Per Beniamin Netanyahu, eia eia alala!
Per la nostra Patria bella, eia eia alala!
Giovinezza, giovinezza, primavera di bellezza …
We owe a lot to Israel. Without it we would have to eat Roma tomatoes, or grape tomatoes, or plum tomatoes, or for the want of very durable varieties we would be at the mercy of local farmers and just eat produce grown within 300 miles from home. We would have to use a bit less convenient forms of flash memories. We would stupidly use ceramic pipes for drip irrigation instead of plastic ones. Humus would never become popular without Israeli advise. And so on and so on. But does it mean that we have to have insane and immoral foreign policy?
Belgium is a delightful country that contributed a lot. Suppose that they had a minor request to support them running Congo Free State in the manner designed by King Leopold. Should we do it?
The support of al-Nusra is a toe of a dinosaur of insane policy. Hey, if we can cheerfully support “Jewish National” religious fanatics, why not make a coalition with other murderous religious fanatics in the region, and as we are at it, label all their opponents as “terrorists”, “illegitimate” or both, while facilitating recruiting, funding and arming of the kind of folks that we would be terrified to have at home (but out there, there are freedom fighters). In that context, whatever Iran does is “support of terrorists”.
One little problem is that this illogical (besides being immoral) foreign policy is crumbling on its own weight, and here comes Senator Cardin to promote the insanity with rhetoric and serial criminality. Sanctions are mostly theft, while the support of our pet terrorists and barely sane princes (or mostly insane?) is being accessory to mass murder, including high tech used to convert a wedding into a goulash (we had to provide the tools, patiently explain how to use them and assists the deed with “targeting aid”).
News flash to Senator Cardin: it is increasingly hard to view our policies as sane, and our allies suffer more and more from indigestion. If the only way out of that insanity is for nations to get together and oppose USA, eventually it will happen, and I suspect that you will not be pleased.
And here you can learn that Shaked belongs to the moderate wing of her party that also has a faction of extreme religious nuts named Tkuma (they are more kooky). In general, Israel looks a bit like http://resources0.news.com.au/images/2014/06/21/1226962/118528-88cff38e-f8ce-11e3-a06e-793f22b94a46.jpg
From what I know, Christian Poles do not claim bagels. Small breads are highly regional, the only type similar to bagels in my parts was a tiny, shiny ring with very crunchy texture (sushki in the Wiki link). In the south, Jews had bagels and Christian bakers had obwarzanki (singular obwarzanek) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bublik.
Concerning flash drives, they were invented by Israelis, but this is basically a way to package flash memory, and flash memory was invented and developed by the Japanese, Toshiba company, and there is a large variety of different uses and interfaces. Without Japan, semiconductors would be very, very different, without Israel? Perhaps a bit different.
Arrest warrant for Bandolero from Grammar Police: confusing misspelling!
There is no “Tectonic shift” of German policy, but “Teutonic shift”, named after a tribe that kept issuing contradicting statements, usually in the same week.
Apart from that, Germany is indeed curiously dependent on Russian natural gas. I do not have stats at hand, but German government has to satisfy two constituencies that pull in somewhat opposite direction: “sensible economic growth” and Green tendency of opposing carbon emissions AND nuclear energy. So Germany is energetically pushing “renewable energy”, quite a lot of wind power installed, many types of sensible energy savings, but there is still a yawning gap that can be filled only with natural gas. Historically, east Germany relied on lignite, a fuel with particularly bad CO2 to energy ratio, and the west on coal with is not as bad but quite bad, while natural gas gives a ratio which is better, if not that spectacular (nukes have much lower emissions). So natural gas is the only way to fix the energy balance, and if Poles and Ukrainians stand in the way, bad luck for them.
New sources of gas may appear of course, but elimination of coal + growth will use all that.
Apart from that, Germans know very well to what extend extreme Ukrainian nationalists are Nazi, and to what extend they are not. But since WWII, the impulse to follow American foreign policy, with some necessary exceptions dictated by the economy, became so ingrained that so far, we see “Teutonic shifts” only.
