freedmanslife

ORFTORFU: Not In My Name

2010-03-03T19:06:00.000Z

As the originator of the acronym "ORFTORFU", I am proud to post this fantastic extract from Not In My Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy. It sums up most of the ORFTORFUs in one elegant piece, and I will be adding a permanent link to it. This chapter was written by Chas Newkey-Burden.

‘When my father was a little boy in Poland, the streets of Europe were covered with graffiti, “Jews, go back to Palestine,” or sometimes worse: “Dirty Yids, piss off to Palestine.” When my father revisited Europe fifty years later, the walls were covered with new graffiti, “Jews, get out of Palestine.”’

- Israeli author Amos Oz

Everyone knows the proverb of the three wise monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. As shown throughout this book, the modern hypocrite can be very skilled indeed at seeing and hearing no evil. When women are stoned to death in Arab states, when gay men are brutalised in Caribbean countries, the hypocrites’ ability to cover their ears and look the other way is remarkable.

However, the triumvirate cannot be completed for when it comes to the state of Israel the modern hypocrite just cannot stop speaking evil. They will fail to condemn – and sometimes actually support – terrorists who blow up school buses and pizza parlours. They will march hand in hand with people who – quite literally – fundamentally disagree with every basic political principle they claim to hold dear. They will openly question whether Israel even has the right to exist.

And all along the way, they will show themselves to be devastating hypocrites.

The anti-Israel brigade would have us believe that the motivation for this vitriolic hatred of Israel is a genuine, compassionate concern for the fate of the Palestinian people. But do they really care about the Palestinians, or is their compassion somewhat selective, to put it politely? In reality, are they only interested in Palestinian suffering for as long as it gives them an opportunity to bash Israel?

This hypocrisy is not entirely modern. When the West Bank and the Gaza strip were occupied by Jordan and Egypt, those occupations of ‘Palestinian land’ drew not a whimper of protest from the people who spat blood at the ‘occupation’ of those territories by Israel. When Jordan killed thousands of Palestinians and drove just as many of them from their refugee camps into Lebanon, Israel-bashers saw nothing wrong with that at all.

Neither did they take issue with Kuwait when it deported Palestinians in the aftermath of the 1991 Iraq war. Why were they silent in all these cases? Because none of them gave them a chance to bash Israel, of course.

Well established as this hypocrisy is, in the 21st century it has well and truly taken root as ‘supporting’ the Palestinians had become achingly fashionable. So when Hamas-sparked violence led to Palestinian students at a West Bank university being brutally beaten and shot by their own people, the Westerners who claim to support the Palestinians raised not a single word of protest or concern. Likewise, when Palestinian women are stabbed to death in “honour killings” across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, no anti-Israel Westerners lose a single moment’s sleep on their behalf.

Likewise, when Palestinian children are hospitalised after being caught in the crossfire of fighting between rival Palestinian factions, there is not a word of condemnation from the West. When Palestinian children are deliberately forced into the line of fire by their own people, where is the concern from those in the West who claim to be their biggest supporters? When terrorists are found to be hiding hand grenades in the cradles where Palestinian babies sleep, where is the outrage?

If Israel is accused of torturing Palestinian terror suspects, the hypocrite is indignantly up-in-arms in protest without establishing a single fact but when Palestinians suspected of collaborating are proven to be brutally tortured – sometimes to death – by members of Islamic Jihad, again the silence is deafening.

Similarly, if these people are truly concerned about the Palestinians, then where are their words of praise for Israel when it flings open its hospital doors to them? Just one example: in May 2007 an eight-day-old baby from the Gaza Strip that was suffering with congenital heart complications was treated in a hospital in Israel. An Israeli Magen David Adom ambulance drove into the Gaza Strip, dodging Qassam rockets that were headed for Israel and collected the child for treatment at the Sheba Medical Center in Hashomer, near Tel Aviv. Such cases are far from rare. But I’ve never heard a word of praise for these treatments from any of those in the West who claim to be concerned over the fate of the Palestinians.

It’s the same with the refugee question. The heartbreak that the hypocrite feels for Palestinian refugees is only expressed in the context of slamming Israel. When it’s pointed out to them that the Arab world has done precious little to help the refugees, their interest dwindles. And what of the hundreds and thousands of Jewish refugees who were deported from Arab states? They’ve never received any compensation – as Palestinian refugees have from Israel – and no Westerner has ever cried them self to sleep on their behalf.

Any action taken by Israel to deal with Palestinian terrorists is met with abuse and distortion. The case of Jenin was typical. Following scores of suicide bombings organised from within the Jenin refugee camp, Israel entered the camp in search of the terrorists. As the fighting ended the media leapt into action to demonise Israel’s action. The Guardian described Israel’s actions as “every bit as repellent” as the 9/11 attacks. The Evening Standard cried: “We are talking here of massacre, and a cover-up, of genocide.” The Independent spoke of a “war crime” and The Times claimed there were “mass graves”.

The head of the United Nations Refugee Agency was quickly out of the traps to describe the affair as a “human rights catastrophe that has few parallels in recent history”. The EU was nor far behind in its condemnation.

Let’s examine the facts of this massacre, this genocide. In total 75 people died at Jenin. 23 of these were Israeli soldiers and 52 were Palestinians, almost all of them combatants. By even the most hysterical, loaded standards of language this does not constitute genocide, nor anything of the sort. Indeed, the Palestinian death toll would have been much higher – and the Israeli death toll non-existent – had Israel simply bombed the camp from the air. Instead, to avoid civilian casualties, Israel put their own soldiers at risk, sending them in on foot to search through booby-trapped homes.

When Prime Minister Ariel Sharon next visited Israeli troops, one of them asked him: “Why didn’t we bomb the terrorists from the air? That operation cost the lives of more than 20 of our comrades!” Sharon replied: “That is the painful and inevitable price that those who refuse to abandon their humanity have to pay.” In return for paying the painful price of eschewing air attacks, Sharon and the brave Israeli soldiers who entered a terrorist camp on foot were accused of genocide and massacre and spoken of in the same terms as the 9/11 terrorists.

However, the hypocrisy doesn’t end there. In 2007, another Palestinian camp, which had become swamped with suicide bombers, was attacked. This time, the gloves came off. The camp was surrounded by tanks and artillery that fired indiscriminately at the inhabitants. Snipers backed up this fire. The camp’s water and electricity supplies were cut off. Thousands of innocent Palestinians were forced to flee but not before at least 18 had been killed and dozens injured. The camp itself was reduced to rubble. Ultimately, the fighting killed more than 300 people and forced nearly 40,000 Palestinian refugees to flee.

This time, there was next to no coverage in the British media. There was no talk of genocide or massacre. Rather than condemning the attack, the EU and UN were quick to express their support to the army. Even the Arab League came out in support. So what had changed? You guessed it, this time the army dealing with the camp was not the Israeli army but the Lebanese army. How terrifyingly revealing this is of the hypocrisy of those who claim to care about fate of the Palestinians.

During the fighting, tanks and artillery had also fired at residential areas of Lebanon and civilians were inevitably caught in the crossfire. Just months earlier, the anti-war brigade has been marching through the streets of London to express their concern for the people of Lebanon who were caught in the crossfire of Israel’s fighting with Hezbollah. Strangely, the marchers couldn’t get off their self-righteous backsides when Lebanese civilians were being shot at by Islamic groups: this time, the people of Lebanon could go to hell as far as they were concerned.

How different it had been in the summer of 2006. “We are all Hezbollah now,” the modern hypocrites had chanted as they marched in fury against Israel’s latest battle for survival, as the rockets of that terror group were raining down on its cities and kibbutzim. If “Not In My Name” was an embarrassing slogan, then “We are all Hezbollah now” was little short of insane. How could these marchers, who say they oppose misogyny, tyranny, homophobia and genocide, march in support of an organisation which fanatically and brutally promotes all those things? Because they’re hypocrites, of course, and because their frenzied hatred of Israel has utterly stupefied them. It was embarrassing for them, therefore, when Hezbollah’s leader Hasan Nasrallah told them: “We don’t want anything from you. We just want to eliminate you.” As Martin Amis neatly put it, these demonstrators were “up the arse of the people that want them dead”.

But what were they doing up there? Many no doubt believed that during the war they were backing the little guy of Hezbollah against the big guy of Israel. The truth was somewhat different, though. Hezbollah was no little guy, it was backed by millions of pounds of Iranian and Syrian money. Neither were the two sides of the conflict as clear-cut as they believed. The Israeli Arabs of Haifa spent much of the summer sitting in bunkers to avoid being killed by Hezbollah rockets. Many of these Arabs cheered on the Israeli army throughout the campaign.

Similarly, Ethiopian Jews who Israel had previously bravely airlifted from oppression and starvation were particularly badly hit in Tiberias. How incredible that back in England, many of the groups whose members wear white Make Poverty History wristbands and campaign on Third World debt were willing to cheer as Ethiopians were bombed by Hezbollah.

So no, Israel was not necessarily the Goliath of the conflict. How could a nation the size of Wales, surrounded by millions who want it wiped off the map be a Goliath? However, the courage shown by its soldiers was immense. Lt Colonel Roe Klein was marching at the head of a unit of troops when a Hezbollah man threw a hand grenade at them. Lt Klein jumped on top of the grenade to save his troops, losing his life in the process. Meanwhile, Hezbollah were employing the standard cowardly tactic of hiding among women and children, with wheelchair-bound people a particular favourite.

Throughout Israel, the population showed itself to be as brave and humanitarian as ever. Newspapers were full of classified advertisements in which families offered to house those from the north of the country who were under Hezbollah fire. Ultra-Orthodox Jews took in secular Jews, people living in small flats flung open their doors to large families with pets. The blitz spirit also saw youngsters from the big cities like Jerusalem and Tel Aviv organise treats for Arab children from Galilee. The government arranged for celebrities to visit the bunker-ridden population of the north and even flew in a gay porn star to cheer up gay Israeli troops. As Hezbollah’s rockets rained down over northern Israel, weddings in the region had to be cancelled. So cinema producer Eliman Bardugo organised for those affected to have the chance to be married en masse on the beach in Tel Aviv. Some 50 couples took him up on the offer.

Meanwhile, in London, left-wing people took to the streets to cheer on Hezbollah as it butchered Israeli people. As, for instance, a Hezbollah rocket hit a kibbutz and killed 12 people including an ultra-orthodox Jew who was sitting next to a hippy with pierced ears. The more of these incidents happened, the further the marchers climbed up the arses of the people who wanted them dead.

It would have been familiar territory for many of them. When I went to see the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie in London’s West End, I had sat in an audience littered with white English men and women wearing keffiyeh scarves and some wearing Hamas badges. I see these people – and the marching Hezbollah-wannabes – as terror groupies, a sort of left-wing equivalent of the little boys who play army in playgrounds across England. But these are adults so they really should know better.

I’m not sure the terror groupies look the other way on the topic of Palestinian terrorism. They seem – sorry to say – almost turned-on by it. You surely can’t, after all, overlook something as big as the blowing up of buses or pizza parlours. There is no ‘bigger picture’ regarding people who do that. And why would you appropriate the uniform of the man who backed all that terrorism unless you actively had, well, a bit of a thing for him? For much of the audience, the play about Rachel Corrie must have been a gleefully pornographic experience. They say a picture is worth a thousand words but sometimes a picture can be worth far more than that. There are more than a thousand words in the play, about Corrie, the young US activist who accidentally died during an anti-Israel protest in Gaza in 2003. But none of them shed light on the now-canonised Corrie as much as a photograph taken of her by the Associated Press a month before her death. She was snapped burning an American flag and whipping up the crowd at a pro-Hamas rally.

Naturally, there is no mention of this photograph in the play. Neither is it mentioned that thanks in part to demonstrations of the International Solidarity Movement with who Corrie travelled to the Middle East, the Israel Defence Force was prevented from blocking the passage of weapons which were later shown to have been used to kill Israeli children in southern Israel.

Instead, the play is full of naïve anti-Israel propaganda from the mouth of Corrie. “The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance,” she wrote in 2003 as Palestinian suicide bombs were slaughtering Israelis. Lest we forget who the real star of the story is, towards the end of the play Corrie writes: “When I come back from Palestine I probably will have nightmares and constantly feel guilty for not being here, but I can channel that into more work.” We’re back in self-indulgence territory, aren’t we? Not in my name. My name is Rachel Corrie. We’re all Hezbollah now. Thousands are dying but it’s all about me. The hypocrisy of the audience was depressing. I wonder if any of were even aware that Hamas had danced over Corrie’s grave when she died? To the Palestinians, a dead young American girl was a wonderful publicity coup. Had any of the audience travelled to the Middle East in a Corriesque trip of self-indulgence, the Palestinians would have crossed their fingers in the hope they too died.

As I say, the modern hypocrite is delighted to overlook misogyny, homophobia and brutal clampdowns on all manner of person freedoms in Arab states and the other side of this coin of hypocritical currency is the way they simultaneously overlook the extraordinarily positive record Israel has on such issues. Take the case of Golda Meir, Israel’s first female Prime Minister who took the top job in 1969, just 21 years into the country’s existence and a full decade before England had our first female Prime Minister. In some Arab states, women are not allowed to go to school. In Israel they can become the most powerful person in the country.

Meir herself was well aware of this spectacular contrast. In 1948, when she was a negotiator with the Jewish Agency, she set off on a secret mission to meet King Abdullah of Transjordan. The meeting was secret so she travelled with the Agency’s Arab expert Ezra Danin and posed as his wife. She recalled: “I would travel in the traditional dark and voluminous robes of an Arab woman. I spoke no Arabic at all but as a Moslem wife accompanying her husband it was most unlikely that I would be called upon to say anything to anyone.” How hypocritical it is of those left-wingers in the West that they can hate a country with tales such as these throughout its history.

It’s just the same with gay issues. Left-wingers who say they passionately believe in gay rights manage to put that passion aside when it comes to their view of the only country in the Middle East with a positive record on the issue. A wonderfully positive record, in fact. In 2006, within days of the country’s fighting with Hezbollah ending, I flew to Israel to research a feature on gay life in the Holy Land. Before leaving, I’d been warned by anti-Israel Westerners to expect to find a very homophobic country. Had any of them bothered to visit Israel, they’d have discovered it’s nothing of the sort. Workplace discrimination against gay people is outlawed; the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) has openly gay members; in schools, teenagers learn about the difficulties of being gay and the importance of treating all sexualities equally. The Israel Defence Force has dozens of openly gay officers who, like all gay soldiers in its ranks, are treated equally by order of the government.

The Supreme Court has ruled that gay couples are eligible for spousal and widower benefits. The country has gay football teams. Most mainstream television dramas in Israel regularly feature gay storylines. When transsexual Dana International won the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest as Israel’s representative, 80 per cent of polled Israelis called her “an appropriate representative of Israel”.

These facts are there for all to see but it is only on visiting Israel that you discover how happily the different sections of the society coexist. I interviewed a gay Israeli man on Tel Aviv’s “Hilton beach” – it is opposite the Hilton hotel – which is also known as the “gay beach”, where men openly check each other out and pick each other up. It is neighboured by the city’s religious beach which has separate bathing days for men and women. And all this is just yards from Tel Aviv’s Independence Park, which is the main gay cruising area in Tel Aviv. The cruising park in Jerusalem has the same name.

Elsewhere in Tel Aviv is the House of Freedom. Opened in the late 1990s, this is a shelter for gay, lesbian and transgender youngsters between the ages of 12 and 18 who have been thrown out of home after coming out to their parents. At the House they are counselled by social workers who then visit the parents and attempt to bring about reconciliation. Those attempts are often successful, each year hundreds of gay youngsters return to a better home thanks to this remarkable institution.

And everywhere you go in the city, gay men walk hand in hand more openly that they even would in London’s Soho. It is staggering that Western left-wingers who claim to believe in gay rights can be so furiously opposed to tolerant Israel. The tolerance is not confined to Tel Aviv, either. When some in Jerusalem opposed the staging of the gay pride parade in the capital in 2007, the media presented a city on the brink of civil war. I happened to be in Jerusalem that week – though I didn’t attend the parade – and I witnessed no unrest. Perhaps the strongest opposition I witnessed to the parade came from a taxi driver. I asked him what he thought about the parade and he sighed deeply before saying: “Oh it was terrible for the traffic.” He was right, too!

By hating Israel, the pro-gay-rights left are not just proving to be hypocritical, they are also endangering the one hope that gay Palestinians have. The leading gay rights organisation in Israel organises Arabic gay evenings where gay Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza strip are invited to come and party with Israelis – and many take up the invitation. “We are their only hope,” says one of the organisers. “If they came out where they live, they would be killed but they can come and party with us in Israel.” As has been documented by human rights groups, gay Palestinians are routinely tortured and murdered by their own people. They often flee to the safety of Israel.

