If you don't grow old you don't get to have a 75th birthday celebration QUOTE
Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.Anthony Powell
THEY SAID
At 75, I now realize that nobody understands what they are talking about—John Cleese in conversation with Eric Idle Ranking right up there with the line, "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?" is this recent headline in The Washington Times: "Honesty issues aside, voters still back Hillary Clinton. Cal Thomas
One of history's painful ironies is how often people on the brink of disaster have been preoccupied with trivialities. With a nuclear Iran with intercontinental missiles looming on the horizon, our intelligentsia are preoccupied with calling achievements "privilege" and playing other word games.Thomas Sowell COMMENT OF THE WEEK
Those European bankrollers, who give the Palestinians hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid every year, should demand that the PA lift its ban on Palestinians voluntarily selling land to Jews. Per the PA's own Central Bureau of Statistics, roughly a third of Palestinians wish to emigrate from the West Bank. But they don't have enough money to make the move. Selling their land to Jews anxious to live in the heartland of ancient Israel (who are the only people who want to buy it) would give emigration-minded Palestinians enough money to settle elsewhere, as they wish to do. Unfortunately, in Palestinian-controlled territory, the punishment for selling land to Jews is a life sentence of hard labor.
Josh Gelernter, National Review
DO YOU KNOW
Teachers across the United Kingdom are being told not to call girls "girls," because it might cause offense. Instead teachers should address them either as 'pupils' or "students"--gender-neutral terms.
Bob Unruh, WND A book by an "anonymous [US] congressman," titled "Confessions of Congressman X," is scheduled for publication. In it, the writer, who is reportedly a man and a Democrat, mocks the country he supposedly serves as a "nation of naive, self-absorbed sheep." He says he and most of his colleagues never read the bills they vote on and spend most of their time raising money. "My main job," he writes, "is to keep my job, to get re-elected. It takes precedence over everything."
Cal Thomas, Jewish World Review
When Moshe Dayan and Abdullah al-Tal of the Arab Legion signed the cease-fire on November 30, 1948, each drew a line on a map in grease pencil--Dayan's green, al-Tal's red--which demarcated the areas of Israeli and Jordanian-held territory. Neither realized their line would be a de facto border for 19 years. Nor did anyone at the time realize that each line was three to four millimeters thick, which, on a map drawn to the scale of 1:20,000, represented strips of land 60-80 meters wide, in a city where streets measured nine meters across.
Marsha B Cohen ,review of City of Stone: The Hidden History of Jerusalem by Meron Benvenisti. THIS CRAZY WORLD
What's a Jewish joke? One which non-Jews can't understand and that Jews have heard a better version of.
Bernard Lewis You can discover three important pieces of information from editorials in Pakistani newspapers about the recent massacre in Orlando by an Islamic extremist:
(1) The Jews did it. (2) But it's ok because the victims deserved to die as a result of their way of living. (3) The purpose of the attack was to help the "Zionist" candidate Donald Trump win the U.S. presidential elections.
Tom Gross LIFE IN ISRAEL
A bill seeking to make life easier for octogenarians was approved by Israel's Ministerial Committee for Legislation. The bill, will exempt Israelis aged 80 and above from having to wait in line in public places. The public places in question are post offices, banks, concert halls, movie theaters, supermarkets and others.
Ruthie Blum, The Algemeiner After landing back in Israel at 3:10 a.m. I found myself standing in a very long line for taxis. A young yeshiva student walked up to me and said, "Are you going to Jerusalem?" I said, "No, to Bet Shemesh." He responded, "I just dropped my friend off here and figured I would check at the taxi line to see if I could do a good deed for someone and help them. Come, I will take you to Bet Shemesh and I will just sleepover at my home in Ramat Bet Shemesh." How many 20-year-olds go out of their way to look "to do a good deed for someone" in general and who does such a thing at 3:30 a.m. This young man studies at the The Mir in Jerusalem.
Dov Lipman. IN THE NEWS
Twenty senators have urged President Obama to posthumously award Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the nation's highest honors.They cited the role of Heschel in advancing the cause of civil rights through his friendship with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. King was scheduled to spend the Pessach seder with Heschel in 1968, but was gunned down days earlier.
