Dave Bender: Compelling Photography

Monday, January 5

Hamas Body Armor

Sunday, January 4

How To 'Reach Out And Touch Somebody' In Gaza

How the Israeli Army manages how to know who, where and how to warn non-combatant Palestinians in Gaza when to get the hell off the phone and out of the building before the Hellfires drop, is eerily similar to the movie, "Eagle Eye:"

"[Apparently] the Israeli Army has "figured out how to separate the civilians from the weapons: call the neighbors and give them ten minutes warning.

"Apparently, by Friday Israel had made at least 9,000 (nine thousand) such phone calls.

"The numbers prove how efficient this has been: prior to the ground invasion, more than 600 targets had been destroyed, fewer than 500 Palestinians killed, and fewer than 100 of those were civilians even by Palestinian and UN reckoning."

Also as apparently, this blogger is an IT ubergeek - NOT that there's anything wrong with that. Jus' sayin'.

For the rest'a'us, let's take a deeeep breath, and read the next paragraph together aloud:

"Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there's a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.

"Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.

"Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.

Ahh, right, that last sentence.

Turns out there's a pretty cool and constructive use for that paranoid, slacker fever-dream of a plot that that pretty much made up Eagle Eye, after all.

Who knew? Clearly not the PatriotActophobics who made the film.

Read the rest.

Latest Twitters On The Fighting & 'Hamasochism'

Latest Twitters on the Fighting in Gaza & 'Hamasochism'

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Contrast & Compare:

Exhibit A)
Israeli doctors mobilize to save a Palestinian baby's life: http://tinyurl.com/9ahb2v

More about this here.

Exhibit B)
From Richard Landes:

"Would Hamas secretly blow up its own people in order to blame Israel? Certainly, their ideology would justify such a move. As Hamas representative Fathi Hamad said last February, “Palestinians have created a human shield against the Zionist bombing machine.”

For the Palestinian people, death became an industry, at which women excel and so do all people on this land: the elderly excel, the Jihad fighters excel, and the children excel. Accordingly [Palestinians] created a human shield of women, children, the elderly and the Jihad fighters against the Zionist bombing machine, as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: We desire death as you desire life. [Al-Aqsa TV (Hamas) Feb. 29, 2008]

"As if to illustrate both the international reach of this Islamic ideology of death and martyrdom and it’s repugnant quality (at least to a Western liberal), a Saudi cameraman filmed live the “making of a martyr” when the doctors pulled the plug on a girl in a Gaza hospital. Could she have lived, had Hamas allowed her to go to Egypt in one of the many unused ambulances waiting at their southern border? We will never know."

'We didn't mean to, but we lied to our kids'

From Daniel Gordis:

"Why should children living in uncontested Israeli territory grow up being taught that in the playground, when the siren goes off, you run into the caterpillar, and hope that the rocket doesn't kill any of your friends who don't make it in time?

"These weeks, with the question of whether or not Jewish sovereignty means anything at all, there is really only one question. As Joshua said to the angel (Joshua 5:13), "are you for us, or for our adversaries?" Do you believe that Jews in Sederot have a right to live without bomb-shelter caterpillars in their playgrounds?

"Do you understand that the only point of having a Jewish state is that Jews should no longer live - and die - at the whim of those who hate us just because we exist?"

And this from Victor David Hanson at NRO:

"There is something especially nauseating about the latest Middle East war — scenes of worldwide Islamic protests with photos of Jews as apes, protesters (in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida of all places!) screaming about nuking Israel and putting Jews in ovens, parades of children dressed up with suicide vests and fake rockets, near constant anti-Semitic vicious sloganeering, Gaza mosques stuffed with rockets to be used against civilians — all to be collated with creepy Hamas rhetoric about the annihilation of Israel. This is the world in which we now live."

Latest Gaza Map & Updates

White words in upper caption: [IDF] control of Kassam firing areas. Israel has returned to take control of [former Israeli] communities in northern Gaza.

Ynet News map (cleared by IDF censors) of Israeli Army incursion into the northern and southern ends of the Gaza Strip. Latest reports say the IDF has also succeeded in deploying forces across Gaza, effectively cutting the territory in two (blue arrows above the Nuseirat and Bureij refugee camps). IDF officials say that is in order to thwart movement of armed Palestinian forces from one area of fighting to another.

Friday, January 2

Shooting Israel

Pyramid Power. Click on the image for the hi-rez view. (Dave Bender)

Here are really, really, impressive "amateur" photographers of Israel by others.

Got any faves of your own? Send 'em to me for posting. I can't get enough of this stuff.

'Aid2Gaza:' Succinct. Comprehensive. Guess who's the owner?

Aid2Gaza. Succint. Comprehensive. Veddy Brrrritsh. Oh, and you'll never guess who puts it out:

"This is a website, maintained at the Israeli Embassy in London, which aims to give as much information as possible on all the international aid being sent into Gaza.
"We’ll post updates from Israel’s COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories) office, OCHA, UNRWA, USAID, ICRC (International Red Cross Red Crescent) and WHO information, as well as individual and group actions from the grassroots ,like the Free Gaza Movement."

And daring. Did I mention daring - aka "Hutzpadik?"

This week in Israel: Margot Dudkevitch on Gaza (Exclusive Podcast Interview)

Thanks and a shoutout to the whole freakin' world that's been clicking on the following link. Umm, here's a heads-up, folks: It's from 2006 - same place, similar situation - and, unfortunately, is a dead audio link. Sorry 'bout that - I'll try to get her on the line soon for an update:

Friday, June 30

This week in Israel: Margot Dudkevitch on Gaza (Exclusive Podcast Interview)

Israeli tank crew viewing an explosion in the Gaza town of of Beit Hanun (archive)

Hear Margot Dudkevitch, an Ozsraeli defense affairs and territories commentator, and former Jerusalem Post territories reporter as she takes look at this difficult week in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

'No More War! No More Bloodshed!' (More Israeli Animation!)

From Israelity:

"An Israeli animation is now creating a buzz on the Net. It got 160,000 views in just two weeks, and a special review at Aniboom – the world’s biggest animation site. It was also featured on YouTube Spain, Mexico, Ireland, Netherlands and Israel.

It’s an animation music video for the Israeli alternative rock band, Eatliz. Called “Hey”, the 3D animation took almost two years to make, with a crew of 15 animators."

While I could do without the indie "bash a hole in the drumhead and cymbals, and scream" music, it's engaging, and pretty in a Eurostyle kinda' way ("...not that there's anything wrong with that" - Google Czech and Hungarian animation for more).

The project is the brainchild of Guy Ben-Shetrit, a freelance animator who has worked for commercials, TV programs and computer games. Ben-Shetrit is the founder and composer of Eatliz, wrote the featured song, directed the movie, and was the lead animator. (He quit his job and took a year off work to complete the project.)

The video, which is going to be featured in the next issues of animation and design DVD magazines Stash and IDN, is a weird Sci-Fi fantasy journey taken by a little girl and her special pet friend, a huge toad.

This is the second animation music video by Eatliz – the first “Attractive” was directed by Yuval and Merav Nathan. The film won Best animation category in Israel’s annual animation festival, Asif.