JoeSettler

Sign of the times

2009-11-20T01:03:00.002+02:00

For the third time in a row, soldiers in the Kfir Brigade (first Shimshon, then Nachshon) hung up a sign saying "Kfir doesn't expel Jews".

The army and the government are terrified. Bibi has gone as far as calling this "insubordination is a threat to all Israeli society".

Officers in the army are saying they will deal with it forcefully, before it gets out of control.

I don't think they even understand how serious a problem they have. These soldiers went through the Expulsion as teenagers, they protested, they saw what happened to their friends and families who were kicked out of their homes. And they have zero intention of expelling another Jew from his or her home.

The government is abusing these soldiers when it forces these purely political decisions on them, and these morally strong and upright young men aren't folding.

This "insubordination" is the best thing that could happen to the army.

It's time that the government comes to terms that they can not blindly count on Jewish soldiers to perform the illegal, immoral and anti-Jewish acts of destroying Jewish communities and homes.

During the expulsion of Gush Katif, the Golani Brigade made it clear they will not participate in the Expulsion - and they didn't. But not many people know about that - which is probably why it was limited to Golani. These soldiers are making their intentions public, and the effect will ripple throughout the army.

It's time the army was returned to its roots - the job of the IDF is to fight the ENEMY. Bibi - stop giving immoral anti-Jewish orders, and you won't have a problem.

It is unfortunate that some people will still say that these soldiers must stop these protest and fulfill their orders to destroy Jewish homes - because otherwise it will lead to the collapse of the Army/State/Society. Get real - these boys are ready and willing to unconditionally fight the enemy- but it is the State who has forgotten who the enemy is.

Obama off the teleprompter again.

2009-11-18T22:14:00.004+02:00

Obama is criticizing the Israeli government for building 900 new housing units in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo stating that construction in Gilo doesn't make Israel safer.

I wonder if Obama realizes how much of an idiot he sounds like to everyone living in Jerusalem – not that he would actually care.

Maybe Obama needs a little geography lesson. Or perhaps he needs to visit for himself (God forbid) to see how his comment on Gilo makes him look like a first class ignoramus.

And he wants to know why 96% of Israelis don't trust or like him?

Unbelievable that there are Jews in America (and 4% of Israelis) that still respect this man.

(The neighborhood of Gilo has 40,000 residents).

Obama (Non)Interference

2009-11-14T19:11:00.002+02:00

Strange how the Obama administration chooses to interfere (or not) with foreign government and their policies.

Knesset speaker Ruby Rivlin received "recommendations" from the George Mitchel's people, not to memorialize Kahane in the Knesset and wouldn't let Michael Ben-Ari get a visa to the US.

Meanwhile, the US won't support the Iranian protesters who are fighting against the Ayatollahs, and cheerfully grants Ahmedijinidad access to the US.

Strange indeed.

A Basic Human Right

2009-11-12T11:24:00.003+02:00

I've heard the anti-Semites make this argument, but Derfner gives the anti-Semites a run for the money with his full-blown repetition.

Derfner seems to be saying that the acquisition of weapons and even nuclear weapons is a fundamental human right that should not be denied to any nation no matter how belligerent or evil their government.

And Israel has no right to stop an enemy country from trying to acquire weapons that will be used against us. And even if Israel had that right it shouldn't use it because it makes our enemies angry at us.

Would Derfner argue that Hamas should be allowed anti-Aircraft weapons to shoot down our planes too? It sounds that way to me.

Radio Yo"Sh

2009-11-10T09:49:00.002+02:00

What could once have been Radio Yesh(a), is now Radio Yosh - Radio Yehuda v'Shomron.

After winning the government tender for the rights, for the next 3 months, Radio Yosh will be running on 98.2 FM. After which presumably it will be assessed and decided if it will continue.

But it wasn't an easy battle.

Even though the group that won the tender, won it unquestionably, Gush Hashalom decided to fight it. Gush Hashalom apparently doesn't believe the residents of Judea and Samaria constitute a geographical region that deserves a regional radio station.

