Former Brazilian-Israeli Behind Google's Now-Famous Logo

Google's Operating Systems Blog has an article this month titled Designing Google's Logo that's interesting to read from a design perspective and cites Ruth Kedar as the graphic designer who developed the now-famous Google logo.

The article goes on to say that Kedar met Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page through a mutual friend nine years ago at Stanford University, where she was an assistant professor.

Wikipedia cites that Ruth Kedar was born in Brazil, moved to Israel where she received a degree in Architecture from the Technion – a leading Israeli Institute of Technology. She later came to the US to attend the Stanford University Masters Program in Design. More about Ruth Kedar’s graphic design studio can be found at Kedar Designs and other digital art work of hers at Ruth Kedar's Art Studio .

פשיטת הרגל של המדיה הישראלית: והפעם יומן השבוע ברשת ב' עם פאר לי שחר וניסים קינן סוחרים במוסר יחסי זול ופופוליסטי

מאת נעם רותם \ By Noam Rotem
ביקורת ותגובה לכתבה בתוכנית יומן השבוע ברשת ב' יום שבת 10:00 בבוקר 9.2.08

בתוכנית יומן השבוע של רשת ב' המגישה ועורכת פאר לי שחר השמיעה כתבה של ניסים קינן בו רואיינו שני ילדים בני 13, אחד משדרות ואחד כפר חנון בצד הפלסטינאי. הכתבה הוגשה כאילו הכול שווה וכולם אשמים במידה שווה ורק הפוליטיקאים הרעים משני הצדדים הם הגורמים לסבל האזרחים ואם רק ניתן לילדים לעשות שלום הרי שלום גדול ישרור באיזור כולו.

אבל העובדות הן:
--שחמאס חרטה על דגלה את השמדת מדינת שישראל כנגד אמנת האו"ם לעומת ישראל שקיבלה על עצמה שתי מדינות לשתי עמים.
--שחמאס ומיליטנטים פלסטינאים הם שיורים רקטות מתוך אזורי אוכלוסיה אזרחית ומשתמשים באזרחים כמגן אנושי, דבר שקודם כל נחשב פשע מלחמה, זה בניגוד לכל אמנה של זכויות אדם, והכי חשוב, זה נעשה מתוך חוסר התחשבות בחיי אדם ככלל ושל הפלסטינאים בפרט.
--שחמאס ומיליטנטים פלסטינאים הם שיורים ישירות על אזרחים ישראלים ובמטרה להרוג אזרחים, לעומת צה"ל שמנסה רק לפגוע בלוחמים המתחבאים בקרב אוכלוסיה אזרחית בניגוד לכל אמנה של זכויות אדם.
--שישראל יצאה מעזה, ובמקום להשקיע בחינוך, ניהול תקין, שגשוג, איפה הפלסטינאים משקיעים את האנרגיות וכספים שלהם? --בהסתה, חינוך לשנאה, נשק התקפי לפגוע באזרחים...

כמובן שילד בן 13 לא ידע להעלות את העובדות האלה, כל שכן אם הוא התחנך על ברכי המדיה הישראלית, והרי אין הרבה סיכויים שיקרא את ה-Wall Street Journal, שם כן היה מוצא את העובדות.

פשוט ביזיון של פאר לי שחר וניסים קינן לאינטליגנציה של המאזינים, לרמה עיתונאית, ובגידה לעובדות של מי המפרים האמיתיים של זכויות אדם. האנלוגיה לפשיטת רגל הזאת, תארו לעצמכם שהיו מראיינים ילד בלונדון וילד בדרזדן בזמן מלחמת העולם השנייה והיו מציגים כאילו כולם אשמים במידה שווה ואין צד רשע המפיר כל צלם אנוש. הכתבה הבוקר הייתה פשוט תרגיל זול ופופוליסטי, רווי אידיאולוגיה של תקינות פוליטית ומוסר יחסי בלי הצגת העובדות ובלי בדיקה אמיתית רצינית ועמוקה של הסוגייה.

בימים אלו מתנהל מלחמת דלגטימציה כנגד מדינת ישראל בזכות שלה להתקיים ולהגן על אזרחיה והכול מתוך אצטלה של תקינות פוליטית ומוסר יחסי. וכמה טוב לדעת שרשת ב' יחד עם פאר לי שחר וניסים קינן הם שותפים למלחמה הזאת נגדינו, במקום לספק את העובדות כנגד ההאשמות נגדינו שרובן ככולן חסרות בסיס ומונעות מאידיאולוגיה אנטי-ישראלית חסרת פשרות.

אבל ברשות השידור כמו בארץ ככלל, כנראה אין נשיאה באחריות, ואין חובה לתת דין וחשבון וכך נמשיך כנראה להיחשף לרמה עיתונאית מתחת לכל ביקורת.

Israeli Singer Accompanies the MacBook Air Commercial

VC Café the tech-blog that tracks Israeli tech startup news from a Silicon Valley perspective reports that the woman's voice behind the Apple MacBook Air commercial is 29 year old Israeli singer Yael Naim: Israeli singer serenades launch of MacBook Air. The article goes on to say that Yael was born in Paris to Tunisian parents who immigrated to Israel when she was 4 years old.

12-year-old Kfar Sava girl defeats 20 men (in chess tournament)

Ha'aretz reports this weekend on this cute story: click here for the full original article. Following is an excerpt and highlight from the story:

...
The most important official event of the tournament took place on Tuesday in a long row of chess games played by grandmasters from Israel, Ukraine, Poland and Germany. At the same time, dozens of Jews and Arabs participated in the Galilee competition, which offered $20,000 in total prize money.

But most of the spotlight was on a simultaneous exhibition match between a 12-year-old Israeli girl, Marsel Efroimski, and 20 chess players seated next to each other who waited anxiously for the young girl's fast-paced moves. Efroimski, the child of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, lives in Kfar Sava and is a seventh grade student. She says that since age eight, she has been playing chess. Her inspiration and her primary influences came from her father and grandfather.

"Chess is a game that requires a lot of thought," Efroimski said. "I know that it's not a game that draws crowds, but it's a very interesting game and in Ma'alot-Tarshiha, there were actually people who were interested and came to watch the games or participate."

The 20 courageous players did not stand much of a chance against the girl who in November was crowned the world youth chess champion in the under-12 girls category at the championships that were held in Turkey. The title earned her an invitation to receive the congratulations of President Shimon Peres.

Within an hour of beginning the chess matches at the community center in Ma'alot-Tarshiha, 20 victories were credited to Efroimski, who stood throughout the entire competition, as is customary, and merely sprinted from one chessboard to the next.

The little discussed plight of a million Jews who were expelled from Arab lands decades ago

From a previous Haaretz weekend magazine : All I wanted was justice
By Adi Schwartz

One family’s 50-year fight for restitution of an Alexandrian hotel sheds light on the little discussed plight of a million Jews who were expelled from Arab lands decades ago

Below extensive excerpts, read entire original article here

Albert Metzger never left his hotel. Although he owned another six hotels in Alexandria, and was actually in charge of the entire hotel industry in northern Egypt, for him the seaside Cecil Hotel was the jewel in the crown. From the time he built it in 1929 Metzger lived there, in a private apartment on the first floor, supervising every movement and every employee closely. Within a few years the hotel in the heart of Alexandria Bay had become famous, and turned into one of the most famous meeting places in the Levant. British author Lawrence Durrell, who lived in the city for a few years, commemorated it in his "The Alexandria Quartet."

One morning in November 1956, however, Albert Metzger was forced to leave. The gallery of famous guests who used to stay at the hotel - from Al Capone, to Josephine Baker, to Winston Churchill - couldn't help him. Nor could the fact that the battle of El Alamein had been planned on its first floor, at a time when the hotel had served as the headquarters of the British Police. Nor could the fact that Metzger himself had built and created the place ex nihilo.

That morning Metzger went from being a wealthy businessman whom everyone in Alexandria knew, to being persona non grata, an enemy among his fellow Egyptians. In the days following the outbreak of the Sinai Campaign, Egypt had decided on a campaign to punish its Jewish community, which numbered about 50,000 souls. The Jews lost their citizenship, their businesses and bank accounts were confiscated, and they were not allowed to work. The Cecil Hotel, like hundreds of other assets, was taken away by the Egyptian regime for one reason only: Its owners were Jewish.

Overnight Metzger turned from multimillionaire to penniless refugee. Even when he decided to leave the country and try his luck elsewhere, the authorities refused to allow him to take out money, property, jewelry, books or pictures. Only one suitcase full of clothing, weighing 20 kilograms. He left by car accompanied by his family and headed for the Libyan border, leaving behind an entire life that had gone down the drain.
...

"They told me I'd never win," says Patricia Metzger, 69, in a phone conversation with Haaretz from Dar es Salaam, "but I'm a very stubborn woman. I wanted to return to Alexandria and run the hotel, but the Egyptians told me 'Forget it, it's over.' They kept dragging things out, and in the end they offered us very low compensation. They didn't want to give up the hotel, and that's why they said that if we didn't accept their offer, they would bury the matter for a few more years. I cried when I heard the sum they had offered us for this beautiful hotel, but I agreed, because in any case this may be the longest lawsuit in history. All I wanted was justice."

Back on the agenda
Patricia Metzger's campaign to achieve justice sheds light on a little-discussed aspect of the Israeli-Arab conflict: In the wake of the War of Independence and the establishment of Israel, two major population movements took place in the Middle East. The one that is frequently mentioned is the Palestinian exodus, but at the same time almost one million Jews were forced to leave Arab countries where they had lived for hundreds of years. According to official Arab statistics, some 850,000 Jews left those countries from 1948 to the beginning of the 1970s, and about 600,000 of them were absorbed in Israel. For the sake of comparison, the United Nations data estimate the original population of Palestinian refugees at 720,000.

