Dave Bender: Compelling Photography

Friday, June 15

Krazy Kaption Kontest! 'Please place all weapons on the x-ray conveyor...'

Captions, anyone?

A Hamas militant poses inside an X-ray machine, at the passport processing area of the Rafah Border Crossing, in the southern Gaza Strip, June 15, 2007.
(AP Photo/Hatem Omar, MaanImages)

Sara Yocheved Rigler: From the ashram to Jerusalem

Sara Yocheved Rigler
Click here or on image to see more photos
(Photos: Dave Bender).

Click on the audio player below to hear an excerpt of her address to the congregation at Ariel Synagogue, Atlanta on Sunday, June 10th.

(Please be patient: the audio stream may not begin immediately. You can also listen here, if the player above isn't working.) Drop me a note if you'd like to hear more segments of Rigler's talk.

More on Rigler's spiritual trek from a decade at a Buddhist ashram to a devout Jewish outlook and observance in Jerusalem is here. Her latest book, Holy Woman: The Road to Greatness of Rebbitzen Chaya Sara Kramer, is available here.

Thursday, June 14

Gaza falls to Hamas: a wake-up call from hell

And here's some food for thought:

"Wonder what Iraq would look like if we left tomorrow? Take a look at Gaza today. Then imagine a situation a thousand times worse."

(...) "And there's humor in Hell: The Islamist madmen behind Hamas call Fatah fighters "the American Jew Army." We've come a long way, boychick, when fellow Arabs anoint the late Yasser Arafat's thugs as tools of the Great Satan and the Lesser Satan."

Still unconvinced? Then watch this report from Israel's Channel 10 television:

What to do? Well, there are calls for a multinational force. In the snarky question of one poster at a popular blog, "...does that mean the US Marines and the IDF?"

Hopefully, whoever it won't be as useless and neutered as the one along the Lebanese border with Israel (hey -- thanks a million for that gesture, guys).

And speaking of useless and neutered, a "senior state official," (wink, nudge) says Israel won't intervene in the clashes.

Meanwhile, in the West Bank,

Fatah gunmen and Palestinian Authority policemen on Thursday launched a wide-scale crackdown on Hamas figures and institutions in the West Bank. More than 30 Hamas officials and supporters were rounded up in Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarm.

But, no worries!:

Defense Minister Amir Peretz told a weekly meeting of security officials that Israel would not allow the ongoing violence between rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas in the Gaza Strip to spread into attacks on southern Israel, meeting participants said.

There now. Don't you feel safer already?

Israel's security?

"Eagle-eye," Peretz has
"Got it covered!"

Sunday, June 3

The 1967 War 40 Years On: Causes & Consequences (battle videos)

This is a very well prepared, comprehensive site coving the events before, during and apre' la guerre in Israel and the vicinity in June, 1967.

Bookmark this one; it's worth a long, considered look, as the reverberations of that conflict continue to wrack the area 40-years later...

High points:

Timeline
Players
Long-term effects

Aish has a good fact sheet, as well:

Why are we talking today about the West Bank and the "Palestinian question"? How did Israel get into this situation where it is reviled as an "occupier" and accused of a refusal to trade "land for peace"?

Prior to June 1967, Israel did not "occupy" any Arab land and did not seek to expand its territory. Israelis were not talking about populating Judea and Samaria or establishing "Greater Israel."

Similarly, Palestinians were not calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, which was controlled by Jordan, or in the Gaza Strip, which was ruled by Egypt.

And here, is an 11-part (!) series, in English, released by the Israeli government soon after the war. Extensive, and what I take to be exclusive footage shows the course of the battles. The rest of the segments are here.

From the poster:
On Monday June 5, 1967, 14 Arab countries came thundering down on Israel. Their armies far exceeded hers. Their Russian-backed weapons resources were vast. Yet in six dramatic days, the little country not only won a decisive victory, but also changed the map of the Middle East. This was the Six Day War.

Shocking video expose' captures IDF's warmongering battle chant

Lyrics: "Peace will yet descend upon us, one and all... (repeat)"

Shot on the steps between floors at Jerusalem's Central Bus Station. Having used the station and those stairs innumerable times, I can tell you that such a scene isn't an unusual occurrence. 'Specially when you have to ask them to move their backpacks aside so you can pass with yours.

In the words of Mererhetoric:

You can easily see the same kind of scene playing out in Saudi Arabia or Iran. The heaviness of depression and the lack of morale - the growing despondency of Israelis that the LA Times keeps telling us about - that comes through in the movie.