Gush Shalom claimed in court that the radio station would be distinguished as right-wing political and not regional, and in that case the Left deserve a radio station too (sic). I guess Gush Shalom listens to Israeli radio even less than me.

Radio Yo"sh goes on the air within a few days on 98.2 FM

Shlomi's Angels

2009-11-08T07:58:00.002+02:00

Drug deals are rampant in the Sharon region. Dealer have a free hand, and the police need a new method to catch these criminals that are staining the reputation of these innocent citizens of the Sharon region, as people all over the country believe that everyone in the Sharon is either druggie or a dealer.

Police Chief Inspector Shlomi Angel had an idea.

He will run a sting operation and catch these drug dealers red handed.

But how will he do it without his undercover officers being exposed.

Shlomi has an idea. He will send in female officers pretending to be models.

But how will he keep his officers safe from other advances by the drug dealers.

The answer is that his female officers will pose as couple.

So off went Merav and Michelle, put on a convincing act and caught 46 drug dealers.

And Shlomi's Angels were born.

Givat HaEitam Revisited

2009-11-07T22:31:00.002+02:00

A few weeks ago ago I wrote about Nadia Matar and Givat HaEitam.

This weekend's Makor Rishon had an interesting and related story that explains how Nadia and friends were eventually able to go up to the Eitam hill and how it became officially a part of Efrat.

It was around a year ago that that the case of the Eitam Hill went to an army court (which is apparently were some of these cases are disputed). The Jews showed the original purchase documentation, the Arabs of course claimed it was all forged.

The documentation claimed the land was bought in 1947 by a man named Mr. Molcho.

As you all know, the War of Independence broke out a short while later and Gush Etzion was lost, and many of its Jewish residents were massacred by the Arabs.

To prove their claim to the Eitam hill, the Arabs hired the services of a Mr. Aharoni (an Efrat resident). Mr. Aharoni had a company that took aerial photographs of the region, and they wanted to improve the strength of their case, by showing photographs of the region.

Went they got to the judge, Mr. Aharoni spoke up and mentioned an interesting point.

Now nearly 80 years old, back in 1947 Mr. Aharoni was 17 and used to ride around with Mr. Molcho for his protection, and in turns out, he was one of the witnesses to the purchase of Givat HaEitam.

The Arabs immediately withdrew their case, and the land was indisputably designated as Jewish owned land.

A while later one of the Arabs even admitted that they knew the purchase was real, but since Mr. Molcho and his wife were dead, they figured no one would be able to prove it if they took it to court and claimed the documents were forged. They assumed the court would side with them.

Think about that story next time an Arab says a land sale to a Jew is fake.

Taking back the power

2009-11-05T09:32:00.003+02:00

The lack of a balanced set of checks and balances is something that hurts Israel a tremendous amount. The Supreme Court simply has too much power, and particularly the power to override laws created by duly elected lawmakers that they disagree with for ideological or political reasons.

Justice Minister Yaakov Ne'eman is (re)introducing a bill that will allow the Knesset to ignore a Supreme Court directive to nullifies a law passed by the Knesset, by allowing for a Knesset revote that would require a special majority to allow the law to pass.

This would, first of all, return the power of passing laws that the citizens want back into the hands of those the citizens elected, and not an elite few who have their own political agendas they are promoting.

Second, it would cause the Supreme Court to weigh far more carefully their decisions to knock down Knesset laws, as the Knesset will only allow them to continue to abuse that power so often.

But what happens if the Supreme Court rejects this legislation as "unconstitutional" (Israel doesn't actually have a Constitution)?

That's a paradox.

I guess it would have to go up to the Supreme Court for them to decide.

On a serious note, expect the Supreme Court to fight this tooth and nail.

Full coverage

2009-11-03T13:25:00.002+02:00

Israel pulls out of Lebanon, missiles are introduced that reach all of Northern Israel.

Israel pulls out of Gaza, missiles are now introduced that reach all of Southern and Central Israel (including Tel Aviv).

Now the world demands Israel pull out of (Jerusalem,) Judea and Samaria to ensure 100% coverage.

Great idea.

