Leftist Humour. Next They Will Be Making Khrushchev Dance Like A Drunken Monkey

geoffff

New Matilda gets all smug and sniffy. Like the last drunk at the bar who thinks he just said something smart and witty about breast cancer.

EXCLUSIVE

29 Sep 2014

Death Down Under: A History Of Muslim Terrorism In Australia

By Chris Graham

Real or imagined, the threat of Muslim terrorism can't be ignored. In this NM exclusive, we bring you the shocking death toll of Australians on Australian soil at the hands of Muslim terrorists.

Zero.

Time gentlemen.

The thread attracts this comment. 

Igic

Posted Monday, September 29, 2014 - 20:41

The mainstream media is either is run or controlled by Jews. (especially in America)

That's why you always hear / read: Muslim terrorism or Islamic extremists. 

It is incorrect, The words can not go together. A Muslim can not be a terrorist. There is no place in Islam for extremisism. In other words, whoever practices extremisism, can not belong to the Muslim nation. 

End of comment

This is an Australian left site that asserts its independence recently under new management that to its credit has adopted a liberal comment posting policy.

We get to see the kind of creature that informs modern left wing ideology, warts and all.     

This blog, and another comments:

geoffff
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - 15:17

It is beyond me why NM and the Australian left is so viciously and violently Islamophobic (If in fact the word has any meaning at all)  

The first victims of Islamist fanaticism and terrorism are Muslims and so it has proven to be in the case of Australia.

Over sixty Australian Muslims have been so iindoctrinated in this vile life hating ideology that they have gone to fight for the caliphate and only God knows how many Muslims they have killed, murdered and raped in pursuit of the ideals of their Jihad. .

That certainly looks like Muslim terrorism to me. Australian Muslim terrorism.

Of the hundreds of thousands of victims of Muslim terrorism in the world over 90% are Muslims. Even Al Queda  murders seven times as many Muslims as non-Muslims.   

There are many brave people in Muslim lands who are fighting to liberate Muslims from the grip of the death cults and to free the women from subjugation from the cradle to the grave. Many are women who have paid with their lives.

NM and the Australian left have betrayed these people. There can be explanation for this and for the position the left has on everything from "Palestine" to genocide in Iraq, Syria and Iran than sheer bloody minded racism.

You disgrace yourselves. 

Decent Australians  who utterly abhor war, war criminals and mass murderers of children will eschew the war criminal, child-killing apologist, racist Greens and their SA allies. However you vote put the Greens last.

  

David.Zyngier

Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - 15:34

Igic writes:

The mainstream media is either is run or controlled by Jews. (especially in America)

Sorry but New Matilda should not permit racist anti-semitism on its pages. This repitiion of Goebels type hysteria needs to be condemned.

Furthermore lgic writes:

 A Muslim can not be a terrorist. There is no place in Islam for extremisism. In other words, whoever practices extremisism, can not belong to the Muslim nation. 

That might be what you say - but that is  not the reality - ask the families of the beheaded westerners whether their sons were murdered by impostors - terrorists masquerading as Moslems. The same can be said of Christianity - a religion of peace according to jesus but how many millions have been murdered in Christ's name over the millenia?

geoffff
Posted Tuesday, September 30, 2014 - 15:47

"The mainstream media is either is run or controlled by Jews. (especially in America)

"That's why you always hear / read: Muslim terrorism or Islamic extremists. "

You see, what we have here is a classic antisemitic Goebbels lie retailed by a thorough and likely born racist on an Australian leftist site.

This sick fantasy that the few million Jews left in the world are somehow a threat to the 25% of the world's populaion that is Muslim, is the most dangerous delusion of our age. Never mind climate change denial if that is something that troubles you in the night. You guys are in denial about something that hovers over you like a giant coal seam gas farting buzzard. . 

You read about Muslim terrorism and Islamist extremism all the time because the bloody world is full of it. You can try to define it away if you like just as some profoundly bigotted and useful idiots sometimes try to define away antisemitism. But you still have to come up with a name for what is murdering all of those hundreds of thousands of innocent people, mainly Muslims, and for the base, bone deep and utterly irrational hatreds that drive it.   