The attraction that Israel should hold for believers in the rainbow alliance doesn’t end with its record on women and gay men. I remember on a road trip from the Dead Sea to Tel Aviv marvelling at a quartet of an ultra-orthodox Jew, an Arab, a uniformed Israeli soldier and a mini-skirt wearing girl in her late teens all engaging in friendly chit-chat as they waited for some traffic lights to change. Such sights are far from uncommon as Israel is home to one of the planet’s most diverse people: dreadlocked Ethiopians, and their fellow Africans from Yemen, Egypt and Morocco exist alongside people from Iraq, Iran, Russian and Latin America. Then there are Asians from the Far East and Israeli Arabs, the latter group enjoying more personal freedoms in Israel than they would in any Arab state.

My experiences in Israel might seem surprising to the reader who hasn’t been there – particularly given the predominance of reports casting the country as a villainous, apartheid state. There exists a peculiar unwillingness to accept good news from Israel, which contrasts with the way that paradigm-shifting reports on ‘The hidden modernity of Tehran’ are welcomed with open arms. When I attempted to include the scene that I had witnessed at the traffic lights in a magazine feature I wrote about the research trip to Israel, I had to go through an exasperating discussion with the commissioning editor. He didn’t seem to know that Israeli Arabs exist and insisted that the scene I described couldn’t have occurred. He’d never been to Israel but was quite sure that he was right and I was wrong.

He was in good company in his blissful ignorance. Within hours of my return from the trip, I received a call from a journalist acquaintance who asked me with genuine shock: “What’s all this about you going to Israel?” He said that a mutual journalist acquaintance of ours was “absolutely disgusted” with me for going there and that he hoped I was “going to put the boot in” when I wrote my articles. These were not close acquaintances, I hadn’t even spoken to one of them for nearly nine years and it must have taken them some digging around to find my new telephone number. They obviously thought it was worth the trouble to have a dig at a writer who was friendly to Israel. Apparently the “absolutely disgusted” man – a weekly columnist on a high-profile magazine – has since tried to get an article published that claims that Tony Blair murdered Yasser Arafat.

The editor of another magazine once told me I was not allowed to write that Yasser Arafat turned down Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David in 2000. I asked why and he replied “because of a need for balance.” I pointed out that nobody, including Arafat, has ever disputed that he rejected Barak’s offer and the editor replied: “Well, I don’t know about that but you still can’t write it.” The article in question was an “opinion” piece and taking sides was the order of the day each week in that column. Not if the article was about Israel, it seemed. Get this for hypocrisy, though: the same magazine had happily published articles accusing Israel of “war crimes” and carried advertising accusing Israel of apartheid policies. Clearly, the need for balance is relative.

Not that there was much balance in the motion the National Union Of Journalists passed in 2007 to boycott Israel. As a writer I felt shame and despair at this motion. Those emotions of shame and despair were not joined by shock, though, because much of the British media has long been absorbed by a blind hatred of Israel.

Broadsheet newspapers print editorials that are so biased and distorted that Osama Bin Laden would probably blush at them and say: “Steady on! We can’t print that!” The BBC refuses to describe suicide bombers who blow up buses full of Israeli schoolchildren as “terrorists” even though it has used that term to describe bombers in London, Iraq and Indonesia. One of its correspondents told a Hamas rally that he and his colleagues were “waging the campaign shoulder-to-shoulder with the Palestinian people”.

Why did the NUJ choose Israel for a boycott? The country has an entirely free press. If the NUJ wanted to boycott a country, then Russia, China, Zimbabwe and Pakistan would have been more sensible options, given their record on press freedom. The timing, too, was ridiculous. Shortly before the motion was passed, BBC journalist Alan Johnston was kidnapped by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. So why did the NUJ respond to this by boycotting Israel?

The coverage of the Alan Johnston case was riddled with hypocrisy. Every day, the BBC devoted acres of space to the story. Yet the BBC largely ignored the plight of young Israeli soldiers who were kidnapped by Palestinians. Indeed, the BBC refuses to even use the term “kidnap” in relation to the snatching of teenager Corporal Gilad Shalit, preferring to say he was “captured”. I was in Israel during Johnston’s captivity and had a conversation about his case with an Arab from the West Bank. He said: “I’m surprised that they took someone from the BBC. Everyone knows the BBC is totally biased for the Palestinians. I bet they’re not so for the Palestinians now, though!” When I told him that the BBC was just as pro-Palestinian as ever, he raised his eyes to the heavens. “That’s strange,” he said.

True. But then Auntie Beeb has long shown its true colours on the conflict. A 2007 leaked internal BBC memo written by Bowen blamed Israel for all the woes of the Gaza Strip, despite the fact that Israel had withdrawn two years earlier from Gaza!

Hmm, what we need is a man who can effortlessly show these BBC buffoons just how hypocritical they are. Step forward and take a bow Benjamin Netanyahu, former Prime Minister of Israel and all-round hero of both myself and my co-author. He was interviewed on the BBC during the 2006 Hezbollah conflict and made mince meat of his quizzer:

Interviewer: “How come so many more Lebanese have been killed in this conflict than Israelis?”

Netanyahu: “Are you sure that you want to start asking in that direction?”

Interviewer: “Why not?”

Netanyahu: “Because in World War II more Germans were killed than British and Americans combined, but there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the war was caused by Germany’s aggression. And in response to the German blitz on London, the British wiped out the entire city of Dresden, burning to death more German civilians than the number of people killed in Hiroshima.

“Moreover, I could remind you that in 1944, when the RAF tried to bomb the Gestapo Headquarters in Copenhagen, some of the bombs missed their target and fell on a Danish children’s hospital, killing 83 little children.

“Perhaps you have another question?”

Perhaps indeed! Perhaps the academics who chose to boycott Israel at the same time as the NUJ might have asked themselves some questions too. In 2007, they voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions in a protest supposedly on behalf of the Palestinians. Meanwhile, back in the real world a young Jordanian-Palestinian woman, was graduating with a Masters degree from Ben Gurion University in Israel. Dana Rassas was trained by the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura in the Negev, and then went on to study the Israeli water desalination program at the Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies at Ben Gurion University. As a result of her studies in Israel, Rassas is now helping to solve Jordan’s water problems. If they boycotters had their way, she’d never have had any of these chances.

To take a wider view, why is it that so many people who cling to the notion of human rights when considering the plight of the Palestinians couldn’t give a hoot about other groups around the world like the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Armenians and the Chechens? Is it because these groups didn’t have the fortune of being in dispute with Jewish people? Either way, it is indisputable that the incessant focus of the human rights movement on the actions of Israel has allowed genuinely horrific human rights abuses in other parts of the world to go unnoticed.

As we keep seeing, whatever it does Israel cannot win and so we end up returning to the graffiti seen by Amos Oz’s father in Poland. First: go back to Palestine, then: get out of Palestine. Anti-semitism has always been dominated by contradictions. The Jews have been attacked for being both communist schemers and capitalists plotting to take over the world. They can’t stop sticking their noses into others’ business yet they also must be attacked for keeping themselves to themselves. They were taunted for being too weak when the Germans tried to eliminate them from the face of the earth and are now slammed for being too strong when the Arabs try the same trick.

Ironically, for all the attention and criticism that Western hypocrites throw at Israel, the biggest questioners of the state and its actions are Israelis themselves. Israel’s Supreme Court is a thorn in the side of the government and army and frequently overrules both. It regularly examines petitions brought by Palestinian people and rules in their favour. Many of its judgements have restricted the options open to the army and in passing them, the Court has acknowledged that its rulings will cause Israeli loss of life but insisted that such steps are needed in the interests of humanity.

When terrorist leaders who have arranged the slaughter of Israeli people are killed by the Israel Defence Force, there is no cheering in the street as is seen among Palestinians when another school bus is blown up by a suicide bomber, a favourite tactic of theirs as seen in November 2000. Instead, commissions of inquiry are set up to examine whether the elimination of these men who wanted to blow murder their children was ethical and correct. On and on it goes, this relentless self-examination by a country that has faced abuse, distortion and calls for its destruction since the very minute it was established in 1948.

But then that’s the thing about Israel: strong, plucky, moral, deeply self-critical yet determinedly happy and upbeat, it is everything the modern hypocrite is not. I love it.

Not In My Name: A Compendium of Modern Hypocrisy, written by Chas Newkey-Burden and Julie Burchill, is published by Virgin Books.

Pavlov's sheep

2010-03-02T22:01:00.002Z

This is an excerpt from an article in the Jerusalem Post today. I have highlighted certain passages for the morally impaired (these people are identified by the grating sound of repetitive bleating, usually a noise like "paaaaaaasport, paaaaaaasport"), as certain media and individuals still don't seem to have their priorities straight on what are the important things to take away from this story...

Arab countries may be complicit in the January 19 assassination of Hamas terror chief Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Hamas sources said on Tuesday, according to various reports.

Citing a report by Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Reuters quoted Hamas official Mahmoud Nasser as saying that Jordanian and Egyptian intelligence agencies had probably tracked Mabhouh prior to his assassination.

Nasser told the newspaper that there was evidence showing that Mabhouh had been targeted by moderate Arab countries because he had handled sensitive information concerning the activities of Hamas and other Islamist elements. He added that that assassination may have been carried out earlier than planned.

According to the newspaper, Nasser is in charge of Iran's ties with Hamas and had worked closely with Mabhouh prior to the latter's death.

Additionally, in an interview with Hamas's Al Aksa radio station from Damascus, Nasser confirmed Israeli claims that his boss had supplied weapons to Palestinian terrorists.

Nassar said Mabhouh "never stopped thinking about how to fight the [Israeli] occupation by supplying quality weapons to the Palestinian fighters. "

The aide also described how al-Mabhouh celebrated killing two Israeli soldiers in the mid-1980s by standing on one of the corpses.

Nonetheless, you bleaters will no doubt carry on with your Pavlovian reaction to the mention of the dirty word Is***l. Paaaaaaasport! Paaaaaaasport!

UN consistency - more holes than a Swiss cheese

2010-02-27T00:27:00.000Z

In one of the biggest and most glaring cases of ORFTORFU ever, a senior spokesman of the UN has immediately and in the strongest terms, quite rightly condemned the outrageous statements of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, which included such morsels as "Let us wage jihad against Switzerland, Zionism and foreign aggression"and "Any Muslim in any part of the world who works with Switzerland is an apostate, is against Muhammad, God and the Koran."

What makes this a nailed-on ORFTORFU is that it took a split second for the UN to come to the defence of Switzerland, which didn't even bother to be a member of the UN until 2002, whilst at the same time:

- continuing to exhibit frightening institutional bias against Israel, which the UN actually CREATED through its vote in 1947

- keeping silent about the outrageous statements made by Muslim and Arab leaders as well as numerous other people of influence

- failing to rebut Gaddafi's simultaneous mention of Zionism and its obvious implication to mean Israel (and perhaps Jews everywhere), despite the revocation by the UN, under duress, of their Zionism = Racism policy in 1990

- electing Libya to chair the ruddy UN Human Rights Commission!

- actively promoting the same agenda as Gaddafi via UNRWA, an organisation that inculcates Palestinian children to wage a similar jihad against the "Zionist Entity" (we don't sully our tongues by saying the word Israel)

Absolute, rank hypocrisy. As usual. And people wonder why Israel couldn't give a shit what the UN thinks.

The Fatah fairy tale

2010-02-21T15:22:00.000Z

A fascinating article by Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:

Israel's is the only government that can force the rest of the world to recognize that Abbas is not an ally.

Fahmi Shabaneh is an odd candidate for dissident status. Shabaneh is a Jerusalemite who joined the Palestinian Authority’s General Intelligence Service in 1994.

Working for PA head Mahmoud Abbas and GIS commander Tawfik Tirawi, Shabaneh was tasked with investigating Arab Jerusalemites suspected of selling land to Jews. Such sales are a capital offense in the PA. Since 1994 scores of Arabs have been the victims of extrajudicial executions after having been fingered by the likes of Shabaneh.

A few years ago, Abbas and Tirawi gave Shabaneh a new assignment. They put him in charge of a unit responsible for investigating corrupt activities carried out by PA officials. They probably assumed a team player like Shabaneh understood what he was supposed to do.

Just as Abbas’s predecessor, Yasser Arafat, reportedly had full dossiers on all of his underlings and used damning information to keep them loyal to him, so Abbas probably believed that Shabaneh’s information was his to use or ignore as he saw fit.

For a while, Abbas’s faith was well-placed. Shabaneh collected massive amounts of information on senior PA officials detailing their illegal activities. These activities included the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars in international aid; illegal seizure of land and homes; and monetary and sexual extortion of their fellow Palestinians.

Over time, Shabaneh became disillusioned with his boss. Abbas appointed him to his job around the time he was elected PA head in 2005. Abbas ran on an anti-corruption platform. Shabaneh’s information demonstrated that Abbas presided over a criminal syndicate posing as a government. And yet rather than arrest his corrupt, criminal associates, Abbas promoted them.

Abbas continued promoting his corrupt colleagues even after Hamas’s 2006 electoral victory. That win owed to a significant degree to the widespread public revulsion with Fatah’s rampant corruption.

With Israel and the US lining up to support him after the Hamas victory, Abbas sat on his hands. Enjoying his new status as the irreplaceable “moderate,” he allowed his advisers and colleagues to continue enriching themselves with the international donor funds that skyrocketed after Hamas’s victory.

Since 2006, despite the billions of dollars in international aid showered on Fatah, Hamas has consistently led Fatah in opinion polls. Rather than clean up their act, Abbas and his Fatah colleagues have sought to ingratiate themselves with their public by ratcheting up their incitement against Israel. And since Abbas has been deemed irreplaceable, the same West that turns a blind eye to his corruption, refuses to criticize his encouragement of terrorism. And this makes sense. How can the West question the only thing standing in the way of a Hamas takeover of Judea and Samaria?

Recently, Shabaneh decided he had had enough. The time had come to expose what he knows. But he ran into an unanticipated difficulty. No one wanted to know. As he put it, Arab and Western journalists wouldn’t touch his story for fear of being “punished” by the PA.

In his words, Western journalists “don’t want to hear negative things about Fatah and Abbas.”

Lacking other options, Shabaneh brought his information to The Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh.

On January 29, the Post published Abu Toameh’s interview with Shabaneh on our front page. Among other impressive scoops, Shabaneh related that Abbas’s associates purloined $3.2 million in cash that the US gave Abbas ahead of the 2006 elections. He told Abu Toameh how PA officials who were almost penniless in 1994 now have tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars in their private accounts. He related how he watched in horror as Abbas promoted the very officials he reported on. And he showed Abu Toameh a video of Abbas’s chief of staff Rafik Husseini naked in the bedroom of a Christian woman who sought employment with the PA.

If Shabaneh’s stories were about Israeli or Western officials, there is no doubt that they would have been picked up by every self-respecting news organization in the world. If he had been talking about Israelis, officials from Washington to Brussels to the UN would be loudly calling for official investigations. But since he was talking about the Palestinians, no one cared.

The State Department had nothing to say. The EU had nothing to say. The New York Times acted as if his revelations were about nothing more than a sex scandal.

As for Abbas and his cronies, they were quick to blame the Jews. They accused Shabaneh – their trusted henchman when it came to land sales to Jews – of being an Israeli agent. And when Channel 10 announced it was broadcasting Husseini’s romp in the sack, Abbas demanded that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu bar the broadcast, (apparently forgetting that unlike his PA-controlled media, Israel’s media organs are free).

SHABANEH’S ODYSSEY from PA regime loyalist to dissident is an interesting tale. But what is more noteworthy than his personal journey is the world’s indifference to his revelations.

Just as the mountains of evidence that Fatah officials – including Shabaneh’s boss Tirawi – have been actively involved in terrorist attacks against Israel have been systematically ignored by successive US administrations, Israeli governments and EU foreign policy chiefs, so no one wants to think about the fact that Fatah is a criminal syndicate. The implications are too devastating.

Since at least 1994, successive US administrations goaded by the EU have made supporting Fatah and the PA the centerpiece of their Middle East policy. They want to receive proof that Fatah is a terrorist organization that operates like a criminal organization like they want – in the immortal words of former EU Middle East envoy Christopher Patten – “a hole in [their] head.”

As for the Western media, their lack of interest in Shabaneh’s revelation serves as a reminder of just how mendacious much of the reportage about the Palestinians and Israel is. For 16 years, the American and European media have turned blind eyes to Palestinian misbehavior while expansively reporting every allegation against Israel – no matter how flimsy or obviously false. When the history of the media’s coverage of the Middle East is written it will constitute one of the darkest chapters in Western media history.