Moreover, the property the Jews left behind in Arab countries was much more valuable than the property of the Palestinians: The mount of Jewish-owned land alone is estimated at 100,000 square kilometers - four times the size of Israel.

Before the Annapolis summit and now, prior to the visit to Israel of U.S. President George W. Bush, several Jewish organizations are trying to put this subject back on the world agenda. Prof. Irwin Cotler, a Canadian MP and former justice minister, wrote a detailed opinion in November on behalf of the Justice for Jews from Arab Countries organization, along with its director and another legal expert...

An expert on human rights, Cotler points out that the definition of refugee in international law - as a person with "a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion" - clearly applied to the Jews from Arab countries. Indeed, the onternational community has already recognized the suffering of these Jews - including in statements by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in the 1950s. In 2000, during the Camp David negotiations, then U.S. president Bill Clinton said that Israel was full of Jews who had lived in Arab countries and immigrated to Israel because they had become refugees in their own countries.

Cotler's detailed opinion mentions that the Arab world's refusal to accept the existence of the State of Israel gave rise to a negative attitude and discrimination against the Jews, and even to violence. The 1948 decision by the Arab League in effect determined the policy that Jews would be considered "members of the Jewish minority of Palestine" - i.e., citizens of an enemy country, Israel. The decision also stipulated freezing Jews' bank accounts, imprisonment of Zionists and confiscation of their property. For all these reasons the Jewish population in the Arab countries declined during the first years after Israel's establishment: in Yemen from 55,000 to 4,000; in Iraq from 135,000 to 6,000; in Aden from 8,000 to 800; in Egypt from 80,000 to 50,000; in Libya from 38,000 to 4,000; and in Syria from 30,000 to 5,000.

In each country the situation was different. Ada Aharoni, a native of Cairo who left with her family in 1949, remembers a happy childhood, but also the swift decline after the Partition Plan of the UN General Assembly in 1947.
...
Aharoni's family decided to leave for Israel. The ships, which couldn't sail directly to Israel, first arrived in Marseille. "Father had deposited all our money in a Swiss bank in Cairo," she recalls, "and the first day we arrived in Marseille, we went to the bank. There the branch manager told him that there wasn't a single cent, because Egypt had confiscated the account."

The shock caused Aharoni's father to suffer a heart attack, from which he had difficulty recovering. His elder brother, a judge in the supreme rabbinical court in Cairo, died of cardiac arrest while on the plane to Paris. The grandmother of her best friend refused to leave the land of her fathers, threw herself down the stairs and died on the spot.

Jewish 'nakba'
The second anti-Jewish wave in Egypt, which took place in 1956, hit the Metzgers. The family had arrived in the 19th century from France, but Albert, and his father, were born in Egypt and spent almost their entire lives there. Only a few years earlier he had received the title "emir," because of funds he raised for charitable projects and his status in Egyptian society. But with the outbreak of the Sinai Campaign in October 1956, the situation deteriorated.

Some 1,000 Jews were arrested immediately upon the outbreak of the war, and about 500 places of business were confiscated. In the mosques of Cairo and Alexandria a government order was read calling for Jews to be treated as "enemies." Bank accounts were blocked, and Jewish managers and salaried workers were fired. Judges and lawyers were expelled from the professional organization, and Jewish engineers, doctors and teachers were not allowed to work.
...
Prof. Aharoni believes that a major mistake is being made. In her opinion, this is not only a matter of doing historical justice to entire communities that were lost, but also a matter of great importance to the present. She discovered that first hand when, a few years ago, she gave a course at the University of Pennsylvania entitled "The Nakba [Arabic for 'catastrophe'] of the Jews of Egypt and Arab Countries." Over half the 50 students in the class, she recalls, were Arabs from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Palestinians and Israelis, as well as several Iranians. They all expressed great anger when she presented the subject of the course, and claimed that "nakba" refers only to the tragic events experienced by the Palestinians in 1948. However, she says, toward the end of the course one of the participants, a Palestinian PhD in sociology, got up and said in amazement: "We checked the data carefully, and the numbers and facts you gave us were in fact correct. I'm surprised that you Jews, who are known to be intelligent, enlightened and smart, haven't publicized this important and interesting story. How is it that we never heard this story? Why don't you tell the story of the nakba of the Jews from the Arab countries?"

Aharoni was curious to know why it was so important to him that the story be publicized. "Because it rescues my honor and that of my people," he replied. "It makes us Palestinians realize that we're not the only ones who suffered from the Arab-Israeli conflict. It makes things much easier for us. This information enables us to stand erect and opens opportunities for a sulha [reconciliation]. The condition for a sulha is that the side that causes injustice to the other side has to pay for it. Full reconciliation is reflected in the sulha ceremony where the payment is made. Now I understand that those Jews already paid for the sulha, when they lost all their property and were forced to disperse, just like us Palestinians. The conditions of the sulha have already been fulfilled. If the Israeli government publicizes that, the two nations will be able to progress to a process of true peace. We won't feel that we are the only underdog, because the Jews from the Arab countries were victims. You also experienced a catastrophe, and the time has come to engage in a sulha and to stop killing one another."

Original Article in Hebrew:

זה היה ביתם
מיליון היהודים האחרים שגורשו ממדינות ערב לאחר הקמת מדינת ישראל, נשכחו משום מה
...
פרופ' אהרוני סבורה שזאת החמצה מצערת. לדעתה, לא רק שמדובר בעשיית צדק היסטורי עם קהילות שלמות שאבדו, אלא שיש בכך גם חשיבות רבה להווה. על כך היא למדה ממקור ראשון, כשהעבירה לפני כמה שנים קורס באוניברסיטת פנסילווניה על "הנכבה של יהודי מצרים וארצות ערב". יותר ממחצית מחמישים הסטודנטים בכיתה, היא מספרת, היו ערבים ממצרים, ירדן, עיראק, סוריה, ערבים פלשתינאים וישראלים, וגם כמה איראנים. כולם הביעו תרעומת כשהציגה את נושא הקורס, וטענו שהמלה נכבה מתייחסת רק לאירועים הטרגיים שעברו על הפלשתינאים ב-1948.

ואולם, היא אומרת, לקראת סוף הקורס קם אחד המשתתפים, דוקטור לסוציולוגיה פלשתינאי, ואמר לה בהשתאות: "בדקנו את הנתונים, ואכן המספרים והעובדות שנתת לנו היו נכונים. אני מתפלא איך אתם היהודים, שידועים כאינטליגנטים, נאורים וחכמים, לא פירסמתם את כל הפרשה החשובה והמעניינת הזאת? איך קרה שלא שמענו אף פעם את הסיפור הזה? למה אתם לא מספרים את סיפור הנכבה של היהודים מארצות ערב?"

אהרוני הסתקרנה לדעת מדוע כל כך חשוב לו שהסיפור הזה יפורסם. "כי זה מציל את כבודי ואת כבוד עמי", השיב לה. "זה מביא אותנו הפלשתינאים להכרה שאנחנו לא היחידים שסבלו מהסכסוך הערבי-ישראלי. זה מאוד מקל עלינו. המידע הזה זוקף את קומתנו ופותח אפשרויות לסולחה. התנאי לקיום סולחה הוא שהצד שגרם עוול לצד השני ישלם על כך במשהו. הפיוס המלא מקבל את ביטויו בטקס הסולחה שבו מתבצע התשלום. עכשיו הבנתי שהיהודים האלה כבר שילמו עבור הסולחה, כאשר הפסידו את כל רכושם ונאלצו להתפזר, בדיוק כמונו הפלשתינאים. תנאי הסולחה הרי הושלמו. אם ממשלת ישראל תפרסם זאת ברבים, שני העמים יוכלו להתקדם לתהליך של שלום אמיתי. אנחנו לא נרגיש שאנחנו האנדרדוג היחיד, כי גם יהודי ארצות ערב היו קורבנות. גם אתם עברתם קטסטרופה, ואכן הגיע הזמן לעשות סולחה ולהפסיק להרוג אחד את השני".

A Suicide Bombing that Killed 50 in a Crowded Mosque and the Deafening Silence of Hypocrisy

Back in December and prior to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto there was a brutal suicide bombing in a crowded Mosque that killed 50 people. Reuters reported the incident in the following manner:

A suicide bomber killed at least 50 people on Friday in a mosque in the home compound of Pakistan's former interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao, in what appeared to be a political attack on the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha. About 100 people were injured.

The bomb, packed with ball bearings and nails, ripped through a crowd of hundreds at a mosque in Sherpao's home compound in a village called Sherpao, not far from Peshawar. The suspected bomber sat in a middle row among the worshippers and set off his bomb as prayers ended and people gathered around...

Editorial Comment
We've seen Arabs and Muslims take to the streets around the world in mass and in frenzied and violent demonstrations over a cartoon of Mohamed. At the same time absolute silence regarding the vile and viciously anti-American and anti-Semitic cartoons which are a staple in the Arab press. But maybe the height of hypocrisy is the utter silence regarding the copious blood letting by Muslims of Muslims as in this incident. And in response to this Mosque massacre there is no pan-Muslim uproar, no worldwide demonstrating by alleged moderates, instead just the deafening silence of hypocrisy.

Former Sudanese Slave and Prominent Human Rights Activist--Simon Deng, blasts Desmond Tutu and Stands up for Israel

Simon Deng a modern day hero, is a native of the Shiluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, an escaped jihad slave and a leading human rights activist. Simon Deng visited Israel last month and is a unique defender of Israel. In 2005 he gave a poignant and passionate speech at a conference in Geneva. Following is an excerpt from that speech:

My name is Simon Aban Deng. I am from Sudan. I am a Shiluk by tribe. I am a Christian by religion. I belong to a people who have been subjected to mass murder, slavery, systematic rape, religious persecution, enforced starvation, dislocation, exile. We are the victims of genocide, both physical and cultural. We have been targeted for annihilation as human beings and as members of a culture. These miseries did not fall upon us from the sky; we have been and remain the victims of the radical jihadist regime in Khartoum.

