a different side of Israel

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We Love Death as Much as the Jews Like Life – Hamas






Another Malware Threat Discovered in the Middle East

Iranâ€™s nuclear ambitions have been marred by the intrusion of viruses that have sabotaged its computers. So far, two major cyber-attacks have been reported and have been given the name Stuxnet and Flame. While the U.S. and Israel have been accused of being the masterminds behind the virus assault, both nations have denied involvement.

The cyber-attack continues on with the emergence of a new virus. This one is being dubbed the â€œGaussâ€ and appears to be created for the purpose of hacking into banking institutions in the Middle East. This virus is so complex and advanced that it is believed that it could only be carried out by a nation and not by a lone hacker or small organization. Once again, the U.S. and Israel are being blamed for the attack though both countries are claiming innocence.

So far, Gauss has mainly targeted banking institutions in Lebanon though attacks have also been verified in 25 other countries. However, it is believed the virus is more directed for the purpose of monitoring transaction information rather than stealing money. It is also capable of stealing passwords and monitoring audio and keystrokes. Gauss was discovered in June though the virus is believed to have been active since last September. About 2,500 accounts have been reportedly hacked and monitored by Gauss though it is believed the actual number of infected accounts could be in the tens of thousands.

In the past few months, The Middle East has come under the assault of extremely sophisticated malware. Stuxnet was the first to be discovered and was responsible for hampering the progress of Iranâ€™s nuclear facilities. This was followed by Flame and Duqu, which targeted various computer systems throughout various regions in the Middle East. It is believed all these viruses are linked and originated from the same creator.

El Al Airlines Charges the President an Extra Fee for Carrying an Oxygen Tank on Board

El Al, Israelâ€™s national airline, has made a not so wise judgment call that is going to lead to a lot of negative publicity. El Al is typically the airline of choice when the president, prime minister and other VIP fly for official business trips. However, when President Shimon Peres booked a flight with the airlines, it decided to charge him an additional $5,000 for the addition of an oxygen tank.

According to safety procedure, an oxygen tank and other emergency first aid equipment are mandatory whenever the president, prime minister or other politician travel abroad by air.

Upon hearing of El Alâ€™s plans of charging for the extra carry-on, Peres cancelled the flight and booked a flight instead with Air Canada.

Anat Friedman, a spokeswoman for El Al, issued an apology to the president. Israeli officials have acknowledged the apology and said that the president wishes to put the matter behind him.

President Peres will be arriving to Canada as a witness when the memorandum of understanding between the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Royal Society of Canada is signed. He will also be meeting with Quebec Premier Jean Charest and Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty. Part of the trip will include a stop in Ottawa with Prime Minister Stephen Harper for a talk on security, peace and trade.

President Peres played a pivotal role in the negotiating of the Oslo Accords in 1992 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 along with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

While most airlines are struggling financially, they need to really consider the consequences when tacking on additional fees. The bad publicity could prove to be far more costly in the long haul. Hopefully, for El Al, their blunder in judgment is something they can recover from.

The Shiksa Song

Menny Malka and Yochai Sponder in the Shiksa song, a parody on the recent Jewish Orthodox attacks on “inappropriately dressed women”, including cases where the women were girls as young as 8 years old.










Coming HOME

Gilad Shalit Free October 18, 2011We just watched the first pictures of Gilad Shalit being handed off to the Egyptians in the Rafah border crossing by Hamas. He was handed off literally, by the man who engineered the kidnapping, Ahmed Jabari. Gilad wears a baseball cap and looks thin, pale and a little dazed. We are all a little dazed today.

It seems like we are all watching this today. Feeling this joy and happiness that he is actually coming home. For 1,941 days he has been held with very little contact except for sparse communications, a letter, a video recorded message and the occasional verifications by mediators that he is alive.

After Ron Arad there was the feeling that Gilad will become another ghost that will fade and disappear. Gilad’s family, a quiet introverted family that lives in a quiet rural village, Mitzpe Hila.

I am watching the interview with Gilad on Egyptian TV, a disturbing aggressive and abusive interview, being aired right now. He looks like he can barely breath, he is out of breath, his eyes are deep set and he seems overwhelmed by the aggressive questions of the (the bitch Shahira Amin) reporter that is oblivious to the fact he is about to pass out in front of her. The Egyptians forced this interview for the sake of political credit and this was not part of the deal. Pathetic on every level!