But while the American and European allegiance to the fable of Fatah as the anchor of the two-state solution accounts for the indifference of both to Shabaneh’s disclosures, what accounts for the Netanyahu government’s behavior in this matter?

Shortly after the Post first published Shabaneh’s story, the PA issued an arrest warrant against him. He was charged among other things with “harming the national interests” of the Palestinians.

But Abbas’s henchmen couldn’t put their hands on him.

Israel had already arrested him.

Shabaneh was booked for among other things, illegally working for the PA. It is illegal for Israeli residents to work for the PA. But oddly, although Israeli authorities have known whom he worked for since 1994, until his disclosures were made public, they never saw any pressing need to arrest or prosecute him.

Official Israel has nothing to say about Shabaneh’s information. Instead, in the wake of his disclosures, everyone from Netanyahu to Defense Minister Ehud Barak has continued to daily proclaim their dedication to reaching a peace accord with Abbas. This even as Abbas and his cronies accuse Israel of using the “traitorous” Shabaneh to pressure Abbas into negotiating with Israel.

There are two explanations for Israel’s behavior. First, there is the fact the presence of Barak and his Labor Party in the government makes it impossible for Netanyahu and his Likud Party to abandon the failed two-state paradigm of dealing the PA. If Netanyahu and his colleagues were to point out that the PA is a kleptocracy and its senior officials enable terror and escalate incitement to deflect their public’s attention away from their criminality, (as well as because they want to destroy Israel), then Labor may bolt the coalition.

Beyond that, there is no doubt that an Israeli denunciation of Abbas and his mafia would enrage the US and EU. Apparently, Netanyahu – who to please President Barack Obama accepted the two-state paradigm in spite of the fact that he opposes it, and suspended Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria despite the fact that knows doing this is wrong – is loath to pick a fight by pointing out the obvious fact that the PA is a corrupt band of oppressive thieves.

Shabaneh argues that due to PA corruption, Hamas remains the preferred alternative for Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. In his view, the only reason Hamas has yet to take over Judea and Samaria is the IDF presence in the areas.

The strategic implications of his statement are clear. Far from being a bulwark against Hamas, Abbas empowers the Iranian-backed jihadist force. The only bulwark against Hamas is Israel.

WHAT THIS means is that Israel must end its support for Abbas. Every day he remains in power, he perpetuates a myth of Palestinian moderation. As a supposed moderate, he claims that Israel should curtail its counterterror operations and let his own “moderate” forces take over.

To strengthen Abbas, the US pressures Israel to curtail its counterterror operations in Judea and Samaria. To please the US, Israel in turn cuts back its operations.

Abbas’s men fight Hamas, but they also terrorize journalists, merchants and plain civilians who fall in their path, and so strengthen Hamas. To ratchet up public support for Fatah, Abbas escalates PA incitement against Israel. This then encourages his own forces to attack Israelis – as happened last week when one of his security officers murdered IDF St.-Sgt. Maj. Ihab Khatib. And so it goes.

It is clear that Barak will threaten to bolt the coalition if Netanyahu decides to cut off Abbas. But if he left, where would he go? Barak has nowhere to go. He will not be reelected to lead his party. And if Labor leaves the coalition, Netanyahu would still be far from losing his majority in Knesset.

As for angering the White House, the fact of the matter is that by pointing out that Abbas is not a credible leader, Israel will make it more difficult for Obama and his advisers to coerce Israel into making further concessions that will only further empower Hamas.

Shabaneh told the Post that he fully expects the PA to try to kill him. But in a way, the yawns that greeted his story are his best life insurance policy. Until the world stops believing that Fatah is indispensable, no one will listen to the Shabanehs of the world and so the PA has no reason to kill him.

Just as the Post was the only media organ that would publish his story, so the Israeli government is the only government that can force the rest of the world to recognize that Abbas is not an ally. But to do that, the government itself must finally break with the fairy tale of Fatah moderation.

Should've gone to Specsavers

2010-02-18T17:47:00.000Z

Genius. Hat tip to Mr Sacerdoti.

The strong horse has bolted

2010-02-17T21:28:00.000Z

Thought this article was interesting in the light of the Dubai incident. It occurs to me that Israel wants to make it quite clear that it still has the odds-on favourites in its stable, and that its opponents are lame. Clichés and puns dispensed with, my point is that many of us have been trying to explain the thesis of Israel toughing it out in a rough neighbourhood for some time, to our well-meaning but naive and wet liberal Western friends. This piece explains it pretty succinctly.

In the Mideast, bet on a strong horse

BY DANIEL PIPES
16/02/2010 22:01

Lee Smith presents pan-Arab nationalism as an effort to transform mini-horses of national states into single super-horse.

The violence and cruelty of Arabs often perplexes Westerners. Not only does the leader of Hizbullah proclaim “We love death,” but so too does, for example, a 24-year-old man who last month yelled “We love death more than you love life” as he crashed his car on the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in New York City. As parents in St. Louis honor-killed their teenage daughter with 13 stabs of a butcher’s knife, the Palestinian father shouted “Die! Die quickly! Die quickly! ... Quiet, little one! Die, my daughter, die!” – and the local Arab community supported them against murder charges.

A prince from Abu Dhabi recently tortured a grain dealer whom he accused of fraud; despite a video of the atrocity appearing on television internationally, the prince was acquitted while his accusers were convicted.

On a larger scale, one accounting finds 15,000 terrorist attacks since 9/11. Governments throughout the Arabic-speaking countries rely more on brutality than on the rule of law. The drive to eliminate Israel still persists even as new insurrections take hold; the latest one has flared up in Yemen.

Several excellent attempts to explain the pathology of Arab politics exist; my personal favorites include studies by David Pryce-Jones and Philip Salzman. Now add to these The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (Doubleday, $26), an entertaining yet deep and important analysis by Lee Smith, Middle East correspondent for the Weekly Standard.

Smith takes as his proof text Osama bin Laden’s comment in 2001, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” What Smith calls the strong-horse principle contains two banal elements: Seize power and then maintain it. This principle predominates because Arab public life has “no mechanism for peaceful transitions of authority or power sharing, and therefore [it] sees political conflict as a fight to the death between strong horses.” Violence, Smith observes, is “central to the politics, society, and culture of the Arabic-speaking Middle East.” It also, more subtly, implies keeping a wary eye on the next strong horse, triangulating and hedging bets.

Smith argues that the strong-horse principle, not Western imperialism or Zionism, “has determined the fundamental character of the Arabic-speaking Middle East.” The Islamic religion itself both fits into the ancient pattern of strong-horse assertiveness and then promulgates it. Muhammad, the Islamic prophet, was a strongman as well as a religious figure. Sunni Muslims have ruled over the centuries “by violence, repression, and coercion.”

Ibn Khaldun’s famous theory of history amounts to a cycle of violence in which strong horses replace weak ones. The humiliation of dhimmis daily reminds non-Muslims who rules.

Smith’s prism offers insights into modern Middle East history. He presents Pan-Arab nationalism as an effort to transform the mini-horses of the national states into a single super-horse and Islamism as an effort to make Muslims powerful again. Israel serves as “a proxy strong horse” for both the US and for the Saudi-Egyptian bloc in the latter’s cold-war rivalry with Iran’s bloc. In a strong-horse environment, militias appeal more than do elections. Lacking a strong horse, Arab liberals make little headway. The US being the most powerful non-Arab and non-Muslim state makes anti-Americanism both inevitable and endemic.

WHICH BRINGS us to policies by non-Arab actors: unless they are forceful and show true staying power, Smith stresses, they lose. Being nice – say, withdrawing unilaterally from southern Lebanon and Gaza – leads to inevitable failure. The Bush administration rightly initiated a democratization project, raising high hopes, but then betrayed Arab liberals by not carrying through. In Iraq, the administration ignored advice to install a democratically minded strongman.

More broadly, when the US government flinches, others (e.g., the Iranian leadership) have an opportunity to “force their own order on the region.” Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese leader, has half-seriously suggested that Washington “send car bombs to Damascus” to get its message across and signal its understanding of Arab ways.

Smith’s simple and near-universal principle provides a tool to comprehend the Arabs’ cult of death, honor killings, terrorist attacks, despotism, warfare and much else. He acknowledges that the strong-horse principle may strike Westerners as ineffably crude, but he correctly insists on its being a cold reality that outsiders must recognize, take into account, and respond to.

The writer (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and Taube distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

What I don't buy in Dubai

2010-02-15T20:28:00.000Z

Let's get this straight. A Hamas terrorist is in Dubai to buy weapons and ship them to Gaza. Hamas admit this. Dubai admit this. He has blood on his hands. Hamas admit this. Dubai admit this. The guy winds up dead in strange circumstances, and arrest warrants are issued for 11 foreigners (British, Irish, French and German apparently), while 2 Palestinians are arrested in Dubai.

Immediately, everyone blames Mossad; even the police chief in Dubai has "no doubts that it was 11 people holding these passports, and we regret that they used the travel documents of friendly countries." So what he clearly means by this odd "regret" is that naughty old Mossad have gone and abused the passports of these nice friendly countries as part of their nefarious plot.

Now perhaps I missed something here. The guy was a known Hamas terrorist, in Dubai to buy arms. Hamas is a terrorist organisation proscribed by all those European countries, and selling them arms is completely prohibited. How is it that this police chief has found it so easy to trace the 11 foreigners and arrest the 2 Palestinians, and blame Mossad for the guy's death, but had no idea that a known terrorist was in his country shopping for guns?

This was a man wanted for the deaths of 2 Israelis, in the middle of an act of war against Israel through the purchase of weaponry to use against it from Gaza. This was also a man who had many other enemies (including Palestinian "brothers" willing to help kill him, it seems).

Let's assume for a minute that Mossad did pull this off (kol hakavod boys!).

We can glean from the press reports that the hit squad were in "hot pursuit" from Syria, that the chap was not planning a beach vacation, and that the Dubai security forces were either blissfully unaware of his presence and intentions, or more likely, turning a blind eye. We can also surmise that showing their Israeli passports at the border might have delayed their "hot pursuit" by say, 10 or 20 years.

Perhaps we can also assume that nobody much in British, Irish, French or German circles gives a crap if the Israelis do their dirty work for them, using naughty fake or stolen passports, or even ones supplied by said countries on a nod and a wink. They get to have their cake and eat it; dead Hamas terrorist prevented from buying arms in breach of EU embargo, AND blame the sneaky Israelis to boot!

But for the moment we don't know if it has anything to do with Mossad (pa'am acher, boys!). Notwithstanding this, the world's media are mainly interested in this story because that is the direction it's going in.

What I find just incredible is that the world's media have not picked up on the enormous irony of Hamas continuing to play the victim of Israeli "sieges" and "massacres", whilst having the time and resource to send operatives to Dubai (and apparently he was en route to Iran next) to buy and smuggle weapons. THAT is the real story here - the exposé on Hamas's priorities.

And somehow the world just keeps on buying the Hamas sob-story, even though it is, like Dubai, totally bankrupt and built on sand.

Tonge wronge - a letter to Nick Clegg

2010-02-11T18:56:00.000Z

Dear Mr Clegg

I note with considerable distress that your erstwhile former MP and current Lib Dem life peer in the House of Lords, Baroness Tonge, has once again gone on an excursion far beyond the bounds of UK politics into the contentious area of Middle Eastern affairs. Whilst I do not agree with her general opinion on Israel/Palestine, I do in that most British liberal way tend to support her right to it, however consistently misinformed it is. However, on this occasion, she has crossed even her own incredibly high water mark for civilized, informed debate on this matter, and possibly into the realm of anti-Semitism. I do not use this term lightly.

In her recent statement she made on an article published in the Palestine Telegraph, of which she is a patron, Baroness Tonge has knowingly perpetuated a classic blood libel against Israel, the Jewish state. The article was based on outlandish allegations, that in turn were predicated on an earlier error-strewn story, which dredged up and manipulated a case many years ago in Israel that was similar to the Alder Hey scandal in the UK, with similar enquiries and changes of policy to reduce the chances of a repetition. This earlier story was dressed up as “Israelis harvesting Palestinian organs”, and the article in the Palestine Telegraph relayed a similarly sinister message about the Israeli involvement in Haiti.

Baroness Tonge gives herself a derisory get-out clause by claiming that “To prevent allegations such as these — which have already been posted on YouTube — going any further, the IDF and the Israeli Medical Association should establish an independent inquiry immediately to clear the names of the team in Haiti.”

Your spokesman claims that neither you nor she actually give credence to these claims, but this is totally disingenuous. The mere fact that she makes such a statement shows her underlying views on the subject to be absolutely clear.

As Monroe Palmer, chair of the Lib Dem Friends of Israel, pointed out: “On this basis, there could be calls for an investigation to discover the ‘truth’ in the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Baroness Tonge is not just an independent writer. She was an MP in your party, and has had a title bestowed upon her with your party’s support. Her views carry more weight, as they can be seen to represent the Lib Dems, particularly as she perversely holds the title of Lib Dem Spokeswoman for Health in the House of Lords, and are more widely read, especially as she gave the above statement to the British Jewish Chronicle, surely knowing it would reach a UK audience.

Her despicable attacks against Israel, carefully veiled by her faint praise of the IDF’s field teams in Haiti and her attempt via your spokesman at a belated disclaimer of her personal opinion, cross the boundaries of decency and are on the borderline of anti-Semitism as they echo the classic blood libel against Jews going back millennia. It would be naive to suggest that she is not aware of this connection in the Jewish consciousness, if not most ordinary people’s – and that of the anti-Semites looking for mainstream respectability for their despicable views.

I urge you to finally draw a line under her continued participation in your party by withdrawing the whip from her with immediate effect. She clearly will not apologise on any genuine basis for her libel, and she will be a liability to your party at the forthcoming general elections, once the decent people of Lib Dem constituencies understand that she is far more interested in making underhand attacks on the first and best equipped group of doctors to get to Haiti than she is in UK politics and her own particular portfolio.

This is a case of the public looking to your moral judgement on who speaks for your party in either house.

Incidentally I think the Palestine Telegraph itself is less at fault for publishing an op-ed of this nature, although perhaps a little misguided. It does in fact make a good effort to publish a full range of opinion, including some that I am quite sure outrage its largely Palestinian and international pro-Palestinian readership, such as this article, the core concept of which perhaps the Lib Dems ought to consider working into their own policy on the Middle East:

Meanwhile I look forward to your early response explaining what form of action will be taken against Baroness Tonge by your party.

Kind regards

Michael

Grandpa

2009-11-11T22:36:00.000Z

As most people know by now, my grandpa passed away a few weeks ago. For those who missed the levaya and shiva, and for posterity, here are a few thoughts and anecdotes about him. Firstly, the personal from the JC:

"MAISEL. Avrem. A kind, gentle, sharp-witted and principled man. Sadly passed away Saturday, October 31, aged 93. Much loved by all the family."

Having been a bit feeble for most of the week, but still lucid enough to recount some stories of his childhood to Mum and see his friends Michael B and Doreen, Grandpa took a very bad turn on the Saturday morning. At the time, my parents and cousin Claire were visiting Hilly and Al in Zurich, leaving only Helen back in the UK. The care home could see he was in his final hours, and managed to get hold of Julie in Zurich, who called me, and I got to Helen, just as she put her mobile on and got the awful news that it was too late. Julie sent Phillip down to shul to get Mum and Hilly, and as we all digested the news and booked planes home, Mum found some immediate comfort in the turn of events that saw us grandchildren deal with things first.

This was swiftly reduced by my inadvertent leaking of the news via Facebook before any other relatives had been informed. Oh well. Shows what a powerful medium it is, and Grandpa would have been chuffed to know he got his own status update - although he wasn't comfortable with t'internet, he understood it was something he had to learn, and had only recently got a computer and his own hotmail account.

When I got back to London, one of the first tasks was for me and Dad to go to the care home and sort out his possessions. I had been giving some thought to whether I wanted to see Grandpa "doing a Lenin" or not, given that my last contact with him had been back in the De'Ath Ward of Northwick Park (that's the ward on floors 1 to 16 for those who have not heard of it), and I was not sure if I wanted that to be my final image - a frail if stubborn man perched in a hospital bed.

In fact, staunch supporter of universal free healthcare that he was, even he was so underwhelmed with his experience there that at one point, he took a bit of a stand. When they had delayed a minor operation for the third time (the second being entirely the hospital's own fault, having fed him breakfast despite the surgeon requiring nil by mouth for 24 hours before the op), the orderlies told him he may as well go and have some lunch, as they wouldn't be able to fit him in until the following day. He said no thanks. They said whaaat? He said he was going to refuse all food just in case an opening came up for surgery and he missed it because he had eaten something. When they understood he was actually going on hunger strike - a 93 year old diabetic with a dodgy foot and a solid 15 years of mileage on a heart bypass - they miraculously found an operating theatre and a surgeon.

