A scenario: On the morning of the day that the long-awaited (chuckle) “peace plan” is to be unveiled, Jared Kushner will be missing. Nowhere to be found.

Some hints in the form of booking confirmations (one for Kushner, one for a 20-year old female national of Belarus, formerly employed as a dancer) for first class flights to a tropical country without an extradition treaty will be discovered.

Confirmation that his assets have been moved, presumably to anonymous accounts based in Switzerland will follow shortly thereafter, along with the discovery of a leather case with “Comprehensive Peace Plan for the Middle East” engraved on it in golden letters.

The case will be found to contain a pad with about 10 pages of random scribblings and drawings (“Tomorrow is another day!” and “Soooo bored!” being among the few decipherable items) and 40 blank pages.

No, I don’t really think this is going to happen. But I do think it’s about ten times as likely to happen as the scenario that this “peace plan” is actually going to have any noticeable effect.

Nevermind, I used the credit card after all. I did not know that about PayPal, thanks for the information.

ISTR there used to be an option to donate via Paypal. Does this no longer exist? (I only use my Credit Card, which has a strict voluntary spending limit for select purchases where no other option exists.)

If your current donation network does not support Paypal, could I just send you a few bucks via Paypal directly?

It’s billed as a ” A Leadership Journey to Israel and the Palestinian Territories”. Discounting tourism-type events without any discernible cultural or political slant as well as purely organizational events, I count a total of 23 Israel-based events, 3 Palestine-based events and 2 events (visit to “Temple Mount” and “Explore Christian and Muslim Quarters of the Old City”) which could go this or that way.

A fan as I am of cold, hard, unforgiving numbers, I conclude: This tour has so much of an Israeli bent that its chosen designation, as quoted above, can only be regarded as a deliberate deception. And one need only perform the very simple mental exercise of imagining that the ratio was reversed, with the tour’s self-description remaining the same, plus how you and other apologists would react to that, in order to realize that this is so and that all arguments you care to put forward to deny this fact are irrelevant.

Anybody else noticed the US Consulate General in Jerusalem’s deathly silence on Facebook since Trump’s announcement? They usually churn out one, usually more, cheerful posts completely detached from political reality every day, but now – nothing for three days in a row.

What may have caused them to withdraw their vapid “aren’t we doing great things for you Palestinians?” postings, I wonder.

I would like to donate a small sum via PayPal. Is that possible?

“Liberal Zionists support Scarlett Johansson– and settlements. Why?”

I think it’s because of the completely dysfunctional relationship Americans (others too, but Americans in particular) have with so-called celebrities. From a rational point of view, there is no reason to believe that a famous actress has any more ethical backbone than any other person, or that her opinions on anything other than acting are relevant or well-founded.

But the belief that people who are rich and famous are universally ‘better’ than those who are not runs deep. So deep that it basically forces compliance even from those who don’t agree because having the ‘correct’ opinion on a given celebrity is almost a social duty.

To myself it is relatively obvious from Johansson’s own statements that she is either a) uninformed and unable to think this issue through, because otherwise she could not believe that SodaStream was committed to ‘equal rights’ for its Palestinian exploitees or
b) does not in fact believe that but chose to claim it anyway in order to bamboozle even less well informed people.

So, in a well known pattern, this means she is either an idiot or a liar. But you will never see any voices in the mainstream media, even among those critical of her actions, put it in nearly as blunt terms. Why not? Because this kind of lèse-majesté would be unthinkable unless and until she commits something from the catalog of sins that would officially have her good celebrity standing removed. Like being caught on camera kicking a dog or something to that effect.

You do realize that SWIFT is a European organization, that its chairman is Dutch and that its HQ is located in Brussels? The US can snoop on, and to an extent control SWIFT transactions thanks solely to a treaty the EU countries (foolishly) signed, but which can be abrogated – something that in light of the recent NSA scandals a growing number of EU politicians has been in favor of anyway. Thanks to geographical reasons alone, if push comes to shove, the US has no means of exercising control over SWIFT without a military invasion of Belgium.

Okay Mike, I have no idea what you’ve been smoking, but on the off-chance that it’s not illegal in the Netherlands, maybe you could send some of it my way.

Israel will remove the settlers from the West Bank, and most definitely will put down any uprising the fanatical fringe among the settlers may want to instigate – if the large majority of Israelis, be they just as racist but slightly more sane, or even merely callously apathetic, is subjected to economic pressure. “Going North Korea” is a hilarious phrase to use in this context, because if Israel truly decides to willfully become a global pariah, it will indeed “go North Korea” – economically. And as soon as Jewish Israelis, members of the pampered global upper class that most of them are – YES, even those poor souls who can’t afford a decent house anywhere near Tel Aviv – begin to feel even the slightest little pangs that will come at the very start of this development, there is indeed the serious possibility of a revolt – unless the Israeli government immediately reverses its policies and does whatever the international community demands to end its economic isolation.

Right-wing Israelis can brag all day about how tough they are: I ain’t buying it. They currently want to keep their colonies because they think there’s no consequences, but if their freedom to travel, their cars, their access to the Internet, their cheap clothes, or many other things that the international community can easily take away from them if it musters the political will are on the line – they’re going to comply with said international community’s demands in a heartbeat. They’ll whine and cry foul and call everyone on the planet an anti-semite – but they’ll comply.

“(The zombie phenomenon in pop culture perplexes me. I can understand the appeal of vampires and dragons–they may be evil, but they’re cool– but zombies? Not sure what it means.)”

Thanks for posting this. I thought I was the only one.