Jaw dropping moment of the year

This from todays Haaretz.

Hamas' Christian convert: I've left a society that sanctifies terror

A moment before beginning his supper, Masab, son of West Bank Hamas leader Sheikh Hassan Yousef, glances at the friend who has accompanied him to the restaurant where we met. They whisper a few words and then say grace, thanking God and Jesus for putting food on their plates. It takes a few seconds to digest this sight: The son of a Hamas MP who is also the most popular figure in that extremist Islamic organization, a young man who assisted his father for years in his political activities, has become a rank-and-file Christian. "I'm now called Joseph," he says at the outset.

Masab knows that he has little hope of returning to visit the Holy Land in this lifetime. "I know that I'm endangering my life and am even liable to lose my father, but I hope that he'll understand this and that God will give him and my family patience and willingness to open their eyes to Jesus and to Christianity. Maybe one day I'll be able to return to Palestine and to Ramallah with Jesus, in the Kingdom of God."

Nor does he attempt to hide his affection for Israel, or his abhorrence of everything representing the surroundings in which he grew up: the nation, the religion, the organization

"Send regards to Israel, I miss it. I respect Israel and admire it as a country," he says. "You Jews should be aware: You will never, but never have peace with Hamas. Islam, as the ideology that guides them, will not allow them to achieve a peace agreement with the Jews. They believe that tradition says that the Prophet Mohammed fought against the Jews and that therefore they must continue to fight them to the death."

Is that the justification for the suicide attacks?

"More than that. An entire society sanctifies death and the suicide terrorists. In Palestinian culture a suicide terrorist becomes a hero, a martyr. Sheikhs tell their students about the 'heroism of the shaheeds.'"

And yet, in spite of the criticism of the place he left, California can't make the longings disappear.

"I miss Ramallah," he says. "People with an open mind. ... I mainly miss my mother, my brothers and sisters, but I know that it will be very difficult for me to return to Ramallah soon."

Saying of the day

A wise man gets more use from his enemies than a fool from his friends.

- Baltasar Gracian

And now for some Radiohead...

Some of their music grates a bit but this is great song performed superbly.

Hugo Chávez's Jewish Problem

This is a classic example how extreme left meets extreme right.

Since Chávez took the oath of office at the beginning of 1999, there has been an unprecedented surge in anti-Semitism throughout Venezuela. Government-owned media outlets have published anti-Semitic tracts with increasing frequency. Pro-Chávez groups have publicly disseminated copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the early-20th-century czarist forgery outlining an alleged worldwide Jewish conspiracy to seize control of the world. Prominent Jewish figures have been publicly denounced for supposed disloyalty to the “Bolívarian” cause, and “Semitic banks” have been accused of plotting against the regime. Citing suspicions of such plots, Chávez’s government has gone so far as to stage raids on Jewish elementary schools and other places of meeting. The anti-Zionism expressed by the government is steadily spilling over into street-level anti-Semitism, in which synagogues are vandalized with a frequency and viciousness never before seen in the country.

[..]

As an alleged oppressor of the Palestinian Arabs, Israel has its own place of special infamy in Chávez’s world view. This latter theme has served him particularly well in his efforts to mobilize the sentiments of his rural constituents. Thus, during a 2005 speech marking Columbus’s discovery of the Americas, Chávez likened the plight of Venezuela’s Indians to that of Palestinians. Reminding his listeners of how their ancestors had been “murdered in their land” by “governments, economic sectors, and great land estates,” he thundered: “You were expelled from your homeland, like the heroic Palestinian people.”

All of these elements seem entirely derivative of Marxist-Leninist theorizing, with a strong admixture of post-colonialism à la Franz Fanon and Fidel Castro. But Chávez is not just another Latin American leftist on the Castro model. While the Cuban dictator may be his most important political influence, his greatest intellectual debt is to the Argentinian writer and thinker Norberto Ceresole: a man not of the Left but of the populist Right, a Holocaust denier, and a sworn enemy of Israel and the Jews.

[..]

The ingeniousness of Ceserole’s doctrine, as filtered through the sensibility of Hugo Chávez, resides in its blending of Marxist economics with two venerable anti-Semitic traditions. The first, still powerful in South America, derives from Catholic teachings about the historic Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. The second, encapsulated most notoriously in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has flourished in both rightist and leftist variations throughout modern European history, resurfacing in our own time in the fulminations of extreme anti-Zionists. Chávez drew on both traditions in an address he delivered on Christmas Eve in 2004. Here he spoke ominously of certain “minorities, the descendants of those who crucified Christ,” who had “taken possession of the riches of the world.”

But there was an added element at play in this passage, which has to be quoted in full to be properly appreciated:

The world has enough for everybody, but it happened that some minorities—the descendants of those who crucified Christ, the descendants of those who ejected Bolívar from here and who crucified him in their own way in Santa Marta, over in Colombia—took possession of the riches of the world. A minority appropriated the world’s gold, the silver, the minerals, the waters, the good lands, the oil, and has concentrated the riches in a few hands.

Read it all.

Israeli saves 2 Palestinians from lynch mob

Here we have a heroic Israeli saving 2 Palestinians from a lynch mob

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3571913,00.html

Hatred in Jerusalem: Two Palestinians narrowly escaped a lynching attempt in Jerusalem Tuesday evening after they were assaulted by dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The two Arabs were wounded, while a Jewish resident who protected them with his body was stabbed.

"Blood was boiling, and these crazy people almost killed me," the Jewish man told Ynet. The police are looking into the incident and searching for the attackers.

"Suddenly, while we were sitting shiva because my father-in-law passed away, two Palestinians stormed into the house bleeding and bruised, following by an angry mob," the Jewish man, who asked that his name not be published, told Ynet. "Dozens of ultra-Orthodox from the nearby yeshiva entered the backyard and severely beat up the two Palestinians, while we, still shocked, were trying to break it up and protect the Palestinians."

[..]

However, a mob then again came out of the yeshiva and started chasing the two Palestinians.

"They caught them and beat them up terribly," the Jewish man said. "My son and I were quick to protect them with our bodies…then, two Orthodox men arrived and one told us: 'You're saving Arabs?' they pulled out knives. I managed to grab the arm of one of them, yet the second one cut my stomach."