Har Hebron and Homesteads

2009-11-01T23:21:00.007+02:00

If you haven't had a chance to drive south on 60 you're missing an interesting learning experience.

After you pass Kiryat Arba/Hebron you drive between what are now 2 large Arab villages (where interestingly enough some/many residents actually claim Jewish descent).

But then things start to thin out and you see a sporadic house here, a Bedouin tent there, and some Jewish towns out on some hills and along the road.

As humanity mostly begins to fade away you suddenly see a serious fence to your left, behind it a forest (Yatir forest). At first glance you wonder what it is, perhaps a secret air force base, and you keep driving for a while until you hit the Machsom and realize that this is only the separation fence, a rather serious section of it at that.

Immediately after the Machsom and fence humanity resumes again. Towns. Gas stations (we learned there is apparently no gas station between the Machsom and Kiryat Arba). Eventually you reach Be'er Sheva, and the rest of the South is open to you.

What is so striking is is that along 60 you realize the obvious mistake we Jews are making.

As you pass by the Jewish Yishuvim you see along the road, or a few hills over, you see fenced-in communities huddled together for protection or habit. While at the same time you see new Arab homes, standing alone, stuck in the middle of nowhere, always followed by a claim of land ownership between one house and the next.

There are incredibly open, large barren areas down South, yet instead of taking the hilltops and planting farms, we have chosen to lock ourselves in walled ghettos, abandoning these empty, ownerless lands to those more brazen than us.

We should be building homesteads across all the hilltops and valleys, instead we concentrate on straddling everyone onto a single hilltop, while abandoning everything else around it.

Is it too late to change strategies? Is it possible?

Expansion needs to be done differently.

Click here for an interactive map (Hebrew)

Life and Death in Ur Kasdim

2009-10-31T19:19:00.002+02:00

NYTimes has an interesting article about an ancient graveyard uncovered in Ur.

I thought one part of the article was strange.

Ritual killing associated with a royal death was practiced by other ancient cultures, archaeologists say, and raises a question: Why would anyone, knowing their probable fate, choose a life as a court attendant?

“It’s almost like mass murder and hard for us to understand,” Dr. Monge said. “But in the culture these were positions of great honor, and you lived well in the court, so it was a trade-off. Besides, the movement into the next world was not for them necessarily something to fear.”

Why is the archaeologists assuming they had much of a choice?

And the rain rain rain came down down down

2009-10-30T14:24:00.002+02:00

Shabbat Shalom

Israel passes "Bathroom Break" Law

2009-10-27T19:41:00.001+02:00

Israel passes "Bathroom Break" Law.

And just in time too. It's tough to hold it in between blog posts.

RabinFest starting early this year

2009-10-26T08:30:00.001+02:00

Usually we have to suffer through just the month of November when the media gets on their high horse and starts to deride, castigate and attack everyone who rightfully opposed/opposes the views of Rabin and the disaster that Oslo brought on us.

But RabinFest is like XMas. Some people can't wait for it to happen. Every year the decorations go up earlier, the sales begin sooner, and the music starts streaming from the radio long before the season begins.

Haaretz has the honor of being the first online media outlet to kick off RabinFest early this year, with their article "Rabin's widow describes Netanyahu as a 'nightmare' in decade-old letter".

Apparently its going to be a long November.

Update: Lurker said I missed stuff from yesterday, and even last month, but my find best captures the RabinFest spirit.

Ariel Sharon waking up?

2009-10-23T12:10:00.002+02:00

Is Ariel Sharon awaking from his coma?

Mixed reports are coming from his doctors, friends, and family.

But if he were (and wasn't an awake vegetable), what would he see? How would he see the changes he wrought, and the disasters he brought down us?

Would he do Tshuva? Would he try to fix it? Would he try to make it worse?

There was a tongue-in-cheek post (and it's somewhere on the Muqata blog if you care to find it) years ago discussing just that. The scenario was that Sharon returned from his coma (and Heaven) repentant in every way.

Your thoughts?

How the dinosaurs really died

2009-10-21T10:51:00.002+02:00

In honor of Parshat Noach.

