So I caught the last part of the 1950s Ten Commandments, and I had forgotten that yes, it’s pretty cheesy. Actually, no, I remembered that. What I’d forgotten was that they had a Passover Seder even before Passover occurred. There were the cups of wine, the unleavened bread, the bitter herbs, and the invitation to the stranger to come and eat with them (though she wasn’t really a stranger, she was the woman who found Moses in the Nile). Oh, and I think they were trying to imitate the way we chant Hebrew, but I gotta say, when you chant English that way, it sounds really, really stooopid.

And, like, what the hell was that thing on Yul Brynner’s head? Did they glue on a spare braid from a Cowboys & Indians movie? Man, it looked dumb. But hey, he made a much better Pharoah than the new guy, and they didn’t use eye makeup on him, either.

Ooh, they’re blowing the shofar. Funny, it sounds like a trumpet. Let’s see, fifteen minutes left — almost time for the Red Sea, during which scene Charlton Heston will look holy and noble, but will not go “Argh! Ugh!” like his staff weighs two hundred pounds.

I had forgotten that when they wanted to add verisimilitude, they had guys walking around with no shirts and wearing only something around their waist. Except these are the guys who are old, ugly, and out of shape. Thank goodness that custom has changed, because I think I just went temporarily blind at the sight of the ugliest bare chest since Willem Defoe’s in Spider-Man.

All in all, I give this one a seven. No, an eight. Cecil B. DeMille, a cast of thousands, no stupid, boring moralization, and no Sayid flashing those bedroom eyes. Oh, and no British accents, either. Only Yul Brynner’s Hungarian accent, which sounds strangely Egyptian. Okay, well, it does after the four cups of wine you’re supposed to drink for Passover.

There you go. New drinking game for the Ten Commandments films: Every time they do something that wasn’t in the Torah, take a shot. You’ll be drunk in half an hour.

Joshua, directing traffic: “Levites to the center! Judah to the left! Hebrons (huh?) to the right! Go!”

Ya gotta love it. All this, and Edward G. Robinson, too.

Iran announced that it has enriched uranium and continues to threaten to destroy Israel on a daily basis.

On the other hand, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists haven’t moved their “Doomsday Clock” at all.

Maybe someone forgot to wind them up this decade?

Click here and find out.

(It’s the Pesach Bunny.)

(Yes, that’s me.)

What more evidence does the world need? At the anti-Israel “Palestine” conference going on in Iran, Khaled Mashaal told the assemblage of Jew-haters that Hamas will never recognize Israel.

That’s never, as in: Not. Ever.

The chief of the Palestinian Islamic resistance movement’s (Hamas) Political Bureau, Khaled Mashaal, here Friday stressed that the US can not force the Palestinian nation to yield.

He made the remark while addressing the Third International Conference on Qods and Support for the Rights of Palestinian People.

The conference kicked off here Friday afternoon with a key note speech by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei.

“We never will recognize Israel,” Mashaal reiterated.

There will be no moderation of Hamas. If anyone out there sincerely thinks there will be, they need some serious psychiatric help.

Now, in spite of this pronouncement being made publicly available by the Iranian news agencies, not a single wire service or major media outlet seems to have picked it up.

Why is that, I wonder?

Our tireless friends of PETA are not content with pissing off the Jews. They are hell bent to prove that they are equal opportunity offenders. This time they have chosen to borrow the most powerful image of Christianity.

Vienna - A row erupted on Thursday over plans by animal protectionists to symbolically “crucify” three activists with animal masks in a Good Friday protest outside Vienna’s St Stephan’s Cathedral.

The militant pro-animal group PETA said the activists would be suspended from crosses with crowns of thorns on their heads.

The slogan of the protest action would be “We suffer and die for your sins of nourishment.”

Up to now, our sins of nourishment have not included eating PETA members. Judging by the picture, there is not a lot of good eating of that chicken. On the other hand, it is low cholesterol vegan meat, so those of us, carnivores, that battle high cholesterol levels, may take heed.

Now we are waiting with baited breath for the Muslim imagery from PETA. Surely it would be a nice and politically correct addition to the vegan menu?

In related news: vegans protest treatment of sheep in Australia in the nude.

US animal rights activists stripped off today in the first of a worldwide series of nude demonstrations to protest Australia’s treatment of sheep. A small group of members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) demonstrated outside the Australian embassy in Washington. In the coming days PETA plans nude protests outside Australian embassies in Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Sao Paulo. In Washington, four women and one man stripped down to g-strings and painted Australian flags on their bodies.

Since the article does not carry the picture of the protesters, choosing instead an idyllic snapshot of a ruminants family, one has to assume that the “small group” was not especially attractive in the nude.

More media members than activists were there to cover the spectacle. “We definitely attracted a lot of attention,” said Brandi Valladolid, a PETA spokesperson and one of the nude protesters. “Of course, protests like these are designed to create attention and it was a big success. We had 13 media outlets there.”

Poor schlubs…

Ms Valladolid said employees at the Australian embassy showed interest in the demonstration. “We noticed a lot of people in the embassy glued to their windows watching the demonstration wondering what the hell was going on,” she said.

A word to the wise, Brandi: some of them Aussies have an acquired… no, this is for Meryl’s place as well. Let’s just say that the word “skewer” has more than one meaning, OK?

Cross-posted on SimplyJews

Those of us with half a brain have been saying for quite some time that palestinians lie when they talk about peace with Israel. We have been saying it especially often — and generally more loudly — about Hamas, the organization whose charter explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state.

Now, Hamas has gone on the record to talk about its policy of lies and duplicity when it comes to the West.

In an interview with Voice of Palestine, Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu-Zahri made no effort to hide the group’s strategy. Asked to explain
the group’s opposing statements to western and Arab media, Zahri said, “It is natural to make different statements to different audiences, each of which has its own style, but Hamas’ basic principles are unchanged and we abide by them.”

[...] On April 1, Zahri told Voice of Palestine Radio that “Hamas adhered to resistance in all its aspects, including terror attacks.”

But when the audience changes so do the tone and the message. “Hamas will never think of violence. Hamas is aspires for peace and calm based on justice and equality. Whatever will be offered to the Palestinian Authority on the political arena will be weighed and discussed. Hamas will devise a mechanism to manage negotiations,” Haniyeh told CBS on March 17.

We rest our case.

No, wait. We don’t. Because the Western media will not pick up this story, and the anti-Israelists will pretend that since it appeared in an Israeli newspaper, it is invalid.

And still, in the face of all this evidence, the world is going to give the PA money, and support the palestinian cause — because Israel is “the apartheid, racist state” — even though the palestinians are the ones that refuse to allow Jews to live in the same area, murder Arabs who sell land to Jews, and call for an Islamic state “from the river to the sea.”

Hamas are not the only liars in this scenario.