He is worth 1,027 terrorists. Worth every one of them. 1000 times more then all of them.

Six Years without Gilad Shalit

It’s been 6 years since Gilad Shalit was kidnapped. This is the Shana Tova (New Year) greeting that was mailed out to politicians and government officials by the family as a reminder.

A few days ago the Palestinian Prime Minister made his bid for Statehood and now waiting for an answer from the UN Council. You would expect that kidnapping and holding a soldier prisoner without basic humanitarian conditions or official communication, would be considered sufficient grounds for immediate disqualification of the bid. But not at the UN.

Gilad’s family will be spending yet another holiday at their tent outside the government offices in Jerusalem. They count the days (now 1920) since they saw their son. May this be the year Gilad comes home.

The Turning Point ?

Qana LebanonSevere reactions to an attack by the Israeli Air Force on the Lebanese town of Qana, located 16 km east of Tyre, has provoked widespread condemnation of Israel’s continuing military operation; and may even be a major ‘turning point’ in this 19 day old war. The air raid, occurring in the early Sunday morning hours, resulted in a basement shelter filled with refugees, many of them women and children, being hit by IAF bombs with more than 60 people reported killed and injured. As the bodies were continuously pulled out of the rubble, the angry outcry has resulted in a cancellation of a planned visit to Beirut by U.S. Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice. Though Israeli military authorities reported that Qana had been used to launch Katyusha rockets into Israel, the resulting death and injury and of innocent civilians has created such a strong backlash against Israel that an immediate and unconditional ceasefire is now being demanded by world leaders, including Jordan’s King Abdullah, who called the attack “an ugly crime”.

Condoleezza Rice Israel Defense Minister Amir Peretz has asked the IAF to investigate the cause of the attack and why this particular location (i.e. the shelter area) was attacked. This effort is not enough to placate an extremely agitated Lebanese populace who afterwards surrounded and broke into the U.N. Beirut headquarters, smashing everything they could lay their hands on, and waiving yellow Hezbollah flags, as well as shouting slogans tied to that organization.

The reverberations from this attack, called an international outrage by many, could well be Hezbollah’s “secret weapon” as they know that international public opinion is even more potent than their continuing to shoot their missiles into the Jewish State. Incidents such as this have always occurred during warfare; and a very similar one occurred in Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War when an American launched ‘smart bomb’ struck a shelter in central Baghdad, killing more than a hundred civilians. That incident, and the public outcry it created, resulted in an immediate scaling down of U.S. attacks on the Iraqi capital, and may have helped keep Saddam Hussein in power, even after his army was crushed.

Qana LebanonHezbollah has successfully used civilians to keep their enemies at bay, and even in the initial attacks on southern Beirut, Hezbollah had used heavily populated areas to launch missiles, as well as hide militiamen and arms. This may have also occurred in what will now be referred to as the ‘Qana massacre’. And regardless of the outcome of Israel’s investigation, the international condemnation pouring out, with the help of zealous news medias, will most likely result in even Ms. Rice and U.S. President Bush calling for an immediate cessation of hostilities.

Hezbollah, especially their leader Sheikh Nasrallah, couldn’t be more pleased, and are probably already making plans on how to exploit this event to the fullest. They even know that if an international peacekeeping force is sent to S. Lebanon (most likely composed of many American combat personnel, despite being stretched thin in Iraq and Afghanistan) will be to Hezbollah’s advantage, as a few well- orchestrated suicide terror attacks will make this force flee like the Americans did form Beirut in 1982. And Nasrallah also knows that he doesnâ€™t even have to fire any more of his Katyusha rockets into Israel, as the ‘missiles’ of anti- Israel public opinion have already been very successfully launched.

Iran, The Eurovision, and Us

Israel’s fortunes at the annual Eurovision song contest have never been easy, even though we have won the contest three times during its 51 year history. Israel first entered the contest in 1956, and often, the voting results from participating countries have been laced with controversy in regards to biased opinions against the Jewish State. This year, following a number of political controversies that have placed Israel in even more difficult relationships with the E.U. and other European countries, our song entry, sung by imported performer Eddie Butler and a mixed chorus group of Israeli and Afro American singers, finished almost last with only 4 votes, and these coming from (of all places) France.

