Original articles on Israel and related issues written by Steven Plaut, a professor at an Israeli university.
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1. The Land of Israel is called in tradition "the land of the Tzvi," where Tzvi is a gazelle, but the expression implies a land of glory.
There is a photo on the news here, I will post if I find it on the web, of a wild gazelle in Haifa leaping in the air with a wall of forest fire flames behind him.
It sums up everything.
2. In America, pusillanimous politicians and appeasers are afraid to say the words "Islamic terrorism".
In Israel, pusillanimous politicians and appeasers are afraid to say the words "Arab arson".
If you are NOT afraid, SHARE!
3. HAIFA;
While the whole world is talking about the arson intifada, there is another side to the story. I find this one of the most fascinating aspects to the story.
My wife is a professor at the Technion. She was stuck on campus for several hours today because of roads closed by the fire.
She received a phone call today from one of her graduate students. He said he owns an apartment that is not occupied near Rambam hospital, far from the fires, and if she and the family are forced by the fires to evacuate we are welcome to use it.
The student is an Arab.
4. Arson - the newest Palestinian human right.
MAKE PALESTINE ANACHRONISTIC AGAIN!
1. Obamacare explained in half a page:
Obama Candy
The Affordable Candy Act is now on the books, guaranteeing free access for youth to candy stores at prices they can afford. The law defines the mix of 9,800 candies that stores must be willing to provide consumers, including fine Belgian chocolates. The cost would be restricted to 75% of the median teenage candy outlay before the Act. Any teenager can sign up for instant access. Stores will be allowed to enter the market and sign up Obamacandy customers.
After a year it turned out that most districts had no stores participating in Obamacandy. A few had a single provider of candy, charging 6 times what was allowed. The other stores refused to participate. The Act had ignored the actual cost of producing and procuring candies.
As Obamacandy is now about to be replaced with Hillarycandy, the problem will be resolved by subsidizing teenagers to sign up for it and subsidizing candy suppliers into joining as providers. So far, none have agreed.
2. From 2013, http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/209905/ten-reasons-obamacare-will-fail-steven-plaut
TEN REASONS OBAMACARE WILL FAIL
The price-controls, shortages and reductions in quality headed our way.
3. The Tessellations: A story
By Steven Plaut
The crisis in New Cyprus actually began in the most seemingly innocuous of manners. New Cyprus was a typical city in the American heartland, consisting of four neighborhoods whose residents were predominantly black and Latino minority members, and 8 other neighborhoods whose residents were predominantly white.
One day in June a proposal was laid before the New Cyprus town council concerning the reconstruction of sidewalks in New Cyprus, where traditional city sidewalks made of asphalt or cement would be replaced by special artistic tessellated colored bricks laid down in a creative pattern. The project promised to turn New Cyprus into the very model of Midwestern aesthetic planning. Part of the costs for the project would come from local businesses, and some were matching federal funds.
The town council approved the proposal with enthusiasm. The only problem was that not all neighborhood sidewalks could be reconstructed at once. Initially funds were sufficient for three neighborhoods only, with the implementation in the other neighborhoods expected to be several years into the future. Being a liberal town in a "blue" state, it was decided to implement the first stage of the program in three out of the four minority neighborhoods, granting them priority for political reasons, and then the fourth minority neighborhood would be among those selected in the second phase 3 years hence.
And so was born the Rainbow Sidewalks project of New Cyprus. The sidewalks were a metaphor for the successful colorful integration of many ethnic strands in the city's heritage.
Three years after the initiation, the second phase began, with three more neighborhoods receiving the colored tessellations. That was followed by two more phases, so that eventually the entire city was treated to the sidewalk reconstruction. Planning and architecture students from all over came to view the project. It was the toast of the media.
