cross-posted at pardesyehuda.blogspot.com
Ha’aretz reports that a new team will debut next week at the Australian Football League’s International Cup, a joint Palestinian-Israeli team dubbed, the “Peace Team”. More »
Filed under
The Democratic National Convention will include an interfaith service, bringing together leaders from the Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities. There will be four rabbis present for the service:
Rabbi David Saperstein, of the RAC, will be reciting an invocation, as noted in the previous post on Jewschool by KRG.
Rabbi Marc Shneier, founder of the Foundation of Ethnic Understanding
Rabbi Amy Schwartzman, a DC area Reform rabbi
Rabbi Tzvi Hersh Weinreb, Executive Vice President of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.
I’m just saying, we make up about 2.5% of the population of the US, and of that 2.5%, what percentage goes to synagogue or relates to someone they call “rabbi”? It’s got to be small. I don’t know how many people are going to be addressing this interfaith event that is commencing the Democratic National Convention, but isn’t it a bit Jew heavy? And is it even representative of your average American Jew? I don’t know what I think about this. Others have thoughts?
Filed under
I cannot help but notice that the Russian assault on Georgia goes unmentioned on Jewschool.
A little background: For the last couple of months there have been border clashes between Georgia and South Ossetia, a breakaway region between Georgia and Russia. Georgia is, of course, a former Soviet satellite state. On the morning of Friday, August 8 Georgia invaded and by the end of the day controlled most of South Ossetia. The evening of August 8 Russia responded with heavy attacks and were bombing in sovereign Georgian territory. On Sunday, August 10 Russia began a steady bombing campaign on Tbilisi, the Georgian capital and opened a second front from the Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia. Russia is being accused of exanding its war technologically. The US has been very firm in its reprimand on the Russian invasion. Putin says, ‘shove off.’ The newsmedia is, of course, just an easy search away.
What does this have to do with Israel? More »
Filed under
For me, the first truly inspiring news from the Beijing Summer Olympics had nothing to do with athletic achievement. It occurred when David Blatt, the Israeli coach of the Russian basketball team made a point of shaking hands with and embracing the captain of the Iranian team after a game.
The American-born Blatt later commented:
This is the beauty of sport: as soon as you start running you forget everything and remember that we are all the same. Unfortunately, politics is not in the hands of the regular people and the athletes.
Uzi Dann, writing in Ha’aretz, snarkily dismissed Blatt’s gesture, pointing out that an Iranian swimmer has already refused to compete against an Israeli and that certainly no Iranian would ever deign to shake Blatt’s hand if he was the coach of the Israeli team. Oh pleeeeze: is it possible to simply savor this exquisite moment without Scrooging it up with sour grapes? Given the often unbearable political tensions in our world, I’d say we should welcome every instance in which someone extends a hand in the spirit of simple humanity…
Filed under
The Iranian Olympic Delegation
It has happened again. They’ve made excuses since the Islamic Revolution in 1979 not to compete against Israelis–you may remember in ‘04 it was a Judo match, and this year it is swimming.
the report and more after the jump More »
Filed under
Every journalist has his source of information–usually the local taxi driver. One wants to touch the pulse of a place. What better way than to shmooze with the salt of the earth. For me, I have my dentist. One doesn’t argue with a dentist–it’s a one way traffic as one lays helpless on one’s back with something stuck in one’s mouth praying for Divine intervention.
So there I was discussing Obama. And my source of information starting talking about McCain. Did I know that McCain worked for Scoop Jackson? “Ahhh, there was a good friend of Israel.” My dentist rose to his own occasion and waxed eloquent. With my mouth highly vulnerable, I asked with some temerity what it meant to be a good friend of Israel. To which my American dentist retorted immediately, “To be a good friend of Israel means my country right or wrong.” I wondered if a dentist in Teheran might have said the same thing about Iran, but I shut up.
Filed under
This is the full article:
Informed sources say Israeli agents are behind the assassination of Syrian president’s security advisor and liaison officer to Hezbollah.Mohammad Suleiman, who was a Syrian top security official and the officer in charge of liaison with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement, was shot by a sniper on the coast of Syria’s Tartous port on Friday.
According to independent sources in Syria, the sniper was an Israeli agent.
Suleiman’s body was buried overnight.
In February, Imad Mughnyiah, a prominent Hezbollah figure, was murdered in a car bomb explosion in the Syrian capital.
