Arab students visit Israeli embassy in Washington

A good news story with regards to Arab/Israeli relations emanating from the US.

It's an open secret that Israel surreptitiously trades with its Arab neighbours (in a big way) in terms of commerce. Indeed, many wealthy Arabs (not to mention poor Azan's) seek and get medical treatment for life threatening diseases/conditions in Israeli hospitals. With that in mind, imagine the possible sea-change of opinions following this.

Dozens of students from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Bahrain, The United Arab Emirates and Qatar visited the Israeli embassy in Washington this week.

The Arab students, who arrived in Washington in the framework of a young international leadership training program sponsored by the US government, listened to diplomatic briefs from embassy employees and asked questions.

“It was a unique opportunity to explain Israel’s position first hand,” said Rafi Harpaz, director of Public Affairs at the embassy, in a report sent to the Foreign Ministry.

When the briefing was over, the Arab students, all from affluent homes, shook Harpaz’ hand and asked to take photos with him, telling the director it was their first time meeting an Israeli.

Each student received a PR kit that included brochures about Israel, photos and CDs.

Back seat lovers survive cliff plunge

This is a hilarious story from Ananova - especially the last line.

Two lovers ended up in hospital in Taiwan after their car plunged 150ft down a cliff face as they made love in the back seat.

Lin Gu, 25, and lover Lee Shin, 29, were left with broken bones and bruises after their car toppled over the edge of a hill in XinDian, reports Today News.

A spokesman for police who were called by witnesses said: "They had parked up close to the edge of the mountain and had left the handbrake off.

"When they started having sex the rocking motion started the car moving and it rolled off the hill. They were lucky they were not more seriously hurt."

The two lovers had driven to a deserted mountain road and parked but their movements made the car topple over the edge and roll down to the bottom of the valley.

Despite their injuries - and being covered with mud and grass - the couple managed to clamber back up to the road where the woman asked the man to keep walking while she sought help at a nearby house.

Homeowner Chen Chenggang said the woman pleaded with him not to reveal how the accident happened as her husband "would definitely sue for divorce".

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."

Hostage released for pizza

Bizarre new from down under:-

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1389697.html

An Australian prison guard held hostage for two days was released after a ransom demand for pizzas was met.

Up to 20 inmates at the Risdon Prison in Hobart, Tasmania, seized the guard in a protest over conditions in the maximum security jail.

Initially they made 24 demands to authorities, but eventually gave up their hostage after agreeing to 15 pizzas, Coke and garlic bread instead.

"At midnight, the final sticking point with the inmates was that they were requiring pizzas to be delivered. Our staff member was negotiated out with the delivery of 15 pizzas," Graeme Barber, Tasmania's director of prisons, told The Advocate newspaper.

The guard is recovering from his ordeal at home

Ban on intentional flatulence

You could not make this shit up - no pun intended.

CAMDEN (Feb 1): The Merriam Webster Dictionary definition for flatulence is brief: "flatus expelled through the anus." And while it's a natural bodily function, it seems some Camden-Rockport Middle School eighth-grade boys are taking it to new heights and making a game of seeing who can expel the loudest and grossest flatus.

"Strange, but true, thanks to a bunch of 8th grade boys, intentional farting has been banned from CRMS," the newsletter said. "It started out as a funny joke and eventually turned into a game. This is the first rule at CRMS that prevents the use of natural bodily functions. The penalty for intentional farting is a detention, so keep it to yourself!"

According to a group of seventh-grade students milling around downtown following Friday's storm-related early release, the eighth-graders' escapades are well known in the school.

"They would do it in science class and other places," said Jordan Tyler. "It's a natural occurrence and we all do it 16 times a day." (speak for yourself - ed)

http://knox.villagesoup.com/rewrite/108448.htm

I can't wait

This could be a very interesting collaboration :-

Mika: I want to work with Winehouse on her 'Jewish album'

Lebanese-born pop wonderboy Mika has offered to collaborate with Amy Winehouse should she come through with her rumored album of Hanukkah songs, the British newspaper The Sun has reported.

Mika, who has a Lebanese mother and American father, reportedly made the offer as "a statement."

The possibility of a Winehouse winter album was first mentioned last month, when producer Mark Ronson told Rolling Stone magazine that the two had discussed an album of Hanukkah and Christmas songs.

But the album may have to wait, as the Jewish songstress is currently in rehab for drug addiction, a fact which Mika acknowledges.

"I heard Amy will be recording an album of Jewish music once she gets well and I'd like to make a contribution to it," The Sun quoted Mika as saying.