All was not to remain so peaceful. Fifteen years after the initiation of the project, after the funds were spent, it was noticed that in the four minority neighborhoods, where the tessellated sidewalks had been constructed somewhat earlier, they were sorely in need of repair and partial rebuilding. In some cases the sidewalks in the minority areas were constructed 15 years before the newer ones in other parts of the city. And they were showing their age. Bricks were missing, some removed by vandals, others victims of tree root expansion and winter storms. They were uneven and some were covered with graffiti.
The gap in the state of maintenance of the tessellations between the white areas and minority neighborhoods became the focus of emotion. Some local leaders in the minority neighborhoods started to criticize the institutional racism that had created the problem. National news shows did specials on the infrastructure gap. It is only the tip of inequality in New Cyprus, opined many locals.
Over time tensions increased. One fall evening a black teenager breaking and entering a white home in New Cyprus was shot and killed by the property owner. Suddenly the years of harmony were forgotten. "Black Lives Matter" commuted in to hold rallies against the violent racism and discrimination in New Cyprus. Classes were suspended at the local State College campus, while classrooms were used to hold a teach-in denouncing the naked discrimination in the tessellated brick sidewalk policy in the city.
When a young hooligan was shot by local police officers while breaking into a store, violence erupted. Stores were looted. Police attacked.
And to draw special attention to the role of the tessellated brick sidewalks where the problems had begun, rioters made a point of vandalizing them, digging up the colored bricks to hurl at police and public service vehicles. The President sent in a fact-finding mission to prepare a report on racial tensions in New Cyprus. It spoke about years of discrimination in the provision of public services there. It called for a new dialogue of tolerance and rebuilding. Federal funds were pledged.
It was decided these would be first used to make infrastructure investments in minority neighborhoods.
1. By concentrating on his role in the Oslo debacle, it is easy to forget the fact that for most of his career, Shimon Peres was a great man. While he was hardly a founding father of the country, as the media are proclaiming in mindless unison, being too young in 1948, Peres played a critical role in Israeli arms procurement, in the creation of the Dimona reactor, in relations with France, even in erection of early settlements in the West Bank. He was Ben Gurion's sidekick in the rightish breakaway Rafi Party, which split from MAPAI.
Because it lasted so long, the majority of his career days were as a skilled diplomat and leader of the Labor Right, and as Ben Gurion's Robin. Had he retired 25 years ago, that would have been his legacy.
But he did not. He spent his last 25 years committing Oslo, endangering the very existence of Israel with his delusions. Hectoring the country that if there was no peace it was because Israelis did not want it enough, insisting to the end that almost all Israelis support the "Two-State Solution," whereas in reality almost none do. Proclaiming that Palestinians seek peace, whereas they seek genocidal jihad.
The obscene reaction to his death among Arabs serves better than anything else to prove how deluded he was.
Arafat wearing military fatigues while collecting his Nobel Peace Prize;
2. Everyone is over-analyzing the debate. Counting numbers of factual errors, about which most people do not care. The real test of who won will be any changes seen in the poll numbers next week.
Am I the only one who picked up on Hillary's comment? Where she mocks Trump for allegedly saying that women do not deserve the same pay as men unless they do the same work as men?
The fact that she considers that idea absurd states volumes. She is so wedded to affirmative apartheid quotas and dumbed down standards that she wants women who do NOT do the same work as men to get the same pay as men.
By the way, did she also say that maybe Trump is not really as rich as he thinks he is?
3. Protectionism does not "create jobs." At most it causes a shift in employment of existing employees from one sector (exports, non-tradables) to another (import substitutes), from more efficient jobs to less efficient jobs. It harms export sectors.
Politicians cannot "create jobs" except using macro tools and structural reform of the labor market. Otherwise, at most they shift employed people from sector to sector.
4. So the Minister of Finance Kahlon wants to bring housing prices down by taxing the ownership of 3 or more apartments by one person.
By his logic, we can get even better results if we simply have a housing ownership tax on ALL apartments and then use the proceeds to help people to afford housing!
(find the fallacy!)
