Tag Archives: Israel

Yom HaZikaron

Posted on May 7, 2008 | Comments Off on Yom HaZikaron

The Remembrance Day commemoration of the IDF fallen, and the soldiers who remain in captivity, was very moving this evening, just up the road from the rancho at the Jewish Community Center. The center’s campus streets are alive with Israeli flags, for Sunday’s Israel Independence Day festival. But Remembrance Day always comes first. This one ended with a showing of "With All Your Soul," an Israeli documentary of the death of Major Roi Klein in last summer’s Second Lebanon War.

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Visiting Israel

Posted on May 2, 2008 | Comments Off on Visiting Israel

Had a nice chat this morning on Skype with Snoopy the Goon in Israel. It was almost like visiting the country itself, though, of course, I never left my chair in the study at the rancho. Mr. Goon, who prefers to remain anonymous, reminded me that I have said I want to visit in person, and I do, but there are too many complications at the moment. Mr. B.’s mom is afraid of going, hostage, I think, to the MSM’s drumbeat of rockets and suicide bombings. Like the way they cover Iraq, all blood and guts, and no in-between. I doubt she would let me take Mr. B. by himself, and otherwise arrangements would have to be made for taking care of him while I was gone. So, for now, an actual visit will remain no more than a future intention. But Skype brought me a little closer. My voice, at least. About fifty kilometers (thirty-one miles) from Jerusalem, in fact.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Israel

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Israel is safer than you think

Posted on May 1, 2008 | Comments Off on Israel is safer than you think

Wright, Farrakhan, Carter, et al, notwithstanding, Israel is doing quite well, thank you very much.

Via Simply Jews. 

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Yom HaShoah

Posted on May 1, 2008 | Comments Off on Yom HaShoah

Today, in the open-air rotunda on the north side of the Texas Capitol, folks in the Austin Jewish community and others will be reading the names of those who were murdered in the Holocaust. Among the readers on this Holocaust Remembrance Day will be University of Texas members of The White Rose Society. Every April they distribute on campus ten thousand white roses to commemorate the approximate number of people the Nazis killed in just one day at their Auschwitz concentration camp alone.

The society takes its name from a non-violent student group at the University of Munich in 1942-43 which distributed anonymous leaflets calling for resistence against Hitler’s regime. Its six core members were captured by the Gestapo and beheaded. Allied bombers later dropped millions of copies of a society leaflet over the whole country. Holocaust Remembrance Day was begun in 1959 by the State of Israel.

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Posted in Israel, Texana

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Under the rocket rain

Posted on March 2, 2008 | Comments Off on Under the rocket rain

As long as the rockets are only falling in Israel, the MSM isn’t too concerned. It’s when Israel fights back that the criticism begins:

"This is ridiculous. If there were no rockets raining on us the IDF wouldn’t have anything to do there. I don’t like the way we are portrayed. We don’t want this war. They are dragging us in. What can we do? There are rockets raining on us daily. But in the media we look like the aggressors."

MORE:  What can you do in the fifteen seconds it takes a rocket to fly the one mile from Gaza to Sderot? Via Treppenwitz. And one more. No, my concern is not for the Palestinians. Let them first stop their attacks, then we’ll talk about concern. The fact is, they never have.

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Posted in Israel, The War

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My shrapnel

Posted on February 22, 2008 | Comments Off on My shrapnel

You’ve read the stories. Where the suicide bomber’s victims are described as dead or injured. The injured are the ones you think about, wondering what sort of injuries. Cripplings? Of mind or of body or both?

"Just like the shrapnel, the bombing also works its slow but sure way out. But it does so through words."

Gila, one of the injured, works her words out simply, seductively, compellingly, in her blog My Shrapnel.

Via Treppenwitz 

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Temple Mount tour

Posted on February 4, 2008 | Comments Off on Temple Mount tour

If, like me, you’ve never been to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, but have always wondered what it was like on the top–where the mosques were planted to conquer the remains of the ancient Jewish temples–and you wanted to go there, then this is a revelation: A downloadable hour and forty-five video tour and lecture by Rabbi Chaim Richman of Israel National Radio. It’s interesting, even inspiring. Someday I hope to make this walking circuit of the outer perimeter of the top of the mount myself. As long as you’re not caught praying, Richman says, the Muslims will allow it. Such toleration, from the "religion of peace." You bet.

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