Facebook Intifada

For some bizarre reason I have yet to figure out, Facebook is refusing to take down the page called "The Third Intifada" despite it's clear violation of Facebook's own policies against hate speech and threats. And, for an even more bizarre reason, certain hateful people seem to be under the impression that we have no right to complain about this. We have no right to complain that Facebook is violating its own rulebook by allowing (nay, encouraging) them to stay. We have no right to complain that there is a site up on Facebook advocating our murder, slaughter, genocide.

Some day, all the phony liberals should take one of those hate-filled diatribes and substitute any other ethnic, religious or uniquely distinct group for "Jews" or "Israel" or "Israelis" or the ubiquitous "Settlers" (as though the people living in Judea and Samaria, over the "green line" are somehow less than human because of where they choose to live in their own land) and tell me if you think that any respectable newspaper would print it -- particularly those bastions of "Truth, Justice and the Saudi Arabian way", the New York Times.

In any case, when my friend "Michelle Nevada" put up a blog entry about the whole Facebook being the home of the Third Intifada, she got tons of hate comments. I felt the need to add a comment:

ב"ה

It's amazing how full of hate people can be -- so full of hate, they don't even see that they are criticizing (understatement) the people who are good to them and supporting (read: lionizing) the people who will kill them.

I really wish all the haters of the world would boycott Facebook (and anything else that we Jews and the people of Israel have introduced/brought to the world). But they never will because they can lie to too many people, use their anti-Jewish gut to turn them into murderers.

Why don't all you Israel-bashing, Murder loving, "Liberals" (not true liberals, my word has been co-opted by haters) just admit it -- what you really want is for all Jews to disappear from the earth. The problem (for you, anyway) is that G-d, the owner, ruler, creator of the world will never allow that to happen. Read your history, uneducated ones. Hitler wasn't the first who tried. Every generation sees a new "Haman" -- someone (or some many) dedicated to killing us. Thank G-d we have G-d on our side.

I also think it's funny (that's ironic, not ha-ha) that the enemies of Israel feel the need to accuse Israel (falsely, I might add) of all the crimes that Israel's enemies actually do TO Israel. Israeli Babies are murdered (in their beds, in their strollers, in their cars), bombs are dropped, and all this to a country that treats the Palestinian sick and injured, gives Palestinians jobs they can't get in their own "territories", gives Palestinians money and food (since they grow precious little of it on their own).

BTW, if you are pro-women's rights and pro-gay rights, you're demonizing the only Middle East country that also supports those issues and lionizing the people who murder and torture women and gays (to mention a few groups).

Put that in your pipe and smoke it (as they used to say on "Laugh-In").

It' a Gas, Gas, Gas.....

ב"ה

My friend "Michelle Nevada" told me a number of years ago that she knew someone who gotten a kit and converted his car to run on natural gas instead of petroleum based gasoline. His gas company installed a spigot on the side of his house and he used that to fill his car up with gas. The natural gas was not only cheaper than gasoline, it didn't need to be procured from politically corrupt and volatile governments. As Michelle said, the US is the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. In addition, Israel recently discovered natural gas.

Israel found this large quantity of natural gas near Haifa. I though about this for some time. For the US and Israel, both of whom rely heavily on foreign oil from volatile, largely anti-Israel and anti-US governments, natural gas seems to be the wave of the future.

It has seemed to me for many years that part of the "imbalance of power" that exists in the world today has to do with the economics of petroleum. Petroleum, however, besides being under the control, for the most part, of the aforementioned unstable regimes, and being highly toxic in its production (evidence the BP spill of recent memory) and use, should not be pursued by the US and Israel. I've always thought it would behoove Israel, with her concentration of great scientific brains, should expend some effort in developing a sustainably produced, non-toxic substitute for gasoline (a substitute that could immediately replace gasoline as a power source for automobiles.

However, given the above information, I think that, instead of working hard at developing electric cars, we should be working on developing cars that run off natural gas.

I would like to get people on board with this idea -- let me know what you think.

Cat Ballou and Israel

ב"ה

One of my favorite movies growing up was "Cat Ballou" with Jane Fonda. I never thought about Jane Fonda's politics; I was very young and I loved the movie. And I still love the movie. I just recently watched it on video. And I enjoyed it as much this time as I had the dozens of previous times (probably none since the 1980s or so until this recent viewing).

I have discovered in my life that oftentimes when I reread something, or see a movie or TV show again, or re-experience something I've already experienced in the past, I discover something new. This was true during this viewing of "Cat Ballou".

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of seeing "Cat Ballou" (which Lee Marvin won an Oscar for), "Cat Ballou" takes place in the late 19th Century, when the trains are beginning to get popular. Catherine Ballou has just graduated college and is coming back home to her father. Frank Ballou owns a spread that the railroad is trying to buy. Since he won't sell, he's being harassed and, finally, shortly after Catherine comes home and hires three incompetents to protect him, he's murdered. The rest of the movie shows Cat Ballou, queen of her newly formed bandit gang, trying to find a way to avenge her father's death, and accidentally killing the head of the railroad. She is captured and sentenced to death.

One of the things I always liked about the movie was interludes narrated and punctuated the action with Nat King Cole (right before his death from lung cancer at 45 -- the movie was released after his death) and Stubby Kaye playing banjos and singing "The Ballad of Cat Ballou". In this ballad, the balladeers sing a song about Cat, but, though she was a young woman looking to protect her father and then avenge his death, the ballad portrays her as "evil through and through..."

This jumped out at me in a way it never did when I saw this movie in my tweens and teens. This, to me, represented Israel.

For those of us with consciences, we can't harm anyone without it bothering us. But one thing that makes harming anyone easier is demonizing them. The people of "Wolf City, Wyoming", where "Cat Ballou" takes place, needed to see her as a demon in order to be able to celebrate and revel in the "hanging of Cat Ballou..."

So, too, it is with Israel. In order for the world to condemn Israel's every move, every terrorist killed to protect someone, every Jewish "settler" murdered with knives, bombs and missiles, every home built for a family dispossessed by Arik Sharon's army from their homes in the freely destroyed and repopulated Gush Katif (known to the world as "Gaza"), every helping hand extended by Israel to places like Haiti, Chile and other countries needing medical or technological assistance people need to demonize Israel and "settlers". "Settlers", by the way, are just people, families, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents and grandchildren, who just want to live their lives in peace, just want to send their children to school, raise them to be good people.

It's easy to demonize Israel, people have been demonizing Jews for millennia. This is nothing new. It makes things nice and neat -- all it takes, people think, is for Israel to move out of Judea and Samaria (known throughout the world as the "West Bank") and suddenly, the world will be at peace.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. What it takes for peace in the Middle East is for the hundreds of millions of Arab-Muslims to realize that their enemy isn't Israel, that demonizing and hating Jews isn't going to solve their life problems. Their problems are caused by leaders who want them to focus their negative energy on Israel and not on them, not on their lack of leadership ability, not on their corruption, not on their stealing from their own people. It will take a leader in Israel who is willing to fight, willing to protect Israel's people and guests from harm, willing to risk censure from our enemy nations, the nations who are also, by the way, the enemies of freedom worldwide, the enemies of women, of gays, of non-Muslims, of children.

Please, G-d, send us such a leader. Or give Bibi the strength to be that leader.

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