As it happens, the decision was rather abruptly taken out of my hands, when we went to Grandpa's room, the nurse pushed the door open - and there he was, still in bed! In fact it was strangely reassuring, once I got used to it. The cliché was definitely true - he was lying there looking so peaceful, as if he was finally getting some decent sleep. The sun was streaming in through the window, and his room was really very nice (I had not seen it before as he went from hospital to care home only after I moved to Tel Aviv), with his favourite paintings and family pictures around him, and a lovely garden view outside.

This was the first moment when I realised that there might be certain items of his that I might stake a unique claim to - I have inherited his round shoulders and barrel chest, and am a pretty good fit for a whole range of rather nice jumpers, shirts and coats. Special mention must go to the stunning sheepskin jacket - Motty eat your heart out. At the levaya on the Tuesday, it felt very right to be there wearing his fab Dunn and Co trilby, red and blue check scarf and very lush gloves with fur lining.

Over the course of the week, we shared some great anecdotes about him, and also had a look through the accumulations of his and Grandma's lifetimes in the flat on Harrow Hill. I was particularly thrilled to find his membership card for the Labour Party, and remembered him telling Mum he was only voting for Blair to get them in, then was hoping for "Real Labour" to emerge. How prophetic - and unfortunate for the rest of the family, who have not inherited his socialist tendencies!

We had many political debates over a Shabbat table, at their flat and at Eastglade, over the years. Grandpa always enjoyed the intellectual rigours of it, even though he knew I would not be persuaded. Right until the end, he was reading the Guardian or having someone read it for him, and although he was a proper leftie, he wrote to them when he felt they crossed too big a line on the Israel thing (or in fact, dictated to Grandma who wrote off in her lovely bubble handwriting).

I was sitting with him in early July 2005, having his usual lunch of Ryvita and crackers and listening to Radio 4, when they announced that London had won the right to stage the Olympics. He switched off the radio and said "well, that will be a disaster. Thank God I'll be dead by then!" I don't think he can have envisaged cutting it quite so fine...

He did manage to come to one sporting event though - the FA Cup Final, when Cardiff played Portsmouth:

Somehow he managed to still get in his traditional afternoon nap during most of the second half, despite 80,000 spectators cheering all around him.

One of our favourite moments with him was on a weekend in Christchurch, not long after Grandma died, when we had a lovely suite together at the Captain's Cabin. After dinner, he had got into bed, and Mum asked him if he had brushed his teeth. He said "not tonight". On further interrogation: "I'm 93 and I don't feel like it." What a geezer.

I also remember being on the Bessies' balcony in Zurich playing Scrabble with him at dusk. As it got darker, he was struggling to see the board, so he said "let's shed some light on this" and whipped out a pocket torch to shine at his letters.

He generally kept in good spirits and set himself new targets to live for. Not least of these was to see his first great-grandchild. When Yosi was born, he and Grandpa seemed to be taking it in turns to be ill, but Grandpa hung in there for long enough to meet him once, on a sunny afternoon in the garden of the home, just a week before the end.

Perhaps because of this final achievement, I don't think any of us were massively shocked by the timing of Grandpa's passing. Mum has been saying to Dad for about 30 years that Grandpa was on his last legs, and this time might be the last she would see him, but after her visit to him last week, when he was so enfeebled but still felt the urge to tell her some of his life story, his early childhood memories (which Mum, in a homage to her day job, took thorough notes on), she really knew.

And I think so did he. A few days earlier, Dad had been visiting him to discuss some financial matters, and although Grandpa was really feeling under the weather, he wanted to hear my news. Dad read him my latest blog entry (luckily there was no autopsy so nobody can prove that this was what killed him), the one about my nascent love affair with Tel Aviv. Afterwards, Grandpa insisted on calling me, despite Dad feeling he was too weak and that I would be able to tell he was poorly.

Although he could hardly speak in more than a small, croaking voice, he managed to tell me he was so happy that I had "found love". Those were the last words he would ever say to me.

I cannot help but feel profoundly uplifted by his incredible dignity, knowing that he was in his final days, and that even when he was so tired in every way, he reached across thousands of miles to give a parting blessing. He must have guessed that my only real guilty feeling about leaving the UK was the sense of abandoning him, and I had felt, deep inside, however much I tried to repress it, that back then in the hospital in August, as I kissed his forehead and walked away, it would prove to be a final goodbye. I am sure he knew too, but - in a homage to the legendary stoicism of Grandma - he just gave me a classic Grandpa grin and wave.

As I return to my Altneuland, I have this strong sense that I am bringing his indomitable spirit with me. All I can hope for is to carry myself for even a fraction of my life with his humility, integrity and humour in the face of whatever adversity I am faced with.

Rest in peace, Grandpa. Even if Labour lose in May.

The honeymoon

2009-10-30T00:42:00.000Z

It's been nearly 8 weeks since I got to Israel, and I am still enjoying the "honeymoon period". I have been reminded by a very awesome guy (mush!) to always be aware that I get a very extended honeymoon period on my aliyah (yes, I am biting the bullet) because of the good fortune of having generous and wonderful parents and grandparents who have endowed me with a very soft landing here for my first year or so.

I want them to know that not a moment goes by here where I do not remember how lucky I am to be here on these terms, and I will be eternally thankful to them.

I look around me at people also just arriving (in some cases really crash-landing), and I see the many stresses and fears they have, their lives one endless stream of struggles with language, accommodation, employment, finance, bureaucracy and distance from loved ones. I feel awful that perhaps they do not have the same opportunity to luxuriate in everything that makes moving here momentous. All I can do is try and take advantage of the fact that out here I have the three key features olim hadashim require - chutzpah, protectsia and savlanut, and maybe try to give people a hand where possible. Perhaps this is one country where you really can and should "pay it forward".

On a wider level, one of my ambitions is to eventually set about improving the aliyah experience for people who choose to come here. It sounds odd that those are the ones that need the help, but actually the state does an adequate job looking after those who have no other choice, and in the longer term, Israel needs to attract the best and brightest of the Diaspora. For them to come here voluntarily and put down roots requires material compromise, so they have to be given a chance to experience something meaningful that replaces the loss of earnings that is almost inevitable.

Because Western olim by and large have the safety net of going back, it takes something quite powerful and profound to continue to anchor them here. In the words of one of my new friends (Polo), he is "earning what I did in London 12 years ago, in a position of seniority I had 7 years ago... but in lifestyle terms, back in the UK I wouldn't be at this level for another 10 years."

How can this be translated into spiritual, emotional and intellectual advancement, not just a statement about career, social and material change?

When I tell some of the little anecdotes of coincidences and moments that have happened to me here, something clearly resonates with native Israelis and both recent and settled olim. But whilst some people do have their own stories to tell, so many just don't have the time and cannot find the mental and emotional space to be open to these things, because of the aforementioned draining process of getting here and getting settled.

There is a reason why this place is like nowhere else, and it is because there is a unique quality to the people and a special atmosphere to every inch of the land that is so hard to describe, and indeed is perhaps unique to each of us. Everyone who has been here and felt a moment of love for this noisy, hot, dusty, dishevelled place knows what I am talking about. It could be the waft of hyssop and jasmine when out on a kibbutz, the unique Tel Aviv beach sounds of clip-clopping matkot and the ice-cream guy shouting "artic, artic", or the moment your ears pop when a very fast taxi driver takes you up into the hills between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (I always think this moment marks the spiritual crossing-point, like some higher being clearing your ears so you can hear a different tone and quality of sound that echoes from those white stones).

Now I am learning not to be too pompous or self-important with all these thoughts and what I write here, and perhaps I don't always succeed, but what I hope is that by trying in my own way to express them and tell my stories, maybe the odd visitor or olah hadashah will just be a bit more open to these experiences for themselves. Not just having them, but being willing to recognise and explore them, without seeming weird or religious. It doesn't help physically with the chores and pressures of being here, but mentally I think it changes the experience completely.

But how to channel this into something practical? This being Israel, everyone has their ideas. I enjoyed a fabulous meal out with T&T (mazel tov on your engagement!) and their lovely friends last night, and we had some discussion about this.

One of the great assets of Israel is the heavily subsidised ulpan system to ensure that anyone who wants to learn Hebrew for any reason and any period of time can do so at a very affordable price. Despite this being a fantastic attraction for many young Jews who want to "try before they buy" - I was one of them - I was horrified to learn that the government are cutting ulpan budgets, and this will have the effect of raising prices or losing classes, or both. This is tragic, short-sighted and counter-productive. Having an accessible ulpan is just as important as Birthright or Masa. Write to the Knesset immediately!

We also talked about ways to improve the city using private money, to create new quarters in the way that Neve Tzedek, anchored by a resplendent Suzanne Dallal Centre, has been transformed. There are many neighbourhoods where a similar process would reap benefits. The key is to make this city proud of itself and try to get the residents to look past the end of their noses.

Israel is a funny place with an inverted value chain of civic pride and public behaviour. In the UK, people hold the door open for you, queue politely, generally don't litter, and obey the no smoking sign. Here, the opposite is true - in fact, they almost relish the barging. But here, if you stumbled on the street, people would rush to check if you were okay, whilst in the UK, people might well politely step over you on their way to the Tube. I know which I would rather have.

But it is not enough. If it can be transformed into a wider civic pride, combined with better care of surroundings, for example not just accepting the unkempt appearance of 80% of the buildings here because they look fine from the inside, perhaps we can have the best of both worlds.

We have to start small - and the advantage of being here is that sense of ownership. The other day, I was on a station platform in Netanya, and saw two kids in army uniform. One took out the last ciggie from his packet, and flicked the empty box at the bin. It missed, and he left it lying on the floor. I went up, said in my bastard Hebrew "you're in uniform, set an example and show some respect", picked up the box and dropped it in the trash.

The kid was completely stunned, probably because people here usually let this sort of sloppy behaviour slide. But I think along the lines of "broken windows theory" - you have to fix the small ills in society before going after the big prizes. And today that kid is chucking a fag-packet, but tomorrow he could be holed up in some Palestinian's house in Gaza, showing the same contempt for their home as for the station platform, or he could be letting his dog crap somewhere on Ruppin so Freedmansister is guaranteed to put her foot in it on the way back from the beach.

I think it is incumbent on Israelis and olim to keep trying to inspire and exhort each other to stay here, even when the going gets tough. This is a pioneering country whose frontiers remain unsecured and undefined, 60 years after creation. It is not an easy place to survive, let alone thrive in, and whilst the cliché of the Israeli Sabra (hard and prickly exterior, soft and sweet inside) is true, some people are disillusioned by the barbs that stick in the hand and craw, and never get as far as scooping out the lush fruit within.

An example: last night I was out for birthday drinks of an old friend at the Dancing Camel Brewery, and ran into Arik Bradshaw, a friend from ulpan. We ended up taking a little walk along the seafront and up to Ben Yehuda, just as the heavens were opening, and she told me how she was struggling financially and therefore physically and mentally, to make a go of it here. Her Hebrew was improving at a dazzling pace thanks to a fun but poorly-paid cafe job, but she felt homesick and to some extent thought Tel Aviv lacked certain things she had been relying upon to make the experience worthwhile and complete.

One of the main things she emphasised was that she had expected this to be a city full of live music culture, and that she was learning the violin. I pointed out that there were plenty of places to go, if she knew where to look, but this clearly was not enough to inspire her. Then, just as we walked down Ruppin to the end of the alley that runs down to Ben Yehuda, we suddenly heard the strains of violins and an accordion, playing Jewish or Central European music.

As a light drizzle turned into a full-scale downpour, complete with the crashing cymbals and drums of thunder and lightning, we ducked into the little pitzutzia at the foot of the alley, where half a dozen people were sitting under the awning at 1am, as three guys from Slovakia or somewhere nearby were playing merrily. The Bulgarian shopkeep merrily handed out pints of Czech draught beer, and gradually more and more people passing by, running to get out of the rain, came and huddled in this little corner shop.

The three men played for a solid hour and by the end, maybe 20 people were squeezed in under the shelter, clapping and singing. Arik was delighted and clearly reinvigorated, not least when one of the players let her play a few bars on his violin.

Only an hour or so earlier, when had just been trying to explain that this kind of small miracle makes up my daily experience here, she appreciated it and felt glad for me, but perhaps couldn't really grasp it for herself. Now, she seemed a different person, her eyes shining, a big beaming smile on her face.

And all of this in the rain! It's amazing how that first deluge of autumn doesn't actually dampen people's spirits here but seems to raise them. There is a sense of camaraderie when everyone is caught outside without coats and umbrellas, and a feeling of common sacrifice that although we may not get to have our 158th consecutive day on the beach, this country needs the water. It never lasts too long, as the novelty washes off, but it is delightful to read all the positive Facebook and Twitter updates from olim hadashim about that first moment of British weather.

I hope the forecast 4 days of solid rain will at least focus my mind on actually making a living and doing some work - to everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven, right? The glorious weather has put a wonderful gloss on my first few weeks here, but now to knuckle down and make a living, and see if the honeymoon lasts.

Now I am off to make some fresh baklava (almond and orange-blossom this week). Shabbat shalom!

----------
Glossary for the uninitiated (ie uncircumcised)

Ulpan - intensive Hebrew language school
Aliyah - Jewish immigration to Israel
Pitzutzia - little corner shop that always has something random for sale
Savlanut - patience
Chutzpah - blarney/cheek
Protectsia - network of useful people for any problem
Olim hadashim - new immigrants
Matkot - beach bat and ball game

I loved her, and now she is here

2009-10-18T08:06:00.003+01:00

Setting the scene: Freedmansdad has been out here for a long weekend while Freedmansmum and Freedmansister have a girlie (girdly?!) weekend in Lille. So too are the Cors, for a wedding (Ham is at home babysitting the toastie machine), and we met up with them for a drink on the beach (well, I sat there while the waitress pointedly refused to take my order - I guess she was one of those who take the Service Not Included thing on the bill quite literally here). Also flying through were one of Freedmansdad's old friends from back in the valleys, and his goody wife.

The leading questions they all had for me were of course whether I was settling in and whether I would stay, and also what made this place so special and better than London. I could only answer this through a series of anecdotes...

Avid readers of Freedmanslife will recall that I recently described my short time here as a life less ordinary. I said that I felt much more aware of my surroundings, much more in tune with people, nature and the world. I also thought I was in love with the city, and had this strange and magical sense that it loved me back. Perhaps there was some kind of Tel Aviv Syndrome (a cross between Jerusalem Syndrome [Type II] and Stockholm Syndrome but with fewer frummers than the former and better beaches than the latter).

I also felt that this was a place where finally I would find the time and space to become the person I always thought I was capable of - in fact, the person so many others always thought I could become, but that got bogged down in London, became listless and dull, and in relative terms to potential, really was a bit of a failure. I can be this self-critical now, because in just a few short weeks, I have started to turn it around.

This city and its people inspire me to read, write, debate, live a healthier lifestyle (so much that I have gained hair and lost belly at a rapid pace, and an old friend from London didn't recognise me standing next to him on the beach!), give myself quality time alone, blended with meaningful time with other people, try new recipes, hang out with artists, dancers and dandies (longstanding Freedmanslifers will understand this represents a radical change), take long walks, set challenges for myself (ie get fit enough to do shlav bet [short voluntary army service for new olim] and then walk the entire 1,000km Israel Trail - does this sound like the old Fatty Freedman?!) and actually put into practice all those things I said I would do a month ago.

Is this a honeymoon period? Maybe. But so many others I know who have moved here, some quite a few years ago, are still in it. So now I am pretty convinced that this is where I belong, because as the hackneyed expression goes, home is where the heart is.

Last week, I was having my daily sunset swim, when I felt a most powerful sensation that I had to turn around and look back at the beach. On doing so, my eye was drawn immediately to the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. I began to swim back to the shore, determined to go up and say something. No sooner had I got close to the beach than an even more powerful feeling overtook me, that it was vitally important not to speak to her after all.

So I sauntered on by, grabbed my towel and went for a shower, before heading up the steps behind the beach, to take my usual seat on a bench on the promenade and enjoy the sunset. As I made my way up, I passed a guy heading in the opposite direction. He was clearly dressed up a bit more than he might be usually, and was holding a large bouquet of flowers. Despite there being hundreds of people on the beach, I knew he was heading to that breathtaking girl.

And of course, that is exactly what he did. Even from a distance, I could see she was delighted to see him. Although I was desperate to know what the occasion was, the whole point was that she was someone very special whose special moment I had narrowly avoided casting a pall over, and I could hardly pop over and ask.

