wool over your eyes, and that the only constant is that what Israel does is illegal? It turns out that the laws of engagement at sea are actually clear and agreed upon. Ed Morgan, a Canadian law professor, tells about them, and how Israel's actions seem pretty clearly to have been legal. (Don't tell this at the Guardian).

Apropos international law and wool over the eyes: the canard about how Israel still occupies Gaza even though it doesn't gets discussed by David Bernstein (another law professor) at the Volokh Conspiracy. The subject is bleak, but his treatment of it is light, and the comments below the line are actually fun.No, of course Israel doesn't occupy Gaza, and yes, of course the other side will continue to claim it is for ever.

Walter Russel Mead, who is growing on me the more I read him, takes a sober look at the Israel-Palestine conflict. No, there's no happy ending, sadly.

Finally, to top off all this gloom despair, despondency, desolation, dejection and gloom, here's a very nice Jewish story by Victor (who sometimes calls himself Avigdor. Victor is probably his Jewish name, and Avigdor is his Bible-Belt name).

15 comments:

Avigdor said...

The reverse. As we like to say, here in America, Victor is my slave name, and Avigdor my Jewish name.

Thanks Yaacov :)

NormanF said...

Caroline Glick's just released musical short reminds us the Big Lie is heard more often than the truth. We are indeed witness to the Chinese curse that we live in an interesting time.

Anonymous said...

Just found this at Michael Totten - Israelis are just great
- please help all of you to make this video and the melody go viral so that it may serve as a hymn for the pro-Israel ones daring to disturb anti-Isreal demos.
and while at it can somebody please tell me the name of the original - my iPod doesn't take video so I need help in finding the soundtrack on iTunes.
enjoy! - Silke

http://www.michaeltotten.com/2010/06/a-bit-of-humor.php

Anonymous said...

I remember having read somewhere that AlJazeera English threw out or neutralized the Brits etc.

- the piece was too insiderish for me to understand or remember much but it seemed like they didn't like to abide by the old school war horses' rules they hired for start-up very much for long.
Silke
PS: having had imbibed a book launch by a BBC-Afpak-correspondent about to switch to AlJazeera I could have told the genuine old war-horses that they were delusional when they believed they could hold up standards.

Anonymous said...

Victor
great slave name pun

during 3rd Reich slavs were considered only slightly superior to you know who and today there are towns who try to cash in on tourism by parading proudly their early slav past
- here is one for example
- of course they present slavs as ancestors to be proud of ...
http://www.oldenburger-wallmuseum.de/

Silke
who is convinced that the world is a weird place

Anonymous said...

Silke, if I'm not very much mistaken, it's "We are the world", also known as "We heal the world".

Thanks again for the laughter of the day.

Anonymous said...

And here is the link to itunes:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/we-are-the-world-single/id41737866

Anonymous said...

Anon
thanks that's really sweet of you

btw in case you are one of the Anons also into drying up Ibrahim's support - here's another big thank you
(don't worry if you are not, Ibrahim needs being taunted and a bit of paranoia is good for him)

Silke

Anonymous said...

I see. So I will not say that I just forgot to sign the comment. (Who is Ibrahim?)

Thanks, btw, for the Golda Meir picture. My grandfather thought the world of her and filled my ears with tales and stories, but that she was that beautiful in her younger years was new to me.

Judith

Anonymous said...

hi Judith
Ibrahim is an anti-semitic troll who managed to fool Yaacov for a very short time into a mutual blog
- you'll find the link to the episode on Yaacov's Profile - but promise not to visit Ibrahim's or rather Fake Ibrahim's place it might make me blush ;-) - one of his recent headlines included "masturbation" and since then I keep asking and advising him on the matter (I once worked in an engineering office in the time before all that harrassment stuff started and the guys took a liking to you if you proved to be no spoil sport - only verbal stuff though, they were decent fellows)
and thanks for giving me the opportunity to talk about Ibrahim - I guess it will make him gnash his teeth - I'm pretty sure that he snoops around here quite regularly.