With Friends Like This (updated)

geoffff

A Defining Moment in the History of the ALP

This is a New Year greeting from NSW Labor to the NSW Jewish community just a few weeks after NSW Labor served up a big bowl of something red and smelly to the NSW Jewish community and for that matter everyone else who might think the Middle East Jews are just as entitled as their neighbours to basic civil and human rights including in particular the right to be left in peace in their own sovereign state.

Look at this . This is Bob Carr's resolution adopted by NSW Labor condemning Israel and rewarding "Palestine" for the Hamas (and Fatah) war crime of attacking the civilian population of Israel from the shelter of the civilian population of Gaza. 

It is now official.

From the policy standpoint of NSW Labor, attacking innocent civilians with lethal force carries no particular moral opprobrium at all so long as those civilians are Jews. Or at least Israeli Jews. Please do not dismiss this as hyperbole.

This is so even if the attacks are carried out from behind women and children as calculated battle tactics to deflect or inhibit directed retaliation aimed at stopping the strikes. That the intended victims are Israeli Jewish civilians overrides everything. Terrorism on a massive scale.  Cold blooded murder. Genocidal antisemitism.  Everything. Nothing is too vicious, depraved or obscene for Carr and NSW Labor to draw in a flash an immediate moral equivalence with Israel's military response to the attacks. 

Can you think of any other circumstance where Carr and the ALP would stoop so low? 

On the other hand Israelis defending themselves against these war criminals are condemned with a resolution that quite explicitly holds them responsible for the violence that Hamas coldly launched and the casualties the terror gangs have quite deliberately caused even among their own population.  

Why does Fatah always get a free pass by the way, in the muddy airy world of Bob Carr and the other strange and unpleasant men and women of NSW Labor? Given that President Abbas' boys were right in there from the start doing their best to murder civilians with the rest of them?

Why does it take a political resolution to determine a matter of international law? Why would a party ever seek to resolve any matter of law at a political conference?  The answer I suggest is obvious. That "Israel and the settlements are in breach of international law"  has long ceased to be an issue of law, at least as the concept is understood in countries such as Australia, US or Israel. The only international law that Israel is in breach is Sharia. The rest is politics and puff.

We may be witnessing the death of international law as a concept that is worth retaining. 

Carr and NSW Labor have sold out much more than you might think when they sold out Israel and the Jews. 

We can say something for certain about international law that NSW Labor in it new role as arbiter, or at least resolver, on issues legal, could save for its next conference. Firing thousands of rockets across a border at random on a civilian population in an attempt to murder as many people as possible is a breach of international law. That's an opinion NSW Labor can have for nothing. 

On reflection NSW Labor should avoid resolving that murder is illegal at the next conference. Let alone that civilised states have a duty to stop if they can with police and soldiers if they must. NSW Labor has already shown its true colours on these matters.  

This is Bob Carr's resolution, now NSW ALP policy. NSW Labor's Rosh Hashanah message follows. It's a peach.        

       MIDDLE EAST PEACE PROCESS – Resolution adopted at NSW Annual Conference

1. Deploring the tragic conflict in Gaza, Conference supports an end to rocket attacks by Hamas and an end to Israeli incursions, which have led to the deaths of innocent civilians.

1. ALP Conference applauds the last Labor government for its commitment to a two-state solution in the Middle East and specifically:

-          voting to enhance Palestinian status in the General Assembly;

-          restating the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is occupied territory;

-          opposing Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land; and

-          joining the world community in branding settlements illegal under international law.

1. NSW Labor recognises a Middle East peace will only be won with the establishment of a Palestinian state.

1. The state of Palestine should be based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps and with security guarantees for itself and Israel.

1. NSW Labor welcomes the decision of the Palestinian Authority to commit to a demilitarised Palestine with the presence of international peacekeepers, including US forces.

1. If, however, there is no progress to a two state solution, and Israel continues to build and expand settlements, a future Labor Government will consult like-minded nations towards recognition of the Palestinian state.

It is impressive that NSW Labor achieved a world scoop on the PA committing to a demilitarised Palestine with international peacekeepers. Or at least it would be if it wasn't the mother of all crocks.  That's NSW Labor for you. I doubt if they even care that this is a lie.