As I enjoyed another delicious ever-changing canvas of red and orange, misty greys and deep blues, and reflected on this, I felt profoundly connected to my surroundings, and comforted by the knowledge that one day I would be that guy coming down the steps at sunset.

Earlier in Freedmansdad's stay, I had told him I was no longer sure if I believed in coincidence, and indeed, since I had been here, every one of these "chance" encounters had been profound or practical. Last night I recounted some of this, and the sensation of being in a deep love affair with the city, to Valley and Goody as we headed up to the closing party of the Tel Aviv 100th anniversary celebrations. I think they thought I was a bit mad, until we arrived, and the chorus of the opening song, referring to this city, was "I loved her, and now she is here". As the fireworks went off, and the faces and facades of the city flashed up on a clever screen formed by a mist of water on the Yarkon River, I knew my love was not unrequited.

If I had any remaining doubts, they were dispelled, when after the fog of the fireworks started drifting away along with the audience, we turned around, and right in front of me were four of my most special Israeli friends, who I had yet to see since arriving. After a lot of hugging and kissing, we enjoyed a spectacular concert of some of Tel Aviv's greatest bands of the 80s and 90s, playing together for an immense crowd, in a wonderful, convivial atmosphere.

What a night. What a month. What a life.

She loved me, and now I am here.

Ahmedinejad is a Jew-hating self

2009-10-06T09:57:00.003+01:00

Okay, so even though the following appears in the Guardian, it does appear to be quite plausible:

Ahmadinejad has no Jewish roots

Rumours that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's family converted to Islam from Judaism are false. In fact, they are proud Shias, by Meir Javedanfar.

In June 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's meteoric rise from mayor of Tehran to president of one of the most influential countries in the Middle East took everyone by surprise.

One of the main reasons for the astonishment was that so little was known about him.One recently published claim about his background comes from an article in the Daily Telegraph. Entitled "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past", it claims that his family converted to Islam after his birth. The claim is based on a number of arguments, a key one being that his previous surname was Sabourjian which "derives from weaver of the sabour, the name for the Jewish tallit shawl in Persia".

Professor David Yeroshalmi, author of The Jews of Iran in the 19th century and an expert on Iranian Jewish communities, disputes the validity of this argument. "There is no such meaning for the word 'sabour' in any of the Persian Jewish dialects, nor does it mean Jewish prayer shawl in Persian. Also, the name Sabourjian is not a well-known Jewish name," he stated in a recent interview. In fact, Iranian Jews use the Hebrew word "tzitzit" to describe the Jewish prayer shawl. Yeroshalmi, a scholar at Tel Aviv University's Center for Iranian Studies, also went on to dispute the article's findings that the "-jian" ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. "This ending is in no way sufficient to judge whether someone has a Jewish background. Many Muslim surnames have the same ending," he stated.

Upon closer inspection, a completely different interpretation of "Sabourjian" emerges. According to Robert Tait, a Guardian correspondent who travelled to Ahmadinejad's native village in 2005, the name "derives from thread painter – sabor in Farsi – a once common and humble occupation in the carpet industry in Semnan province, where Aradan is situated". This is confirmed by Kasra Naji, who also wrote a biography of Ahmadinejad and met his family in his native village. Carpet weaving or colouring carpet threads are not professions associated with Jews in Iran.

According to both Naji and Tait, Ahmadinejad's father Ahmad was in fact a religious Shia, who taught the Quran before and after Ahmadinejad's birth and their move to Tehran. So religious was Ahmad Sabourjian that he bought a house near a Hosseinieh, a religious club that he frequented during the holy month of Moharram to mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hossein.

Moreover, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's mother is a Seyyede. This is a title given to women whose family are believed to be direct bloodline descendants of Prophet Muhammad. Male members are given the title of Seyyed, and include prominent figures such as Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei. In Judaism, this is equivalent to the Cohens, who are direct descendants of Aaron, the brother of Moses. One has to be born into a Seyyed family: the title is never given to Muslims by birth, let alone converts. This makes it impossible for Ahmadinejad's mother to have been a Jew. In fact, she was so proud of her lineage that everyone in her native village of Aradan referred to her by her Islamic title, Seyyede.

The reason that Ahmadinejad's father changed his surname has more to do with the class struggle in Iran. When it became mandatory to adopt surnames, many people from rural areas chose names that represented their professions or that of their ancestors. This made them easily identifiable as townfolk. In many cases they changed their surnames upon moving to Tehran, in order to avoid snobbery and discrimination from residents of the capital.

The Sabourjians were one of many such families. Their surname was related to carpet-making, an industry that conjures up images of sweatshops. They changed it to Ahmadinejad in order to help them fit in. The new name was also chosen because it means from the race of Ahmad, one of the names given to Muhammad.

According to Ahmadinejad's relatives the new name emphasised the family's piety and their dedication to their religion and its founder. This is something that the president and his relatives in Tehran and Aradan have maintained to the present day. Not because they are trying to deny their past, but because they are proud of it.

Ahmedinejad is a self-hating Jew

2009-10-04T17:16:00.004+01:00

This one needs to be re-read a few times to be believed:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed to have Jewish past... vitriolic attacks on the Jewish world hide an astonishing secret, evidence uncovered by The Daily Telegraph shows.
By Damien McElroy and Ahmad Vahdat

A photograph of the Iranian president holding up his identity card during elections in March 2008 clearly shows his family has Jewish roots. A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.

The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.

The Sabourjians traditionally hail from Aradan, Mr Ahmadinejad's birthplace, and the name derives from "weaver of the Sabour", the name for the Jewish Tallit shawl in Persia. The name is even on the list of reserved names for Iranian Jews compiled by Iran's Ministry of the Interior.

Experts last night suggested Mr Ahmadinejad's track record for hate-filled attacks on Jews could be an overcompensation to hide his past. Ali Nourizadeh, of the Centre for Arab and Iranian Studies, said: "This aspect of Mr Ahmadinejad's background explains a lot about him. "Every family that converts into a different religion takes a new identity by condemning their old faith. "By making anti-Israeli statements he is trying to shed any suspicions about his Jewish connections. He feels vulnerable in a radical Shia society."

A London-based expert on Iranian Jewry said that "jian" ending to the name specifically showed the family had been practising Jews. "He has changed his name for religious reasons, or at least his parents had," said the Iranian-born Jew living in London. "Sabourjian is well known Jewish name in Iran."

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said it would not be drawn on Mr Ahmadinejad's background. "It's not something we'd talk about," said Ron Gidor, a spokesman.

The Iranian leader has not denied his name was changed when his family moved to Tehran in the 1950s. But he has never revealed what it was change from or directly addressed the reason for the switch. Relatives have previously said a mixture of religious reasons and economic pressures forced his blacksmith father Ahmad to change when Mr Ahmadinejad was aged four.

The Iranian president grew up to be a qualified engineer with a doctorate in traffic management. He served in the Revolutionary Guards militia before going on to make his name in hardline politics in the capital.

During this year's presidential debate on television he was goaded to admit that his name had changed but he ignored the jibe. However Mehdi Khazali, an internet blogger, who called for an investigation of Mr Ahmadinejad's roots was arrested this summer.

Mr Ahmadinejad has regularly levelled bitter criticism at Israel, questioned its right to exist and denied the Holocaust. British diplomats walked out of a UN meeting last month after the Iranian president denounced Israel's 'genocide, barbarism and racism.'

Benjamin Netanyahu made an impassioned denunciation of the Iranian leader at the same UN summit. "Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium," he said. "A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies the murder of six million Jews while promising to wipe out the State of Israel, the State of the Jews. What a disgrace. What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations."

Mr Ahmadinejad has been consistently outspoken about the Nazi attempt to wipe out the Jewish race. "They have created a myth today that they call the massacre of Jews and they consider it a principle above God, religions and the prophets," he declared at a conference on the holocaust staged in Tehran in 2006.

[ Incidentally I noticed that whilst Ahmedinevich is busy denying the Holocaust, the Taleban not only recognise it happened, but used it as the basis of a threat to German NATO troops in Afghanistan that they would wipe them out in a similar way to how the Nazis killed the Jews... ]

Goldstone's passion for works of fiction

2009-10-01T22:16:00.000+01:00

I have so far refrained from having a good old dig at Richard Goldstone for his quite incredible (I mean it literally, it's not credible) report for the UN on the Gaza operation. In part this is because Dershowitz (x3), Phillips et al have done such a good job already. I also found a peach from Evelyn Gordon about the use of proportion and force - not recommended for weak-hearted lefties. Even the Economist, which might generously be described as a critical and naive friend of Israel, managed to say something decent. And I had to pick myself up off the floor after reading an article from notoriously self-flagellating former Ha'aretz editor David Landau.

We already know the story of Goldstone sleeping through one of the sessions where residents of the bombed towns of Israel were giving evidence to his committee. But I had to share with you this little treasure which has somehow gone unreported in the British media, despite casting even more doubt over Goldstone's capabilities and ability to discern fact from fiction:

When Goldstone Indicted a Fictional Character (and a Dead Man)

by Nissan Ratzlav-Katz

Judge Richard Goldstone, whose recent United Nations Human Rights Council investigation purported to find evidence of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, once indicted a fictional Serbian character and a dead man for war crimes as well. As in Gaza, those indictments were also allegedly based on "eyewitness testimony."

Goldstone headed the Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established by the United Nations in 1993. In 1995, one year into his term as chief ICTY prosecutor, Goldstone presented an indictment of several Serbs for war crimes and crimes against humanity. As brought to light in the weekend edition of the Hebrew-language Makor Rishon newspaper, among those indicted was a man identified as "Gruban".

Gruban, later identified more fully as Gruban from Bijelo Polje, was charged with viciously raping Muslim prisoners in what was identified by the prosecution as essentially a Serbian concentration camp. His crimes were given weight by an anonymous individual identified only as "Witness F", who claimed to have suffered at the hands of the notorious war criminal.

As described by Makor Rishon, "Within just a few months, the black silhouette of 'Gruban' was plastered on a poster of the most wanted war criminals in Bosnia." At the time, Makor Rishon noted, the American newspaper The Boston Globe published an article wondering why the poster of "Gruban" stated that his description, father's name, location and age were all listed as "unknown".

The problem for NATO forces in tracking down the serial rapist was that Gruban from Bijelo Polje, also known as Gruban Malic, is a fictional character from Hero on a Donkey, a famous Serbian novel about World War II by Miodrag Bulatovic.

The Gruban hoax was the result of a conversation in a Bosnian cafe between Yugoslavian war correspondent Nebojsa Jevric and an American journalist desperate to see a "real war criminal", according to Makor Rishon. Jevric identified "Gruban Malic" by name as the Serbian people's "worst war criminal", having committed the most rapes.

After the indictment of "Gruban" became known, Jevric capitalized on his countrymen's bemused fascination with Goldstone's "investigation" and wrote a book called Hero on a Donkey Goes to The Hague. In the book he detailed how his comment to an American reporter took on a life of its own.

In 1998, even after the true identity of the "war criminal" was known, the charges against "Gruban Malic" were officially dropped for lack of evidence by Goldstone's successor. Thirteen other flesh-and-blood Serbs were also taken off the same ICTY indictment docket alongside "Gruban" - including a man that Goldstone indicted several years after he had already died.

Rav Freedman's Yom Kippur Message

2009-09-27T16:27:00.001+01:00

Tonight is the beginning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, and one of a handful that receives close to impeccable levels of observance (at least in public places) from even the most secular of Israelis, in terms of not eating, driving cars, yacking on mobiles etc. They do however let their kids go cycling and rollerblading down the middle of the totally deserted streets of the city, which is surreal and somehow incredibly beautiful - the buzz of traffic (especially the ubiquitous Israeli honking) replaced by the tinkle of bike bells and sound of children playing everywhere.

Somehow this juxtaposition seems quite appropriate: the solemnity of the day for adults, on a Jewish religious and spiritual level but also as the 36th anniversary of a war that blew away Israel's ideal of invulnerability post-'67; and teenage kids taking advantage of 2 miles of Dizengoff to build up a head of steam on their scooters.

This time of year is always a period of reflection, for the religious and secular, as families get together, broadcasters run their summaries of the year that was, (some) people go to shul in the old-fashioned way, and - even more than it usually does - being in a city composed almost entirely of other Jews, built by our own hand in just the last 100 years, I find myself more contemplative than ever (despite my minimal attendance at shul). I think about all the things I did last year, those I really shouldn't, and consider that the best way to seek forgiveness for the latter is by not doing them again, and striving to redeem myself by actively doing the right things (and doing things right - harming no-one but frittering away time and ability is almost as sinful in my view).

I particularly ponder why I am here - what draws me to Israel, not just on the practical level of it being a financial imperative, a natural break point in my life back in London, crammed full of gorgeous Jewish women at a time when (apparently) I ought to be thinking of settling down with one, and all under delicious blue skies and next to lapping waves.

Some avid readers have been kind enough to post the odd remark or comment on my notes so far, and some more forthright friends have voiced their opinions on my move here. Among these are "I always thought you would go, I am just surprised it took you this long", "why on earth would you live there... there's nothing there", "hope the honeymoon phase lasts", "soooo jealous", "wish I had the courage to do the same" and "still as impartial as ever, Michael!"

With this interesting blend of views in mind, I got to thinking about the bits I am less keen on. Not the obvious stuff that as a Brit abroad, I notice in most places, ie the total ignorance of the concept of personal space, the general barging and pushing by people and vehicles, the grudging service and so on. Israeli society is a long way from perfect, and I question (as do many others) why I would trade the apparent comforts of London life for the daily challenges of living here.

There are problems here on so many levels, with a religious-secular divide, an Arab-Jewish divide, an Israeli-Palestinian divide, a Sephardi-Ashkenazi divide, all the lovely neighbours, water shortages, lack of recycling, general pollution and litter, the fact that having a country has just changed the nature of the Wandering Jew into something more optional, the general level of corruption and protectsia and so on. Then there are all the same ones we suffer from in the UK - a widening gulf between the elite and the poor, alarming levels of hidden poverty, over-reliance on the state by too many sectors of society, concerns about education and health, and the impact of a global financial crisis.

However, the difference I see here, and this is what compels me to be here, is that these are our problems. For all that people in every country like a good old grizzle about such problems, the blame is usually placed on the government or the mystical "they", no practical solutions are mooted, let alone ones which the debaters feel like trotting off and implementing themselves, and the end result is usually a polite but resigned sigh then a cup of tea (British goyim) or a throwing up of hands in the air and an oy va voy then a cup of tea (British Jews).

Here, it is a pretty small country, and the constant interference in each other's personal space and good old protectsia do have their uses. People who feel strongly about something can - and often do - get off their butts and try to fix it. This is the entrepreneurial nature of society, on a commercial and social level. See a disease, an injustice, an empty patch of land, a gap in the market, an opinion that needs a counter-argument, and go do something about it.

For me this is the Israeli way. Or at least, it was.

My greatest concern for Israel is that young people here are tired. They are tired of creating your heart and cancer drugs, your mobile phone chips, your laptops, your desalination and solar technologies, your irrigation systems, your instant messenger, your citrus fruit, only to receive endless calls for a boycott of Israeli goods.

They are tired of silently suffering 8,000 rockets aimed at them with no international condemnation, tired of responding by emailing, texting and leafleting the civilians near the rockets to please step aside, before putting troops on the ground at great risk to check if they left before firing back, when airstrikes would be safer for them, tired of the anonymous and unproven claims of systematic abuse of civilian populations and property during this mission, tired of the world believing every one of the blood libels spread by a side that threw its own brothers off buildings, tired of having to keep checkpoints because although they are inconvenient, they do cut the threat of bombs, tired of removing hundreds of them at their own risk, but getting no thanks from anyone, least of all the Palestinians, tired of being the ones to make concession after concession when the reward for doing so is 8,000 rockets.

And you know what? Sixty-one years of living in this neighbourhood, trying to make peace with neighbours in a white Western Ashkenazi philosophical manner, trying to "civilise" them, has not worked. In fact I think the opposite is starting to happen. Instead, they are brutalising us.

Let us not just blame the average Palestinian in the street - it is the result of years of steady inculcation of the message that Jews have no claim over any part of this region, that Jews are evil, that Jews drink the blood of Palestinian children, that Jews killed Mohammed al-Durra, that Jews invented the Holocaust.

For as we tumbled into a chicken-and-egg of being attacked, having to occupy these people, thereby unintentionally and unwillingly reinforcing these myths, and creating the next generation of attackers, the world did not stand idly by. Far from it. The world perpetuated this state of affairs by funding the camps, the textbooks, the weaponry, by allowing the smuggling, the revision of history, the barrage of rockets, by failing to even maintain a pretence of impartiality in its reporting, its institutional rulings, its policies.

