netbus – brilliant idea

During their compulsory IDF army service 4 guys decided to do something about their frustration at having to wait at bus stops not knowing when the bus would arrive.

Thus the NetBus app was born.

priorities

We get it, some Rabbi’s want their flock to remain in the dark.

But is this the most important thing they want to teach them now?

Really?

And here in Israel, the Haredi education boffins are scared of teaching their students english, maths and science.

yeah, what she said

Carol Hunt has written an interesting piece in the Irish Independent newspaper on attitudes and anti-semitism in Ireland, by the public and the media.

As recent statictics are showing, it can equally be applied in so many other countries.

how can a smart guy

allow himself to be so misinformed?

If he thinks that he is helping the Palestinian cause, he is wrong.

There is no logic, on any level, to the decision by Stephen Hawking to boycott the Israeli Presidential Conference.

At the very least, it is a chance to show support to the one Israeli who has international credibility as a person working for peace.

The conference is hosted by Israeli President Shimon Peres, and in previous years Palestinian lawmakers and educators have attended and spoken at the conference.

cashton puts her foot in it…

On 10 May 2013, the EU High Commissioner issued a statement

In this statement she says: “…It is essential that access to the holy sites in Jerusalem for peaceful worship for all denominations is fully respected…”

Does this mean that Jews can also enter the Temple Mount for peaceful worship too?

let’s make peace with this guy

Jibril Rajoub is a standup guy with a long history close to the Palestinian leadership, he sounds like the kind of person you would want as a peaceful neighbor, right?

Back in the day he was a sponsor of the Geneva Initiative and even made a video saying he is a partner for peace.

Below is the transcript of an interview he recently gave on Lebanese tv.

Lebanese TV moderator: “The American [John Kerry] came to the PA. They are talking about reviving negotiations, about getting back to the table with the Israelis… Will you go back to the negotiations game?”

Jibril Rajoub: “There is no going back to negotiations unless the source of authority is the international resolutions, with a time frame and with the freezing of all unilateral Israeli steps: Jerusalem, the fence, settlements and prisoners.”

Moderator: “You’ve heard Israel’s refusal.”

Jibril Rajoub: “That doesn’t matter. Listen. We as yet don’t have a nuke, but I swear that if we did have a nuke, we’d have used it this very morning.”

[Al-Mayadeen TV (Lebanon), April 30, 2013]

pro athletes coming out

The reverberations of NBA player Jason Collins publicly coming out are still being felt more than a week later.

The main issue is that he is an active player in one of the 4 major professional  TEAM  sports in America.

Apparently an individual athlete coming out is less of an issue, because there is no discomfort in the showers and dressing room.

It makes me wonder what the players who have objected to having a gay athlete in their dressing room are thinking.

An athlete is gay whether he comes out or not, and he is already in your dressing room.

What is the difference when he comes out, do you think he will start behaving differently?

Will he look at you in a different way in the shower after a game?

Will his tap on your butt after a big play mean something different now?

Just because heterosexual guys might be sexual predators, it does not mean that gay guys are.

useful idiots

Anshel Pfeffer says it much better than I can.

“The Israel boycotters are the right wing’s useful idiots

The BDS people are doing harm to Israel, but in ways diverging from their intents; they are being used by supporters of the settlers, as attention deflectors.

By Anshel Pfeffer     |      May.03, 2013 | 2:49 AM |

Last week was a good one for Zionists in Scotland. It was also a good week for Caledonian abominators of the Jewish state. Both sides are claiming victory. In the annals of the Israel-Palestine conflict this was barely a skirmish, nothing to warrant even a footnote. But in the university town of St. Andrews, the battle of the Matzah Ball excited passions.

The university’s Jewish society, along with Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi, planned to hold its annual ball at the Golf Hotel last Friday. It wasn’t a huge event − the society numbers around 50 members − but along with the food and dancing, they hoped to raise a few hundred pounds for several Jewish and Israeli charities.

Here they ran afoul of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which objected to including, among the charities, the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, an organization that funds educational and social programs for Israeli soldiers − or, as the SPSC puts it, supports “an occupation force that brutalizes, humiliates, kills and maims Palestinians, commits widespread human rights abuses to maintain the illegal occupation and settlements, and flouts international law.” They also objected to including the Jewish National Fund, which bills itself as a “global environmental leader … bringing life to the Negev Desert and education students around the world about Israel and the environment,” but who, according to pro-Palestinians, are little more than “experts in racist land administration.”

Pressure was applied to the Golf Hotel not to allow the event to take place. The hotel was bombarded with phone calls and an online campaign, including threats of violence ‏(from which the campaigners belatedly distanced themselves‏). Two days before the ball, the Golf Hotel capitulated and canceled the event. SPSC was triumphant and celebrated on its website “a further blow to supporters of such human rights abuses.”

The organizers began looking for an alternate venue, but due to the short notice − or fear of more protests − they were refused by three other locations until finally they found a new site. The new location was kept secret; ticket-holders were instructed to meet on Friday evening at pubs in the area, where they were to be transferred by taxi to the event.

The ball went ahead ‏(with security‏), and according to one organizer it was “a success both in terms of the amounts raised for charity and the enjoyment of all our guests.” Apparently over a thousand pounds, three times the original goal, was raised.

So who won the Battle of Matzah Ball 2013? The SPSC which succeeded in getting a local hotel to cancel a fundraising event for Israeli charities, or the university’s Jewish students who held their ball?

Is the SPSC really proud of browbeating local businesses and intimidating the small Jewish community? And JSoc cannot be happy at having to celebrate at a secret and secure location.

An anecdote from distant borders

The Jewish community in Scotland is small, and statistically at least it is dwindling. The Scottish pro-Palestine movement is more radical than its counterparts in the rest of Britain and largely isolated from them. But what happened last week in St. Andrews still represents a much wider picture.