The scale of our losses has been enormous in the two genocides perpetrated by the Islamists - two, not one. Starting in 1955, the year before independence was granted by the British, up until 1973, 1.5 million Southern Sudanese Christians were slaughtered by the Arab/Muslim dominated government in Khartoum. From 1983 until just 3 months ago when a peace treaty was brokered by the United States, we Southern Sudanese lost 2 million more to what Khartoum calls a holy war against the infidels. Yes, I am an infidel according to their definition. I think many of you are as well. We black "infidels" in the South, Christians and other non-Muslims, refused to be ruled by Islam, and we refused to be Arabized.

Our only offense was our determination to remain faithful to our religion and to honor our African cultures. For these "crimes" The National Islamic Front regime has committed genocide against us. Not only has that genocide produced the largest body-count of murdered innocents since the Nazis and the work of Joseph Stalin's followers, but it has also produced the largest population of refugees anywhere on earth since the Second World War.

Editorial Comment: And I ask: where are you Ms. Christian Amanpour, in light of this account and your saliently distorted and blatantly disingenuous "God's Holy Warriors". (A more extensive rebuttal to Ms. Amanpour's insincere series will follow at some later time).

This past month Simon Deng wrote the following article, which seems to have been originally published on The David Project and then reproduced on several other Blogs-- The Jewish Advocate, Gay and Right and Aish. Following is the article in its entirety:

Disappearance of Bishop Tutu
By Simon Deng

Late last month, I went to hear Bishop Desmond Tutu speak at Boston’s Old South Church at a conference on “Israel Apartheid.” Tutu is a well respected man of God. He brought reconciliation between blacks and whites in South Africa. That he would lead a conference that damns the Jewish state is very disturbing to me.

The State of Israel is not an apartheid state. I know because I write this from Jerusalem where I have seen Arab mothers peacefully strolling with their families – even though I also drove on Israeli roads protected by walls and fences from Arab bullets and stones. I know Arabs go to Israeli schools, and get the best medical care in the world. I know they vote and have elected representatives to the Israeli Parliament. I see street signs in Arabic, an official language here. None of this was true for blacks under Apartheid in Tutu’s South Africa.

I also know countries that do deserve the apartheid label: My country, Sudan, is on the top of the list, but so are Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. What has happened to my people in Sudan is a thousand times worse than Apartheid in South Africa. And no matter how the Palestinians suffer, they suffer nothing compared to my people. Nothing. And most of the suffering is the fault of their leaders. Bishop Tutu, I see black Jews walking down the street here in Jerusalem. Black like us, free and proud.

Tutu said Israeli checkpoints are a nightmare. But checkpoints are there because Palestinians are sent into Israel to blow up and kill innocent women and children. Tutu wants checkpoints removed. Do you not have doors in your home, Bishop? Does that make your house an apartheid house? If someone, Heaven forbid, tried to enter with a bomb, we would want you to have security people “humiliating” your guests with searches, and we would not call you racist for doing so. We all go through checkpoints at every airport. Are the airlines being racist? No.

Yes, the Palestinians are inconvenienced at checkpoints. But why, Bishop Tutu, do you care more about that inconvenience than about Jewish lives?

Bishop, when you used to dance for Mandela’s freedom, we Africans – all over Africa – joined in. Our support was key in your freedom. But when children in Burundi and Kinshasa, all the way to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and in particular in Sudan, cried and called for rescue, you heard but chose to be silent.

Today, black children are enslaved in Sudan, the last place in the continent of Africa where humans are owned by other humans – I was part of the movement to stop slavery in Mauritania, which just now abolished the practice. But you were not with us, Bishop Tutu.

So where is Desmond Tutu when my people call out for freedom? Slaughter and genocide and slavery are lashing Africans right now. Where are you for Sudan, Bishop Tutu? You are busy attacking the Jewish state. Why?

New Bezeq TV Ad: Invites us to Come Rediscover Home

The video ad takes viewers on a series of candid family scenes, where one family member stumbles by chance on some unexpected and poignant moment of another family member. These small stolen observations, unveil something new about those closest to them. The voice over at the end of the clip says: "one can always discover something new about those closest to us". Bezeq telecom, Israel's oldest and leading land line provider, invites viewers to come rediscover home (the implication being the new unexpected land line offerings)

UK: Children's Sing-Along DVD Which Glorifies Suicide Bombing

London's Evening Standard online entertainment magazine thisislondon.co.uk reports about a shocking sing-along children's DVD which glorifies suicide bombing found on sale in one of Britain's terrorist hotbeds.

Read the full report along with accompanying photos here: British children targeted with terror sing-along DVD for would-be suicide bombers

The disc - part of an Egyptian-made series - is on sale in West Yorkshire, where three of the July 7 bombers lived, and is aimed at youngsters from the local Muslim community.

Introduced by a cute cartoon chicken, it contains three songs in Arabic which are illustrated with a video story. But any impression of its being an innocent music DVD is immediately dispelled by a song with English subtitles about two children who lose their mother when she blows herself up in a suicide bomb attack.

The song, sung as if told by the bomber's daughter, ends with the young Arabic girl vowing to follow in her mother's footsteps.

...

האמנה הפלסטינאית עדיין מכילה 10 סעיפים הכוללים את חיסול מדינת ישראל ומאבק טרור להשיג מטרה זו

For the benefit of Hebrew readers who get little to no exposure to a serious contrarian debate in the Israeli media the previous article has been translated into Hebrew

ארגון ציוני אמריקה הוציאה השבוע פרסומת בגודל עמוד שלם בניו-יורק טיימס, הרלד טריביון, והמהדורה האנגלית של הארץ, האמורה להזכיר למזכירת המדינה רייס כמו גם לקוראים, שהאמנה הפלסטינאית עדיין מכילה 10 סעיפים הקוראים לחיסול מדינת ישראל ומאבק טרור להשיג מטרה זו. את הפרסומת עם כל 10 הסעיפים ניתן למצוא כאן באתר ציוני אמריקה.
להלן כמה נקודות עיקריות:

1. סעיף 22: התנגדות לכל פיתרון פוליטי כאלטרנטיבה לפירוק הכיבוש הציוני של פלסטין
2. סעיף 12: להשלים את שחרור פלסטין, והכחדת הכלכלה, הפוליטיקה, הצבא והתרבות הצינוית
3. סעיף 19: המאבק המזוין היא אסטרטגיה ולא טקטיקה...והמאבק לא יחדל עד השמדת המדינה הציונית והשחרור המלא של פלסטין
4. סעיף 17: מאבק ציבורי מזוין הוא השיטה הבלתי נמנעת לשחרור פלסטין
5. סעיף 25: יש לשכנע מדינות בעולם למנוע הגירה יהודית לפלסטין כשיטה לפתרון הבעייה

דבר מערכת
לאור האמנה יש מקום להזכיר מספר עובדות היסטוריות:

1. השם פלסטין נטבעה ע"י הרומאים לחבל ארץ יהודה גם כמידת עונשין לאחר מרד העצמאות הכושלת של היהודים כנגד האימפריה הרומאית שהתחילה בשנת 66 לספירה
2. יש התיישבות רציפה של יהודים בארץ ישראל למעלה מ-3,000 שנה והרבה לפני הכיבוש הערבי במאה ה-7
3. עד לעלייה היהודית בתחילת המאה ה-20, הישוב הערבי לא קראה לעצמה פלסטינאים ולא היית לה ספרות, או תרבות שביטאה זהות כעם לחבל ארץ ענייה זו
4. הרבה ערבים שלאחר מכן זיהו עצמם כפלסטינאים היגרו לארץ בתחילת המאה ה-20 כתוצאה של פיתוח כלכלי שהביאה העלייה היהודית
5. לו הבריטים היו פותחים את שערי הכניסה לארץ בזמן השואה, אז מיליוני יהודים היו יכולים להינצל ממות באירופה בידי הנאצים והיום לא הייתה מאבק דמוגראפי על חבל ארץ צרה זו
6. לבסוף יש לזכור שהייתה כמות שווה של פליטים יהודים ממדינות ערב, ובשונה למדינות ערב, ישראל קלטה פליטים יהודים מכל רחבי העולם עם שפות ותרבויות שונות לתוך ישראל הקטנה. לעומתם מדינות ערב השולטים על שטחים נרחבים של כדור הארץ והמשתרעים מהאוקיינוס ההודי במזרח ועד האוקיאנוס האטלנטי במערב סירבו לקלוט ערבים שדיברו אותה שפה ותרבות בניצול ציני של חיי אדם כחלק מהאסטרטגיה כנגד מדינת ישראל

Palestinian Charter Still Contains 10 Articles Promoting Terrorism and the Destruction of Israel

The ZOA (Zionist Organization of America) took out a full page ad this past week in the New York Times, Herald Tribune and English edition of Ha'aretz reminding readers that there are still 10 articles in the Palestinian charter that promote terrorism and the destruction of Israel. Click on full page ad to see all 10 articles. Following are highlights from some of these articles:

1. Article 22: Opposing any political solution offered as an alternative to demolishing the Zionist occupation in Palestine...
2. Article 12: Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence
3. Article 19: Armed struggle is a strategy and not a tactic...and this struggle will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated
4. Article 17: Armed public revolution is the inevitable method to liberating Palestine
5. Article 25: Convincing concerned countries in the world to prevent Jewish immigration to Palestine as a method of solving the problem