"I really like her music. Think about this - me, a part-Lebanese artist working on a Jewish album. I think that's a nice statement.

"I'd like to make a statement some day."

Both Mika and Winehouse have earned critical and commercial success. Mika's debut album, Life in Cartoon Motion, has sold more than 4,000,000 copies worldwide, while Winehouse's Back to Black became a five-time platinum seller and garnered three Grammy nominations.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/950674.html

Saying of the day

How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct.

- Benjamin Disraeli

Genius of Hendrix

This is Hendrix at his best IMHO, a classic from Woodstock

A noble initiative

I love reading these sorts of initiatives amongst Israelis and Palestinians, it makes light of how the msm portrays their everyday existance. From first hand I can say that Palestinians and Israelis interact and cooperate on a daily basis.

Read on....

We are a group of Israeli and Palestinian individuals who were actively involved in the cycle of violence in our area. The Israelis served as combat soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces and the Palestinians were involved in acts of violence in the name of Palestinian liberation.

We all used weapons against one another, and looked at each other only through weapon sights; however today we cooperate and commit ourselves to the following:

• We no longer believe that the conflict can be resolved through violence


• We believe that the blood bath will not end unless we act together to terminate the occupation and stop all forms of violence.


• We call for the establishment of a Palestinian State, alongside the State of Israel. The two states can exist in peace and security one by the other.


• We will use only non violent means to achieve our goals and call for both societies to end violence.
  

Read it all

Lebanese Prime Minister blames Hezbollah

It is quite clear who is to blame for the current conflagration in the Middle East. Even the Lebanese Prime Minister thinks so:-

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/738699.html

“Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora called Saturday for an immediate cease-fire with Israel, and asked for help in deploying the country's army in the south, from where Hezbollah has for days pounded northern Israel with Katyusha rockets.

"We call for an immediate cease-fire backed by the United Nations," said Siniora in an address to the nation. "We call to broaden the state's control over all of its territory, in cooperation with United Nations forces, in southern Lebanon." (editor: about time and best for all concerned, especially the Lebanese.)

Siniora also called on Lebanon to "work to recover all Lebanese territories and exercising full sovereignty of the state over those territories," Saniora said in a televised address to the nation.

His voice cracking with emotion, Saniora criticized Hezbollah without naming the group, saying Lebanon "cannot rise and get back on its feet if its government is the last to know."

"The government alone has the legitimate right to decide on matters of peace and war because it represents the will of the Lebanese people," he said.”

Israeli plants Palestinian flag on Mt. Everest

For those who follow the, mostly depressing, news from the Middle East - as presented by the MSM - here is a touching story of how Palestinians and Israelis can and do get along.


2 Israelis reach tallest point in the world as part of ‘Everest Climb for Peace’ expedition; one of them plants Israeli and Palestinian flags on summit as gesture to fellow Palestinian mountain climber who collapsed on way to top Tzadok Yechezkeli

Israeli mountain climber Dudu Yifrah of the “Everest Climb for Peace” expedition conquered the mountain from its Tibetan side at exactly 6:51 a.m. local time last Thursday after a grueling final climb of seven hours in -45 degrees weather.

Micha Yaniv, the second Israeli on the team, arrived two hours later.

Upon reaching the summit, Yifrah, a 32-year-old farmer from Kfar Shamai, proceeded to plant Israeli and Palestinian flags, thus keeping his promise to fellow mountain climber Ali Bushnaq, a Palestinian water engineer who currently resides in Abu Dhabi, who collapsed on the way to the top and was forced to wait for the others at 7000 meters (23,000 feet).

Bushnaq broke into tears when he heard of Yifrah’s gesture.

“Now he is my brother,” he said.

Yaniv, a father of two from Beit Zayit, described each step along the final hundreds of meters as “an eternity,” adding that the view from the top was “amazing.”

“Everything looks so small from here,” he told Yedioth Ahronoth from the summit.

Unsatisfied hashish buyer seeks German police help

This story kind of gives new meaning to the moniker stonehead.

BERLIN (Reuters) - A 52-year-old man from the German town of Darmstadt tried in vain to get a refund for 400 euros ($475) worth of what he said was "bad marijuana" from his dealer before turning to the police for help, according to authorities.

The police then charged the man with violating drugs possession laws and confiscated the 200 grams of marijuana he brought with him to the police station, according to a report in Bild am Sonntag newspaper on Sunday.

"It is un-usable," the man told police in the hope they would help him get his money back. Amounts of up to 30 grams of marijuana are allowed in most German states for private consumption.