But I digress. Back to NSW Labor and Rosh Hashanah.



This is from Michael Easson, one of Israel's few remaining friends in NSW Labor,  from Australia Israel Labor Dialogue. 

I was a regular at Annual Conference for my first 21 years of membership. Not so in the last 20. I was surprised at how few foreign policy resolutions were sent in by party units for consideration by the 2014 Conference. There was nothing about Syria’s devastating civil war, nor the brutal conquests by the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – including the massacre of religious opponents, persecution of the historic, remnant Christian communities, and the introduction of sharia law including the mandatory circumcision of girls by excision of the clitoris. Nor anything about conflicts and outrages against human rights in Nigeria, Ukraine, North Korea, Eritrea, Sudan and a host of trouble spots. No doubt this is partly a reflection of the long term decline of the vibrancy of ALP branches, a theme this Newsletter has commendably addressed over many years.

At this year’s Conference, there was just one resolution on ANZUS, several on Julian Assange, and 33 on Israeli settlements and Palestine.

and this

There is obviously going to be a campaign led by Carr into the National Conference. As he stated to Arab Friends of Labor at the Sunday fringe event – “next step, Federal Conference”.

There's a blow by blow description of what went on at the NSW Labor Conference on Israel (you would think they had nothing better at all in mind) at that link.

An article by Michael Easson in the Spectator provides some history to this parting of the ways.  

Labor must not turn its back on Israel

The ALP has a long history of support for Israel. As it should.

7 CommentsMichael Easson 16 August 2014

Like many supporters of Israel across the Australian community, I am stunned by the erosion of sympathy and advocacy within the Labor Party in defence of the only democratic nation in the Middle East.

Shrugging one’s shoulders and writing off Labor as a lost cause would be a mistake for three reasons. First, there are plenty of advocates of Israel within the ALP, probably a majority of the Right outside NSW. Second, notwithstanding recent setbacks such as the loosely worded Bob Carr motion carried at July’s NSW Conference, social democrats still have more in common with Israel than against. Third, giving up the ghost with one side of politics is to make support for Israel, or the Palestinians, partisan causes – a dangerous position in the longer term.

What is needed is re-engagement with emerging, future generations of Labor. New strategies are also required to restore balance to the debate.

As a student in 1977, I joined Labor Friends of Israel, an organisation formed by Carr with plenty of backing across the centre and right of NSW Labor. It was morally right then and now to resist thinly disguised anti-Semitism from the far-Left on campuses and elsewhere.

There was then a lot of deep attachment from many NSW Labor figures like Lionel Bowen (1922-2012), Deputy Prime Minister under Hawke and Joe Riordan (1930-2012), anti-communist union leader, MP for Phillip and briefly a Whitlam Minister. Riordan admired the Leon Uris book Trinity as one of the best accounts of the Irish experience. He also loved Uris’s Exodus which told the story of Zionist immigration to existing Jewish communities in Palestine by refugees and others from around the world. Riordan believed the Jewish struggle for statehood was akin to Irish battles for independence.

The support for Israel from Australian Workers’ Union leader, President of the NSW ALP from 1960-1970, Charlie Oliver (1901-1990) was so ardent that his Will stipulated that the President of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies read the Old Testament at his funeral – which ALP member Leslie Caplan duly did. In this era, Bob Hawke’s passionate defence of Israel against the truly mad Labor official Bill Hartley (1930-2006) and others in the Victorian ALP inspired generations of Labor moderates. In NSW, Jewish Labor luminaries like Premier Wran’s Ministers Syd Einfeld (1909-1995) and potential successor as Premier Paul Landa (1941-1984) enjoyed wide respect.

continues here

Almost exactly ten years ago, former ALP minister Barry Cohen wrote a watershed article on what he called the Anti-Semitic Labor Party.


His party.

Carr says it is Israel that has changed but Carr knows that is a lie. Every single concession made or offered in an attempt to forge a peace deal has come from Israel. Carr knows that the Arabs can have another Arab Muslim state if they want it and they can call it what they like. They can do with what they want. This is old and settled ground and for NSW Labor to hold out that it is Israel that is an obstacle to a "state of Palestine" is nothing but a convenient and cowardly lie.