Amos Schocken is the editor of the anti-Israel Haaretz. He took it over from his own father, Gershom Schocken, who ran it from 1939 until 1989 after Amos' grandfather bought the paper in 1937. Gershom was moderate compared with his pro-terror pro-jihad son.
This week was the anniversary of the attack by the Irgun (Etsel) on the military headquarters of the British in the King David Hotel in 1946 before Israeli Independence. See http://www.etzel.org.il/english/ac10.htm. Lots of chatter about it in the press this week.
At the time, Gershom Schocken published a condemnation of the attack in shrill terms that included the comment that if an attack like that on the King David were the price to be paid for Israeli statehood, then maybe it was preferable to forego it. This a year after the Shoah ended. His son seems to think that if the price of Israeli statehood is Israelis burping, then maybe it is preferable to forego it.
I mention this because almost every day Haaretz under the hegemony of Amos Schocken argues that that if mass terrorist attacks by Palestinians against Jewish women and children are the price to be paid for a Palestinian state, it is worth it and only fascists would say otherwise and besides it is not terrorism!!
By the way,TREASON does not sell. Haaretz market share is now down 1/3 to 3.9%of newspaper readers, or about 1% of all Israelis. .
The residuals read it for the Marker.
The latest crisis in Israeli philistinism involves the artsy-phartsy arts "college," Shenkar College. Seems that one of the final projects by a student there was to make a painting of Israel's religious Minister of Justice Ayelet Shaked wearing only her smile. See http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4830419,00.html
The philistine president of the philistine "college" is Yuli Tamir, one-time Minister of Education and Tel Aviv University professor. She ordered the painting removed, not because it was porno defamation of Shaked but because it was disrespectful towards all women.
Huh?
And who exactly is this Yuli Tamir so concerned with the honor of women? She is a world advocate of female circumcisions.
Read all about that here:
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/2274
Yuli Tamir Goes A-Snipping
Can the procedure be performed from the neck up?
Hold on to your -- er -- hats!
Before pouncing upon me for posting a tasteless spoof, let me forewarn you that this is NOT a spoof. It is for real, and any nausea you feel should be directed against the actual cause, not your humble messenger.
Nevertheless you can check it all out for yourself. It is there in black and white. Never mind that the Israeli mainstream media have hidden the story for the past 11 years, trying to protect the rep of the Labor Party's daffiest leader.
Israel's Minister of Education, Yael "Yuli" Tamir, has campaigned publicly for the common form of female mutilation in the Third World known as "Clitoridectomy." It means what you think it means. "Yuli," back in 1996 when she launched her campaign, was a Professor at Tel Aviv University and had just joined Labor. Previously she had been Shulamit Aloni's sidekick in the "RATZ" party. She was in the news the past few weeks for proposing that Arab students in Israel learn from textbooks that portray Israel's very existence and creation as a "Naqba" or catastrophe.
The "Boston Review" is a left-leaning political and literary quarterly in Boston, the sort "anarchists" read. In its summer 1996 issue it ranTamir's own article entitled, "Hands Off Clitoridectomy." Its theme was that all those Westerners expressing revulsion at the practice of slicing up female genitalia in certain parts of the world are themselves evil insensitive chauvistic philistine racists. Westerners should stop criticizing and allow the Third World to carry on with its enlightened multicultural clitorectomies.
She rants thus in the article:
'In discussions about multiculturalism, clitoridectomy is now the trump card, taking over the role once played by cannibalism, slavery, lynchings, or the Indian tradition of Sati: "Is this the kind of tradition you would like to protect?" liberals ask embarrassed multiculturalists, who immediately qualify their cultural pluralism. Clitoridectomy defines the boundary between us and them, between cultures we can tolerate and those we must condemn....