as far as I've been able to figure out until now or rather been told by people who know him, Ibrahim's real name is Alberto José Miraya and he once claimed on Amazon to be Jewish. Other than that he is a hapless short story writer, composer, pianist, linguist, wood engineer and math teacher. Also he is just 1,55 m tall, a destiny which makes him perfect for the role of the failed artist. oh and I almost forgot he once bought an expensive piece of jewellery for his wife in NY (he lives in Rosario Argentina) and the jeweller refused to shake the hand of his wife because she was a woman. After he had gotten taunted enough he confessed that the jeweller offered to leave them free from the deal if she objected to it - so after he had made the man look like a moron he finally recalled that he in fact had been a gentleman.

as you have a connection to Golda - the story about her I like best is that Carter tried to talk Bible with her (he is a Sunday School teacher) and she just kept chain smoking. Having once been a real beauty seems to be conducive to a girl's mojo. (it is somewhere on the web, probably while he was promoting that heinous apartheid book of his)

Silke

Bailey Hill Bookshop said...

To add to your list of helpful articles I refer you to Charles Moore's column in todays Saturday Telegraph in London.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/charlesmoore/7803919/Why-has-Israel-disarmed-itself-in-the-battle-for-world-opinion.html
He is always one of the most sympathetic and clear headed in this sea of madness.

Also following the blog down from that there is a blog from instant saver which is very pertinent.

Israel needs to do two things: firstly repeat consistently the objective justifcation for the blockade and their preparedness to check and ship in bona fide supplies. And secondly, people in both the west and Israel need to stop being politically correct and naive and start talking about ISLAMIST TAQIYYA. Taqiyya is officially-mandated deception and lying on the part of Israel's enemies. Israel is not fighting a straight battle of the narratives; it is up against people who have no regard for the truth in what they broadcast, and who are finding - currently - a totally credulous audience in the west.

One of the items discovered on the ship were propaganda clips of "injured" passengers - which presumably were going to be disseminated to the western press once the violent confrontation had been triggered. The only problem: these Pallywood videos had been pre-filmed in daylight, whereas the interception took place at night.

Journalists in the west tend unquestioningly to imbibe the fabricated facts and characterisations pumped at them by cynical foes of Israel. It is time a conversation began in the western media about Taqiyya, and how incidents must be routinely and assiduously screened for any signs of it.

Israel is not a superpower in PR; but neither is it facing remotely a fair fight. It is critical for the western media to level the playing field by becoming alive to Taqiyya; the propaganda battlefield that plays out against Pastor Niemoller's neighbours in Tel Aviv is the one Britain itself will face in Afghanistan and on our own soil.
Report Recommend

Gavin said...

AKUS from Cifwatch might want to look at adding a BBC watch to the website. This link here might interest;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/haveyoursay/2010/05/was_israel_right_to_board_the.html

Huge number of comments, very noticeable for the number of deleted ones early in the piece. What BBC forgot to do was delete the replies to deleted comments and it's possible to get an inkling why there were so few pro-Israel comments showing there, and how the BBC manipulated the opening stanza to be entirely critical of Israel & set the tone for the thread;

# 31. At 3:02pm on 31 May 2010, mtgibby wrote:

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.

Someone replied to mtgibby further down before his comment got removed, this is what mtgibby said;

51. At 3:13pm on 31 May 2010, Rob wrote:

31. At 3:02pm on 31 May 2010, mtgibby wrote:
Israel has a right to defend itself against those attempting to aid terrorists groups (HAMAS) who are trying to destroy Israel.

(usual anti-Israel bollocks cut by Gavin...)

Now what's wrong with a perfectly reasonable comment like that? Few more examples further down, inoffensive comments defending Israel removed. BBC been learning from the Guardian there.

Gavin

Anonymous said...

Bailey
I just read the Moore article you recommended - yes you are right it tries probably honestly to be in favour of Israel which is an unmitigated blessing and I in no way want to belittle that with what else I have to say about it.