The Israeli regime extended the tenure of Mossad chief Meir Dagan for a second term following the successful assassination of Mughniyah.
Source: AJP
This journalism is worthy of Fox News. In fact, I remember watching a documentary years ago about Al Jazeera (I don’t remember which one) where the CEO said that he hopes to emulate Fox News and would gladly take a job there (I don’t know if it’s the same guy running things now or not). Truly, it should come as no surprise that the Arab press would blame Israel. I love the dubious connection that Dagan’s tenure was extended and the killing of Mugniyah.
Al Jazeera recently produced a celebratory broadcast in honor of Samir Kuntar, the infamous murderer who spent nearly 30 years in prison in Israel for his heinous crimes and was recently released for the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. The Israeli government announced that it would no longer service the satellite station, at which point the network officially apologized for its “unethical broadcast.”
Filed under
Israel is, as it perhaps should, simultaneously planning for peace and war with Syria, and, well just war with Syria’s neighbors.
Planning for the worst, the IDF is preparing for a simultaneous attack from Syria, Iran and Hezbullah. Syria and Iran have a mutual defense pact, which could prove a hinderance to peace.
Punditry and rumors presume that Olmert is attempting to push a peace deal for normalized relations with Syria, and a withdrawal from the Golan Heights, before his upcoming resignation from office. The two countries have been in indirect talks via Turkey for many years, both secret and public, and are edging their way towards direct negotiation.
From what I’ve learned about peace negotiations over the years, if Israel and Syria are actually to sit down together officially, face-to-face, it will only be because an agreement was made ahead of time–i.e., if there is a sit-down and a summit later this summer or early fall, there will likely be a negotiated, signed agreement that results from it. Practically speaking, putting a rush on such diplomatic developments achieves two things: 1) leaves Olmert a golden nugget for his embarassingly tarnished legacy, and 2) once Israel is in the full swing of the general election, cold peace deals with unfriendly neighbors will certainly be put on the backburner.
some personal thoughts on the prospects of peace with Syria after the jump More »
Filed under
The chart here and article the Washington Post is not quite a silver bullet — but it’s a decent wooden stake to jab long and hard into the little myth than the Israeli political system doesn’t suffer somewhere between skewed to possibly dragged kicking and screaming into the right-wing cave by the American Jewish community. This chart shows that US and other Diaspora donors support Bibi Netanyahu almost two-to-one (eyeballing it) compared to Ehud Barak. Bibi got less than 5% donations from Israelis (phenomenal!) in this 2007 primary.
The chart just covers Bibi and Ehud, but nobody need think too far about where the monied givers in American Jewish society tend to spend their money: against the peace process, by and large.
Says Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, “The American Jews who hold the more conservative views toward Israel are also the ones who tend to be most actively engaged with Israel…Liberal American Jews tend not to single out Israel as the focus of their philanthropy.”
Which is why, when we talk about the creation of progressive Jewish institutions in America, like J Street, Brit Tzedek and PJA, we generally feel like it’s about damn time. The institutions to which you could give if you wanted to support progressive causes in Israel didn’t previously exist.
Filed under
A couple months ago, when it looked like Olmert was circling the proverbial drain, we put up a predictions thread to give our readers the opportunity to prognosticate about his political figure. Not many people participated, but maybe you made your predictions to yourself and were too embarrassed to post them. Anyway, the results are:
1. (a) Olmert resigns before he is formally charged with anything.
2. This question was ambiguously worded - it’s not clear whether it was asking when he would announce his resignation or when the resignation would take effect. In any case, the answers are July 30, 2008, and sometime in September 2008.
3. The date of the next Knesset elections is still unknown, but right now it looks like it won’t be in 2008.
4. It’s looking to be either (a) Tsipi Livni or (b) someone else from Kadima, depending who wins the Kadima leadership election in September.
So if you made predictions on your own, how did you do?
I was correct about question 1 and way off on the others, but I guessed September 16 as election day, which was only off by one day (except that September 17 will be Kadima leadership elections, not Knesset elections).
Filed under
Never too soon and ever too late, Olmert’s end is near. The PM stifled by failed policies, a failed war and a corruption resume so long he’d make a mob boss blush is finally getting ready to pack his bags.
