Almost, but not quite, forgot.

Funny, funny post at The Museum of Hoaxes. Well, funny for women, but I suspect not for men.

Huichol Indians are descendants of the Aztecs, and live in the mountains of North Central Mexico. During traditional childbirth, the father sits above his labouring wife on the roof of their hut. Ropes are tied around his testicles and his wife holds onto the other ends. Each time she feels a painful contraction, she tugs on the ropes so that her husband will share some of the pain of their child’s entrance into the world.

Sorry, but just imagining that happening is totally sending me into fits of laughter. Anyway, the author is still investigating, but it appears to be true.

Here’s the best picture I’ve found yet of Jack, the orange tabby (yay orange tabbies!) who chased a black bear up a tree. Hey, Tig swatted an Australian Cattle Dog on the nose once.

Real giant jellyfish photo. Fake giant jellyfish photo. (Again, Museum of Hoaxes, which needs to go in my current sidebar.)

And, if that weren’t enough for you, there’s this gem from the Weekly World News:

“We’ve hired 25 young, beautiful women willing to remove all their clothing and station themselves at strategic points on and approaching the bridge,” explained San Francisco Police Public Information Officer Bruce Onder.

“Hopefully, that will keep religious radicals from coming near the structure.”

According to Dr. Henry Chilvers, Professor Emeritus of Religion and Morality at the University of Sprituality in Sacramento, “Many orthodox faiths demand that a woman cover herself completely, excluding the face and hands, from men except her husband. Most religious zealots who would harm our nation are youths who have not seen one naked woman, let alone many. The shock, shame or simple eye-popping spectacle is going to make them do a U-turn pretty quickly. Or else drive into the bay, which is just as good.”

They’re much prettier than the usual naked San Franciscans you see in protest pictures.

Since the French Police tend to focus on taking sloppy notes after Jews are attacked and filing them away in dusty cabinets for statisticians to pore over now and then instead of actively working to prevent such anti-Semitic violence, French Jews are banding together to defend themselves and take the fight to their would-be aggressors:

Formed in 2000, the Jewish Defense League - which has no ties to the U.S. Jewish Defense League - groups about 100 to 150 Jewish teens and young men to protect their community, experts say.

“Jews are fed up,” said a league member named Maxime who refused to give his full name, saying he feared for his safety. “We’ve been nice for 30 years. Now, we gather and fight back.”

Maxime, a 22-year-old waiter, admits his group is not afraid to take justice into its own hands if need be. He bragged about a 2003 incident in which a Jewish Defense League member beat up pro-Palestinian university students, injuring one.

“If a (Jewish) kid gets beaten up at school a few times, we go there and talk to the guy who beat him up,” he said. “If he does it again, we go back and it’s another story.”
“Investigations are useless,” Maxime said. “We’re a second police.”

Kind of reminds me of the “My Second Amendment rights are there to protect my First Amendment rights” way of thinking.

Good idea? Bad idea? Make aliyah and let the Islamist colonizers of Europe finish off the suicidal Eurogoy?

What do you think?

Y’know, my frequent bouts with various stomach ailments have finally been diagnosed in a possible pre-ulcer condition. Last week, the doctor took blood samples and had the lab do a variety of tests, most of which proved I’m fairly healthy. But my H. pylori antibodies were high, so he has prescribed for me a two-week course designed to utterly destroy the evil, ulcer-causing bacteria.

The thing is, this drug regimen is probably the suckiest, worst regimen I have ever had to undergo. Four pills (large ones!) twice a day, three of which are two separate antiobiotics, one of which is amoxicillin, which has previously had negative consequences on my digestive tract. So I take these four horse-pills before breakfast, then again twelve hours later, and man, something’s leaving this nasty aftertaste (I blame the antibiotics) throughout the day.

On the other hand, it ought to get rid of the evil, nasty, ulcer-causing H. pylori that dares reside in my duodenum. So, in Jewish mother parlance, I’ll suffer.