'Furthermore, it seems clear that Western conceptions of female beauty encourage women to undergo a wide range of painful, medically unnecessary, and potentially damaging processes -- extreme diets, depilation, face lifts, fat pumping, silicone implants. Of course, adult women do these things to their own bodies, and, it is said, their decisions are freely made. But would our gut reaction to female circumcision be very different if it were performed on consenting adults? It is not unlikely that girls at the age of 13 or 14, who are considered in traditional societies as adults mature enough to wed and bear children, would "consent" to the mutilation of their bodies if they were convinced that marriage and children were contingent on so doing. Many women who followed the tradition of Sati seemed to do it as a matter of choice....
'But our own culture fosters false beliefs of a similar kind. According to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, some 75 percent of women aged 18-35 believe that they are fat, whereas only 25 percent are medically overweight.1 Still more heartbreaking is the fact that the majority of the 30,000 women who responded to a Glamour questionnaire preferred losing 10-15 pounds to success in work or in love. So the fostering of such beliefs cannot differentiate their culture from our own and explain our hostility to it....A fulfilling sex life is certainly one good, but there are others. ...
'My purpose, however, is not to justify clitoridectomy, but to expose the roots of the deep hostility to it -- to reveal the smug, unjustified self-satisfaction lurking behind the current condemnation of clitoridectomy. Referring to clitoridectomy, and emphasizing the distance of the practice from our own conventions, allows us to condemn them for what they do to their women, support the struggle of their women against their primitive, inhuman culture, and remain silent on the status of women in our society.'
We have a suggestion for the Olmert government. Remove the worst embarrassment in the cabinet by performing a small procedure of SNIP-SNIP!
The Uri Weiss Affair and Bar Ilan's Cowardice
By Steven Plaut
For years the anti-Israel academic Left in Israeli universities has defended the "right" of anyone and everyone to boycott Israel.. The BDS terrorists are just exercising freedom of speech. So are those who organize conferences on why Israel needs to seize existing. Every anti-Semitic loon has the "right" to appear on Israeli campuses, from Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein to Mister Khmer Rouge - Noam Chomsky. In addition, the Left wants everyone to have the right to boycott "settlers," which is why artists and performers who refuse to work across the Green Line must not be denied their cushy governmental subsidies. And of course Ariel University must be boycotted!
The one thing the Left will never tolerate is a boycott of violently anti-Israel leftwing academics. Students at Israeli universities must themselves never be allowed to boycott tenured traitors or radical anti-Israel howling pseudo-academics. THAT would be anti-democratic!
All of which brings us to the Uri Weiss Affair at Bar Ilan this University week. Bar Ilan is usually not the campus of choice for the leftwing ultras in Israel, although it does have a few, like political science prof Menachem Klein, who thinks Sephardim are Jewish Arabs and who wants the Old City of Jerusalem to be judenrein.
Another faculty member at Bar Ilan is one Uri Weiss, who studied law at the radical leftist law school of Tel Aviv University and teaches a course in the Bar Ilan business school. To clarify, Weiss is not a tenure-track appointee but an outside adjunct, which in the world of academia makes him well below the janitors in terms of status or importance. More to the point, adjuncts who do not have a quorum of students for their course get that course cancelled and they do not get paid.
Now Komrade Uri has been in the news a lot in recent days. In particular he published ghoulish attacks against settlers whose children were murdered by terrorists. http://www.timesofisrael.com/anger-at-bar-ilan-lecturer-who-accused-settlers-of-psychosis/ The settlers not only deserved to see their children murdered but are themselves guilty of psychosis for living in places the Palestinians want. Never mind that the Palestinians also want the Sarona Market in Tel Aviv.
Weiss accused IDF soldiers of committing "war crimes" when they raided the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara terror ship in 2010. The flotilla's goal according to him was "to break through a combination of a cruel naval and land siege imposed on an entire population." He also praised controversial Arab Joint List MK Hanin Zoabi, who was aboard the ship and last week caused a furor in the Knesset when she accused IDF soldiers of committing murder during the raid. Weiss has published trash on the Neo-Nazi web magazine "Counterpunch" accusing Israel's Supreme Court of "engaging in apartheid." See http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/01/28/apartheid-at-the-israeli-high-court/ .