Oh - and the love of war. The whole joyfully singing about peace thing really brings that out, don't you think? It's always like this - there seems to be little difference between the Israeli approach to life and the seething of their genocidal enemies. Except for the vast and total difference between the two.

In a similar vein, here are two report with Israeli troops I prepared during a visit along the border with Lebanon during last summer's war against Hizbullah:

Deaf, mute, wheelchair-bound Israeli child killed in Kassam strike. World media? (crickets)

An appalling report of a rocket strike last week that killed a 13-year-old Israeli:

In the town of Sderot, a bus transporting four special-needs children suffered a near-direct-hit from one of dozens of rockets fired into Israel by Pal-Arab terrorists. Shrapnel from the resulting explosion penetrated the vehicle and wounded all the children. One child, thirteen year-old wheelchair-bound Chai Shalom, who had cerebral palsy, was deaf and mute, and had congenital heart problems, suffered injuries from the bombing serious enough to require hospitalization. Sadly, little Chai Shalom (Chai means "life" in Hebrew, and shalom is the Hebrew word for "peace") died of his injuries in Beer Sheva's Soroka Hospital.
And since balance is all the rage in the foreign media, here's another report from a different vantage point.

Tom Gross reports that a child with congenital heart complications - this one a newborn Gazan baby - was rushed to Israel on Sunday while Qassams whizzed overhead.

An Israeli ambulance took the eight-day-old Pal-Arab infant from Gaza to the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Aviv's suburbs.

As Tom writes: "Unreported by the international media, Israeli ambulances transfer patients from the Gaza Strip to Israeli hospitals on an almost daily basis. According to Dr Dudi Mishali, head of the Department of Pediatric & Congenital Cardiothoracic Surgery at the hospital next to Tel Aviv, an average of three Palestinian babies with heart defects come to his department alone every week."
Mishali said "We have daily communications by phone and fax with doctors in Gaza. There is no heart surgeon in the Strip, so they transfer all of these children, and there are many, to be operated on here." The expenses are largely paid for by the hospital.

[Meanwhile] Dozens of British doctors are calling for the Israeli Medical Association to be expelled from the World Medical Association.

More here. The bloggers are the parents of Malki Chana Roth, a young Israeli girl killed in a Palestinian suicide bombing at a downtown Jerusalem pizza parlor in August of 2001. "The family of Malki's murderer were awarded a cash prize of US$20,000 for his great deed."

Of course, you read all about this in the international feeding frenzy of the Israeli retaliatory airstrikes against the scum that fired the rockets. Right?

More Sderot coverage here.

In a related story, here's what a slice of daily life for one veteran American immigrant in Sderot:

Mechi Fendel may seem like an ordinary mother with an ordinary life. When she picks up her cell phone, she's going to her four-year-old son's day care to collect him, and her voice sounds typically hectic for a mother juggling daily responsibilities and seven rambunctious children.
But when you consider that the day care facility is inside a bomb shelter, and that Sderot, the southern Israeli city Fendel lives in has been bombarded by hundreds of Kassam rockets in the last week - 22 over the weekend alone - then the uniqueness of her life becomes apparent.

Netanyahu on British boycotts: the slapdown

And in a similar vein, here's Ben-Dror Yemini at Haaretz:

How is it that, once again, the Jews - excuse me, citizens of the
Jewish collective - are again deserving of boycotts even though they did not perpetrate any crime against humanity then, seventy or eighty years ago, or now, if we compare what other countries have done, including Britain, to what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Why? Why are we witnessing an astounding, recurrent and disturbing historical phenomenon of a different law for Jews - a unique and racist law - than for all others?

Read it all.

Spielberg Film Archives adds 400 films, about Israel, Jews

The Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has completed a major upgrade and expansion of its “virtual cinema” project.

The Archive has launched a new, contemporary and user-friendly portal, now containing over 400 films from its collection.

Get the Cokes, popcorn and go take a look.

Multiculturalism: the 'Star Wars Cantina' model doesn't work

From reputed former hard-Left author David Solway’s recently released book, The Big Lie: on Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity:

It is a grave error to conceive of a nation as a sort of gigantic Noah’s Ark in which every creature without exception is welcomed and given sanctuary, even those engaged in boring holes in the timber, throwing their bunkmates overboard, and blowing up the wheelhouse.

This is the multicultural model currently in vogue and in the long run it doesn’t work. Admission must be strict and those who may pose a significant threat, whether individually or communally, must be carefully screened and, if necessary, refused their boarding cards.

A viable society does not resemble the interplanetary tavern in Star Wars serving all the weird and wonderful but also rowdy and uncontrollable denizens hailing from every quadrant of the known universe.