It is not Israel that has changed since Carr helped form Labor Friends of Israel in the sixties or seventies. That is Carr lying at his worst. Since then Israel has made three formal and detailed peace proposals all of which met any remotely legitimate demand or grievance. They were all viciously and violently rejected.

Of course.

 It is the demographics of western Sydney, and in particular in a swag of Labor held federal and state seats, that have changed.

It really is as simple as that. It really is that cynical and cowardly. Abandoning or attacking Israel is the course of least resistance in a world where political Islam is rampant and Jew hatred is core to the ideology. We have seen all of this before.

There is absolutely nothing new about Bob Carr and NSW Labor. 

You have to respect Michael Easson for what he does and indeed for his expert knowledge but the truth is that despite him  NSW Labor gave up on Israel and the Jews the moment there was some pain in it. 

Federal Labor is on the precipice.  Carr abandoned Israel the moment he was able and regards this as a career highlight. He instinctively and viscerally blamed Israel for flaming the 9/11 attacks. He is determined to have his way (if you have any doubt how obsessed he is with Israel and Jews you should read his published diary) and he has the tide of his party with him. 

This is the kind of friends they are. It is good that we found out in time. 

Sorry John Robertson MP and NSW Labor. Coming from you, all this talk about a society where all are valued and free from hate speech and racism, about strong beliefs in peace and freedom, rings about as true as tinnitus. 

You abandoned all that when you abandoned the only state in the Middle East that prizes those concepts. And for that reason you have to agree with the rabid left, and now it seems NSW Labor, that indeed the matter of Israel, "Palestine" and the eternal racist war on the Middle East Jews is a threshold entry level issue for all.

How bloody disgusting. So be it. 

You can define a person morally and politically, and make an assessment of their character, by where they stand on this issue. That is worth thirty-three resolutions for a start.   

You can thank Bob Carr more than most for that. 

cross posted Jews Down Under

Update

crossed posted Israel Thrives with this background for US readers

On the face of it these pieces must have the look of the parochial from the standpoint of where all the action is.  Australia is a middle ranking power that diplomatically punches above its weight but no one here kids herself that the country has much sway in the way of the world. Yet it is remarkable how much flash and powder is devoted to Israel in the mundane domestic political processes of the country. 

This is about a state conference of the state branch of the party in opposition in that state and nationally. As in the US, perhaps even more so, the Australian states have no responsibility whatsoever for foreign policy or defence. 

It is striking how similar are the issues in our countries. This is a reminder that we are up against a sophisticated global movement that is pulling out all stops in this sinister campaign against Israel and the Jews. 

They mean business. Rewriting history is nothing for them. For them, that is the least that they will do. 

Australia, with Canada and the Czech Republic, may be Israel's only remaining true friends in the world, and in the case of Australia at least, that can now change with a change of government. 

No one can trust Obama. It seems clear Netanyahu does not. Netanyahu is right.

If you follow the links you may be astonished at the energy and sheer bloody-minded determination that has been invested this year and last in the ongoing process of tearing the Australian Labor Party, despite aberrations, arguably historically the most pro-Israel party in the Western world, away from its traditional rock solid support of Israel and Zionism that extends back to the foundation of Israel and decades before.

You may recall Bob Carr is the creepy little man who due to the vagaries of the Australian constitutional and political systems was unelected to any public office when he was appointed the country's foreign minister in 2012 by the besieged Prime Minister in a bizarre twist to a failed attempt to stop her government from falling apart.

Don't ask. 

It is to do with the faction system of the ALP, especially the power of the faction bosses  in the then ruling party in the lower house and without question the most formally factionalised party in the democratic world. 

Except perhaps Israel.  

The good news is that it did not work, the Australian public did its job and last year out went the government, poxy foreign minister and all. As predicted, former PM Gillard, now in political retirement and on the record, immediately came to regret her appointment of the creepy little man as FM and also as predicted, the creepy little man has lived on in retirement as the Jimmy Carter of Australian politics who as we know is the strangest and creepiest little man to have ever been president

Free the women

geoffff

Like slavery in the nineteenth century the treatment of women and girls in Arab Muslim countries and Iran is the great human rights issue of our age. Free the women and all freedoms will follow. The Islamists know this. That is why keeping women enslaved is their first priority everywhere. 