There is always a bad apple, a dirty mind not totally cleansed by brainwashing. Once there was a story in Ha’aretz, one of those “can you believe that!?”, about a reserve officer in West Bank who was instructing his troops how to be polite on checkpoints.
There was a little discussion why Hadeel did not understand Hebrew. Actually, there is no evidence that she did not:
QUOTE
He said a soldier had asked Ms. Hashlamoun to open her bag for inspection. “When she was opening at her bag, he began shouting: ‘Stop! Stop! Stop! Don’t move! Don’t move!’ ” the activist said. “She was trying to show him what was inside her bag, but the soldier shot her once, and then shot her again.”
The activist said three or four other soldiers had raced to the scene and also fired.
Another witness, Fawaz Abu Aisheh, 34, who appeared in the photographs taken by the activist, said Ms. Hashlamoun did not respond as soldiers screamed at her in Hebrew to step back. A soldier shot at her feet twice, but she did not move, he said.
“She was like a nail, like she was in shock,” he said. “I was shouting, ‘She doesn’t understand Hebrew!’ ”
Mr. Abu Aisheh said he had opened a small gate inside the checkpoint so that she could back away from the soldiers. She did so, creating more distance between her and the soldiers. END QUOTE
You do not need to be a sheltered shy girl with comprehension difficulties to be utterly confused when men with huge guns surround you and start shouting contradictory commands, “Open the bag! Don’t move”. Actually, sensibly enough, she stopped moving. Abu Aisheh to defuse situation said that “She does not understand Hebrew”, which is more tactful then “quiet down and decide what you want her to do”. On the photographs, the eyes of a soldiers are almost popping out of his head, as if he was thinking “O my G.d! I will not get out of here alive, she is about to explode!”
Actually, typically for IDF, it was extremely weird checkpoint. On a checkpoint they should be prepared to check things. There should be a large well visible table, a person to pat (a female person for patting females), etc. Each of us knows the airport procedure. In the photo, we see a strangely placed tiny table, a chair, and a bucket, they did not bring her to the checking area — there was none? After commanding Hadeel to open her case, the soldier probably realized that he made a blunder, and then his panic could not be stopped.
It reminds me an incident when IDF shot dead a settler rabbi. For some reason, just before dawn they decided to suddenly make a checkpoint on a road. And they set it in such a way that they were hardly visible in the pre-morning twilight so slowly driving rabbi passed through. Then to stop him they did not use remotely controlled spiked tape or something like that but shot through his car. The next driver nearly hit the soldiers, as they were not visible, but luckily for him (a Palestinian), at this point soldiers were to baffled to shoot. Making and manning checkpoints is the most basic activity of IDF, and yet they are totally ill-equipped and ill-trained to do it. The top command dreams of grand battles with Iran.
The concept was a multi-lingual countdown, perhaps a bit to subtle (five in Spanish, four in Russian, two in some Slavic language etc.) For that, puppies would not do. The idea was that now Iran will start tossing bombs at Russia, some other Slavic country, a Spanish speaking country, literally, all over the place.
I think Goldwater ad had an American girl, and the message was clear. Here, I am not sure if “low information” voters would realize what was it about.
Some people complain about the designation “extrajudicial execution”. It is by no means a euphemism, it is a term for a type of crime that is hardly ever prosecuted because it is performed by the state, covertly or overtly. The more the act is sanctioned by the state, the more it falls under “extrajudicial execution” and less under simple “murder”. That just means that responsibility lies mostly with the state.
Member of security forces, police, military are getting weapons and instruction how to use them in the case of danger, how to recognize the danger and how to use different types of force. And how to concoct evidence in a case things go wrong. So the responsibility lies chiefly with people in command position who organize, instruct, approve etc. In particular, I feel that there is a huge correlation between hysterical killings like Hadeel case and bouts of hysteria emanating from Knesset and the government.