It's finally time to get that Twitter account. According to the JTA the Israeli Consulate will hold a public press conference via Twitter:
In what may be a first for any government the world over, the Consulate General of Israel in New York will be holding a public press conference about the war in Gaza via Twitter. On Tuesday, December 30 during the hours of 1-3 p.m. EST, David
Saranga, Consul of Media and Public Affairs in New York, will answer
questions written in by users of the popular Internet social messaging
Web site.
To participate, create an account at Twitter.com and compose a message to user israelconsulate, including the keyword #AskIsrael in your tweets.
To participate, create an account at Twitter.com and compose a message to user israelconsulate, including the keyword #AskIsrael in your tweets.
Okay, so we have until 1:00 tomorrow to figure out how to use Twitter and what 'tweets' are. I do know that Twitter messages have to be 140 characters or less - so keep it short and sweet.
Ask them to respond to an Hamas official's statement that "This is not about rockets because rockets have not been fired." And also about the claim that Israel told collaborators to fire the rockets from Gaza into Israel.
You can't ask a complex question or get a full answer in Twitter. Brilliant spin.
A tweet is that 140 character sentence you're allowed in twitter.
Mumbai tragedy was covered by locals tweeting details. Police had to ask folks to cut it out because bad guys might have been monitoring. It seems like a totally useless technology but it has its charms and its utility. Press conference – oh, please.
Has opposed to a real press conference anywhere in the Arab world, ( outside of Iraq anyway ) Lets see Hamas take a a few questions.
Earlybird NBC news on American TV now keeps repeating 4 Israelis have been
killed by Palestinian rockets–no mention at all of number of Palestinian deaths, nor even that any Palestinians at all died
due to Israel "pounding" them for four days.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/opinion/30morris.html?_r=1
Why Israel Feels Threatened
By BENNY MORRIS
Published: December 29, 2008
Li-On, Israel
MANY Israelis feel that the walls — and history — are closing in on their 60-year-old state, much as they felt in early June 1967, just before Israel launched the Six-Day War and destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian armies in Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan Heights.
More than 40 years ago, the Egyptians had driven a United Nations peacekeeping force from the Sinai-Israel border, had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping and air traffic and had deployed the equivalent of seven armored and infantry divisions on Israel’s doorstep. Egypt had signed a series of military pacts with Syria and Jordan and placed troops in the West Bank. Arab radio stations blared messages about the coming destruction of Israel.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/opinion/30tue1.html
Editorial
War Over Gaza
Published: December 29, 2008
Israel must defend itself. And Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this month with a barrage of rocket attacks into Israeli territory. Still we fear that Israel’s response — devastating airstrikes that represent the largest military operation in Gaza since 1967 — is unlikely to weaken the militant Palestinian group substantially or move things any closer to what all Israelis and all Palestinians need: a durable peace agreement and a two-state solution.
Leila, you are dead wrong about Twitter. DEAD WRONG. I normally agree with you about so many of your posts, but about Twitter, you are behind the Eight-Ball.
The Israeli Consulate will not be able to control this medium. It can't call up a major player and threaten them with lack of funding like AIPAC. This is truly global. And it is more a psychic medium than anything else. You succeed at Twitter by being able to sense what people really fer, and talking to thatl. Pablum doesn't cut it. People can unfollow you and you are dead-meat.
This is Phil's medium, But he doesn't know it yet.
As someone wrote, and I am paraphrasing: to make a Tweet Sweet, write it tight.
How to prepare? Get your ref material ready with links. Use link to
[that's right:
How did these typos happen?
You succeed at Twitter by being able to sense what people really fer, and talking to thatl.
should be
You succeed at Twitter by being able to sense what people really feel, and talking to that.
…and in the universe of Twitter, Richard Twitty is a relic: a phucking fossil, disproved and unfollowed in a nanosecond.
I reiterate, any chance of hamas holding a press conference MRW or is that not allowed. Might ruin the narrative.
You need to understand something: the US population of 300 million is zippo compared to the world population of 6 billion-plus.
Because the USA us a third-world country when it comes to Internet access and access speed, the rest of the world is light-years ahead in information reception. Twitter makes that appealing in ways the USA cant even begin to grasp. Hasn't even imagined yet. It can't because it doesn't have the infrastructure to comprehend how it's been beaten.
Typo: my mistake
Because the USA us a third-world country
should be
Because the USA is a third-world country
They just bombed a dairy factory in Gaza. They did the same in Lebanon too, by the way. I sure hope someone will put the question to this fascist bastard who had the audacity to face people (even from behind a computer screen) and to try to justify his crimes against humanity. Someone ask him what dairy factories have got to do with Hamas. Or will Israel claim that dairy factories help boost support for Hamas ? So, short of disallowing Gazans from breathing in oxygen, Israel is allowed to do anything and everything? Or maybe, just maybe, they will soon say that the very fact that Palestinians continue to exist means that Hamas will have support, and therefore, to end Hamas Israel must, and can justifiably, perpetrate a holocaust? Israel is only a step or two away from doing just that anyway.
A blogger from Lebanon,
If Twitter takes over the conversation, as the Israeli Consulate thinks it can, Israel is finished. Finished.
It is walking into a mine field led by its own stupidity.
WHO REALLY STARTED THE 1967 ARAB-ISRAELI WAR?
PARIS – One of the primary causes of the epochal 1967 Arab-Israeli War has been largely forgotten or ignored.
In the months before the June, 1967 conflict, Israel and Syria fought increasingly violent clashes along their border as Israeli paramilitary settlers pushed into the demilitarized zone separating the two states.