Ron Kampeas, Forward A new pediatric hospital was recently inaugurated in the Galilee. The four-story medical center in Safed, spanning 6,000 meters, is fully fortified against Katyusha rockets and earthquakes. The walls of the new medical center were built in accordance with Home Front Command requirements: 30-cm (nearly 12 inches) of fortified concrete. The northern wall that faces Lebanon is twice as thick. The structure is equiped with special doors and windows, as well as a ventilation system enabling a complete sealing off of the structure during an attack, without shutting off the air supply. The new fortified hospital has in-patient wards built underground.
Ruthie Blum, The Algemeiner THE WORLD AROUND US
The Israel Council for Higher Education, chaired by Education Minister Naftali Bennett, is advancing plans for Israel's first ever BA-granting college in an Arab town. The new institution is expected to significantly increase the number of Arabs, and especially Arab women, obtaining BA's. Many will now be able to live at home and commute to college. Not only will this eliminate the expense of renting apartments near campus, but it also solves the access problem for women from conservative Arab families who are barred by social norms from living away from home.
To ease the housing shortage in Arab communities, a government planning committee decided to build a new neighborhood in the Arab city of Taibeh, which "will be one of the largest building plans in the Arab sector to have been approved for many years. The Interior Ministry approved a decision to take land from the Jewish jurisdiction of Misgav and give it to the Arab town of Sakhnin. These decisions are the latest in "an increasing number" over the past year and a half intended "to accelerate development in the Arab sector.
Evelyn Gordon, Commentary Magazine THIS AND THAT
When in 1958, on the occasion of Israel's 10th anniversary, the first president of the independent Irish republic, Eamon de Valera, came to Israel, he told his host David Ben-Gurion, "I am astounded by the rapid development of your country, but especially by your most extraordinary achievement in reviving a language that had been dead for 2,000 years — Hebrew". He added bitterly, "In 1921, when Ireland achieved independence, the people in scores of Irish villages continued to speak Gaelic, our native Celtic language. However, in spite of a brief surge of literary output in Gaelic, we have failed to revive and reinstate our language in our country. Today, 35 years after we achieved independence, English has permanently supplanted our language, even if the official name of our country is Gaelic — Eire."
Avigdor Ben-Asher, Palestine-Israel Journal
Was the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas a war between sovereign nations, or were the rocket barrages fired by Hamas at Israeli territory terrorist acts? This question has become a point of contention in Hollywood, where a production company has sued its Insurer after it refused to cover expenses incurred due to the aggressions between Israel and Hamas. In the summer of 2014, the production started filming in Israel a mystery-thriller mini-series set in Jerusalem, but was forced to stop the production and move to New Mexico because of the rockets fired by Hamas. The company submitted a claim for moving the production to its Insurers. The latter denied the claim as the policy excluded war or warlike action. In its lawsuit against the Insurer, the production company claimed that the Insurer's claim flies in the face of the U.S.'s official policy, which doesn't recognize Hamas as a sovereign government [and that there therefore the action was a terrorist action, which was covered]. Haaretz. FROM ABBA EBAN'S LATEST BIOGRAPHY BY ASAF SINIVER
Abba Eban was not very good at making friends or alliances. His family and colleagues thought of him as very shy. He would even sweat profusely when he had to make small talk. Those who didn't know him could think him aloof. One of his best friends was Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate in the 1952 and 1956 US Presidential elections. Like Eban, Stevenson was one of the greatest intellectuals of his generation. There is a story in which Eban got a taxi in New York and Stevenson was talking on the radio. The driver said to his passenger: 'No one understands Stevenson because he's too intellectual; the only person who understands him is Abba Eban.' The same qualities that made Eban one of the most revered statesmen also made him a poor politician. Eban was the best prime minister Israel never had. But he never became prime minister for a specific reason – because Israelis saw him as too far removed from the Israeli psyche. In 1973-4 when Golda Meir heard that Eban was considering running for the premiership, she quipped to her advisers: 'In which country?'
