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KIBBUTZ GAATON, ISRAEL — The story could have been drawn straight from the Billy Elliot movie script: A young boy who was first transfixed by ballet on television, and would dance secretly in his room at night, practicing what he learned from films and Internet videos.Read the rest (Gross posted what appears to be a large excerpt, since the G&M page is subscriber-only).
But Ayman Saffah is a young Palestinian-Israeli – as he prefers to be known – from a small village in the Galilee, and young men in traditional Arab Muslim villages don’t dance ballet, at least not publicly. And so Mr. Saffah’s path to a remote ballet school at Kibbutz Gaaton, the preparatory school for Israel’s prestigious Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, has been riddled with stops and starts.
“I always wanted to dance,” says the young-looking 17-year-old, wearing jeans and sneakers, a pair of sunglasses dangling at his neck. “[But] when I saw it on the TV or Internet, I saw many, many girls dance, but I never saw boys. So I thought I couldn’t do it.”
History notwithstanding, Hanukkah still lags behind Christmas in the transition from traditional light sources like candles towards microcontroller driven arrays of LEDs. While that may be simply due to the relative flammability of dry pine trees versus that of metal menorahs, the irony is that Hanukkah -- unlike Christmas -- actually requires observers to light up specific lights in a specific order, which is exactly the sort of thing that you want a microcontroller for.Umm, ahh, sure. That's what I always wanted a microcontroller for. Doesn't everyone? Fun for the whole family:
As kickoffs go, the opening play of last Friday's game between Big Blue and the Pioneers was unexceptional - the only indication of any greater significance being that it ended, in what was undoubtedly a first for an American tackle football league, with a Levi tackling a Levy.
Minutes into the Israel Football League's inaugural game on an unseasonably warm November afternoon at Jerusalem's Kraft Stadium, one of the more than 200 mostly American immigrants in attendance soaked in the sound of shoulder pads crunching against churning thighs as if listening to a long-lost rock'n'roll album he had just rediscovered at the back of his closet. "Wow," he said, turning to his friend and nodding with satisfaction, "it really brings you back to high school, doesn't it?"But how do they say, "Hail Mary Play" in the language of the Prophets, and does, "throwing the bomb," rattle the receiver?
We live in La Jolla, which means "The Jewel." Our community is little more than a stone's throw from one of the prettiest pieces of coastline in the entire county and boasts the best weather too. We have a lovely shul with over 280 families, a spa-like mikvah, and an eruv on the way. This past Shabbat, as we do every week, we enjoyed our shul kiddush al fresco, socializing around the towering Torrey Pine tree that defines our shul's courtyard. We could not have predicted that such a short time later, our blue skies would turn toxic, the crisp ocean breezes replaced with menacing winds and our Torrey Pine and its courtyard laden with ash.Read the rest, and try to decide for yourself what you really care about.
Thankfully, our normally idyllic coastal enclave seems to be out the path of the fire -- at least for now. But as the communities immediately to the North and to the East of us were steadily evacuated, my husband and I were increasingly concerned: What if we were next? What if a call comes in the middle of the night asking us -- telling us -- to leave?
Vandals spray anti-meat graffiti on McDonalds in Jaffa
In a speech that condemned the upcoming U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace conference, Iran’s Supreme Leader today called on the United Nations to impose sanctions on the United States aimed at “bringing the U.S. into the global community of unfree nations.”Spot the differences:
“The people of the United States have lived under iron-fist of liberty for too long,” said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose word is law in Iran. “We believe that deep in the human soul dwells a universal desire to submit to a more powerful person whom one can revere with quiet obedience. Americans have had to squelch this yearning for more than two centuries.”
Mr. Khamenei told a cheering Iranian crowd, “No people can long endure the shackles of a democratic regime, without finally breaking those chains and taking their place among uncivilized nations that have wisely advanced only so far as they ought.”
“With proper encouragement from the United Nations,” he added, “the American people will soon throw off the yoke of freedom, and breathe the fresh air of subservience along with their millions of brethren in the Muslim world.”