Editorial Commentary
A few historical facts are prudent here in light of the charter:

1. The term Palestine was coined by the Romans for the Judean state as a repressive measure to the failed Jewish rebellion for independence from the Roman Empire in 66 C.E.
2. Jews have continuously lived in the land of Israel for over 3,000 years and prior to the Arab conquest in the 7th century
3. Until Jewish immigration in the 20th century to the land of Israel, the sparse Arab settlers never referred to themselves as Palestinians or had any notable body of literature, culture, or national identity pertaining to this strip of land
4. Many Arabs, later to call themselves Palestinians immigrated to Israel as Jewish immigration presented new economic opportunities to this largely economically dormant landscape
5. Had the British opened the flood gates to the the land of Israel during World War II, millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis could have been saved and there would have been no demographic conflict over this narrow strip of ancient Jewish homeland
6. There were a similar number of Jewish refugees from Arab countries in wake of Israel’s independence and the collapse of British and French colonialism in the near east. But in contrast to the Arab states, Israel absorbed Jewish refugees of different languages and cultures from around the world into the tiny strip of land called Israel. The Arab countries on the other hand, with vast territories stretching from the Indian Ocean in the east to the Atlantic ocean in the west, put Arab refugees in refugee camps, despite that they called them their brethren and despite their speaking the same language and culture, in a cynical use of human life in order for them to serve as part of a strategic tactic to undermine the Jewish state

Two Iraqi children treated in Israel for open heart surgery

Back in October, two Iraqi children were successfully treated in Israel for emergency open heart surgery, as part of an Israeli initiative to treat children from around the world who would otherwise not have access to such operations.

The 5-month-old girl and 11-year-old boy were selected from among 40 other Iraqi children during a one-day cardiology clinic held in Jordan earlier this week by the Israeli-based organization Save A Child's Heart(SACH).View an online image gallery of this news item

SACH has performed heart surgery on 35 Iraqi children and over 1700 children from 28 other countries since its inception in 1996. Nearly half of the children treated are Palestinians or residents of other Arab countries.

The children are treated at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon and are housed at the SACH Children's Home in Azur for the duration of their treatment.

Save A Child's Heart is an Israeli based, humanitarian organization and is one of the largest undertakings in the world providing urgently needed pediatric heart surgery and follow-up care for children from third world and developing countries.

All children, regardless of race, religion, sex, color, or financial consideration receive the best possible care that modern medicine has to offer. The entire surgical, intensive care, and nursing staff substantially volunteer their services and donate their time!

Editorial Comment
Israel makes up 0.1% of the world's population, it has no oil resources, and has been in an existential struggle for survival since its inception, threatened repeatedly by much larger surrounding Arab countries. And yet this humanitarian program, is one of the largest of its kind, with no comparable Arab program out there(despite hundreds of billions of dollars from oil revenue), and certainly no similar humanitarian program in the business of also saving Jewish children's hearts. Sadly, the approach in the Arab world is practically the opposite. Instead of humanitarian acts, demonization and indoctrinated hatred of Israel and Jews is too often common place across too much of the Arab world, where despot regimes and dysfunctional societies (see Yemen for example with 70% illiteracy amongst women), deflect the anger of their deprived masses by using Israel and the Jews as their scapegoat.

Short video clip of story:

More Israeli TV Commercials

By Noam Rotem
Local cellular carrier Cellcom advertises it’s new on-the-second billing where you only pay for the exact amount of seconds you talked. Ad includes quintessentially Israeli scenes depicting of how when ones says: “just a second” they don’t literally mean a second. The tag being: in life, not always is a second really a second but at cellcom it really is


Back in Passover local cellular carrier Pelephone ran a seasonal ad for surprise prizes for all its customers for the holiday. Playing off of the Passover tradition where children search for the Afikoman towards the end of the Seder, which are then redeemed for prizes by the Seder host. The ad is accompanied by a Ladino rendition of one of the children songs from the Passover Seder.



In a more recent Pelephone summer campaign for free sms’s from abroad to Israel--provides reason enough for an EL AL flight to turn around with the tagline being: looking for an excuse to return abroad ...?


Finally the local McDonald’s franchise pokes fun at Israeli taxis driver’s English skills by having one call up to ask how do you say McDonald’s in English (it’s the same in Hebrew) in order to promote their freshly cut Arabic style salad now to be found at your local Israeli McDonald’s

Ahmadinejad's September UN Visit

By Noam Rotem
Last month I was in NY and went down with my family to attend the Jewish protest rally against Iranian president Ahmadinejad's UN visit. The bulk of the protesters were students from New York-area Jewish day schools, many of those being modern orthodox. But there were also representatives from every major Jewish organization along with Christian supporters of Israel.

Some of the most effective words spoken vis-a-vis the hypocrisy behind Holocaust denying Ahmadinejad's invitation to speak at Columbia University came from former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu on a FOX News interview where he exposed Columbia University's disingenuousness by posing a question along the following analogy:

Can anyone imagine Columbia University (or the UN for that matter) inviting and providing an open stage for some hypothetical African despot, who has a record for repeatedly denying the historical truth of the African slave trade and repeatedly threatening to wipe off the face of the earth another African nation?

The question is rendered rhetorical given Columbia University's disingenuousness--reinforced by its past record of rejecting the free speech rights of ROTC recruiters, yet not of Holocaust deniers!?

Newt Gingrich also weighed in on this matter poignantly pointing out the persecution of gays and women who are the primary targets of criminal sentencing in Iran for adultery which can end in death by hanging or by stoning!

Why are so many left liberals, silent on these basic and crucial human rights issues when it comes to Arab and Muslim dictatorships, yet Israel with by and large progressive western conduct and liberal policies toward gays and women remains the center of their relentless, biased and unfair condemnations? Tel Aviv Vistas' position on this matter is that this is the manifestation of the new anti-Semitism.

It should be noted that in countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, homosexuality is punishable by death. Additionally, in Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait, Qatar and Syria, homosexual acts can result in jail time...

Some Tel-Aviv Vista exclusive photos and video from the demonstration opposite the UN:

Leading Media Organizations Along with Several Independent Investigations Conclude that Muhammad al-Durah was not shot by Israeli Soldiers

Respected media organizations like the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Atlantic Monthly and Commentary magazine have published detailed investigations that all conclude that the footage was either staged or simply edited to show something that didn’t happen.

On October 2, 2002, a German television documentary film by Esther Schapira called Three Bullets and a Dead Child: Who Shot Muhammad al-Durah? was broadcast, and concluded that IDF bullets could not have killed Al-Durah.

Independent Israeli physicists have separately proven mathematically and physically that the IDF forces on the ground could not see al-Durah and his father from their outpost and that it was physically impossible for their bullets to have killed al-Durah. Moreover, some of the evidence even indicates the not unlikely possibility that al-Durah’s death might have been staged

The full investigative report below as it appears on the ZOA site: Was Muhammad Al-Durah's Alleged Killing A Staged Fraud By Palestinians?

September 04, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Morton A. Klein, 212-481-1500
ZOA: France-2 TV must release entire 27-minute footage

New York -- The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is calling upon France-2 Television network to release the full, never before publicly broadcast, 27 minutes of footage surrounding the alleged killing of a Palestinian Arab boy, Muhammad al-Durah, on September 30, 2000 at Netzarim junction in order to clarify whether the boy’s alleged killing was a staged Palestinian propaganda incident. Al-Durah’s alleged death was filmed by a local Palestinian cameraman, Tala Abu Rahma, and a mere 55 seconds of selected footage from his 27 minutes of filming became the basis for a story by France-2’s correspondent, Charles Enderlin, who had not been present on the scene at the time. The 55 seconds of footage shows al-Durah and his father seeking cover during a crossfire between an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) outpost and Palestinian police and gunmen, who were shooting from 7 main locations, including the towers behind the Israeli post, and the boy later slumped over, allegedly dead. The broadcast, basing itself on Abu Rahma’s words, claimed that the boy was shot by Israeli troops. Enderlin’s story, which France-2 provided free of charge to the rest of the international media, led to world-wide accusations against Israel that the boy had been deliberately killed by IDF during a shoot out with Palestinian Authority (PA) forces.

The edited 55-second al-Durah footage was shown repeatedly worldwide and particularly on Arab television networks, resulting in a wave of hatred and terror directed against Israel and Israelis. On October 12, two IDF soldiers, Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Novesche, who had mistakenly wandering into PA-controlled territory, were murdered, their bodies disemboweled beyond recognition and their entrails passed around and literally chewed and swallowed at a PA police station in Ramallah after they mistakenly wandered into PA-controlled territory. The mob invoked Durah’s death as a justification for its barbarism.

The Orr Commission, which investigated the violent rioting by Israeli Arabs in October 2000, concluded in its final report that “Muhammad al-Durra’s picture, which was distributed by the media, was one of the causes that led people in the Arab sector to take to the streets on October 1, 2000.” Also, the Mitchell report, drafted in May 2001 by a joint U.S.-European committee, also noted that the al-Durah incident was one of the events that sparked the Palestinian Arab violence.

Additionally, innumerable suicide bombers and other Palestinian terrorists have cited al-Durah as a justification for their crimes. In June 2005, a 21-year old Palestinian Arab woman, Wafa Samir al-Bis, who was stopped on her way to blow herself up and kill as many Israeli children as possible at the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, acknowledged that she specifically wanted to kill children in revenge for the death of Mohammad al-Durah. Moreover, al-Durah is prominently featured in al-Qaeda recruitment videos and on Hizballah banners. The murderers of Wall Street Journal ‘s Daniel Pearl interspersed their video of his beheading with the France-2 film. Throughout Europe, and particularly in France, Muslims have used al-Durah as a rallying cry in their attacks against Jews, which broke out shortly after the Durah film was broadcast ( Jerusalem Post, October 23, 2006).