Here is the what else:
The guy has not even the vaguest idea of how military operations go. There is a saying "the fog of war" and that is true, even now there isn't yet a clear picture of what happened in sequence. Let's say Michael Oren or even Netanjahu had been at the micros right away. If they had wanted to be honest they would have had nothing, absolutely nothing to say they could have been sure of at that moment. Both came out as soon as something had been reasonably asserted. If you had been following the IDF Press Site you'd know that out there they are watching whatever is put online and pounce on it with the biggest magnifying glasses and the most ridiculous nitpicking possible and you want the Ambassador to the US or the Prime Minister to go public with nothing certain to say? The backlash from that would be even bigger than from a delay of 5 hours. After all human beings what they are it might have been possible that the IDF for once had screwed up. Heaven forbid that ever happens.

There are 2 claims I keep coming across since Monday and both are ridiculous and proof of utter ignorance. (I base my judgment on hours of listening to what's on offer at the Pritzker Military Library) One that Israel is doing bad PR and the other that the IDF botched the operation. I don't care who says it but both are slander in my eyes, maybe slander out of a knee-jerk mea culpa mea maxima culpa attitude and uttered with a genuine pro-Israel heart but still at best treating Israel like the King treated his new wife in Rumpelstilzchen "spin gold out of straw or I'll kill you"

So that was that I am going to calm down now and ask you quietly what is this about Niemöller - I tried to google but seem not to be able to find the story you are referring to.

Silke

Bailey Hill Bookshop said...

Silke

I take your comments about Charles Moore's article and appreciate your comments on the military position. I think Charles Moore would be the kind of person who would take your comments on board. I did comment on his article under the name lindenlea if you want to read that. Charles Moore is a very important journalist; former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Spectator as well as the biographer of Margaret Thatcher. His opinion counts.

Pastor Niemoller can be found on Wikipedia and is the author of

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

That is the context that Charles Moore was referring to him in.

Anyway following other UK blogs Melanie Phillips has a very interesting one on her blog today about the Andrew Marr show - a big Sunday news interview and I am just going to put in this very good comment from someone in the States.

If any one has any doubts about the bias of the British media they should the English language Turkish newspaper - Hurriyet today, Sunday. Here there is a far more balanced debate with many voicing reservations about the Jihadist attitude of their government, the intentions of some on the flotilla, the backing of IHH; even from Fethullah Gulen, the inspiration behind the Erdogan government, says about the activists: “What I saw was not pretty… It was ugly" - adding that the organizers should have sought the permission of the Israeli authorities, rather than confrontation. The newspaper also shows restored photos from phone cards of Israeli soldiers badly beaten, dragged to the lower decks, threatening use of weapons etc. One activist appears to be trying to protect an already badly beaten soldier with a head injury from further assault, but he is alone in taking such an attitude, while someone else is taking a video the scene; another shows what looks like the same soldier falling, or having been pushed, down stairs. They are clearly distressed and under the control of a mob with brutal intent. Also it is noticeable that the soldiers have been stripped of their weapons and protective gear and are in an entirely vulnerable state. On the face of it, any reasonable person would conclude that the soldiers have been effectively kidnapped and violently held; it would not be far fetched to assume that their rescue, reasonable in circumstances of actual and current threat to their lives, led to a rapidly worsening situation. These photos should bury is any more humbug in the West, but of course that will not happen.

I just think those of us who support the truth and care about Israel should stick together and swap helpful information.

Bailey Hill

Anonymous said...

Hi Bailey
I've been back to the article and searched for Niemöller (I know who he was, I'm German), I found nothing but I got intrigued by this in your first comment - maybe the telegraph has changed something about the link?

"against Pastor Niemoller's neighbours in Tel Aviv"

thanks for your "invitation" to the telegraph but I'm already engrossed in more arguing campaigns than I should be, but seem unable to scale down because it is all so enraging. I'm grateful for anybody who makes me feel less alone in all that madness :-)))))

Silke