Olmert announced today that he will cease to be the Prime Minister following his party’s elections in September. He also said that he would continue with his recent peace agenda until the day he steps down. There have been more frequent non-direct meetings with Syria, negotiations for the release of captive soldier Gilad Shalit, and talk of more serious negotiations with Fatah.
It would seem to make sense that, as noted here, Olmert is making this announcement now so that it will precede the announcement of his soon-to-come indictment.
I’m shuddering with the prospects of this notion. If you’re wanting to rid a government of corruption, something tells me Bibi is not the top choice… But well, I don’t vote in that election.
Read more about Olmert’s departure at the news source of your choice; this is covered everywhere.
Filed under
A sampling from the brief editorial:
When the Olympic torch is formally lit August 8 in the Bird’s Nest, China’s odd-looking new Olympic stadium, and the sky above Beijing explodes with what officials promise will be a “spectacular” fireworks display (in the very “birthplace of gunpowder,” as a government press release artlessly points out), a few key figures will be conspicuously absent. Truants will include the presidents of Poland and the Czech Republic and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany. They plan to boycott the opening ceremony to protest China’s poor human rights record and its ongoing occupation of Tibet…In Canada, a furious debate is raging over the planned absence of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and whether it will even be noticed — that is, assuming he is actually boycotting rather than simply detained by other commitments. His office won’t say one way or the other…Shimon Peres, the president of Israel, had been planning to skip the ceremony, but not because of child labor, Tibet’s agony or China’s appalling role in Darfur. Peres intended to stay home because the accommodations were too far from the stadium and he didn’t want to ride on the Sabbath. Instead, China found him a hotel on stadium grounds in the Olympic village, allowing Peres to uphold the Israeli political tradition of pretending to be Sabbath-observant when traveling abroad. Now he’s good to go.
If all this sounds silly, that’s because it is. The political gamesmanship surrounding the games this year is making fools of just about everyone involved…
The editorial then makes a kind of strange comparison at the end of Jewish community center basketball teams with the Warsaw ghetto uprising,
A century ago, movements arose among the Jews of Europe to reclaim Jewish destiny by teaching Jews to reclaim themselves, physically as well as spiritually. Polish yeshiva students reinvented themselves as Israeli farmers. Jewish soccer leagues were created in Vienna and Budapest, and Jewish basketball teams at community centers in Cleveland and Philadelphia helped spawn the National Basketball Association. Jewish scouting and Zionist pioneering clubs in Nazi-occupied Warsaw taught themselves to shoot and staged an uprising. A spirit of Jewish self-reliance was reborn, and it gave Jews the strength to carry on after the horrors of the Holocaust. Today, with new generations of Jews returning in droves to their pallid desks and study halls, that spirit is needed more than ever.
I mean, I’m all for athletes (who don’t get paid exorbitant amounts of money), and Jewish athletes are fun, mainly because at sports, well, we’re much better at being the commissioner or team president. But why does a general look at the weak state of international moral staturing played poorly have to turn into, ‘Jews invented the NBA, that spirit caused the Warsaw ghetto uprising, now Jews are becoming weak again because they study, Jewish Olympians are the answer.’ Personally, what would make me proud to be Jewish would be a series of editorials in the Forward on what the Jewish community has to say about the issues with China’s policies and why the Jewish world should pay more attention to them.
Anyways, aside from the “proud Jews hate gemara and love to kill nazis and play basketball” thing at the end, most of the editorial drives home a pretty good point. Even if the Olympics is used as a place for political statements and jockeying (whether or not is should be is a completely different issue, this year it has been done in particularly poor form.
Filed under
As usual, the Daily Show nails it.
Filed under
After Israel released convicted Lebanese murderer, Samir Kuntar, from prison last week, immediately Hamas began extortionist demands, citing that they would “stick to its demands, which includes the release of 1,000 prisoners, many of whom were sentenced to life in prison for their role in suicide bomb attacks,” Ha’aretz previously reported.
Today Ha’aretz reports:
A Gulf newspaper reported Monday that Israel is willing to include jailed Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti in a list of 300 Palestinian prisoners to be freed in exchange for abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Marwan Barghouti is a very important member of Fatah who was implicated in dozens of terrorist attacks and is considered responsible for the deaths of scores of innocent Israeli civilians. Mr. Barghouti is a the source of a very famous quote regarding Palestinian tactic; “We have spent seven years of intifada without negotiation, then we spent seven years of negotiation without intifada. Maybe it is time we try both.” While Mr. Barghouti has never denounced violence or terrorism, many hope that upon leaving prison he will join legitimate, moderate politics. There were inklings of this following Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004 when Barghouti considered a presidential bid from within prison, but dropped out at the last minute.