Official Trailer

Extended Clip

geoffff

A CNN reporter, a BBC reporter, and an Israeli commando were captured by terrorists in Iraq. The leader of the terrorists told them that he would grant them each one last request before they were beheaded.

The CNN Reporter said, ‘Well, I’m an American, so I’d like one last hamburger with French fries.” The leader nodded to an underling who left and returned with the burger & fries.  The reporter ate it and said “Now, I can die.”

The BBC Reporter said, ‘I’m a reporter to the end. I want to take out my tape recorder and describe the scene here and what’s about to happen. Maybe someday someone will hear it and know that I was on the job till the end.” The terror leader directed an aide to hand over the tape recorder and dictated some comments. The reporter then said, ‘Now I can die knowing I stayed true until the end.”

The leader turned and said, “And now, Mr. Israeli tough guy, what is your final wish?”

“Kick me in the rear,” said the soldier.

“What?’ asked the leader, “Will you mock us in your last hour?”

“No, I’m not kidding. I want you to kick me in the rear,” insisted the Israeli.

So the leader shoved him into the open and kicked him in the rear.

The soldier went sprawling, but rolled to his knees, pulled a 9 mm pistol from under his flak jacket, and shot the leader dead. In the resulting confusion, he jumped to his knapsack, pulled out his carbine and sprayed the terrorists with gunfire. In a flash, all terrorists were either dead or fleeing for their lives.

As the soldier was untying the reporters, they asked him, “Why didn’t you just shoot them in the beginning? Why did you ask them to kick you in the rear first?”

“What?” replied the Israeli, “and have you report that I was the aggressor?”

hat tip Eleanor and Malcolm 

The Opinion Of A Military Man

geoffff

Ever  wondered what a  professional soldier serving or who has served in another modern military, such as Australia's or Britain's, have on the technical performance of the IDF in Gaza, its ethical standards, checks and oversights and the allegations of war crimes against the IDF that as usual began as soon as Hamas launched the war. 

Colonel Richard Kemp served as a commander in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans. He is in a position to know and is an officer who tells it straight as the best of them always do. 

Well worth the five minutes for the briefing. 

hat tip Daphne Anson

Dershowitz On The Dead Baby Strategy And Other Crimes Against Nature

geoffff

Close readers of this blog may know that it has shamelessly claimed for itself credit for coining the phrase "dead baby strategy" to describe the standing plan of the ruling Gaza authorities of the day, whoever and wherever they may be on the day and that is by no means necessarily in Gaza, to put civilians and especially children in the way of wars so as to harvest the propaganda value of the resulting lost lives for the war effort. 

Ah huh. Dead baby strategy. We had seen it before so many times it could be predicted with certainty with Operation Pillar of Cloud in November 2012 when it reached a new low of this depraved theatre of the grotesque.  Recall the Egyptian PM on a flash visit of solidarity just in time to carry for the cameras a freshly killed infant, son of a distraught BBC man no less. Turned out the child had been killed by a Hamas misfire.

Other images used have been of casualties of the Syrian conflict where there is an availability of dead kid stock several orders of magnitude over what is available in Gaza and is guaranteed to be always fresh in store.   

All you have to do is lie that the Jews did the killing and that of course is no sweat at all. Been doing that for centuries. 

 It was time it was given a name. Snuff movie is morally in the same field but doesn't quite cover it.  Death porn is closer.  

Anywhere in the world , building vast war tunnels with the blood and resources of a brutally and unlawfully ruled people and placing war facilities, including operations, war tunnel entrances and enormous munitions stocks among whatever facilities the people have been left after the plundering, would be seen as an enormous crime. To then instruct the civilian population to stay put and ignore warnings to evacuate that they know will come as the criminals have already attacked the civilian population of the hated enemy would hardly be seen as a point in mitigation anywhere.

Except in Gaza.

