TDDPirate’s Ideas

The following is an adaptation of the English translation of a talkback, which I wrote in response to an article in Ira Abramov’s blog (written in Hebrew), which commented on the results of the elections held in Israel at 2009 February 10, whose results showed the decline of the Israeli Left.

I do not think that the Israeli Left lost the elections due to leadership failures, divisiveness or other nonsense.

I think that it was a victory of the Palestinians in their war against the Israeli Left, pure and simple.

• After Rabin’s murder at November 1995, there was widespread support for Shimon Peres (who advocated the same pro-Palestinian policy, which caused Yigal Amir to murder Rabin). Until the elections were at last held at 1996, the support passed to Bibi Netanyahu and he won landslide victory in the elctions. Who helped him? All those Palestinian terrorists, who exploded busses during the months between murder and elections.
• One of the consequences of the Al-Aqsa intifada, which started at 2000, and which included terror attacks committed by suicide bombers almost every day, was that several people from the Israeli Left felt that they no longer have a partner in the other side, and withdrew support for policy of appeasement toward the Palestinians.
• The third round of the war between the Palestinians and the Israeli Left was held during the years from the Disengagement until now. The By continuing to launch missiles from Gaza Strip into Israel, the Palestinians provided ammunition to those forces in the Israeli Right, who opposed the Disengagement and demonstrated and blocked roads in an attempt to stop the Disengagement.

After such battles, which ended with unequivocal victory of the Palestinians, why does anyone still wonder that the Israeli Left lost its influence over Israeli politics?

During the last few days, I have been alarmed by the news that the families of the soldiers abducted by Hezbollah and Hamas are suing the government in the Supreme Court in an attempt to force it to weaken itself in its negotiation tactics with Hezbollah and Hamas.

My concern is that those families are not taking the long range view.

The way they are pursuing now has the consequence of weakening the Israeli ability to deter its opponents. Thus, few months or years from now, Hezbollah and/or Hamas will abduct 5 soldiers. Then the families of those newly-abducted soldiers will be furious at the Shalit, Goldwasser and Regev families for preventing the government from adopting the hard-line stance, which would have deterred our enemies from ever kidnapping Israeli soldiers.

Contrary to popular opinion, this is not a personal Olmert issue. Any Prime Minister, faced with the same situation, would have to adopt a similar course of action.

Top 25 Censored Stories of 2007
Some of the stories are startling. For example:
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

The information is slanted against Israel - see:
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
On the other hand, the story of Palestinian terror acts, before the Wall’s construction was started, is not widely known outside of Israel and is not in the list.

In addition to few massive lawsuits, there is also a petition to add captions to all Hebrew language TV broadcasts in Israel, for the benefit of the hearing impaired. You can find it in http://www.azuma.co.il/show_petition.pl?id=889.

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/games/wargames.html
(Thanks to moshez for this link, which he mentioned in a recent blog entry.)

I participate in a mailing list with subscribers from all the world. The recent events in Qana provoked a discussion. In this discussion, a Leftist suggested to me that it would be a good idea if I were to write to some Tel Aviv newspaper editor and explain that it is immoral to bomb civilians.

My response:

• How about writing to editors of Arab newspapers explaining that it is immoral to sacrifice oneself and one’s children in order to kill civilians?
• How about writing to explain that it is immoral to be suicide bombers?
• How about writing to explain that it is immoral to use people as human shields, the way Hizbollah are doing in Lebanon?

Not expecting better from the Arabs, I am not amazed anymore at their hypocrisy at approval of Israeli civilian deaths from rockets, yet crying foul when Arab civilians, who proclaim readiness to die in the war against Israel - get their wish and die - only because they die from Israeli bombs rather than from exploding themselves in middle of crowds of Jewish civilians.

HOW MANY ISRAELI CIVILIANS HAVE TO DIE IN ORDER FOR THE IDF TO REGAIN ITS FREEDOM TO ACT TO PROTECT THE REST OF US FROM HIZBOLLAH MISSILES?
Obviously one or two (the usual number of casualties of missile attacks) are not enough. How many of us do you, bloodthirsty Leftists, want to die before you reluctantly allow us to defend ourselves against enemies, who use human shields forcing us to kill civilians in any act of self-defense we commit?

Someone wrote a black humor based article (Catch 22, in Hebrew) in his blog.
Most of the talkbacks to the article demonstrate that most of the readers in Israel did not exactly internalize the values of freedom of expression and black humor.
Where is the Yiddish humor heritage when we need it?

Any relationship between the publicized schedule of broadcasts of channels 1 and 10 and the actual broadcasts has been lost.
As a consequence, yesterday I missed my weekly infusions of “Veronica Mars” (channel 10), “The Simpsons” and “Stargate” (channel 1). I expect to miss also “Lost” (channel 10, tonight).

AAARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!

World of potential for mercy and compassion,
of room for grace and reconciliation,
teach all your children in the Middle East:
Jews, Muslims and Christians,
Bahai’s, Druzes and Buddhists,
Atheists and Agnosticians,
Palestinians and Israelis and Syrians and Iranians,
Let us value and love our fellow human beings
more than we value our beliefs, God or Gods.
Let hatred be turned into love, fear to trust, despair to hope,
oppression to freedom, occupation to liberation,
that violent encounters may be replaced by loving embraces,
and peace and justice could be experienced by all.
Let us swear that we shall never let Gods incite war and hatred among human beings.
Amen

In the build-up toward the 2^nd Gulf War at 2003, the deaf in Israel were at last issued beepers to alert them under the same circumstances that airstrike sirens are activated.

My beeper appears to work - I got several test messages. However, according to unconfirmed report from someone, there may be a delay of as long as 5 minutes from the hearies’ siren activation until messages are sent to the beepers. This report is still not confirmed, and I hope that we’ll not have the opportunity to put the beepers to live test.

The more serious problem is that three Israeli TV channels (channels 1, 2 and 10) broadcast news several hours each day, and they sometimes repeat themselves. Yet there are no universal captioning or Sign Language interpreting in the news - not even when they are repeated and therefore are not truly live broadcasts, which are still difficult to caption.