For the past six years, PA television has continuously aired a film showing al-Durah in heaven beckoning other Palestinian children to “martyr” themselves by becoming terrorists so that they can join him in paradise. Postage stamps bearing his crouched image have been issued in Jordan, Egypt and Tunisia, a street in Baghdad and a square in Morocco bear his name, while many schools across the Arab world are named after him. His image has even been reproduced on a designer dress in Saudi Arabia.

However, the accusation that Israeli forces deliberately targeted a boy (and his father), whom they had clearly seen is debunked by investigations and evidence that has already come to light, and which suggests even that al-Durah’s death did not occur, including the following:

• The 55 seconds of Abu Rahma’s footage that was publicly broadcast does not show al-Durah dying or any bloodstains where the boy and his father were crouched, nor any ambulance evacuating them.
• No autopsy was ever performed on Muhammad’s body.
• In the weeks that followed the event, physicists Nahum Shachaf and Yosef Doriel conducted investigations on behalf of the IDF’s Southern Command. Both men separately proved mathematically and physically that the IDF forces on the ground could not see al-Durah and his father from their outpost and that it was physically impossible for their bullets to have killed al-Durah.
• 3 hours of raw footage from Reuters and Associated Press taken at the vicinity at the time show dozens of Palestinian boys attacking Israeli guards posts with stones, Molotov cocktails and projectiles, appliances etc. Yet, if the IDF had wanted to deliberately kill children, it could have easily done so yet none were killed and al-Durah was the only one allegedly killed on the scene.
• The few people who have been allowed to watch Rahma’s entire film have stated that it is impossible to conclude that al-Durah was killed because he is shown in this unpublicized footage to be raising his elbow and right leg, turning his head and looking around furtively, then putting his head and elbow back in position, but leaving his leg suspended in air ( FrontPageMag.com , August 29, 2007).
• Al-Durah’s father was allegedly wounded in the arm elbow and leg -- but no blood appears in the footage.
• The cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma, claims that the IDF were firing for an astonishing 45 minutes at al-Durah and his father which is not only absurd but, if true, would have resulted in many wounds, bloodstains and bullet marks that are simply not present in the footage.
• The al-Durahs were sheltering from gunfire behind a concrete wall and barrel not visible to IDF soldiers in the guard post from which they were allegedly shot and on which there are no bullet marks ( FrontPageMag.com, August 29, 2007).
• Respected media organizations like the Wall Street Journal, CBS News, Atlantic Monthly and Commentary magazine have published detailed investigations that all conclude that the footage was either staged or simply edited to show something that didn’t happen.
• On October 2, 2002, a German television documentary film by Esther Schapira called Three Bullets and a Dead Child: Who Shot Muhammad al-Durah? was broadcast, and concluded that IDF bullets could not have killed Al-Durah.

According to the cameraman, Abu Rahmeh, Mohammad bled for 20 minutes. But, in the film clip broadcast the world over, and in the additional 3 seconds not commonly seen by television viewers, there are no signs of blood on the Al Durahs, on the wall behind them, nor on the ground.

The findings of this German documentary and other investigations shown that, at a minimum, the probability that the IDF killed al-Durah is virtually nil and, more likely, the event was either staged or edited to lead to the false conclusion that al-Durah had been killed by Israeli forces. Yet France-2 refuses to release the full 27 minutes of its own footage to public scrutiny and has sued three French Jews who accused them in various ways of manufacturing a blood libel against Israel by purposely distorting the events at Netzarim junction that day.

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “It is past time that France-2 stop hiding behind legal action aimed at penalizing those who have questioned the veracity of its report that misleadingly lead the world to believe that Israeli forces deliberately killed this Palestinian child, if in fact al-Durah was killed at all. Even without seeing the full 27 minutes of France-2 footage, which it has simply refused to publicly release, it is already clear that it is highly unlikely, if not in fact impossible, that IDF bullets killed al-Durah (again, if in fact he was killed).

“This staging of a phony murder and lying about Israeli killings of Palestinians would be nothing new for the PA. It is has been demonstrated on several occasions that the PA and other terror groups have deliberately staged propaganda incidents involving non-existent massacres, like the one that supposedly occurred at Jenin in April 2002 in which PA officials claimed that 5,000, then 1,000, then 500 Palestinian civilians had been killed. (In fact, 52 Palestinians, at least 30 of them combatants, were killed in the heart of a civilian area in a ground battle which also claimed the lives of 23 Israeli soldiers).

The PA has been known to present live bodies as corpses and stage armed confrontations in collaboration with sympathetic media. Or, to give another example, the Lebanese terrorist group Hizballah last year mounted an elaborate hoax in which an ambulance was made to appear as if it had been deliberately targeted by Israeli forces, only this hoax was quickly exposed. Or in June 2006, when a girl, Hoda Ghalia, was killed with six other members of her family on a Gaza beach in an explosion for which the PA accused Israel although the IDF had not been conducting any military operations in the area. It has also been reported that Palestinians have been filmed on stretchers taken to and from ambulances, with the supposed casualties then climbing off unhurt when the news cameras have left the scene.

“As this particular incident was not exposed in a timely manner and has been shown to have inspired further acts of terror against Israelis and other Westerners, we call upon France-2 Television to come clean by releasing the entire footage so that all can make an informed judgment on the events at Netzarim junction on September 30, 2000. It is deeply suspicious that France-2, if it believes its story to have been correct and truthful, has refused until now to release the footage which ought to back up its case, and has instead attempted to silence and penalize those who have raised legitimate and searching questions about its story. We also urge all American Jewish organizations to call upon France-2 to release the footage.”

The UN & the face of the new Anti-Semitism

UN Watch exposes the hypocrisy, indifference and moral inversions of the supposedly reformed UN Human Rights Council. Millions of victims and 191 countries ignored. Darfur atrocities denied. Self-proclaimed defenders of Palestinian rights -- Assad, Ahamadinejad, Khaddafi and UN expert John Dugard -- say nothing of Hamas and Fatah killing of Palestinians. Council President Luis de Alba, ambassador of Mexico, rejects the speech as "inadmissible" -- and bans such remarks from being delivered again.

Please view this highly important video clip to its chilling end
Hillel Neuer is executive director of UN Watch, a human rights NGO in Geneva, Switzerland

The objective anti-Semites

British researcher Robin Shepherd says a new form of anti-Semitism lies at the root of much of Western Europe’s criticism of Israel.
From yesterday's Haaretz: The objective anti-Semites, by Anshel Pfeffer

Robin Shepherd is not the first person to try and define the world's oldest hatred, but he is perhaps one of the most unlikely. The senior research fellow at the Chatham House think tank in London has no significant connection to the Jewish people, and his visit to Israel last week was only his second. But he still believes his decision to spend a year researching the new European anti-Semitism is perfectly relevant for any serious observer of international affairs.

When asked about his interest in the subject, he first answers on a philosophical level by quoting the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who has said that "only a moral cretin thinks that anti-Semitism is a threat only to Jews." He then offers an academic explanation: "The Israel-Palestine conflict is one of the key issues in international relations, and there are very few people in this field without a position on it." His last work was on the wave of anti-Americanism sweeping Europe, and this led him to believe that a new form of anti-Semitism was also at the root of the increasingly critical attitude toward Israel there.

...

The article ends off with the following interesting observation

Religion of politics
Israel's poisonous critics who say they are not anti-Semites often state that there are prominent Jews among their ranks. Shepherd says this is one of the most interesting points that he plans to research.

"I know there is a tendency to call them self-hating Jews, but the key point is much more subtle. This is where you have to understand people like Noam Chomsky, who is American but an iconic figure for the European left. He is not a self-hating Jew, but his political standing in the left is more important for him than his Jewish identity. That's why the extreme Jewish critics of Israel almost always come from the far left - for them, politics is the most important part of their identity. They are in thrall with a system of thought that happens to have as one of its main objects of belief an obsessive hatred of Israel.

"It might be personally painful for them, but the ideological left is a secular religion, more than any other political group, and for them this religion comes before being Jewish," he says.

Day 2 of School in Sderot: Seven Kassam Attacks

12 Sderot Children Hospitalized for Shock After Kassam Attacks
by Hana Levi Julian and Hillel Fendel

(IsraelNN.com) Twelve Sderot children were hospitalized at Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon Monday morning in the wake of a barrage of seven Kassam rockets fired by Islamic Jihad terrorists in northern Gaza.

The missiles had slammed into various parts of the city, including one that scored a direct hit on a house next to a day care center. A staff member at the day care center told Army Radio that the director ran into the room to give warning that an attack was underway. None of the staff heard the Color Red alert system that provides a 20-second window in which to seek shelter from attacks.

IDF soldiers raced into the building and carried 15 babies out to safety...

For the rest of this article see: 12 Sderot Children Hospitalized for Shock After Kassam Attacks

IDF foils 15-year-old Palestinian suicide bomber

Israeli radio reported that the IDF foiled a 15-year-old Palestinian who tried to attack Israeli soldiers near the northern Gaza Strip. The bomber, who was strapped with explosives, was stopped on Tuesday night as he approached the soldiers. Details were not provided on how the army persuaded the teenager to surrender rather than detonate his bomb.

The incident, officials said, demonstrated the growing use of children by Gaza-based terror groups.

For further information on the criminal indoctrination and abuse of Palestinian children by Palestinian authorities and culture, see earlier published article here on Tel-Aviv Vistas titled: Palestinian abuse of Palestinian Children

Shin Bet Warns:'Hamas in Damascus Ordered a Mega Terrorist Attack'

JTA News reports that the Hamas leadership abroad has ordered the group to carry out a major terrorist attack in Israel, the Shin Bet said. The deputy chief of Israel's domestic intelligence service told the Cabinet in a briefing Sunday that Hamas, since it seized control of the Gaza Strip in June, has smuggled in 40 tons of weaponry from nearby Egypt, a radical hike in quantities.