Over 300 kids were killed digging those tunnels. Hamas and the PA are the sources for that. Apparently the kids were prized as diggers because of their size and agility.  Likely they would have died horribly of course. 

What do you call this. A war crime? It doesn't even begin to describe it. Of course it is a war crime, not just one, but it is something else besides. Can you call it genocide not only as a policy for the Jews but also as policy for the Gazans, even when it is part of a single coherent strategy that includes rapidly expanding the population of the ruled people for the purposes that include the waging of jihad?

A policy that enslaves women, entrenches poverty, grinds out never ending grievance and that has resulted in Gaza having among the highest birth rates and population projections anywhere going all the way back to 1967 when living standards in Gaza and other places nearby dramatically began to improve in key sectors.

But I digress.

That was way before Hamas was calling the shots and the policy settings, such as they were, were flung in reverse with all seven gears grinding like a Norwegian submarine right back all the way to the seventh century. 

Not just Gaza by the way. The policy extends beyond Gaza. But how is a population explosion possibly in the same street as genocide?

Not the right word just now. But who knows what these maniacs are capable of and as the antizionist bigots in the West are fond of accusing Israel of genocide that involves the same population explosion it must be said that Hamas and its ugly sisters are guilty of a crime against their own people that is in the same dimension even now.

Not to mention the policy regarding the Jews.

Whatever else you could call this thing, you can say for sure it is uglier than a hatful of massacres and something else even uglier besides. You don't have to be a moral philosopher to note this.  

Where else in the world and in history would there be any doubt about the nature of a crime like this? There may  excellent reasons to not intervene including the most excellent reason of them all; that there is nothing that can be reasonably done. But whether it was genocide in Darfur, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia or the crushing of the Tibetans there would be no lack of moral clarity about what we were seeing. 

Except in Gaza. 

Why is that? Isn't that being a little racist?  Because it sure looks like it to me. A kind of double racism. The racism that relieves the rulers of Arab peoples and especially "Palestinians" from all responsibility for their terrible crimes even against their own people and the racism that places the burden of responsibility for these crimes squarely onto the Jews.  

I've got to say this so please hear me through. We know it was determined Third Reich policy from the start to breed, as they saw and put it, as many Germans as possible so that they could be burned for a purpose that transcended the value of their lives.  This was a core theme of the ruling ideology.  Everyone knew this. It was taught in the schools. Beyond the individual is the state and beyond the state is the ruling ideology that must and will triumph even as the individual as an animal must die and whose duty therefore is to submit to the service of the state with his life.

In the light of events I guess one of the crimes you could accuse Hitler is the genocide of the German people. It is certainly true that Germans were his first victims and not just the Jewish Germans. 

Which brings me back to Gaza.  

As Hamas and its ugly sisters are being rewarded for their crimes and have people to burn as a result of a political culture that has a pathological attitude toward women and girls and a death cult attitude to the value of human life they will of  course keep on doing this.

But here's the thing. The rewards for Hamas are mainly in the West. They can see for themselves the strategy is working in spades and at a cost to them that is negligible. Other people's kids that have been brought into the world for this purpose as policy. 

The people of Gaza are oppressed and no one can seriously believe that there are not many among them who know what Hamas is up to and who just want a good and quiet life. But such thoughts are crimes in Gaza let alone words and how in any event supporting Hamas from the West can in any way be seen as in the best interests of the people of Gaza has to be dangerously close to racism in its own right.

Here is Alan Dershowitz nailing it at the Gatestone Institute. 

Hamas quickly produces photographs of dead babies to be shown around the world, while at the same time preventing the media from showing its rocket launchers in densely populated areas.
Unless Hamas's "dead baby strategy" is denounced and stopped -- by the international community, the media, the academy and all good people -- it will be coming soon "to a theater near you".
If Hamas's dead baby strategy works, why not repeat it every few years? And why shouldn't other terrorist groups, like ISIS and Boko Haram, adapt this strategy as Hezbollah has already done?

On June 13, 2014, the commander of the Gaza Division of the Israel Defense Forces took me into a Hamas tunnel that had recently been discovered by a Bedouin tracker who serves in the IDF. The tunnel was a concrete bunker that extended several miles from its entrance in the Gaza Strip to its exit near an Israeli kibbutz kindergarten.