Hattip: JerusalemCop

What's Obama attacking? Capitalism or Free Press?

2009-10-20T01:11:00.003+02:00

Unless you're living under a rock, you'd know that the Obama adminstration has targeted Fox News as the enemy.

They're knowingly involved with Post-American activities because "their programming is geared toward making money," according to senior Obama advisor David Axelrod.

After all, making money is anti-American.

In fact, it's only something that the Obama campaign war chest manager is allowed to do, not a news agency.

I wonder how CNN pays the bills in Obama's America.

Living in Israel and watching CNN's reporting on local events that I'm involved in or close to, I find it amusing that Obama's stafft would essentially claim that CNN's News reporting is objective and they don't heavily inject their own political opinions into the News reports through their selective phrasing and selective reporting.

But hey, those opinions are closer to theirs, so that's OK. And they won't ask him the really tough questions. And we've seen enough to know that Obama and his administration don't like the really tough questions (you know, any question that questions the President, or "fact-checking").

Karl Rove, a Fox News contributor and former White House adviser to President George W. Bush, pointed out something amusing. President Richard Nixon also had certain journalists on his "enemies list."

The Naive Jew

2009-10-18T09:42:00.002+02:00

It's probably in part due to our hopeful optimism that has kept the Jewish people going these past 2000 years in Galus, while the practicality of a few of us is what has protected us from that same hopeful optimism.

InJerusalem this weekend had a long article about a group of Palestinians and Israelis who meet regularly to learn about each other as human beings, and not discuss politics.

Here are a few interesting excerpts from the article.

At least once a month, Palestinian lawyer Abed Eriqat, 29, passes through the one exit out of Abu Dis where there is no security barrier, gritting his teeth at the soldiers manning the checkpoint on the road where most of his life he had traveled freely to neighboring Jerusalem.

If you didn't know why Eriqat needs to now go through a check point, the article clarifies it for us:

Abu Dis is generally considered a hotbed for extremists. Three suicide bombers during the intifada came from the village, and Al-Quds University was known for supporting groups affiliated with Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The campus was also home to the Abu-Jihad Museum honoring Palestinian "martyrs" and had just celebrated a week-long event honoring the life of the late Palestinian engineer of the suicide bomb, Yahya Ayyash.

But obviously that is past history, and with Peace in the air, what Ereqat describes next shouldn't be happening.

To help him get through the wait and then interrogation, moments that he describes as the most humiliating and hopeless of his life, he sometimes uses an unusual tactic: remembering meetings with Israelis, even settlers, as a source of hope.

He's going to get a Peace Hug, so that's enough to get him through the trauma.

Yet just the other day Arutz-7 happens to have published a related article.

Israeli forces recently discovered a weapons lab in the village of Abu Dis, east of Jerusalem. Three Palestinian Authority men have been arrested on suspicion of using the lab to build bombs and weapons for attacks on Israeli citizens.

Military officials believe the discovery of the weapons lab led to the prevention of terrorist attacks. The lab is part of a larger effort to carry out attacks in the greater Jerusalem area, they warned.

I can comfortably live with Palestinian lawyer Abed Eriqat feeling moments that he describes as the most humiliating and hopeless of his life, because those few moments of his discomfort protect the rest of us, naive Israelis included, from Palestinian suicide bombers and terrorists from Eriqat's village of Abu Dis.

I wonder if they'll discuss that at their next group hug.

By the way, here are some other statements and comments about Abed Eriqat, co-director of Peace Now's Youth Dialogue program:

"Abed grew up throwing stones at Israeli soldiers in the little village of Abu Dis in the West Bank."

But Eriqat is now much more intelligent about that now, as he apparently realized it's futility.

Instead he's chosen a new tactic to get Jews out of the Land of Israel.

He finds that "engaging with Israeli partners for peace is a more constructive form of resistance. " as "working with Israelis... to advocate for peace is a form of "resistance" to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank."

God protect us from naive Israelis and Palestinians terrorists and "resisters".

Turkish Delight?

2009-10-13T16:20:00.003+02:00

There's no denying it. Turkey is going Islamic (or at least it appears to want to go that way).