Fathom Magazine THE LEFT AND ISRAEL
Since the creation of Israel, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims have been the mainstay of anti-Zionism with the Left, from the Soviet Union to professors of literature, their auxiliary. But this might be in the process of change. As Muslims slowly come to accept Israel as a reality, the Left is becoming increasingly obsessive in its rejection of Israel. A US survey for the first time shows the Democrats to be more anti-Israel than pro-Israel. An illustrative example is the World Health Organization's vote on May to accept the biased report titled Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan. The WHO accepted the assessment by 107 votes in favor, 8 votes against, 8 abstentions and 58 absences.
This is routine. But the composition of those voting blocs renders the decision noteworthy. Votes in favor included every state in Europe except two, Bosnia-Herzegovina (which has a half-Muslim population) and San Marino, both of which missed the vote. Voting in favour included Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain and the UK.
More remarkable were the many absented governments with large- to overwhelming-majority Muslim populations. So, Iceland voted for the amendment and against Israel while Turkmenistan, which is over 90% Muslim, did not. Cyprus and Greece, which have critical new relations with Israel, voted against Israel while the historically hostile Libyans missed the vote. Germany, with its malignant history, voted against Israel while Tajikistan, a partner of the Iranian regime's, was absent. Denmark, with its noble history, voted against Israel while Sudan, led by an Islamist, did not.
This unlikely pattern suggests that monolithic Muslim hostility is cracking while Europeans, who are overwhelmingly on the Left, to the point that even right-wing parties pursue watered-down left-wing policies, increasingly despise Israel. Worse, even those who do not share this attitude go along with it, even in an obscure WHO vote.
Muslims, not leftists, still staff almost all the violent attacks on Israel; and Islamism, not socialism, remains the reigning anti-Zionist ideology. But these changes point to Israel's cooling relations with the West and warming ones in its neighborhood.
Daniel Pipes ANARCHY RETURNS TO THE WEST BANK Palestinians fear that their communities may be facing a return to anarchy due to tensions between Fatah and Palestinians living inside the refugee camps in the West Bank. Although these camps are controlled by the PA, the Palestinian security forces do their best to steer clear of them. Attempts by Palestinian security forces to arrest camp residents wanted for various crimes have often resulted in armed confrontations.
These men, many of who once belonged to Fatah's armed wing, the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which was dismantled several years ago under pressure from Israel, accuse the PA leadership of turning its back on them and ignoring their demand for jobs and money. A quick chat with Palestinians in any refugee camp will reveal a driving sense of betrayal. In these camps, the PA seems as much the enemy as Israel. They speak of the PA as a corrupt and incompetent body that is managed by "mafia leaders." Many camp activists believe it is only a matter of time before Palestinians launch an intifada against the PA.
These individuals have no love for Israel. But hostility towards the PA seems to have reached unprecedented heights among camp residents. The feeling is that the PA leaders have done nothing to improve their living conditions while they are getting hundreds of millions of dollars from the international community and distributing this among themselves and their sons. "Look at all the big buildings and fancy restaurants and bars in Ramallah. Where do they get all the money to purchase expensive cars?"
Nablus, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank, exemplifies the growing West Bank anarchy. The city is surrounded by a number of refugee camps that are effectively controlled by dozens of Fatah gangs that have long been terrorizing the city's wealthy clans and leading figures. But there are also instances where it seems that rival Fatah leaders hire the unruly gunmen from the refugee camps to settle scores among themselves.
The return of anarchy to the streets of West Bank cities and refugee camps is a bad omen for President Abbas and his regime. It's also a natural result of the failure of the PA over the past two decades to offer the residents of the refugee camps any realistic hope for a better life.
The PA, like most Arab countries, has spent years upon years lying to the camp residents, telling them that they should remain in their misery because one day they will return to their families' former homes inside Israel. Adding to this extraordinarily extended effort of deceit, the PA has marginalized the refugee camp residents, cutting them out of any process of state-building. It appears that the residents have had enough. Abbas's talk of establishing an independent Palestinian state is hard to reconcile with the "security chaos" in the territories under his control. Hamas, of course, is cheering on the sidelines as it watches the PA-controlled territories going to hell.
Khaled Abu Toameh, Gatestone Institute |
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