Editorial Commentary
Yet another news item that one is unlikely to come across on CNN. They of course would rather ignore inconvenient facts that conflict with their news narrative of Israel as the perpetrator. So facts that present Israel as a victim of relentless pursuit of indiscriminate violence by Palestinian terrorist organizations is simply censored.

Furthermore no one’s mentioning the fact that the order came out of Damascus Syria, a ruthless dictatorship harboring this internationally recognized terrorist group. For more “delightful” facts about Syria see: Syrian Minister Compares US & Israel to a Snake

All of this is yet another example of the alarming specter of the real-life grotesque rendition of 1984 that Jews and Israel find themselves confronting .

Taglit-birthright Israel: Touching Videos and a $30 million donation

Touching video compilations from the Taglit-birthright Israel experience





In a related item from YNET

...
American billionaire Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Dr Miriam Adelson, donated on Sunday $30 million to the Taglit-Birthright Israel project, during an event sponsored by President Shimon Peres and held at his Jerusalem Residence.

"The gift by The Adelson Family Charitable Foundation (ADCF) will significantly contribute to fulfilling Taglit-birthright israel’s mission to provide every young Jew with the opportunity to visit Israel for the first time," Taglit said in a statement.
...
The first major gift of $5 million to Taglit-birthright israel by the Adelsons in December 2006 enabled those on waiting lists to participate in the winter trips to Israel. In total, ADCF has given $60 million to Taglit-birthright Israel in the last twelve months, the single largest calendar year gift to a Jewish continuity program in history.

Dr Miriam Adelson, a physician and native Israeli said, “A number of participants had told us that they had been on waiting lists for these trips, and only because of the increased trip capacity this summer, were able to participate in the program. I am so proud to share my beautiful country with so many young people and welcome ‘home’ our big, extended family.

"As we look forward to celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary next year, we are honored to help ensure that any young Jew who wants to visit the wonderful nation of Israel has this opportunity of a lifetime,” she said.
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Israeli satellite company employed in tracking human rights crisis in Darfur

The Israeli commercial satellite company ImageSat, is being employed by Amnesty International in order to track the worst human rights abuse crisis of this century in Darfur. ImageSat along with a few other international commercial satellite companies are providing many sizable discounts and donations of satellite imagery in order to help locate refugee camps and provide an indelible record of the unimaginable magnitude of this human rights abuse crisis.

These images along with explanations can be found on the site:
EYES ON DARFUR

Profile of an Immigrant Family from Albania in Israel

Ha’aretz in its weekend magazine every week profiles one family living in Israel as part of an on going series that’s been going on for years and adds up to an amazing and fascinating mosaic of the Israeli landscape. This week the profile was of a family that immigrated from Albania in 1991
The full article on Ha’aretz website can be found here:
Family Affair / The Chilis
By Avner and Reli Avrahami Or Akiva

Chili: Means a lock of light hair on a dark head (in Albanian).

The cast: Agim (59), Anna (54), Daniella (29).

The home: Third floor (on the right), apartment building, 70 square meters, with a living room, three other rooms and a mall (Orot), visible from the window. They have been here since 1993 ("We were the first family"), paying the shekel equivalent of $67,000 ("All of it a mortgage"). They pay back NIS 1,430 a month and are pleased. "Our city is Or Akiva - we don't go to Hadera" (Agim).
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the apartment is full of embroidered pictures (done by Anna), statuettes (from around the world), decorative objects and small red-and-black flags (Albanian). The large flatscreen TV is broadcasting Top Channel (an Albanian station), and resting in the narrow bureau is Skenderbeu, an Albanian brandy ("five star"), named for an Albanian hero who defeated the Turks in the 15th century. The tour begins.
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Livelihoods and occupations: Agim has worked for Amnir, a Hadera-based plant that recycles plastics and paper, for 14 years. He is a shift manager ("from shredding to granulation"). He works in weekly rotating shifts - a week in the morning, a week in the afternoon, a week at night ("I prefer night") - and travels back and forth in a privately owned 2002 Fiat Punto.

Anna: Retired. She worked for Hogla, a paper products plant (in Hadera), and took early retirement in January of this year due to back problems ("I had an operation"). Until then she was in charge of the toilet paper machine. As a pensioner, she receives 70 percent of her former salary and is pleased with the arrangement ("I was smart when I worked out the contract"). At the same time, she is sad at having had to conclude a career as a gifted bowler.
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Daniella: Almost a B.A. in English language and literature, which she studied at Seminar Hakibbutzim Teachers College ("I had two exams left"). She works a five-day week as a technical writer for Newstar, a firm that develops platforms for immediate messages on cellular phones in the high-tech area of Haifa. She travels to and from work by bus and receives traveling expenses. Her work consists of documenting (in English) every product made by the company and ascertaining that the texts are readable.

Agim's bio: Born in Tirana, Albania, in 1948. His father owned a printing press, which the government nationalized; it then made him work in it as a laborer ("We were considered capitalists"); his mother was a housewife. After graduating in economics from the University of Tirana (1969), he worked in a trucking company as director of wages and transports planner. In 1991, a year after the communist regime collapsed, he and Anna immigrated to Israel with the family. Six years earlier, Enver Hoxha, who ruled Albanian for 41 years and made the life of the population hell ("He was worse than Stalin"), died.

The Hoxha years: Fear ("The first lesson of education was to keep quiet") and hunger ("We received 600 grams of cheese a week"). Agim relates that two of his uncles were executed and an aunt was tortured so brutally that she became barren. The collapse of the regime was like a dream for him ("Until I actually boarded the plane, I didn't believe it would happen").

Anna's bio: Born 1953 to the Matityahu family in Vlore, a port city in southwestern Albania, the eldest of three children (she has a brother who is a violin maker in England and a sister who lives in the United States). Her family is originally from Greece. Her father and mother worked as accountants for collective farms. Her elementary school was on a kolkhoz for which her father worked (near Tirana), and she spent her high-school years at a teacher-training boarding school ("I did a lot of crying there"). After graduating (1971), she was sent to teach in a poor village in the north of the country. It was in this period that she met Agim.

The meeting: 1972, on a train to Tirana. She, a teacher, was on her way home from the village where she worked; he, an economist, was on the way home from the transportation cooperative, where he worked. They sat opposite each other, and not by chance. Anna knew a woman who was engaged to a friend of his. When they parted on the station platform, they knew their story was just beginning.

The wedding: 1977, at home ("There was no banquet hall). Before the party they went to the interior ministry with two witnesses ("Every neighborhood had an interior ministry"). Her mother made the wedding dress, his suit was made by a tailor whom Agim invited to his home. The party lasted two days: Saturday in the bride's home, Sunday in the groom's. They ate a lot of meat, drank "Tirana" ("a better beer than [the Israeli brew] Maccabi") and raki, a homemade arak (which is kept in their home in Israeli mineral-water bottles), and then went on honeymoon.

Honeymoon: Two weeks in the "Workers' House" of Vlore ("free").

Immigration to Israel: March 1991 ("We waited for the Gulf War to end"). Agim encountered the first pizza of his life at the airport in Rome ("We ate nonstop"), and they spent the entire sum that they received from the Jewish Agency on sweets. They arrived in the Galilee town of Carmiel at midnight and found the apartment they were housed in depressing, but a visit to the supermarket the next day raised their spirits ("We filled up a cart without knowing what we had taken"). Carmiel was filled with Albanians, and Daniella had no integration problems.
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Dreams: Agim - "A trip to Europe"; "I have a dream that I don't want to reveal now," says Anna, looking at Daniella; "Mom - enough!" Daniella says.

Daniella's dream: "What Mom said."
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Romance: Coffee among the archaeological ruins at Caesarea (Anna and Agim).

God: "There is no God," Agim states. Daniella agrees. Anna can't say that.

Quarrels: Plenty. Agim says there are fights of a minute and a half ("Daniella is the referee"). Their wish for her is that she finds someone who understands that "family is sacred."

Politics: "I am for peace and against occupation," Agim says. In the big picture, he thinks highly of Shimon Peres ("the best"). Anna agrees. Both of them are in favor of equality in the country (Agim: "Everyone should either do army or two years of national service"). Daniella did her military service in the Israel Air Force as a secretary ("I had a terrific time").

Israeli-born friends: They have none ("Only Nehemiah and Aada from Nir Zvi") and don't understand why.

Happiness quotient (scale of 1-10): Everyone - 10. Agim: "Believe me, it is not my country, but I'm happy."

Albania: "My country" (Agim); "I won't forget Albania, either" (Anna).

Granddaughter of former chief rabbi of Israel writes a best-seller about her tempestuous life

From this past weekend’s Ha’aretz Magazine. Click on following title for the full article:
Between cocaine and commandments
By Dalia Karpel
Granddaughter of former chief rabbi of Israel writes a best-seller about her tempestuous life including sex on the synagogue floor

So what if she's the granddaughter of the second Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the State of Israel? Maybe just for that reason she rushed to have sexual relations at the age of 15, on the floor of the synagogue in London, of all places, where her father served as the rabbi? Today, at the age of 50, Reva Mann is convinced that the reason for her journey of self-destruction was that she was lonely and miserable. Lonely and miserable enough to produce an autobiographical novel full of good and bad deeds - about doing it on your wedding night through a hole in a sheet, about the husband who runs to the rabbi with his wife's panties to receive the approval that she is indeed "kosher," and about why, in the name of God, he shouts "Gevalt!" even when he has it so good in bed.