So to all those people out there in the world, who really believe they are fair-minded decent liberal people, and if only nasty little Israel would learn to behave, everything would resolve itself nicely, my message this Yom Kippur is this. You should look at yourselves and understand that you hate Israel because we are a reflection of you. A quote from Stephen King's article in the Irish Examiner - "could it actually be that we see Israelis as very much like ourselves – sophisticated, prosperous, well-educated, fairly pale-skinned democrats? Do we hate ourselves that much?"

I propose that you are so terrified of having this same situation on your own doorstep on a daily basis, and more so, terrified of how you would react, whether submissively or repressively, that you demonise Israel even as it struggles with these demons on a daily basis.

Abbas, Erekat et al have admitted in the past few months (just not to the English-speaking media) that they will effectively never sign a peace treaty. They retained the right to try and wipe out Israeli in their constitution, they stated that there is only Allah above and below the Temple Mount (ie even a theoretical Jewish/Israeli right to what is under the Dome of the Rock would be rejected because the Muslim world would tolerate no less, and how can any Israeli government - especially one in coalition with the frummers, sign that away?!), and they continue with the usual equivocations elsewhere. And these are the "moderates"!

This is a conundrum for the world to resolve - cue throwing up of hands and an exasperated sigh, followed by a cup of tea and a spot of BBC News.

To Israelis and to Jews everywhere, my message is that we do not have to be brutalised by our neighbours, enemies and critics, and we should not try to impose our own cultural and philosophical norms on them.

For the Jews, whether in the Diaspora or Israel, instead let us look to ourselves, to all the problems we need to fix internally. Why is there such visceral hatred between settlers and peaceniks, even though they both love Israel and their enemies want them both dead or exiled (just maybe in order)? Why do I not have a mixed-recycling bin as even backward Blighty manages in many areas? Why does the Gordon Beach manage to look pristine on the sand and in the water most days, but is still subject to a layer of flotsam and debris on others? Why must Israeli drivers continue to kill more civilians than the rockets and bomb-belts? Why can't Israeli society learn that Jews have been around for six millenia, outliving every other tribe and nation, including the ones who tried to wipe us out, and therefore show just a little care and patience when it comes to customer service, waiting, queuing, giving a smile every now and then? Why is anyone homeless or hungry in this land, where we have several billionaires, GDP per capital that competes with Europe, and we "have never seen a righteous person in need"?

Why does everyone use the excuse of "this is the Middle East" to explain away every problem (including why Israel is maybe becoming more desensitised to brutality and violence) when the Bauhaus architecture, phenomenal technology, H&M and Ikea, obsession with education, constant self-flagellation, democracy, social liberalism, melting-pot of opinions and beliefs, and easy ability to obtain schnitzel clearly mark us out as a Western society, regardless of which shore we have washed up on?

We are in a unique and blessed situation. Israel was formed by "kibbutz galuyot", the ingathering of exiles - but it is also "Kibbutz Galuyot" in the sense of being a commune of people from the world over, with their ideas, experiences and enthusiasm, and despite the Israeli post-army wanderlust, still nowhere else to go that accepts us and that we can really call home.

All those years of galut mean we have built up some incredible attributes and experience in how to make the best of what we have, how to make the transient into the permanent, how to give to those around us even as they restrict, spite and persecute us, how we tread the line between their grudging respect and seething jealousy. We do this by looking after ourselves first - the family unit, the synagogue, the shtetl, the community, the city, and now that we have our own country, we can try to improve our nation as a whole.

For the Jews, cue throwing up of hands, an oy va voy and a cup of tea. But after Yom Kippur, let us start finding some solutions for our own problems.

A life less ordinary

2009-09-16T17:20:00.003+01:00

I think I am in love. At least, the whole movie schtick about being in love is that all your senses are heightened, and you become almost autistically aware of everything around you in a heady and pulsating new way. Well, if this is the case, I am in love with Tel Aviv.

A simple jaunt to the beach near to sunset brings with it a series of very Israeli cameos.

Firstly, as I come down onto Ruppin, there's the mother with two children in the back of the car, the car wedged into a space about 3 inches longer than the vehicle, warning her kids (in Hebrew - I think I understood this correctly but some of the vocab hasn't come up in my first 4 days of ulpan) that "mummy has to make some bumpies to get the car out so hold on".

Just around the corner on Shalag, I notice a middle-aged lady outside an old block with no lift, in heated discussion with a guy on the ground floor and another on a top floor balcony. They have installed a very neat little winch system and have hooked up crates full of the lady's shopping, and are having the classic 3 Jews, 4 opinions moment on how to get the goods to the 4th floor. I consider adding a 5th and even 6th perspective, but there is a picture-postcard moment in front of me as the sun drops behind a fluffy cloud and a halo of dusty pink rays shoot out in every direction.

As I come down the ramp to Gordon Beach, a very large labrador has just spotted a tiny little bassett and decided to make friends. The owners are giggling away as the lab appears to give it a sloppy kiss on the forehead. One of those instants that ends up on the nasty black-tinged posters with tacky quotations that you used to get in Athena (z"l).

Down on the sand, it's 6.15pm and I think about my friends in London as I kick off my flip-flops and dive into crystal-clear bath-water temperature seas, tinged a lovely ochre by the setting sun. Then I focus on the native wildlife. Sorry, assorted Wifeys!

After an invigorating swim, I trot off to take a shower. A twentysomething Russian dolly-bird is walking along with the tiniest little baby greyhound, which sprints to the foot-washing taps for a frolic, much to the delight of a blonde toddler, who shrieks with delight as it runs around her.

I head up from the beach, a beatific smile across my face, thinking it has been a proper Lou Reed Perfect Day. Halfway up Shalag I realise I left my keys somewhere on the beach. About-turn, more glowing sunset, more dogs, more cute owners, still a great day.

It truly sinks in why Rav Kook always signed letters from his house in Neve Tzedek as "Tel Aviv, Iyr HaKodesh" - Tel Aviv, holy city.

My love affair is such that I am looking at myself in a whole new way. I walk a little taller, I am prepared to make changes and personal compromises to ensure this relationship works, I can imagine myself becoming a better person with every moment together. I want to gain knowledge and lose weight. I want to gain insight on my self and lose my fear of the 'other'. I want to gain experience and lose inhibitions. I want to be free and yet I can best achieve that by committing to this place.

Someone implied recently that my postings on Israel are not objective; I say to you that this is a place I defend with passion as well as reason, because I love it, and I think it loves me back.

With thanks to Berlinerstrasse for also daring to dream.

Five months of Fizzybubbly

2009-09-15T13:47:00.002+01:00

Well, there has been a heck of a hiatus since my last posting, but now I am happily settled in Tel Aviv for a 5 month test run ahead of a possible decision to make aliyah. I will try and post regularly with news and views, especially as this will save dramatically on repetitive emails and phone conversations.

A brief explanation of how I got here and why, as my departure seems to have taken some by surprise, despite the 4 different leaving shindigs and efforts to reach everyone by text, email and Facebook. Basically since we got the flat out here about 5 years ago, I have spent 3 months a year enjoying being in Israel, but never for more than 3-4 weeks at a time. With a business to run in the UK, I felt compelled to return and make a go of it, but finally a few months ago I decided to give it a shot. With the forthcoming end of my lease making a natural break-point and a feeling that I was just as unlikely to make a decent amount of money here as in London in the current economic climate, I bit the bullet.

So with the fantastic help of Marlon the black/white van man and Grandpa's garage, I put all my stuff in storage (about 70 crates, a dozen large bags, 60 bottles of booze), booked my bmi ticket with specially schnorrered gold status, and flew off into the sunset.

Now I am safely ensconced in Tel Aviv, have had 3 days of ulpan so far, and am generally having a fantastic time. If I can find a way to eke out a reasonable living, then it's hard to think of any compelling reasons to come back to Blighty. Every day I speak to or email someone and they mention the shit weather, or broken Tube, or dead economy, whilst here the cafes are full, the nightlife is vibrant, the weather is a steady 30 degrees by day and 20 by night, and need I mention the women?

Also as I am in the shadow of Iran's mushroom cloud for a few months, I am once again invigorated with the urge to fight back against the combined efforts of the world media, the Axis of Feeble in DC (Zbig/Hilldog/Obummer), and the wonderful so-called humanitarian organisations with their warped sense of do-gooding.

On this note, a quick celebratory gloat at the exposure of Marc Garlasco as a Nazi obsessive. You might remember I mentioned him in a posting back in January, when the world was having one of its regular feeding frenzies at Israel's expense. Here's what I wrote:

For example, the "neutral" "expert" from "Human Rights Watch", Marc Garlasco. Here is a little snippet about him, and a link to Honest Reporting's article on him, HRW, and some of their previous handiwork. Now whilst the killing of this doctor's family was clearly a tragic accident (unless you are Bowen, Garlasco or Gilbert of course), the IDF's initial reaction was that if they did hit the house with a shell, there was a reason it was targetted. Then they started to carry out a fuller investigation and I found this coverage of the actual tank unit commander's comments.

At the time, I had a bad feeling about him and the various other parties who kept cropping up in the world's media. Now it transpires he has a bit of a Nazi fetish. And it must be true, because I read it here on the BBC. Just the kind of guy to check out allegations of Isreali human rights abuses. He is taken to task in this fabulous article over at Mere Rhetoric.

That's about it for the moment. L'hitra'ot, ani holech lahof!

There are 70 conflicts worldwide, so why do we focus on just one?

2009-05-22T11:49:00.002+01:00

Original article by Stephen King appeared on May 13 in the Irish Examiner

Yes, there is public feeling about the Palestinians and their rotten deal. I’ve never heard Chechnya being discussed on the DART, whereas I have heard Israel being trashed on buses as well as at smart dinner parties. Besides, who’s ever heard of a "Sri Lanka out of Tamil Eelam" march through Cork or calls for a boycott of Russia? I owe Micheál Martin an apology of sorts. I admit that when I read media reports of his discussions with Ban Ki-moon in New York at the weekend my eyes rolled up to the heavens.

The country’s most senior representative to the rest of the world has a rare opportunity to raise Ireland’s issues with the UN secretary-general and what’s his top priority? Yes, you guessed it – Gaza.

It’s not that Gaza isn’t an important issue facing the world. It is. What Gaza is not, though, is an issue where Europe, let alone Ireland, can wield much positive influence. Gaza will only be sorted when the Arab states, the US and Israel – probably in that order – decide it should be sorted.

But I was wrong. I had swallowed the media line. Yes, Micheál Martin and Ban Ki-moon did talk about Gaza, but it was just one subject among others.

In fact, when you look at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) press release, the first item of discussion listed was one where Ireland has a very direct interest, namely Chad.

So what caused my blood pressure to rise? Was Gaza the topic the DFA’s spindoctors were pushing? Possibly. Was the position on Gaza the most objectively newsworthy? Again, possibly: the Pope is in the region and Ireland tends to be at one end of the European spectrum of opinion on anything to do with Israel.

The third possibility, and the one that seems to me most likely, is that the media has a fixation on Israel (and its supposed crimes) which is, for want of a better word, disproportionate. That’s why the line about Gaza led several media reports of Minister Martin’s meeting.

If I were Jewish, I would be told I’m paranoid for thinking the world and its media are out to get me. After all, the fact that Israel is the world’s one and only Jewish state – amidst a vast ocean of Muslim states – inevitably makes many Jewish people think it’s them, and not Israel as such, which is in the media’s sights. But I’m not Jewish. Besides, just because people are paranoid doesn’t mean others aren’t out to get them.

A quick scan of the world’s trouble spots makes my point. The well-respected International Crisis Group is currently tracking 70 conflicts around the world, from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zimbabwe. Yes, 70: we live in a dangerous world.

Some of these are very familiar to us: Northern Ireland, Iraq, the Basque country, North Korea and, of course, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Others are not nightly news: Kashmir, Burma, Eritrea and so on. And then there are the conflicts we have forgotten about, or never really heard about too much because they are far away or poor, or both: Armenia versus Azerbaijan, Mindanao in the Philippines, Morocco/western Sahara and Aceh.

Some of the 70 hotspots are especially deadly. Millions of black Africans have died in Congo in the past decade, well below most people’s radar.

Sri Lanka has had a bit of a focus in recent weeks – though hardly the minute-by-minute wraparound coverage Gaza had in January. How many of us were really aware of the fact that more than 80,000 people have died in a quarter of a century of civil war?

Try this. Google "Tamil Tigers" and you will receive 2.3 million results. Google "Hamas" and you get 10 times as many – and Hamas hasn’t been around nearly as long. It’s the same if you Google "Tamils" and "Palestinians". Is the difference that the Tigers might have killed Rajiv Gandhi but, unlike the Palestinians, have rarely brought their murderous tactics to Europe directly? The Sri Lankan conflict, at least in its military phase, looks as though it is coming to an end. The work of peace-building will last for years to come.

The same could be said about Chechnya. The Russians have just announced the end of their "counter-terrorism" operation. There are no solid figures for the number of civilians killed since the second war began there in late 1999, but estimates range anywhere between 25,000 and 200,000.

Put that in context. Israel might be geographically small – smaller than Munster – but in population terms Chechnya is absolutely tiny. A region with a little more than one million inhabitants has seen anything up to one-fifth of its civilian population killed in two decades of war. And one school siege aside, we have largely looked the other way.

By comparison, 6,000 Palestinians – armed and civilian together – out of a Palestinian population in the territories three to four times that of Chechnya have died since the second intifada of 2001.

It goes without saying that any civilian death is a tragedy – and, very often, an outrage – but search for Chechnya on the DFA website and you only receive one-tenth of the number of hits that you do for Israel. No-one believes the DFA is somehow in league with the Russians and supports their quasi-colonial war against Chechnya, but it does go to show some perspective has been lost somewhere along the line.

Yes, there is public feeling about the Palestinians and their rotten deal. I’ve never heard Chechnya being discussed on the DART, whereas I have heard Israel being trashed on buses as well as at smart dinner parties. Besides, who’s ever heard of a "Sri Lanka out of Tamil Eelam" march through Cork or calls for a boycott of Russia?

But whose fault is that? Dare I suggest, the media? As a result, Israel has learned a lesson from the Russians and the Sri Lankans: impose a media ban and the world leaves you pretty much alone. No one could condone the ban during the Gaza offensive – and being host to the world’s second largest press corps, after Washington, means you pay a high price in terms of stroppy hacks – but it does seem to work.

SO WHY why the obsession with Israel? It’s the only country in the world whose existence is queried is one reason. It’s the Holy Land to the world’s two largest faiths is another. That al-Qaeda sometimes backs the Palestinian cause makes Israel/Palestine strategically important – but that’s true of Chechnya, too.

Maybe it’s the oil in the Middle East region that makes Arab countries important in western capitals (while distracting from their own despotism)?

Could it be some wrongheaded notion of guilt for having set up Israel after the Holocaust, when actually Israel fought British imperialism for its independence? Could it be, as many Israelis believe, that we see Israelis as Jews and, therefore, as bloodthirsty sub-humans in the latest manifestation of centuries-old anti-semitism?

Or is it just anti-Americanism? Perhaps it’s a little to do with each of these factors. But could it actually be that we see Israelis as very much like ourselves – sophisticated, prosperous, well-educated, fairly pale-skinned democrats? Do we hate ourselves that much? It’s either that or Israel simply isn’t deadly enough to deter the journalists too afraid to work in fly-ridden Congo.

Gaza for breakfast, back to the pool at the American Colony Hotel in time for tea, and pick up an attractive girl or strapping lad at a bar after dinner. Same again tomorrow, please. Just try doing that in Darfur.

Bluebirds grounded

2009-04-28T23:20:00.004+01:00

A quick footy-related posting. Cardiff City have managed their usual success at snatching defeat from the jaws of glorious victory by spending the last 3 matches getting one solitary point, by scraping a 2-2 draw with a couple of late goals against rock-bottom Charlton. Their other two fixtures saw a 6-0 drubbing at Preston, the only team who could realistically catch them for the last play-off place, and an ignominious 3-0 home reverse to Ipswich, a team with nothing to play for except avoiding the wrath of famously hot-headed new gaffer Roy Keane, in Ninian Park's final ever league game before their move to the new place across the road.

Why is this surprising, special, worthy of comment? SOmething that has seemingly gone totally unnoticed by footy fans is the real possibility of a bizarre play-off for the play-offs scenario. Under Football League rules, if two teams finish the season with identical points, goal difference and goals scored, and there is something to play for (ie a place in the play-offs for promotion), then the two teams must play a special play-off to determine who finishes highest.

Here is a part of the latest league table:

	Played	Pts	Goals Diff	Goal Scored
Wolverhampton	45	87	27	79
Birmingham	45	80	16	52
Sheff Utd	45	79	25	64
Reading	45	77	33	71
Cardiff	45	74	13	65
Burnley	45	73	8	68
Preston	45	71	11	64
Swansea	45	68	14	63

I have included Swansea just to rub it in that they cannot get into the play-offs. Small comforts...