The tunnel had one purpose: to allow Hamas death squads to kill and kidnap Israelis. The commander told me that Israeli intelligence had identified more than two dozen additional tunnel entrances in the Gaza Strip. They had been identified by the large amounts of earth being removed to dig them. Although Israeli intelligence knew where these entrances were, they could not order an attack from the air, because they were built into civilian structures such as mosques, schools, hospitals, and private homes. Nor could Israel identify their underground routes from Gaza into Israel, or their intended exit points in Israel. Israeli scientists and military experts had spent millions of dollars in aneffort to develop technologies that could find the underground routes and intended exits for tunnels that were as deep as a hundred feet beneath the earth, but they had not succeeded in finding a complete solution to this problem. The planned exits from these tunnels in Israel were also a Hamas secret, hidden deep in the ground and incapable of being discovered by Israel until the Hamas fighters emerged. At that point it would be too late to prevent the death squads from doing their damage.

Sure to get this 

I was taken into the tunnel and saw the technological innovations: tracks on which small trains could transport kidnapped Israelis back to Gaza; telephone and electrical lines; crevices beneath schools and other civilian targets that could hold explosives; and smaller offshoot tunnels leading from the main tube to numerous exit points from which fighters could simultaneously emerge from different places.

Continues here. A must read.

Cross posted Israel Thrives

  

Letter From Israel

elinor        אלינור   

   

                                                                                                                     

Australia, August 2014

Just came back from Australia.  Departed Israel during a ‘temporary’ truce in the war between Hamas and the Iron Dome; returned to a ‘permanent’ truce.  No one knows exactly what that means yet but children are playing in schoolyards, so it can’t be all bad.

If there is an experience more stunning than leaving Israel during wartime and landing anywhere in Australia, I haven’t had it yet.  There had been efforts to bomb Ben Gurion airport just days before our departure.  Leaving on El Al, I realized I was undertaking what one might call a tightening of certain muscles, even though El Al is now equipped with anti-missile deflectors, or so we are told. Looking around the cabin I can guarantee that I was not the only one doing such exercises.

The route of the flight was weird.  It usually goes over one of the charming countries to the east of Israel, but this time we headed right down the Red Sea and over India.  Good that India is still talking to us. The path to Bangkok, our first stop, might have headed over Russia but no one wants to tangle with Russia these days, so other choices were made.  At that point, I fell asleep, figuring if they don’t know how to get there, hell with it.

If one is a member of MATMID, El Al’s cheery passenger club, one can acquire up-graded seating.  We were seated in the forward cabin in two seats right in the middle of the /\-shaped space.  If you enjoy being stepped on, becoming part of other people’s conversations and the local authority on whether or not the lavs are occupied, it’s a great place to sit, although without a chair back or a bit of unoccupied floor to use for ones bits and pieces, it has its drawbacks. 

Apparently we were sterling passengers because on the way back, we were upgraded twice during the same flight.  The woman ahead of me said she refused to have a mother and baby as her seat-mates, so we were shifted to accommodate her mishegass.  I never knew one could do that!  The second time was best.  Lots of leg-room and for the first time in years, I sat by the window. Had to watch my head when I stood up, though. 

Anyway, Australia.  Absolutely amazing place, so very laid back.  No one checks handbags, or cares if you speak Arabic, but don’t try to bring anything into that country which the cute little Customs dogs don’t like—that’s when you’re off to jail instead of heading for sand and sea. And it’s really funny for me to hear Sorry, I didn’t understand your accent.  Sometimes it takes two tries for me to understand that sentence!

At this time of year our usual destination, Melbourne, is freezing cold, so we went northward to a small town, usually warmer.  This year it was truly awesome, with only the most intrepid surfers out in the ocean; wind to blow a zipped jacket right off; days of rain and temperatures lower than those in the south, with phone calls from relatives and close friends that began Greetings from sunny Melbourne—and it was.  Tant pis, I thought, so what.  I’ve left both a Middle East war and an over-heated summer behind. I win.

 

cross posted Israel Thrives