On Sunday in the wee hours of the morning, Reva Mann flew to London from Israel on the occasion of the recent publication of her book: "The Rabbi's Daughter: Sex, Drugs and Orthodoxy" (Hodder & Stoughton). A few hours before the flight she spoke excitedly about the busy week awaiting her in London: interviews for the British editions of Time and Elle magazines, as well as The Evening Standard, Sky News, the BBC, etc.

This week the book landed on the shelves of the bookstores. "The entire edition was almost sold out after the interview I gave to the The Sunday Times (London) supplement at the end of July," said Mann excitedly. "People bought copies by phone. The publisher has started to print a second edition."

Mann, a divorced mother of three, is enjoying this PR campaign: She was photographed twice for the article in The Sunday Times supplement: once disguised as a righteous ultra-Orthodox woman, and once wearing a suggestive outfit, sitting with her legs apart on a chair, with a glass of wine in her hand. It seems that from now on there is no more need to explain anything, and the book will sell itself. First in Britain, and soon in France and the United States as well. Mann, a person who was cured of her drug addiction and has become addicted to shopping, will be happy to pack her bags.

Unconditional love
Mann does not mention in her book the name of her famous grandfather, Isser Yehuda Unterman, because she worries that it will cause harm to her children. Her grandfather came to Israel from Liverpool and served as the chief rabbi of Tel Aviv before being appointed the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel in 1964. He served in that senior position for 26 years, until his death in 1973.

Unterman is described in the book as having soft blue eyes, and wearing a silk robe during prayers in the synagogue. She says he loved her unconditionally - the opposite of her strict and restrained parents. Even when she did not demonstrate expert knowledge of religious texts, he was forgiving, and spoiled her. Every summer vacation, he visited her in her apartment in Rehavia, opposite the Heichal Shlomo synagogue in Jerusalem.

From the mid-1980s Mann has been living in a house in the German Colony, purchased for her by her late father Morris Unterman, rabbi of the West End Marble Arch Synagogue in London. He also left her an inheritance on which she is living. In recent years she has been writing a kind of personal column for two Jewish newspapers: The London Jewish News and the Boston Jewish Advocate. She dreams of a literary career and is now writing her second book, a comedy on the End of Days - "fiction for a change, and not a book about myself," she says.

"The Rabbi's Daughter" took shape in her mind two months after her mother committed suicide in an old-age home in Jerusalem, in the summer of 2004. Mann contracted breast cancer at the time. "I underwent chemotherapy, it was hard, and I only wanted to return to life, but I didn't have anything to return to. Even though I had my three darling children who live with me in Jerusalem, cancer provokes the question: 'Why do I deserve this?' My oncologist told me that there is no proven reasons for cancer, but that didn't convince me, and I had to deal with the question of why I had fallen ill. I started to write my life story in order to understand what had happened. Writing was a kind of healing. Before this book I didn't write anything, and the moment I got started, writing became a challenge. I decided that I can write.

"I came to my writing teacher, Judy Labensohn, with 20 pages. I had no hair on my head and I was very weak from the radiation. Labensohn lives five minutes from my house and getting to her was like climbing the Everest. She marked all the pages in red. She simply erased almost everything. I was shocked, but I was happy because I knew that I was the outstanding pupil who had found a teacher."

A few months later Mann completed the first version of the book. She sent the draft to an agent in England who decided to represent her, and says he came back to her in two weeks with a contract from a British publisher and from Dial Press in America. For half a year she went over the manuscript with a literary editor from New York and prepared it for printing.

The result - how shall we put it? - shakes you up. The scene when she loses her virginity in the synagogue reaches its climax with a cry of pain on the royal-blue carpet, under the ner tamid (eternal light). Mann stands naked in front of the Holy Ark and shouts "Hallelujah!" She hears steps, and before she gets back into her dress, the doorman of the synagogue is standing in front of her and reprimanding her: "You'd better go home now." The doorman, a righteous person, never revealed her secret.
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For rest of article click here

A branch of Germany’s left that is vehemently pro-Israel

From Ha'aretz's Magazine section from 2 weeks ago. Click on title for full article.

Letter from Berlin: The anti-anti-Zionists
By Benjamin Weinthal

The square in the former East Berlin named for Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish Jewish social revolutionary who was murdered by right-wing extremists in 1919, served as my introduction to the pro-Israel left in Germany. After moving to Berlin in 2002, I attended a May 1 demonstration at Rosa Luxemburg Square. There among maybe a thousand union members and other left-wing activists, I found myself pleasantly ambushed by a group of a dozen or more young people waving massive Israeli flags and buzzing around the demonstrators. This bizarre scene was a cause of cognitive dissonance: Was it possible for there to be left-wing, non-Jewish Germans who were also militant supporters of Israel?

The answer, apparently, is yes, as an astonishing thing has happened in the leftist political and intellectual culture of Germany. Though the left here, as in the rest of Western Europe, continues to be overwhelmingly anti-Israel, one can now point to a slice of the German left that identifies itself as pro-Israel and is creating a flourishing anti-anti-Zionist leftist culture.
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The pro-Zionist Left in Germany is not made up of pro-Israel Evangelical Christians, but rather is a loose coalition of card-carrying leftists who fight to bring their camp back into the labor movement and advance the rights of gays and other sexual minorities.
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There is no cookie-cutter approach to characterize the complex spectrum of groups and publications that promote active solidarity with Israel. In addition to the hardcore Anti-Germans, this colorful leftist mini-movement includes anti-nationalists (who argue that every national state should be abolished, but that Israel should be the last to go), pro-Zionists, moderate quasi-anarchists and anti-fascists. A sharp break with the majority leftist German culture, which is contaminated by an intense aversion to Israel - and a common left-wing anti-Semitism - unifies these diverse groups in their staunch support of Israel.

An ephemeral entity?
Members of the pro-Israel left have churned out an impressive number of books and journals addressing traditionally taboo topics on the left, with critiques of subjects ranging from political Islam to "respectable," liberal anti-Semitism. This curious development is not an expression of philo-Semitism; rather, it grounds its critique of social structures in the critical theory writings of the philosophers Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, as well as a flexible Marxist philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis.

Is the pro-Israel German left simply an ephemeral entity, or does it constitute a sustainable new left capable of breathing fire and light into central Europe?

Andrei Markovits, a University of Michigan political scientist and professor of German studies, observes that there are "considerably more pockets of pro-Israel groups in Germany in comparison to the 1980s." The Romanian-born Markovits, who is Jewish, has the stature of a public intellectual in Germany and Austria. We spoke by phone when he toured Germany in late June publicizing his book "Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America," which examines the interplay between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in Europe.

The publisher of "Uncouth Nation" in Germany, Konkret Literatur Verlag, also recently published a German edition of "Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars," by the Israeli scholar Yaacov Lozowick, director of archives at Yad Vashem. That's a title sure to produce anxiety in Germany where, according to an opinion poll carried out by the influential weekly magazine Der Spiegel, a majority of Germans during the first week of the Second Lebanon War last year did not believe Israel had the right to defend itself against Hezbollah's rockets.
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Call of the jungle
The magazine Bahamas is the leading publication of the hardcore pro-Israel, Anti-German communist movement, whose members advocate unconditional solidarity with Israel. Its founders chose the name Bahamas in 1992 as a sort of an ironic rejoinder to the Communist Alliance in Hamburg, whose majority faction urged the Anti-Germans to immigrate to the Atlantic island nation.

Karl Nele, a co-founder of the publication, said the development of Israel solidarity was a response to the German left's "strong support for the [second] intifida" and "an anti-Zionist consensus formed from the political left to the political right" that is deeply anchored in German society. The Holocaust also informs Bahamas' militant defense of Israel as "a place of refuge for Jews."

Bahamas carved out new territory on the German left in explicitly supporting the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a 2003 conference, the magazine's co-founder Justus Wertmueller said that the removal of a "fascistic regime with strong National Socialistic features" represents "liberation for the population." The national security of Israel was also an overriding rationale for Bahamas' support of the Iraq war.

Wertmueller, whose remarks were reprinted in the magazine, went on to suggest that "the problem is still that German and Islamic resentments are identical: anti-Western, anti-liberal, anti-Semitic. German-Islamic friendship stems from the fact that the Germans recognize themselves in political Islam, because it is fascist and at the same time gives the impression of being an indigenous culture."

In contrast to the unqualified pro-war position of Bahamas, over at Konkret, Gremliza editorialized a month before the start of the allied invasion that "I would have no objections if it could be guaranteed that Saddam Hussein's regime could be removed and replaced by a humane one, without the collateral deaths of fifty or a hundred thousand or more Iraqis and without unleashing other monsters elsewhere." While the overwhelming majority of the German left remained painfully silent about the repressive Ba'ath regime, the anti-Germans highlighted Saddam's crimes.
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Ivo Bozic, a founder and co-editor of Jungle World, says the publication is "explicitly anti-anti-Zionist, anti-anti-Semitic, and anti-anti-American." He also notes that the paper's writing is peppered with "self-irony." The Jungle World editorial staff traveled to Israel in 2004 to devote an entire issue to the politics and culture of Israeli society. They visited a training camp for Israeli tank drivers, conducted interviews with writer Etgar Keret and filmmaker Benny Barbash and got a taste of the club scene in Tel Aviv. They also had meetings with Palestinians, but did not come away with great sympathy for their struggle.
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Jungle World is not bound by what it sees as a kind of rigid socially and politically correct style of journalism among the German left media, where a hyperactive sense of inhibition prevents criticism of political Islam, or coverage of the lack of women's rights, sexual minority freedoms, labor rights and parliamentary democracy in the Arab world.