Two Palestinian children in need of complex, life-saving heart surgery will be operated on by an international team of experts during a live broadcast surgery at an upcoming international medical seminar in Israel.The conference will also unite Israeli and Palestinian doctors through the Save A Child's Heart, 'Heart of the Matter' program sponsored by the European Union, where 15 Palestinian doctors from the West Bank and Gaza are expected to participate in the conference. Read the rest.
World-renowned medical professionals will meet in Israel next week to share and debate leading research and techniques in adult and pediatric cardiothoracic surgery and cardiology, as part of the Second Sami and Angela Shamoon Medical Seminar held at the Edith Wolfson Medical Center.
The seminar will take place from October 21st – 22nd, 2007 and will bring together distinguished medical professionals from the US, Canada, UK, China, Germany and the Netherlands.
President Shimon Peres expressed regret on Thursday that innocent Palestinians were being subjected to any form of maltreatment by Israel, but he added that over the past three weeks, six potential suicide bombers had been apprehended as they tried to enter Israel with explosives... Peres outlined his vision of the proposal for an industrial zone peace village that is supported by the Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian leadership and said the Japanese were giving $100 million and the Germans $30m. toward the project.Click here for previous posts on Israeli medical advances, and related medical news.
Oxford University’s world famous Oxford Union debating society has sparked outrage after it was revealed that they have invited Holocaust denier David Irving, who was recently released from an Austrian jail, to address students at the end of November. The Oxford Union has also asked British fascist leader Nick Griffin to join him, reports The Guardian.(What - and ruin a perfectly good day?)
“If Columbia can invite Ahmadinejad, then why shouldn’t we invite Irving?” one Oxford Union committee member asked.
Last month Irving told The Guardian that the Jews were responsible for “most of the wars of the last 100 years.”
Duncan Money, a second-year student at the university, said: “It is disappointing that the Oxford Union has chosen to promote and legitimize fascism.”
The Oxford Union had already been criticized for a debate they are holding later this month titled “This House Believes that One State is the Only Solution to the Israel-Palestine Conflict.” Norman Finkelstein, who has been accused of being an anti-Semite and Holocaust revisionist, will be one of the key speakers, as will former Israelis Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe, both of whom will be speaking against the continuing existence of Israel.
In his book, “The Holocaust Industry,” Finkelstein referred to Jewish leaders as “caricatures straight from the pages of Der Stuermer and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” On his website, he called Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt the “Elsie the Cow Chair in Judeo-Yenta Studies.” And he said Auschwitz death camp survivor Elie Wiesel was “the resident clown of the Holocaust circus.”
[...]
No Israeli has been invited by Oxford to put the opposing view....
The National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) [has] called on mainstream media outlets to stop inviting Ann Coulter as a guest commentator/pundit and strongly condemned her comments that Jews should be "perfected" by accepting the New Testament and that America would be better off if Judaism were "thrown away" and all Americans were Christian.The (verbal) free-for-all, with video, is here, at Left-of-center, media watchdog group Media Matters:
When pressed by Deutsch regarding whether she wanted to be like "the head of Iran" and "wipe Israel off the Earth," Coulter stated: "No, we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. ... That's what Christianity is. We believe the Old Testament, but ours is more like Federal Express. You have to obey laws."Omri over at Merehetoric has an interesting - if snarky - take(down) on the tussle:
It combines the best elements of liberal sophistication: the banality of multiculturalist tolerance, the humorlessness of scolding identity politics, and the blubbering of righteous indignation. It's the shallow beginning and the myopic end of the belief gap.
Abbas wants state in 98% of West Bank:Infolive TV:
Demands include all of Gaza, W. Bank, e. J'lem and areas in e. J'lem demilitarized before '67.
Real Estate Is Booming In The Capital:Click here for previous posts about Jerusalem.
Infolive.tv brings you the first in a series of special reports on Jerusalem, offering our readers the opportunity to learn about the different aspects of Israel's capital city, including security, the different peace plans concerning the city, real estate, religion and cultural events.