No longer concerned about their relationship with Israel, particularly after the Israelis voted with their feet and stopped visiting when the Turks couldn't stop mouthing off against Israel, Turkey is going out full force against Israel with the wildest of accusations.

The question, as always, is "Why now?".

Despite their desire to be full fledged members of the EU, and their newly inked peace treaty with the Armenians (which will last only as long as no one yells "genocide" in a closed theater), Turkey is still a long way off from EU membership with their conflict with Greece, and their latest NATO snafu hovering overhead like a dark cloud (and don't even think of mentioning Kurdish separatists).

And now they are building ties with Syria too with their open borders agreement.

Wow. Turkey does have a lot of owning up to do. Perhaps it's given up and has decided that Islam is the way to go?

Or maybe in the bigger picture, it sees ties with Iran and Syria as more valuable than ties with a weak US (the EU is going Moslem anyway).

Science Non-fiction? [OT]

2009-10-13T10:14:00.003+02:00

I read two interesting article lately in respectable papers.

The first is that scientist have figured out how to (theoretically) accelerate objects to near light speeds, and as a result also create anti-Gravity fields that push other objects away. This based on a nearly forgotten theory from the 1920s. Another group of scientists is claiming they one can create the anti-Gravity field at just 10% of the speed of light if done correctly.

The second is that Higgs Bosons don't want to be discovered, and their independent existence is so abhorrent to nature, that they ripple backwards in time and self-sabotage the tools needed to create them.

Science can be pretty cool sometimes.

The Power of One

2009-10-11T14:02:00.003+02:00

As regular readers know I like to take my family to visit various "hot spots" in Greater Israel. While not the first time I was there, Nadia Matar invited me up to the Eitam Hill today where they would be giving out awards and certificates to new Olim moving to the Yishuvim.

During the speeches someone began to praise Nadia.

All the time people say, "What can I do, I'm just one person," and "How can we fight the system, there are so few of us."

It was just over 15 years ago, right after Oslo, when whatever land didn't have a Jewish home on it would be transferred into Area A.

So Nadia got up, gathered a few women (and a couple of men) and climbed up three empty, barren hilltops. Those hilltops where in danger of being handed over to the PA terrorists.

They sat there. They built temporary structures. They fought.

Today, those formerly empty, barren hilltops are the neighborhoods Zayit, Tamar, and Dagan - home to thousands of Jews.

Today, the Eitam hill is barren and empty, but in 15 years from now, maybe it will be those Olim who received certificates and awards today that will be living there with their families.

Truly an inspiring thought.

Other prizes Obama will be receiving soon...

2009-10-10T21:01:00.003+02:00

Here is a list of other prizes we expect to see President Obama winning in the coming weeks:

Pulitzer Prize: For his future autobiography about his current presidency.

Oscar: For starring in the movie based on his autobiography that he will be writing in 4 years from now.

X-Prize: For his radical breakthrough in next generation health care.

Feel free to add your own...

Operation "Every Succah and Outpost" a success

2009-10-10T20:48:00.002+02:00

We'd like to thank the millions of Jews around the world who participated in Operation: "Every Succah an Outpost".

Thanks to you, this Sukkot was a great success and the world was shown that Jews all over the world support the Zionist Enterprise.

This isn't a joke - Obama wins Nobel Peace Price

2009-10-09T13:09:00.003+02:00

There is no bigger joke than this.

Obama, who has done nothing of note in his life besides winning the US Presidential election has also won the Nobel Peace Prize.

If you thought the Nobel Peace Prize proved worthless after Arafat got it, then this is just the nail in the coffin.

It's no joke that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. It's the Nobel Peace Prize that has become a joke.

Another Nobel Prize (Ho Hum)

2009-10-08T09:35:00.004+02:00

Yet another Israeli has one a Nobel Prize, nearly double that of the entire number of Muslims and Arabs who have won the prize (total 5). And she is also a Jew, so that comes out to around 35 times the number of Muslims and Arabs who have won a Nobel Prize.

Congratulations Ada Yonath.