The German Jewish journalist Henryk M. Broder divorced himself from the mainstream German left in 1981, when he published an open letter in the weekly Die Zeit ("The Times") critiquing the anti-Semitism of the left. He also writes occasionally for Jungle World. His first best-seller, "Hurray, We're Capitulating" (2006), is a fiercely combative indictment of Europe's soggy response to a growing and radicalized political Islam.

The book most identified with Broder, however, is his 1986 "The Eternal Anti-Semite," a critique of liberal and leftist anti-Semitism. He summed up his scathing indictment of the German left with the stinging line: "You're still your parents' children. Your Jew today is the State of Israel." Broder, and the Holocaust survivor Jean Amery, who wrote exhaustively about the interplay between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism on the European left, both serve as kind of sine qua non of the criticism launched by the pro-Israel left against the majority liberal-left here.
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Reconciling realities
... anti-Jewish sentiment is indeed on the rise. The Verfassungschutz, the country's domestic intelligence agency, claimed in its most recent annual report that there has been a dramatic increase over the past two years in criminal offenses and anti-Semitic slurs. The Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a German think tank with close ties to the Social Democratic Party, released findings of a 2006 study that revealed alarming levels of extreme right-wing attitudes, including among leftist and Green Party voters. A BBC poll conducted earlier this year determined that 77 percent of Germans have a pejorative view of Israel, the highest percentage in Europe, yet the opinion editor of die taz seems to feel the need to debunk the charge of anti-Semitism.

How does one reconcile the fact that the mainstream left is developing a cottage industry dedicated to avoiding dealing with anti-Semitism and with the purported aim of the political left to abolish racism, which necessarily includes anti-Semitism?

Dr. Lars Rensmann, a political theorist who teaches at the University of Michigan and who has written extensively on the subject, says anti-Jewish bias is not confronted because of the faulty conception "that one is exonerated from the charge of anti-Semitism because one is left."
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Andrei Markovits views the phenomenon of pro-Israeli German leftist publications as "a counterweight to the overwhelmingly pro-Palestinian tone of the German media." To this, Dr. Dieter Graumann, vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said: "It is nice that they stand up for Israel, but unfortunately these groups are not a true political power."

Graumann points to a dangerous heavyweight on the political scene in Germany: the newly formed Left Party, which is already the third strongest political party in the country. In the fall of 2006, the party invited a Hamas minister to meet with its representatives in parliament, the only political party in Germany to commence high level diplomatic contact with the Palestinian party. And a faction within the party (Linksruck, which means, roughly, a "shift to the left") justifies terror as a method of resistance against the "oppressor state" of Israel.

To Graumann's thinking, the Left Party is little better than an extension of the Socialist Unity Party of the now-defunct East German government, which "supported the Black September group and issued money and munitions for the destruction of Israel." Graumann also cites the potency of the newspaper Neues Deutschland, the former party organ paper of the SED, which today attracts many of its readers from the Left Party, and published an anti-Israel cartoon that could have appeared in the anti-Semitic Nazi paper Der Stuermer.

The Left Party just secured its first election victory in a western German federal state, Bremen. Oskar Lafontaine, the party's co-chairman and a popular political writer, argues that Iran is entitled to nuclear weapons because Israel possesses nuclear capability. The pro-Israel left intelligentsia views Lafontaine as the embodiment of a fiery left-wing German nationalism that tends to spill over into raw nativism. This new political party is, according to Graumann, riddled with anti-Israelism. The pro-Zionist left argues Lafontaine is a phony leftist and cites his praise for the "interface between Islam and the German left" as proof for his reactionary outlook. The foreign policy spokesman of the party, Norman Paech, frequently employs Nazi terminology to describe Israel, and equates the Israeli campaign in Lebanon in 2006 with a "war of annihilation," a term otherwise reserved for the Nazi destruction of European Jewry.
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Is it possible to cite other left-wing newspapers in Europe that meet the criteria of vehemently opposing anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism? The leftist journal "Dissent" is perhaps the only comparable reference point, but that is an American publication. And can one point to other clusters of non-Jewish, pro-Israel leftists on the continental European left? This radical minority of pro-Israel leftists in Germany and Austria might very well have jumped into the avant-garde leftist future. The pressing question is, is anyone paying attention?

Medal of Valor for Israeli Officer who Sacrificed His Life by Jumping on a Grenade

Israel radio reported that 142 soldiers who fought in the Second Lebanon War, last summer including an officer who sacrificed his life by jumping on a grenade to save his soldiers, were chosen by an IDF committee to receive medals of valor and citations of excellence for the courage they displayed during Israel's war against Hizbullah last summer.

Editorial Commentary
Compare this to the phenomenon one finds in the Arab/Moslem world where radical indoctrination causes people to kill themselves in order to take innocent lives rather than save lives (See article on this blog: Teaching Children Martyrdom).
It’s this stark contrast regarding the sanctity of life, from the horrors of 9-11, to suicide bombers blowing themselves up in Israeli cafes, and discotheques, to mosques in Iraq, which needs to be brought into focus by the media, politicians and people everywhere if one really want to address the core issues in the middle-east.

Syrian Minister Compares US & Israel to a Snake

Israel Radio reported today that Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal publicly attacked Israel and the United States, comparing both countries to a snake "ready to attack at any minute, even if it knows it will die." Bilal, speaking to the Persian Gulf newspaper Al-Hilaj, characterized Israel an "immoral" nation lacking in values.

Editorial Commentary
This coming from a country that wiped out the entire city of Hama (in Syria) back in 1982, killing 20,000 people as part of Hafez Assad’s systematic persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood. Occupied parts of Lebanon for close to 30 years, has been engaged in ongoing subversive activity against the Christian factions in the Lebanese government.

A country that provided safe haven to Alois Brunner, who served during World War II as the personal secretary to Adolf Eichmann, and was condemned to death in absentia by two French courts in 1954. Brunner was responsible for the deportation of French and Greek Jewry to death camps.

Finally Syria is country with a litany of blatant and systematic human right abuses as documented in this U.S. Department of State report

Egyptians kill 4 Sudanese refugees at Israeli border

The report appeared on Israel TV on Channel 10 on Friday night. An account of the report was filed by Associated Press and appears on the Ynet site
See the full report here

Egyptian soldiers beat two refugees to death, shoot others, Israeli TV reports

Egyptian soldiers killed four Sudanese refugees, beating two to death in front of horrified Israeli soldiers, an Israeli TV station reported Thursday, screening what it said was army surveillance video and interviews with the soldiers.

Egyptian police said that authorities arrested two Sudanese refugees Thursday, seriously injuring one when he scuffled with police. But Egyptian police Capt. Mohammed Badr did not report any deaths.

Channel 10 TV said the incident happened late Wednesday night. In the video, the refugees are seen running toward the border with Israel. Then, according to one of the soldiers, who was not identified and whose voice was distorted, Egyptian soldiers opened fire, killing two.
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Last month, Egyptian border guards shot and killed a Sudanese woman and wounded four others. She was the first Sudanese refugee to be killed

In an earlier report on this blog titled: Sudanese Mother and Child Reunion, I posted the story of Israelis who held no bars to reunite Sudanese refugees with their child who got stuck on the other side of the border when they smuggled across the Israeli--Egyptian border. That same blog posting also included a story of Sudanese refugees hosted by a Jewish Jerusalem family.

It went on to ponder about the silence of the so called enlightened-world to Egypt’s brutal dictatorship and its litany of human rights abuses. Finally it stated that though the status of the Sudanese refugees in Israel remains unclear, the story of Israelis providing shelter for African Moslems, fleeing Arab atrocities, for the most part goes untold and unnoticed...

Solel Solar inks huge solar power deal in California

by Merav Ankori
Globes www.globes.co.il
July 25, 2007
http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/DocView.asp?did=1000235907&fid=1725

Solel Solar Systems Ltd. will sell 553 megawatts of electricity to California's PG & E Corp. (AMEX:PCG) (Pacific Gas and Electric Company) from a solar power plant that the company will build in the Mojave Desert at an investment of some $2 billion. PG & E's nine-square mile Mojave Solar Park is due to begin operating in 2011. PG&E said that the power, enough for 400,000 homes, will go to customers in northern and central California. The Mojave Solar Park project is now the world's largest single solar commitment.

New Ad Campaign Uses Everyday Israelis

From the Advertising section of Today's NYTs

(Read the full story here: travel.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/business/media/30adv-w.html)

The North American office of the Israel Ministry of Tourism is running an $11 million ad campaign - the ministry’s largest ever - that suggests visitors will “love Israel from the first ‘Shalom.’ ”
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Featuring a cross-section of welcoming Israelis who include an archeologist, chef, cowboy, dancer and high-tech executive, the ads are part of a plan to double North American tourism to Israel by 2010, said Arie Sommer, Israel’s Tourism Commissioner for North and South America. Approximately 600,000 North Americans traveled to Israel last year, 30 percent of the country’s total and its largest single group of visitors
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Mal MacDougall, chief creative officer of Communications Plus in New York, the ministry’s ad agency, said these individuals “are a cross-section, real Israelis. They’re not models or famous, they’re real, everyday people.”

He also said they were chosen because they represent the “breadth Israelis have. For example, the dancer does studies in the animal world. We tried to get people who were not just a doctor, who do nothing but be a doctor.”

The campaign’s tagline, “You’ll love Israel from the first ‘Shalom’ ” was chosen, Mr. Sommer said, because it reflects the “warm feelings between American people and the people of Israel.”

Maya Weiser, the dancer in the campaign, is shown posing on a beach in Tel Aviv. The copy asks, “Who can say ‘Shalom’ more eloquently” than she, and explains that she has danced since she was 6 and been a member of the Batsheva Dance Company, and that she now studies animal science at Hebrew University.
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