Now look at Cardiff and Preston's records. If Cardiff were to lose by a single goal, be it any given scoreline, and Preston were to win by that same scoreline, they would be exactly tied, and for the first time ever (I think!), the top seven would all make it into the play-offs, with Cardiff and Preston facing each other in a preliminary round.

Wonder what odds you'd have got at the beginning of the season that a team effectively finishing seventh could make it into the Premiership?!

None of this is of any comfort; I am pretty sure Preston will romp home with a fantastic end-of-season performance, while Cardiff will cave in miserably to a Sheffield Wednesday side who have absolutely nothing to play for and are mentally already halfway to the Costa del Bling for their summer break.

Ahmedinejihad

2009-04-20T14:48:00.002+01:00

So some of the spineless diplomats who didn't manage to boycott the Geneva charade did at least manage to wriggle out on their shameful serpent bellies during Ahmedinejihad's speech. Even by his standards, it was totally nuts - just the kind of finger one wants on the nuclear trigger. He started with the classic "Palestine was expropriated by the Jooz" tirade, which prompted a first wave of walkouts, then ranted on through Israel being "a most cruel and racist regime" and "genocide of the innocent Palestinians while the world stood by", before explicitly blaming "the Zionists" for the war on Iraq.

Still, all credit to him for his oratory skills, he kept steadily spitting bile as a solid hundred delegates got up and huffed out, not to mention a couple of protestors running in wearing very funky wigs.

Needless to say, the BBC managed its usual spin, with a preview report saying how the whole thing had been made a farce by all the nasty boycotters, then managing not to translate his speech. Prior to that, an interview with an expert about North Korea's nuclear arsenal was quickly turned by the Beeb anchor into a discussion about Israel's nuclear ambiguity, and suggesting that Israel could just declare then give up its weapons in return for Iran ceasing their nuclear programme. Nice one.

A little affirmation is needed; may I first recommend readers to Calev's wonderful blog, In The Land Of Milk And Honey, and secondly I am cribbing a passage from Amos Oz that he just used, by way of sticking two fingers up to Ahmedinejad, the people who stayed on the conference floor, and the continued insidious bias of the BBC.

Then he [my father] told me in a whisper, without once calling me Your Highness or Your Honour, what some hooligans did to him and his brother David in Odessa and what some gentile boys did to him at his Polish school in Vilna, and the girls joined in too, and the next day, when his father, Grandpa Alexander, came to the school to register a complaint, the bullies refused to return the torn trousers but attacked his father, Grandpa, in front of his eyes, forced him down on the paving stones and removed his trousers too in the middle of the playground, and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes, saying that Jews were all so-and-sos, while the teachers watched and said nothing, or maybe they were laughing too.

And still in a voice of darkness with his hand still losing its way in my hair (because he was not used to stroking my hair) my father told me under my blanket in the early hours of the thirtieth of November 1947, ‘Bullies may well bother you in the street or at school some day. They may do it precisely because you are a bit like me. But from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again. From tonight that’s finished here. For ever.’

Dur-brain

2009-04-20T00:49:00.002+01:00

Good heavens. Are my eyes deceiving me? Here is someone very senior from the UN commenting on the "Durban 2" extravaganza of Israel-bashing taking place in Geneva:

"A handful of states have permitted one or two issues to dominate their approach to this issue, allowing them to outweigh the concerns of numerous groups of people that suffer racism and similar forms of intolerance to a pernicious and life-damaging degree on a daily basis all across the world."

Indeed, it is horrific that the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, along with their fellow human-rights-abusing, oil-weapon-wielding, Jew-bashing friends Venezuela, Russia et al, should use this as a tool for anti-Semitism and tedious attacks on Israel, when there are so many other things going on in the...

...hold on...some interference on the line...what's this...ah...I see...so...got it...orftorfu, you say...yes...yes...uh huh...business as usual then...thanks!

Sorry about that dear reader, it seems I made a mistake. That quotation from the beeyatch UN head honcho of this conference is actually aimed at AUSTRALIA, ISRAEL, THE USA, HOLLAND ETC for walking out in protest at the appropriation of the conference agenda to solely attack Israel and the Jooz.

Hopefully she will bury her head so far in the sand she'll strike some choice Arab crude and choke to death on it.

Back in TLV

2009-04-19T09:42:00.004+01:00

After a 10-week hiatus, I am finally getting back on the horse and blogging again. I was just thinking about what to write, as I sit at Ruppin Villas, with the BBC news on in the background. Lo and behold, Lize Ducet is hosting a debate on - get this - "Do the Palestinians have a partner for peace in Netanyahu?"

The delightful Abdul Bari Atwan is peddling the standard Palestinian line. I always think he looks like a sleepy hound dog. He speaks in that totally stereotypical Arabic-English voice, throwing in plenty of quavering emotional crap. Hilariously he makes a slip and says Israel could have dealt with "moderates like Arafat... I mean Abbas"!

Most of the debate is a yawn-fest in which the British and American folks on the panel try to stick to blandishments, whilst Bari Fatwa peddles his nonsense and the Israeli guy, Saul Zadka of some unheard-of agency, and formerly of Ha'aretz, plods along with his heavily accented English and blunt, boring counter-arguments. He fails to question very much of the others' statements, for example he leaves unchallenged such phrases as "Netanyahu is opposed to a two-state solution" and "Israel's government coalition is extreme right-wing."

Then the debate switches to a discussion on the worldwide recession and even Bari Fatwa has something reasonable to say, whilst the dumb Israeli sits twiddling his thumbs and looking like a one-trick pony. This is the time to point out that Israel's banks largely avoided sub-prime, that Israel is slowing down but is going to have a much milder recession, and this shows that Netanyahu's policies in the past as Finance Minister, and his suggestion that the best way to cut a deal with the Palestinians is through "economic peace" is a realistic option. Instead he gets a laugh from the panel by meekly agreeing with Bari Fatwa that Gordon Brown is a pillock.

Useless bloody Zionists.

Meanwhile, a bit earlier on in the trip, I read an excellent piece by the wonderful David Horovitz of the Jerusalem Post. Note the references to Saeb Erekat's recent interview on Al-Jazeera. Want to know if we have a partner for peace with the "moderates" of Fatah? Really think there is a workable solution? Wake up and smell the white phosphorus. Here is a choice morsel of Erekat's interview:

"Yasser Arafat said to Clinton defiantly: 'I will not be a traitor. Someone will come to liberate it after 10, 50, or 100 years. Jerusalem will be nothing but the capital of the Palestinian state, and there is nothing underneath or above the Haram Al-Sharif except for Allah.' That is why Yasser Arafat was besieged, and that is why he was killed unjustly."

Let that sink in a bit. Arafat denied that the Temple Mount had any Jewish connotations, therefore was unwilling to concede even the idea of Palestinian sovereignty on the ground with theoretical Jewish sovereignty of what was underneath. Erekat and Abbas concur with this, and Erekat even suggests Arafat was KILLED by Israel for this. The full interview is translated here at MEMRI.

We will never have peace with the Palestinians, unless we want a civil war of our own when the frummers turn on an Israeli government for allowing the destruction of what is left of the Temple.

So I find myself in this bizarre position where the more time I spend here in TLV, the more I think about aliyah, love the lifestyle, and wonder what I am doing in London, but then I see things like that and think I would be a better Zionist by being back in Blighty defending Israel properly. In either event, do I really want to spend the next few years wheeler-dealing, or should I be doing something more meaningful? Some big questions...

Editor's Notes: Home truths about Gaza

2009-04-09T10:28:00.001+01:00

Superb piece by David Horovitz, editor of the Jerusalem Post:

Are we losing the capacity to distinguish between what we know from our own experiences to be true or credible and what others would have the world believe about us?

In a Jerusalem Post supplement that will appear next week to mark the end of Pessah, Esther Wachsman, whose son Nachshon was kidnapped by Hamas in 1994 and killed in a Palestinian village not far from Jerusalem as the IDF tried to come to his rescue, describes poignantly how the family came to choose his name.

The family's third son, he was born at Pessah time in 1975, and they decided to name him in honor of Nachshon the son of Aminadav, the man who had the guts to trust God and test the waters, the man who leapt into the Red Sea confident that his people would be able to cross, the man who showed the children of Israel the path to their destiny.

Israel cries out for such a figure today... or such a mindset: the confidence to set a path of national destiny, to unify behind it, and to pursue it for our own benefit and that of like-minded nations, leaving our enemies helpless in our wake.

Israel has faced, and faced down, more daunting hostile challenges in its brief modern history than those posed today by the toxic mix of demonization and violence championed by Iran and offshoots such as Hamas and Hizbullah. Surviving the first moments of statehood in 1948, when a few hundred thousand pioneering Israelis prevailed against armies drawn from surrounding populations in the tens of millions, was only the first of many improbable victories.

It was a series maintained through the decades, notably including the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, all the way through to the second intifada, when the Palestinians dispatched suicide bombers in a calculated, strategic onslaught that was designed to terrorize our nation and encourage us to take the only sensible course of action - to flee. Yet even with buses and cafes and shopping malls blown up week after week, and much of a watching world branding us the architect of our own misery because we had resisted suicidal terms for Palestinian independence, the people of modern Israel did not flee; we stayed, we rethought, and we learned to protect ourselves more effectively.

But in the years since then, those who seek our demise have rethought as well. We sought to construct hermetic physical barriers to the suicide bomber onslaught. From south Lebanon and Gaza, Hizbullah and then Hamas simply cleared those obstacles by firing missiles over them, and every effort is being made to do likewise from the West Bank.

Protecting Israel cannot now be achieved by walls and fences and defensive measures; the rockets have to be stopped at source - and the source of the rockets, as ruthlessly determined by the Palestinians who manufacture and launch them, lies in the heart of the civilian populace. By cynical design, those who would kill our citizens thus ensure that their people are killed when we try to thwart the attacks - so that we are forced to fight not only to protect ourselves, but to protect our good name and our legitimacy as we do so.

This creates a somewhat complex reality - in which war footage and death tolls emphatically do not tell the full story of our conflicts, and yet that story is told, and is misunderstood, largely in a mix of misleading images and statistics. Still, internalizing the true picture - of an Israeli nation seeking to defend itself against a cynical, dishonest Palestinian terror leadership whose religiously inspired loathing for us far outweighs its concerns for the well-being of its own people - is not impossibly challenging, not for those with the earnest will to look a little more carefully.

Operation Cast Lead, Israel's turn-of-the-year military effort to halt the rocket fire from Gaza, however, seems to have marked something of a turning point as regards the willingness to look a little more carefully, to probe beyond the daily images of war and the casualty tolls.

Indeed, the furor surrounding purported testimonies from a small group of soldiers back from the war - the soldiers whose stories were compiled by the Rabin pre-army program's Danny Zamir - would suggest that a growing proportion even of our own people, we Israelis, are losing the capacity to distinguish between what we know from our own experiences to be true or credible and what others would have the world believe about us.

THE IDF is a people's army which directly touches us almost all of us. We all serve in it ourselves, and/or have relatives and friends and colleagues who do.

Almost all of us knew soldiers who directly experienced the Second Lebanon War, and came home with sorry tales of inadequate training, equipment and supplies. Almost all of us know soldiers who served in Operation Cast Lead. And what we didn't hear directly was supplemented by what we saw and heard and read about in the media.

We knew that the IDF was drawn into a civilian theater of war by an enemy that had placed rockets inside mosques, booby-trapped schools and deployed snipers in apartment buildings. We knew, too, because IDF commanders were permitted to say so publicly, that the army had changed tactics in the wake of events such as the ambush in Jenin refugee camp in 2002, in which 13 soldiers lost their lives, and that there was a readier resort to fire power in areas of military operation.

We knew, for instance, that the IDF leafleted areas where it was tackling Hamas, and urged Palestinian civilians by radio and in countless phone calls to leave. If it then came under fire from a particular building in such an area, we heard commanders detail, rather than send in soldiers to their possible deaths, it called for air support and, if necessary, took the building down.

We knew that mistakes were made - how could they not be in so densely populated an area at a time of war? Somewhere amid the self-flagellation of the Zamir soldiers' stories, we seemed to forget that the IDF killed several of its own soldiers in the bloody chaos of conflict. Inevitably, there were Palestinian noncombatants, many Palestinian noncombatants, killed in error in a conflict in which teenagers and the elderly were known to be potential suicide bombers, in which Hamas gunmen fought out of uniform and sometimes fired from within civilian crowds, in which any notion of Palestinian fighters following rules of war was nonsensical.

Credible sources, furthermore, suggest that, post-war, there has been considerable debate within the IDF about the difficulties of reconciling traditional IDF military ethics with the problematics posed by the nature of the civilian-theater conflict Hizbullah and Hamas have concocted: Where is the correct path between safeguarding troops and minimizing harm to civilians, and was it followed this time?

This newspaper, when news broke of the Rabin academy graduates' "testimonies," sought to measure their credibility by traditional journalistic standards. How dependable was the source? Were the testifying soldiers named? Could they be contacted to verify their accounts?

By definition, such assessments have to be made rapidly, decisions taken against the pressures of deadlines, and all newspapers inevitably get some of them wrong. But since the soldiers themselves were not named and not contactable, and since doubts about the accuracy of their accounts surfaced almost immediately, it was rapidly decided to carry those initial stories on the inside pages of the paper.

Danny Zamir's unexpected declaration to this newspaper on Tuesday that he had been horrified by the worldwide controversy sparked by his soldiers' accounts was, to put it mildly, hard to reconcile with his earlier stance and expressions. Now, Zamir says that the IDF "tried to protect civilians in the most crowded place in the world. There were no orders to kill civilians or any summary executions or things like that. There were problems, but problems the army can deal with."

The narrow focus in his own op-ed article (reprinted on Tuesday in the Post) on The New York Times in particular and the international media in general is disingenuous, too; it was parts of the Hebrew media, notably Haaretz and Ma'ariv, that first splashed the damning accusations he had compiled of permissive rules of engagement producing specific incidents in which civilians were deliberately shot dead. It was a Haaretz reporter who flatly stated that "the soldiers are not lying, for the simple reason that they have no reason to... This is what the soldiers, from their point of view, saw in Gaza."

Except, it turns out, they didn't. Their "testimony" was hearsay, and untrue.

FROM ISRAEL'S front-pages, in the sadly predictable rat-pack world of what passes for global journalism these days, Zamir's compilation became the most prominent story on earth for a few days - headlining major newspapers, leading global newscasts, demolishing yet more of Israel's legitimacy, turning Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi's insistence that the IDF is a "moral army" into an international bad joke.

With newspapers closing down, resources evaporating and reporters' buckling under ever-heavier pressures of work, it should be understood, there is no profound process of evaluation that determines whether a story like this will dominate the global agenda. What happens, rather, is that a hostile-to-Israel story in the Hebrew press is deemed credible simply by virtue of its having appeared in the Hebrew press: The Israelis are saying nasty stuff about themselves. Networks such as Al-Jazeera have an ideological interest in pumping up any such stories. Rival networks don't want to be left behind. Once the story is running on TV, in turn, the print news agencies feel obligated to cover it, because otherwise their clients will complain that it's on TV but not on the wires. Hey presto. World headlines.

The highly dubious nature of this and certain other items that made world headlines relating to the Gaza conflict, I have been told, prompted considerable unrest in the newsrooms of several international news organizations, with some staffers loudly protesting the apparent suspension of more rigorous journalistic standards - to no avail and, I suspect, to no lasting effect.

Entirely unsurprisingly, infinitely less global media attention has attended Zamir's contention to the Post this week that "the international media turned the IDF into war criminals," that he had no way of knowing whether the alleged shooting incidents ever took place, and that "Operation Cast Lead was justified; the IDF worked in a surgical manner. Unfortunately, in these types of operations, civilians will be killed."

FROM THE Israeli perspective, among the more troubling aspects of this dismal affair was emblemized by a letter we received, and published in Wednesday's paper, from a reader in Tel Aviv who took the Post to task for believing that "the IDF 'investigation' [of the purported killings] is gospel truth" and for ostensibly ignoring what he called "the flood of testimonies coming from Gaza - almost on a daily basis - about IDF soldiers shooting innocent men, women and children fleeing their homes, about killing medical personnel, about a civilian death toll much higher than Israel claims, all backed with strong evidence.

"No, the Palestinian side of things will always remain a lie for you," the letter writer concluded, "and evidence [of] grave wrongdoing is not for a once-honorable paper that is rapidly becoming a mouthpiece for the propaganda of the most moral army in the world."