Israeli singers, including ones like Sarit Hadad and Shiri Maimon, have recently managed to hold their own against the European hordes, and walk away with at least a feeling that they finished respectfully, despite all the negative flack being thrown at them by an increasingly hostile Europe. Last night’s poor results on behalf of the “European Jury” may cause future Israeli native and guest singers to think twice â€“even thrice â€“ before making the trip to this contest again; this time to be held in Helsinki Finland.

Speaking of the Finns, their ‘heavy metal’ version of The Rocky Mountain Horror Show was nothing less than absolutely disgusting. Many other countries, including Sweden, Germany and even Russia (which came in second) had much better songs than the Finns whose living in Lapland must be so boring that they have to go to these extremes to win a song contest. Their gyrations and bizarre costumes were so grotesque that any sane person can only wonder if the Continent of Europe is once again slipping back into the Dark Ages, like what occurred following the destruction of the Roman Empire by the Huns and Visigoths during the Fourth and Fifth Centuries C.E.

This entire scenario comes on the heels of what has been going in Iran, courtesy of their astute president Mahmoud Admadinejad, who recently proclaimed that Israel is a non legitimate country and therefore should be “wiped off the face of the map”. This almost happened last night in Athens, as it became obvious that no voting country was prepared to give Israel even the least bit of praise or consideration. The four votes that France did give us were most likely because French Jewish citizens, especially the younger ones, got on the phones and cast their vote for the Jewish State. In a way, this was very fitting as more and more French are making Aliyah and purchasing properties in Israel, as they appear to see the writing on the walls concerning their future in the French Republic.

Iran even went one step further in regards to it’s own Jewish community by discussing in Parliament the possibility of passing a law similar to the ‘Nuremberg Laws’ passed by the German Third Reich in the mid 1930’s requiring Jewish citizens to wear stars to identify them as Jews. Though not yet passed into law, the mere discussion of this possibility already has Iranian Jews a bit worried, with their lovely President already being compared to Adolf Hitler.

Not that Israel’s song would have won, but it would surely have finished in a much better position had these modern day ‘Huns’ not been out to assist Mr. Ahmadinejad in his plans. As the saying goes: today the Eurovision, tomorrow Kristalnacht!”

Not Jewish?! What are you doing here?

Jill Cartwright is a 31 year-old non-Jewish woman from England who lives in Tel Aviv, where she works as a sub-editor at Haaretz newspaper and lives with her boyfriend, the Israeli singer/songwriter Saar Badishi. The following is the first part of a mini-memoir that recounts how and why she moved to Israel in the winter of 2001, at the height of the second intifada, and what it’s like to be a non-Jew in Israel.
Send email to Jill:

One day after purchasing my open-return ticket to Tel Aviv, in the winter of 2001, I was sitting in the spacious living room of my parentâ€™s North Yorkshire home watching the news. Images of panicked Israelis queuing up for gas masks filled the screen. A few days previously, a Palestinian bus driver had driven into a line of people waiting at a bus stop, killing eight, and just a couple of months before that, Ariel Sharon had made his infamous visit to the Temple Mount and kicked off the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

My Dad slowly turned his gaze towards me, lifted his eyebrows and gave me a â€œWhat the hell are you doing?â€ look. It was the first such look – but definitely not the last. From then on it was normally directed at me by one of those guys who stroll Tel Aviv beaches looking for unsuspecting single girls reading a book in a foreign language. They know foreign girls will be more polite to them than any self-respecting Israeli girl who would tell them exactly where to go (but more of that later):

Guy: â€œWhere are you from?â€
Me: â€œEngland.â€
Guy: â€œWhat is your name?â€
Me: â€œJillâ€
Guy: â€œAre you Jewish?â€
Me: â€œNo.â€

Then the eyes squint into an involuntary spasm of perplexity, the forehead wrinkles, the jaw drops loose, the shoulders shrug and the palms turn out, the head starts to shake from side to side and they just canâ€™t help themselves: â€œThen what the hell are you doing here?â€
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Jesus the Musical by Javier Prato


Thanks for the clip Javier.

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