It should come as little surprise that Marwan Barghouti will be included in the deal to release captive soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Hamas in the summer of 2006.
Filed under
In a heated interrogation of Morris (Moshe) Talansky, American business man and bankroller of Olmert’s campaigns and general lavish lifestyle, contradicts his earlier testimony. A link of the video, courtesy of ynet.com, can be seen here, in English with Hebrew subtitles. One of the interrogators asks the poignant question: “If nothing was done wrong why are you so angry?”
Ha’retz reports:
Talansky was quizzed about contributions he had passed on to Olmert during his Jerusalem mayoral campaigns in 1993 and 1998. Eli Zohar, Olmert’s attorney, presented Talansky with a letter from an accountant which alludes to Olmert’s ‘93 campaign. The letter states that the source of NIS 80,000 which were donated remains unaccounted for. The witness was asked if it was possible that the sum of money was befitting the amounts he had procured for Olmert.
The American businessman was then presented a list of donors to Olmert’s 1998 campaign. Earlier, Talansky claimed that none of the donors had contributed money by way of Talansky. Zohar then produced a statement Talansky gave to police in which he confirmed that some of the donors on the list had in fact contributed money through him.
When asked about the discrepancy, Talansky said that he thought he was being asked about donors who had contributed in cash, and not donors who had sent checks.
Further into questioning, Talansky was shown a list of donors, each of whom had contributed $1,200 to Olmert’s 1998 campaign. Talansky said that the names that appear on the list were people who did not attend fundraising events, and that Uri Messer, Olmert’s former law partner, told him that the amount was the maximum contribution that was permissible.
Olmert’s lawyers then showed Talansky a video of the testimony he gave to the prosecution on May 21 in which he stated that the donors indeed attended fundraisers and that it was Olmert who issued the directive about the maximum amount that donors could contribute.
Filed under
“woe to the nation that at this time celebrates the release of an animal who crushed the skull of a four-year-old child.”-Ehud Olmert
May our hearts and prayers be with the Regev and Goldwasser families, and the Israeli people. And may peace be upon the souls of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.
This was not a victory for anybody. Not for Hezbollah. Not for Lebanon. Not for Israel. Not for Nasrallah. Not for Olmert. Not for the families of the captive soldiers. Not for the families of the released prisoners. Not for Samir Kuntar. Not for the Haran family. Nobody is a victor.
My personal reflections after the jump. More »
Filed under
Filed under
[Pictured is Swift Boat Veterans for Truth backer, Ambassador to Belgium and RJC Chairman Sam Fox]
According to the Huffington Post, Suzanne Kurtz, communications director for the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), is making up news–and not the funny kind that Jon Stewart and the Onion are so good at putting together. And it’s also not funny who is paying for it.
A press release was issued Monday calling on Barack Obama “to drop Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) from his upcoming trip to Israel.”
Mr. Hagel is not, however, joining Mr. Obama to Israel; Afghanistan and Iraq, yes; Israel, not-so-much. It seems that the folks at the RJC are trying to manipulate the news to make it appear that Senator Hagel is a close adviser on Israel to Senator Obama. The press release lists a resume of ‘anti-Israel highlights’ from Hagel’s recent career.
- In August 2006, Hagel was one of only 12 senators who refused to write the EU asking them to declare Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
- In December 2005, Hagel was one of only 27 who refused to sign a letter to President Bush to pressure the Palestinian Authority to ban terrorist groups from participating in Palestinian legislative elections.
- In June 2004, Hagel refused to sign a letter urging President Bush to highlight Iran’s nuclear program at the G-8 summit.
- In November 2001, Hagel was one of only 11 senators who refused to sign a letter urging President Bush not to meet with the late Yassir Arafat until his forces ended the violence against Israel.
- In October 2000, Hagel was one of only four senators who refused to sign a Senate letter in support of Israel.
after the jump is a transcript of the phone call from Monday afternoon between The Huffington Post and the RJC, sad and entertaining–like fake news ought to be.
Filed under
For more links, visit our Community directory.