Far more worrying than the criticism of this newspaper was the assertion of a "flood of testimonies" backed by "strong evidence" that IDF soldiers shot the innocent, and the cynical description of the IDF as "the most moral army in the world."

Skepticism is an essential tool in the armory of any journalist, and indeed of any member of the public in assessing what is presented as fact. Again, the IDF is itself agonizing about the ethical parameters within which to wage war in Gaza.

What was so sad about this reader's letter was the mix of elevated skepticism regarding what the army has to say about its own practices, and the suspension of such skepticism as regards the worst allegations being leveled against it. And what is so dismaying is the degree to which that skewed mix was widely manifest not only in this episode, but in much of the way that Israel is generally viewed from afar and, increasingly I fear, in the way we are coming to view ourselves.

WE ISRAELIS need to constantly ensure that our actions are moral and just. In that context, Zamir's allegations emphatically should have been - and indeed were - carefully investigated and handled as he told the Post this week he'd hoped they would be: His soldiers had "talked about what was difficult and painful in the war," and he took their accounts "to the army because I expected them to deal with the issues raised."

More broadly, with the dilemmas posed by Gaza as with all challenges to our capacity to live here securely, we need to shape military and diplomatic tactics and strategy to best ensure that we can both hold true to our core values and survive.

We live in a region where hostility and hatred are not easily redirected toward conciliation. We are battling in a largely unsympathetic international climate and must defend ourselves, physically and intellectually, against those who seek our demise. Critically, we cannot afford to become the prisoners of others' distorted sense of our reality, our behavior and our challenges.

These are national imperatives and they require a cohesion of purpose that Israel has yet to achieve. Internally riven and all-too intolerant, we remain as far as ever from a consensus over what our goals should be and the means we should employ to realize them.

We have left Egypt and reached the promised land, but not yet fulfilled our destiny. We await our Nachshon.

Freedman Down Under: Sydney to South Hampstead

2009-02-04T14:57:00.000Z

This is the final instalment of Freedman Down Under... we pick up as Wifey and I cruise across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, in glorious sunshine and blue skies, with the words of John Farnham ringing in our ears. The combination of the song, the view and the air conditioning made the hair stand on end.

We swung by the hostel first, to drop off our things, and were delighted to see that they had prepared a simple method of burning off the excess pounds we had piled on in the previous month. 40 degrees in the shade, and no aircon in the room - not even a decent ceiling fan, just some ancient plastic thing that may as well have been a fly taped to a stick for all the air it was pushing. Still, at least we didn't have squeaky prison bunks.

With a few hours left on the clock before returning the car, we headed out for a little orientation drive around the city. Not much to say really; the place is like London and New York combined with some serious tropics and a dash of old-fashioned English seaside sans scum and crap weather. We took in the cheapest pub lunch ever (under £3 for a mahoosive and actually very excellent steak and chips), dropped the car back, then had a leisurely stroll back to the hostel in said 40 degree heat. Mad dogs and Englishmen and all that...

That evening, we contemplated a big meal out but decided it might be nice to actually cook something for ourselves for once. The hostel had a pretty decent kitchen, and a Coles was handily at the top of the road, so we rustled up a spot of spag roo, much to the amusement of some funny Taiwanese kids who had never cooked anything before, and stood nearby gawking, and pointing at onions or garlic, asking "rot is dis?" etc etc. Not that we believe in stereotypes or nuffink.

The following day, our prayers for ANY change in the weather were answered with some grey clouds and light intermittent drizzle. We headed out to Bondi Beach for a nice long jaunt down to Coogee along the fab coastal path. Bondi is nice, but does have the same faded charm as a Brighton or a Scarborough. Obviously the birds and weather are a bit hotter though.

Highlight of the trip, other than a conversation with Wifey which was just a tad Sixth Sense, was the part where we passed some interesting curved rock formations, and I immediately switched into my best Aboriginal voice and told a beautiful made-up story about how back in Dreamtime, Plonka the Whale had chased Fukuit the Shark into the bay, where they threshed about until Fukuit fled and Plonka was beached against these rocks, making the smooth curved indentation. Then we walked around the next corner and found a plaque explaining a bit about the area, and, um, telling pretty much that exact story. I think I might get a spearing on my next trip to Oz...

Stopped off for a fress at Bronte, probably my fave of the beaches, and wound up back at the hostel to freshen up and head out for the evening (after devouring a serious load of fajitas first). Although it was a Sunday, the following day was Australia Day, ie public holiday, so people were out in force. It's hard to describe just how many stunning girls were just parading around the streets of King's Cross, but think Playboy Mansion with clothes on, and you wouldn't be too far off. Wound up at the funky Goldfish bar, where we worked through a few cocktails, including one with marmalade in it, and chatted to a bevy of cuties of course, as well as checking out the cool unisex toilets. Now I know why women always go in pairs, but I am sworn to secrecy.

The following day was characterised by a steady wet mist descending, with the effect that we didn't feel like doing a whole lot. That evening we headed out for a harbour boat trip (for which read piss up and pick up) with a large group of "fellow backpackers". Obviously I am not one, but best to keep up the pretense and slum it from time to time. Keeps one grounded. A dozen cans of Tooheys later, and with a cute strawberry blonde Canadian snuggled under my bright orange umbrella, we dashed through the rain to a crazy grafitti-covered bus, on to a mad club, where pitchers of cocktail were a fiver each. Got through half a dozen jugs of that, threw myself massively into the ambience of Australia Day, especially a spot of the ol' Flo Rida, where I did a full Les Grossman (Tropic Thunder reference!).

Next day a nice early start as we had a 10am checkout to contend with. Wifey was a little woolly-headed but I dragged myself downtown for a little mooch about nonetheless, including visits to the NSW Parliament, some other random historical buildings, and a drop of coffee on the top floor of the NSW Supreme Court, which is actually a skyscraper right next to Hyde Park (kinda mini-Central park), with cracking views across the city despite the weather.

Then off to the airport, with Wifey accidentally-on-purpose losing his Huckleberry Finn hat en route - it had reacted as straw usually does to damp, and smelled like a horse had slept on it. Usual visit to airport lounge, disappointing Qantas red wine selection masked by a G&T and the ubiquitous glass of sparkling, as well as a stack of very good cheese. Back to Melbourne, temperatures down to just high 30s, trek back to collect the car then wind up at Cool Aunt and Uncle's designer pad for leftover roo (we schlepped it from NSW, smashing all the rules about bringing food interstate), which we washed down with some excellent red brought by the Rippa, who stayed for dinner.

After a couple of days in Melbourne, and with another heatwave of 40+ approaching, we hopped in the car down the Great Ocean Road. Very pleasant, and all the more impressive for learning that large chunks of it were built by hand by a private company looking to attract tourists to the region, but as Wifey pointed out, compared to say Route 1 in the USA, this is a Good Ocean Road with occasional Greats. Highlights included the Round The Twist lighthouse and some really excellent quiche at Cape Otway, as well as the obvious lovely scenery. We got to Warrnambool at the end of the road, kipped overnight in a motel, and swung back to Melbourne the next day.

We had some really nice stops along the way - Wifey is learning the Freedman Road Trip methodology, where we potter, meander and mooch our way across various landscapes. One of them was particularly nice - a little cove hidden right down under the cliffs, complete with its own fairytale story about Tom and Eva, the only survivors of a shipwreck. Except there was no happily ever after; Tom, some lowly shiphand, didn't get to snog Eva, some rich kid, after rescuing her. In fact, they never saw each other again once they had recuperated. But then again, from the engravings of the incident, she looked like a minger anyway.

After getting back to Melbourne and having a leisurely weekend of mooching around town, not doing too much, little walks and dips at the beach, bit of fressing here and there, we took in a nice birthday dinner at Chocolate Buddha on Fed Square with Yankanaussie, whilst enjoying the atmosphere of tens of thousands of people packed onto the plaza in the balmy evening sun, enjoying the final of the Australian Open. Then some swift beers down by the riverside, and back home thoroughly contented.

Next day, final full day in Oz, mostly chilling out, then off to Neighbours Night with Wifey, Rippa and The Ringer, who actually works for Neighbours. Met the very sexy but just a tad ditzy Sky Mangel, Eastenders-a-like Steve, and the wonderful Dr Karl Kennedy, who played a set with his band, Waiting Room. Pics to follow.

Sadly that brings us to the end of Freedman Down Under. Suffice to say I cheered myself up over the next 24 hours of travel by downing obscene amounts of excellent food and drink on first Qantas to HK and then BA back to Heathrow, and making use of the lovely Arrivals Lounge for snobs like me back at T5. Then Wifey #3 and his Wifey came to collect, complete with my bright orange BP coat to wear, as it was the same tempreature in fahrenheit in London as it had been in celsius in Melbourne.

Anyway, I am now back in Blighty, and looking forward to catching up with y'all soon...

A quick news round-up

2009-01-27T23:18:00.004Z

No point reinventing the wheel re what's still going on in Gaza, the debate re the Beeb etc. Suffice to say that Auntie is showing its usual orftorfu re the Palestinians: they had an unelected, corrupt leadership that stole all its aid money, then they elected the same mob, then replaced them with another bunch who turn out to also be appropriating cash, as well as attacking their own aid vehicles, and who prefer to provoke a war using the resources they do have, to trying to improve their own society.

Oh, did I mention that Hamas seem to have enough cash to splash that they are going around damaged properties handing out wads of banknotes? Also the irony that these are usually evil Zionist shekels and dollars... Meanwhile normal service has resumed re rockets and border attacks. So the Gazans are on the whole definitely good candidates for a humanitarian appeal.

So here are a few choice stories and links for you (thanks for this first bit to Honest Reporting):

Despite widespread charges leveled against Israel in the international media, some journalists have, to their credit, made the effort to dig deeper amidst the rubble to find out what really went on in Gaza and the crimes committed by Hamas against its own people. Here are a couple of stories that you may not have seen in your local media.

Hamas hijacking ambulances:

According to the Sydney Morning Herald:

Palestinian civilians living in Gaza during the three-week war with Israel have spoken of the challenge of being caught between Hamas and Israeli soldiers as the radical Islamic movement that controls the Gaza strip attempted to hijack ambulances.

Mohammed Shriteh, 30, is an ambulance driver registered with and trained by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

His first day of work in the al-Quds neighbourhood was January 1, the sixth day of the war. "Mostly the war was not as fast or as chaotic as I expected," Mr Shriteh told the Herald. "We would co-ordinate with the Israelis before we pick up patients, because they have all our names, and our IDs, so they would not shoot at us."

Mr Shriteh said the more immediate threat was from Hamas, who would lure the ambulances into the heart of a battle to transport fighters to safety.

Hamas's human shields:

Der Spiegel reveals the abuse of Palestinian civilian homes by Hamas:

Hail's house is just a few streets away and only suffered light damage. There are a few bullet holes in the living room walls and all of the window panes are broken. Hail also found out after the cease-fire that the militants had used his house as a base for their operations. The door to his house stood open and there were electric cables lying in the hallway. When Hail followed them they led to his neighbor's house which it seems Hamas had mined.

As Hail, in his mid-30s, sat on his porch and thought about what to do a man came by: He was from Hamas and had left something in Hail's home. He let him in and the man then emerged with a bullet proof vest, a rocket launcher and an ammunitions belt. An hour later a fighter with Islamic Jihad called to the door, then disappeared onto the roof and reappeared with a box of ammunition. "The abused civilians' homes for their own purposes. That is not right," Hail says with disgust while trying to remain polite.

IDF INVESTIGATES CASUALTY FIGURES

YNet News reports:

A continuing IDF investigation into the number of civilian Palestinian casualties during the Israeli offensive in Gaza indicated that only 250 of the fatalities were civilians.

The military estimates that between 1,100 and 1,200 people were killed during the offensive. Some 700 of are believed to be militants and most are believed to be Hamas operatives.

The IDF is still trying to ascertain the identity of the remaining fatalities, but security sources said many would probably turn out to be militants as well. "Hamas is familiar with the numbers and is doing everything it can to concealed them," said an IDF source....

Many of the fatalities were considered to be civilians at first, because there were no weapons found with them, said a military source, "But that method of operation is consistent with the way Hamas was hiding in the midst of civilians, moving between their strongholds with no weapons. In many cases someone thought to be a civilian casualty turned out to be a Hamas operative after we ran our checks."

giving
Now a few articles from The Times (hat tips to Reuben, Bodie and Lazarus, I think).

Firstly this piece by the masterful Daniel Finkelstein, where he points out that all we want is for the other lot to say they are okay with us existing and actually mean it, rather than ululating and handing out sweets when some Jews/Yanks get blown up. Also here is his recent gem about giving airtime to whoever wants to buy it, so they can just run with their own bias, and we all know what we're getting.

Next up, also in The Times, this excellent piece by Andrew Roberts, pointing out that the charities who might run a BBC appeal have been as systematically biased against Israel as the Beeb itself.

I also caught this superb Times editorial, which really sums it up and has a feel of cool objectivity (ie hundreds of bleeding hearts wrote in afterwards to "correct" it). The only bit that made me squirm was the quoting of that Norwegian doctor, because yes, it is all so tragic, but then he creeped me out when I saw him on the news. So I did a bit of research...

Gilbert is a radical Marxist and a member of the political Red (Rodt) party, a revolutionary socialist party in Norway. He has been a pro-Palestinian activist since the 1970's and travelled to Lebanon in support of the Palestinians during the first Lebanon war in 1982. He has long been a vocal opponent of Israel and the U.S. Gilbert has acknowledged that he cannot separate politics from medicine, stating, "there is little in medicine that is not politics." He even criticizes the group Doctors Without Borders for providing medical assistance to both sides in a conflict instead of taking a strong stance and supporting only one party. In a 2006 article in Nordlys, journalist Ivan Kristoffersen lamented the fact that Gilbert allows his humanitarian efforts to be politicized by his radical agenda.
Mads Gilbert is described on his Wikipedia page as a “Communist politician as a member of the party Red”. The Red party was previously the Workers Communist Party, which supported Pol Pot:
AKP openly endorsed the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, and when that party’s forces invaded Phnom Penh, Klassekampen had “Long live the free Cambodia” as their front page headline. Support from AKP endured in spite of the killings which were reported during Pol Pot’s rule which AKP at that time considered to be lies, and AKP had delegations visiting the country.

Mads Gibert himself supports terrorism. This is what he told a Norwegian newspaper, the Dagbladet, a couple of weeks after 9/11:

If the U.S. government has a legitimate right to bomb and kill civilians in Iraq, then there is also a moral right to attack the United States with the weapons they had to create. Dead civilians are the same whether they are Americans, Palestinians or Iraqis.
…
Do you supports the terrorist attack on the United States?
Terror is a bad weapon, but the answer is yes, within the context I have mentioned”

Full articles here at CAMERA and Harry's Place.

Let's conclude with a classic piece of BBC emoti-journalism from the incomparable Jeremy Bowen (I think Jim Bowen would be a better reporter). Here is his heart-rending diary entry about Dr Izzeldeen Abuelaish, a Palestinian doctor who has worked in Israel for many years, and lost daughters and nieces in a shell explosion at his house, yet still puts a brave face on it, likes his Israeli colleagues, and is happy for his surviving but injured family to be rushed to Israel where the best treatment is available (not that Norwegian guy then?!).

So we should start with a few things Bowen forgot to mention. For example, the "neutral" "expert" from "Human Rights Watch", Marc Garlasco. Here is a little snippet about him, and a link to Honest Reporting's article on him, HRW, and some of their previous handiwork. Now whilst the killing of this doctor's family was clearly a tragic accident (unless you are Bowen, Garlasco or Gilbert of course), the IDF's initial reaction was that if they did hit the house with a shell, there was a reason it was targetted. Then they started to carry out a fuller investigation and I found this coverage of the actual tank unit commander's comments.

Not only that, but even Garlasco makes a discovery of "anti-tank shell" fragments - not sure why Israel would be firing those at snipers... surely the other way round? Ah yes, some more evidence of this was apparently found embedded in the unfortunate girls' heads. Pieces of Russian-made, Iranian-sponsored Grad anti-tank missile, adapted from the infamous katyusha. Still a tragedy, not least because this particular family seems to have been genuinely interested in peace and co-existence, but once again the truth in this story is somewhere between blurred enough for Bowen to hold back on the emote button just a bit, and being yet another example of Hamas cynically using parts of civilian infrastructure, knowing the response.

I even saw one comment, apparently from an Arab reader, on a blog about this, where he said it was even more likely that Hamas used this guy's house, knowing that either nobody would fire back because he had protectsia from high-ranking Israelis, or that they would, and the PR "gain" of his loss would be spectacular. Wouldn't put it past them, given the track record.

Think that'll do for the moment. Next, some more light news about Australia...