Hawkish Israeli generals, led by Moshe Dayan, sought to provoke a limited war with Syria in hopes of grabbing water resources around Lake Tiberias. Palestinian `fedayeen’ were staging raids across Israel’s borders.
As tensions surged, the Soviet Union, then Egypt’s close ally, urgently warned Cairo and Damascus that its spy satellites were detecting Israeli armored formations massing to attack Syria. The Arabs had no independent means of verifying Moscow’s warnings, but could not ignore them.
Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, believed an Israeli invasion of his close ally Syria was imminent and came under intense pressure from Damascus and his own generals to counter Israel’s threat. Egypt’s rivals in the Arab World heaped scorn on Nasser for timidity, demanding Cairo take action to defend Syria.
So Nasser ordered four Egyptian divisions into Sinai. They were deployed in defensive formations in the middle of the peninsula, well away from Israel’s border.
In reality, Israel was not massing troops to attack Syria. Moscow’s warnings to Cairo and Damascus of an impending Israeli attack were false. In late 1990, the US used similarly doctored satellite photos to fool the Saudis into believing Iraq had massed troops on its border and was about to invade.
Moscow’s disinformation lit the fuse that ignited the second major Arab-Israeli war. Syria, knowing its military forces were useless, was gripped by panic and pleaded with Nasser to deter the imagined Israeli attack by making some powerful demonstration.
israel is a criminal murderous colonialist experiment.
and only israels suckup zionists fools believe the mythical lies.
SamuelBurke, Moshe Dayan was clear as to who provoked and started the 1967 war. He admitted that it was Israel, and solely Israel, that brought about the 67 war, and deliberately so. They used to send armored tractors accompanied by troops into DMZs, provoking a natural and justified Syrian response (after all the DMZ is by definition a DE-militarized zone), which Israel would then use to justify its massive "retaliation". Basically, Israel has been using this same policy w/ Lebanon and Gaza… nothing has changed, and not surprisingly so. The international community has not forced Israel to pay the price of its warmongering since 1948, and has in fact rewarded it for starting a completely unprovoked war in 1967.
see what that shitty little country is doing….
The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, has labeled what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza “a crime against humanity.” Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as “a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.”
Falk’s unflinching honesty has enraged Israel. He was banned from entering the country on Dec. 14 during his attempt to visit Gaza and the West Bank.
“After being denied entry I was put in a holding room with about 20 others experiencing entry problems,” he said. “At this point I was treated not as a U.N. representative, but as some sort of security threat, subjected to an inch-by-inch body search, and the most meticulous luggage inspection I have ever witnessed. I was separated from my two U.N. companions, who were allowed to enter Israel. At this point I was taken to the airport detention facility a mile or so away, required to put all my bags and cell phone in a room, taken to a locked, tiny room that had five other detainees, smelled of urine and filth, and was an unwelcome invitation to claustrophobia. I spent the next 15 hours so confined, which amounted to a cram course on the miseries of prison life, including dirty sheets, inedible food, and either lights that were too bright or darkness controlled from the guard office.”
The foreign press has been, like Falk, barred by Israel from entering Gaza to report on the destruction.
The Phil Weiss, Richard Silverstein self hating Jew proposal.
) Request that 50% of Israel's air-to-ground missiles be duds to ensure greater proportionality.
2) Allow Hamas another 1,000 free rocket launches to see if they can catch up with the body count.
3) Have Israeli soldiers congregate in border barracks so that Hamas's random rockets have a better chance of killing military personnel, to ensure it can claim at least a few military targets.
4) Redefine "holocaust" to refer to deaths of terrorists in numbers under 400 to give greater credence to Hamas's current claims.
5) In the interest of fairness, allow Hamas to establish both the date that war is supposed to begin and the date when it must end.
6) Send Israeli military advisers to Hamas to improve the accuracy of their missiles.
7) Take down the barriers to return to Hamas a fair chance of getting suicide bombers back inside Israel.
Proposal to repair the world ASAP:
1.) End all aid to Israel and Egypt.
2.) End US veto of UN resolutions regarding Israel.
3.) Require AIPAC to register as a foreign agent.
4.) Require every US government employee take the same loyalty
oath as is required for legal aliens to attain citizenship. Use this
recorded oath to parse all federal employees activity patterns and actions.
5.) Ditto as to all incumbents and candidates for elected public
office.
6.)Campaign finance law: Sole funding to be by IRS tax on every
citizen proportionate to their annual income and assets.
7.) Ban privitization of any former or current military operations.
8.) Reinstitute military draft with no exceptions. Absent war, draftees will be used for enhancement of domestic infrastructure
and to repair harms due to nature, and otherwise as needed.
9.) Kill the federal reserve system.
10 ) End the immigration law allowing chain families and anchor baby drops.
11.) End affirmation action and legacy school enrollments.
12.) Devote =time public TV time to third party contenders.
rabbi kook, the only problem with your list is #10. The US fertility rate is below 2%. Without immigration of young fertile people, the US will be no more by 2050.
Look at the physical size of India. It is minute compared to the US. It has over a billion people and its population rose over 20% in the 90s. Their educated students will high IQs exceed the entire population of the US according to a report given in Rome last May to Sony executives.
The problem in the US is that our students are dumb. They rank #52 worldwide. They can't speak more than one language — English — and even that is troublesome to master.
Your #10 should be that all students must be required to speak, read, and write three languages to graduate: English, Spanish, Mandarin. (Or French/Italian and Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese, whatever) Norway requires four languages and their students are #1.
There is no way the current crop of students will be able to compete effectively in the global marketplace in the next two decades. And the older Americans are counting on this crew to pay their SS.
Perhaps what is needed is more carrots for potential new higher quality legal immigrants, rather than the kind pouring over our southern borders and nesting by themselves?