It is hard to assess the success of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Despite the activists’ efforts, Israel’s export economy has flourished, dozens of international cooperation agreements have been signed, and hundreds of multinational companies have invested tens of billions in Israeli companies.

So a couple of American churches and a handful of European trade unions have voted to divest from Israel. Their effect has been negligible. One British supermarket chain has stopped buying Israeli produce and a few companies have pulled out of projects in which they were involved across the Green Line. Hardly anything that has hobbled Israeli businesses.

Neither is the academic boycott particularly effective. A few lecturers have found it difficult to publish articles, but it has barely limited Israeli academia.

Some singers canceled their performances in Israel; others prefer not to visit. Israeli musicians, dance troupes and theater companies have been heckled, mainly in Britain. But while music lovers in Tel Aviv may miss out on a few of their favorite performers, Israeli artists are still very much part of the international scene. There is no way of knowing how many business deals, concerts, conferences, package tours and co-productions would have taken place if foreigners were not afraid of drawing the ire of the BDS crowd.

Undoubtedly, there has been a cost. But if the intention was to isolate Israel and Israelis and to influence Israeli policies, it has been a total failure. The movement’s small success, mainly on university campuses and in a few places in Britain and South Africa, has been to remind Israelis and their Jewish supporters that they cannot ignore the Palestinian conflict. In effect, they tried to do what the Arab national movement failed at − deny Israel normalization. And to a large degree they have also failed.

Even under successive right-wing governments, Israel has expanded its trade relations, membership in international bodies, cultural and sporting ties. More crucially, they have provided a cause around which Jewish organizations and individuals ‏(all but a small fringe of anti-Zionists‏) can rally, a cause that unites them, a cause in which they have the support of the great majority of Western governments in fighting against Israel’s “delegitimization.”

And here is where they have truly caused damage and set back the cause of peace between Israel and its neighbors.

Despite the small industry of Jewish organizations and Israeli agencies dedicated to fighting “delegitimization,” no one in the West aside from a rag-tag group mostly comprised of aging hippies, radical students, champagne socialists, Arab emigres and detached professors is actually delegitimizing Israel.

Facebook may give them a deceptively loud voice. But if you spend a bit of time online and go to a few demonstrations, you will realize that it is just a bunch of the usual suspects, with a small supporting cast of disaffected young Muslim immigrants − and a few radical Jews, so the group can prove it is not anti-Semitic.

They are useful though to the Israeli right wing and supporters of the settlers who have effectively utilized the BDS people as bogeymen to deflect attention from what should be a concerted Jewish and Zionist campaign to convince the wide Israeli public to finally vote in a government dedicated to establishing a two-state solution and ending the occupation of another nation.

Small wonder Benjamin Netanyahu is such a fan; he has tasked his acolyte Yuval Steinitz with the useless position of minister of international relations, to fight the phantom of “delegitimization.” The boycotters are his useful idiots; their hysterical rhetoric supplies him with proof that the Palestinians don’t want peace, that all they want is to end the Jewish state. Not that BDS movement actually represents Palestinians actually living under occupation.

The BDS campaign is little more than a minor nuisance to Israel’s current policies; a movement whose successes include empty resolutions, heckling concerts and forcing Jewish students to dance in hiding. They have joined Jewish settlers in the West Bank as obstacles to peace. Read their literature and you will see how similar both groups are. They both oppose a two-state solution, both believe that Western media is biased against them, both abhor the Palestinian Authority and any real effort being made to improve the daily lives of Palestinian citizens, both see the Obama administration ‏(any American administration, for that matter‏) as a hostile entity, and while both deny racist tendencies, they are riddled with bigots and maintain contacts with dubious regimes and political parties.

The BDSers have only one advantage over the settlers − we can totally ignore them. Any undue attention to this rabble of misfits, cranks and conspiracy theorists only serves to aggrandize them and provides the settlers and their supporters with ammunition. Anyone who is serious about achieving lasting peace in the region should let them languish in obscurity.”

the cruel, oppressive apartheid regime

Another one for those ignorant BDS’ers – instead of searching for the negative and exaggerating it to make their anti-Semitic views known, they should read some facts.

Better yet, come to Israel and spend some time seeing the reality.

I have have visited a couple of Israeli hospitals recently – plenty of Israeli-Arabs and Palestinians are there walking around freely, as they should be able to do.  However, I doubt any Jewish Israeli would be able to do the same in any Palestinian hospital.

They receive the same medical care, from the same doctors, that all Israeli citizens receive – as they should do.  The problem is that this is the ugly truth that the haters don’t want to publicise.

Read about the plight of Mohammed, a 3 year-old from Gaza.

“…Mohammed’s plight is an extreme example of the harsh treatment some families mete out to the disabled, particularly in the more tribal-dominated corners of the Gaza Strip, even as Palestinians make strides in combating such attitudes.

It also demonstrates a costly legacy of Gaza’s strongly patriarchal culture that prods women into first-cousin marriages and allows polygamy, while rendering mothers powerless over their children’s fate.

Mohammed was rushed to Israel as a newborn for emergency treatment. His genetic disorder left him with a weakened immune system and crippled his bowels, doctors say, and an infection destroyed his hands and feet, requiring them to be amputated.

In the midst of his treatment, his mother abandoned Mohammed because her husband, ashamed of their son, threatened to take a second wife if she didn’t leave the baby and return to their home in the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis…”

And what of the evil Israeli doctors?

“…His 55-year-old grandfather cares for him. Mohammed’s Israeli doctors, who’ve grown attached to the boy, fund-raise to cover his bills, allowing him and his grandfather to live in the sunny pediatric ward…”

siriuslymeg

Thanks to SiriuslyMeg for 99 life hacks…