There is a battle going on in my innards. The barbarians are going to be beaten back, and peace (and a calm stomach) will be restored.

H. pylori must die.

Menachem Begin always struck me as a man very much like my grandfather. Both were deeply religious Jews, extremely well-read and intelligent, and immersed in Judaism and Jewish history. And my grandfather would have said something very like Begin said to a BBC reporter:

SO WHEN, on the first day of his premiership in 1977, he was waylaid by a tall, debonair, rakishly good-looking Englishman in a bow tie and a perfectly pitched BBC announcer’s voice, and saucily asked whether he looked forward to a time when the Palestinians would recognize Israel, his jaw tightened in restrained Jewish anger. But honed as he was by years of legal training, he answered with the composed demeanor of a practiced jurist, saying, “Traditionally, there are four major criteria of statehood under international law. One - an effective and independent government. Two - an effective and independent control of the population. Three - a defined territory. And four - the capacity to freely engage in foreign relations. Israel is in possession of all four attributes and, hence, is a fully fledged sovereign state and a fully accredited member of the United Nations.”

“But, surely, you would insist, would you not, that the relevant Palestinian organizations recognize Israel as a sine qua non for negotiations with them?” persisted the fellow.

“Certainly not! Those so-called relevant organizations are gangs of murderers bent on destroying the State of Israel. We will never conduct talks about our own destruction.”

“And were they to recognize Israel’s existence - would you then negotiate with them?” pressed the correspondent.

“No, sir!”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t need Palestinian recognition for my right to exist.”

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Because here is the rest of what he said, and what he, my grandfather, and I believe:

TWO HOURS later Menachem Begin stood at the podium of the Knesset, presenting his new cabinet. He began by dryly outlining the democratic processes that led to the changing of the guard, from Labor to Likud. And then, in recollection perhaps, of his acerbic exchange with the BBC man, he began talking about Israel’s right to exist.

“Our right to exist - have you ever heard of such a thing?” he declared, passion creeping into his voice. “Would it enter the mind of any Briton or Frenchman, Belgian or Dutchman, Hungarian or Bulgarian, Russian or American, to request for its people recognition of its right to exist?”

“Mr. Speaker: We were granted our right to exist by the God of our fathers at the glimmer of the dawn of human civilization four thousand years ago. Hence, the Jewish people have an historic, eternal and inalienable right to exist in this land, Eretz Yisrael, the land of our forefathers. We need nobody’s recognition in asserting this inalienable right. And for this inalienable right, which has been sanctified in Jewish blood from generation to generation, we have paid a price unexampled in the annals of nations.”

And there was yet another incident. During his first meeting with Jimmy Carter, the final draft of the statement Carter was going to release was given to Begin. He asked Carter to remove any reference to Israel’s right to exist. Carter was surprised, and said that every previous president had affirmed Israel’s right to exist. He asked Begin why he should remove the statement.

“Because our Jewish state needs no American affirmation of our right to exist. Our Hebrew bible established that right millennia ago. Never, throughout the centuries, did we ever abandon or forfeit that right. Therefore, sir, we alone, the Jewish people - no one else - are responsible for our country’s right to exist.”

Eretz Yisrael existed centuries before Mohammed set foot in the desert to invent his religion. Jerusalem existed for more than a millennium before Jesus, a Jew and son of Jews, began studying Torah. The people of Israel have existed for thousands of years, and the state of Israel was always Israel, even when the Romans renamed it “Palestine” and the British used their former conquerors’ name when they ruled it.

I once ended an argument with four friends in college when one of them, exasperated at my unwillingness to agree with the palestinian side of the issue, quoted the words of the PLO observer to the UN, whom we had just heard speak at our school: “How can you argue with someone who uses the Bible as a title deed?”

3,500 years of unbroken Jewish existence in the land of our forefathers should suffice. But it doesn’t, because the world can’t wrap its brain around the Jewish claim to Israel. It can only see the claim of the “palestinians,” many of whom moved there after Jews returned and started making the desert bloom again.