When most tourists think of Jerusalem, they generally have in mind the Western Wall, the Israel Museum, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Ben Yehuda Mall and Yad Vashem. Sadly, tourists, like most Israeli Jews, don't spend much time in eastern Jerusalem--despite the fact that this part of the Holy City holds the most historical, spiritual and strategic significance for Jews and Christians.Read the rest and learn. Previous post featuring Balint.
But in the run-up to the Annapolis summit, as the Olmert and Bush administrations intone the old "two states for two peoples" mantra, and renewed declarations that a Palestinian state will have east Jerusalem as its capital go on, perhaps it's time to understand the dynamics of the eastern part of the city.
Until very recently, Israeli politicians both left and right cited "Jerusalem, the undivided capital of Israel" as the consensus mantra. Now, Deputy Prime Minister Haim Ramon, (the same Ramon who was convicted just six months ago on sexual harassment charges) is advancing the same unrealistic Camp David thinking on Jerusalem as that first raised by Ehud Barak in 2000. Let the Arabs have the Arab neighborhoods and the Jews will keep the Jewish areas, and the "Holy Basin" of Judaism and Christianity's holiest sites will be administered by joint international supervision, declares Ramon.
But, as anyone who has spent any time at all in Jerusalem's neighborhoods can attest, things on the ground are far more complex than that.
When Google Earth first came along, the company went to some lengths to address the security concerns and restrictions in various countries, including Israel, where images of this nation were often blurry and you couldn't zoom in to find your house in Jerusalem.Here's a recent thread on an aviation enthusiast site with the details.
Well, good-bye to all that.
"Sensitive installations, Air Force bases with their planes and helicopters, missile bases and even the nuclear reactor in Dimona have never been photographed better," writes Yuval Dror in Friday's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. "A recent Google Earth update shows satellite pictures that make it possible to see clear, sharp pictures of military and civilian targets all across Israel."
"Up until recently, the satellite pictures of Israel on Google Earth had a particularly low resolution: every pixel was equal to 10-20 meters. Now, the satellite maps of Israel show great parts of the country with a resolution close to two meters per pixel.
"The Palestinian surfer, seems to be quite a moderate person. In the Google Earth forum, one of the surfers asked him: "There were hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who were forced to escape their homes in Arab states at the same time… maybe their property should also be documented, in order to maintain balance?"Nu? Anyone ready, able and willing to take up the challenge?
And Darby replied: "I agree with you 100 percent. I wish I had time to document the Jewish residence in the Arab world, but I don't. I would be happy to see someone taking this project upon himself."
One does not need to be a great Israeli leader to discern what Winston Churchill would have undoubtedly called the "gathering storm", and it doesn't comprise just rain clouds. We all understand what is happening but prefer to supress our thoughts. Or, just as in that Kol Nidre night in 1973, we can't see what is happening:Eitanush?... Tishma', habibi: although it's like, really nice of you to wake up this late in the game and realize that our backs are to the wall, howza'bout a smidgen of pride, self-respect and, ya' know, uttering the umm, "F" word. Faith. As in who and what we are, have been and will remain.
The Arab and Islamic world is looking to obtain nuclear arms: The Iranians are working full out on this; Syria is trying to acquire them on the sly; Libya reached an advanced stage in its nuclear project and we knew nothing about it; Pakistan is already a nuclear power and is not, if I am not mistaken, a country that sends us flowers for Shabbat.
The world’s headache
Washington is preparing an international peace conference and, at the conference, Israel will be asked to make sweeping concessions. President George W. Bush is looking for at least one success, before he becomes an oil magnate in Texas, and it looks like it will come at our expense. Let's not forget: America does not recognize the West Bank settlements, some 200,000 people. And joining the US will be many other world nations which, in the past few years, have bought into the notion that "we are the world's headache". If the Americans don't succeed in November, these countries will try in January and they won't give up.