In the past, in 2014, in response to his cheerleading for terror, students demanded that they be allowed to drop his course and swap it for a different course with someone else. Back then, Bar Ilan agreed. http://www.haaretz.co.il/news/education/1.2386146 But Bar Ilan quietly let him sneak back in, until his comments this week. Bar Ilan students led by Im Tirtzu Zionists demanded that the university allow them to boycott the course. The problem is at this point in the summer the course is done and there is just the exam to take. The university proposed as compromise that the students who so requested should be allowed to opt out of the exam and just take a "pass" as their course grade. That way the students could still be boycotting the pro-terror anti-Israel lecturer. Freedom to boycott - just what the loony Left says it wants.
Ah but then the radical academics together with Haaretz went on the war path. Why should these students claim the right not to be indoctrinated in anti-Israel hate! Isn't that why we have Israeli universities in the first place?
Bar Ilan's courage lasted less than 24 hours. It then cancelled the deal with the exam and ordered students in the course to take it after all. http://www.iba.org.il/bet/?type=1&entity=1170438
And so the bottom line is this: in Israel Thou must NOT boycott leftwing dingbat faculty members nor get their propaganda courses shut down!!
In the mid-1960s came the Eureka moment the conspiracists had long awaited. At last they had found a Yemenite child who had been put up for illicit adoption to an Ashkenazi family, one from Bulgaria, well probably Ashkenazi cause some Bulgarian Jews are Sephardic. The girl was named Miriam Shukar. She had been born to Yemenite parents in a maabara transit camp, albeit well after the 1950-1 period when all the "kidnappings" were supposed to take place, and the girl was in the hospital before being adopted.
GOTCHA, bellow the conspiracy nuts. PRIMA FACIE proof.
Or is it?
Shukar's parents were in the process of getting divorced. The baby was placed for adoption behind the back of the father but evidently not that of the mother. The adoption was deemed legit by the Commission of Inquiry into the "kidnapping." Miriam grew up and traced her biological parents to meet them. The case was kicked around the media as proof that there were all sorts of other illicit adoptions. No one has found any, although a handful of legit adoptions occurred. If Miriam's adoption was illicit, the problem was the adoption procedure and law in the 1960s and exploitation of it by parents in a divorce conflict, not a grand conspiracy by Ashkenazim who were too stupid to know that the orphanages of Israel were full of Ashkenazi orphans waiting for a home.
No kidnapping. No conspiracy.
2. Loon Alert - you first heard it here:
It is only a question of time before the yemen-kidnap-conspiracy nuts start comparing dismissal of their "theory" to Holocaust Denial.
3. Shifra Shvarts, of Ben Gurion University, who has researched the early years of Israel's medical system, said that she never found "even a shred of evidence" that there was any systematic kidnapping. "I have examined some 30,000-40,000 files form that period," she said. "It is inconceivable that, if so many babies had indeed been kidnapped, I would not have found even a single document that proves it. But I did not." She did find "doctors, nurses, and patients who came from different countries and cultures and could not even communicate in a common language, and almost total chaos."
Ami Hovav, a private investigator who served the first two commissions that examined the fate of the Yemenite babies, also said "there were no kidnappings." Speaking on an Israeli TV program in 2013, Hovav said that he'd investigated 650 cases of missing babies, and he was unable to solve 80 of those cases; the rest of the babies died, "except for a few dozen who were put up for adoption when their parents could not be traced."
"I myself am a Yemenite," he said. "I wanted to find justice. But I never found even a hint of the kidnappings. Babies were transferred from nurseries and hospitals, with staff and patients who couldn't speak the same language."
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/194601/disappeared-yemenite-babies
4. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4825751,00.html