The fact that the leaders of Iran — a terror state — terrorist organizations, and various Muslim and Arab nations refuse to “recognize” Israel’s existence doesn’t make Israel any less real, or their non-recognition any more legitimate.

Israel exists. Arab and Muslim recognition or not will not change that fact.

Hineni.

The institutions of higher learning are usually selective when choosing their employees or granting an exalted status of fellow. It looks like at least in one case Oxford granted this latter status to a person with doubtful level of knowledge, albeit with a poisoned tongue and considerable skills in manipulation of history.

The note under the “Comment” article Despite the divisions, the national consensus holds in the Guardian tells about its author: “Karma Nabulsi is a politics fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford University, and a former PLO representative.” It was my personal bad karma for today to become a reader of this opus.

Everything in the article is looked upon from the point of view of political correctness according to Arafat, and the subtitle of the article summarizes its main point:

The Palestinian strategy of negotiation and resistance is common to liberation movements.

There are three elements in the above that beg for a clarification:

1. Negotiation.

According to the deceased, it’s a big show of good will. Usually not related to any real goals, proposals, acts or behavior aside of the intention to kill as many Jooz as possible on the side. Could be stopped for a better focus on “resistance” when convenient for any possible reason.

2. Resistance.

The definition of resistance also underwent a dramatic change in the hands of the deceased. Murdering unarmed civilians, at the same time in majority of the cases steadfastly keeping distance from the armed soldiers of the occupying forces. If not actually inventing the suicide bombing, at least creating a whole industry of “martyrs” that served as a shining example for others. Hiding behind the backs of innocent population and squeezing every PR drop out of the images of the killed and wounded innocents. Some resistance…

3. Similarity to other liberation movements.

It is interesting that in support of this (quite stupid) statement Ms Nabulsi, the learned fellow of politics, has chosen the ANC and Nelson Mandela. Interesting for several reasons, but the chief one is that ANC won due to the wise decision by its leaders to to use non-violent opposition and to negotiate in good faith. Like other successful liberation movements (Indian freedom movement under Mahatma Gandhi, IRA), the solution to RSA apartheid was reached mainly thanks to non-violent opposition and appeal to the world public opinion.

That way has never suited Arafat who wanted to negotiate (or paying lip service), kill Jews and use (abuse) the world public opinion - all at the same time. This way has obviously not occured to our Karma…

Now read my lips, Karma: during the beginning of the nineties there were a lot of people (I confess to be one of them) who wanted to believe in a possibility of making peace with our neighbours and cousins through negotiations only. It was the solemn promise of your buddy Yasser, and no “resistance” string was attached to it. At least not publicly. Now you come out of the closet to tell us all this was a lie? Thanks, we already know it.

We stopped believing Arafat a long time ago. We prefer now to believe in what Hamas says. Maybe they cannot yet take their, mostly impotent, threats to the bank, but they, at least, are saying it straight - unlike their predecessors.

And tell you what, Karma: each Qassam, each suicide bombing attempt, each bullet shot to kill a passer-by, each knife stuck in the back of a Jew - reduce the number of us who still want to believe in a possibility of that oh so remote peace. Unfortunately, we are all becoming more and more united in our skepticism. And you and yours better beware of us when we are united. I am sorry to have to say it, but unfortunately I must…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews

Fatah sent some of its goons to get Hamas’ attention again. At least this time they didn’t burn down the building.

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Dozens of Palestinian civil servants stormed a parliamentary session on Wednesday to demand long-overdue salaries, attacking Hamas lawmakers and forcing the parliament speaker to flee the building.

The demonstrators chanted slogans and banged on the door of the building before entering the hall. The angry crowd then pelted Hamas lawmakers with water bottles, tissue boxes and other small items. Some climbed onto the lawmakers’ desks.

“We are hungry. We are hungry,” the protesters screamed.

As the saying goes: I hope you both lose.