By Ted Belman
From now on comments on every post must relate to the content of the post.
Comments that don’t relate to the post must go here.
Any person who contravenes this demand will be put on moderation. Also their offending comment will be trashed.
The reason for this demand is so that people who want to read comments which pertain to the post, don’t have to wade through the chatter.
Everyone will be happier.
Thank you Edgar. I am praying for her safe passage through the Bardo. 49 days.
SEV-
Just now looking at the posts I see that you are bereaved of your mother. I offer my very deepest sympathy and a refuah shlema for your spirit…
I know how it feels, as my Mother passed at 75 and for the previous 5-6 months I slept in a camp bed across her door praying like crazy.. To this very day it hurts.
A mother is so special/. especially a loving mother.
I wish you the very Long Life that is associated with your family.
@ Michael Thank you. She was 98. Her cousin was 100. Yes from the early 70s. It’s how she brought me up. We never changed.
She was very ecumenical when it came to religion but not politics. The first time Obama ran, she was very upset that I was thinking about not voting for Obama. Just like she was very upset when I was a pro -Pal activist though she eventually went along with the mainstream and when I said Trump moved tge embassy she thought it was a controversial issue. She didn’t know two congresses passed tge Jerusalem Embassy Act unanimously or almost unanimously and it was signed by two presidents, one democratic and one republican. It’s the law. NONE OF THEM KNOW THIS STUFF.
You know, traditional pro-Israel liberals as well as the other kind are living in a bubble. To this day, I Never met one who ever heard of pay for slay or the Taylor Force Act.
We are talking to ourselves, you know. I wonder if there is anything that can be done. They don’t even hear us. How’s that for distressing?
@ Honeybee Thank you
Sebastien My condolences on the lost of your extraordinary Mother.
Sebastien, I’m saddened to hear of the passing of your mother. This past year, I lost a sister, a nephew and a couple of old friends. This thoroughly disrupted my life, because we were quite close. When my sister was in a coma, my niece held the phone to her ear and I sang her Psalms 121. Just a few weeks later, that niece suddenly lost her husband. Life goes on, but it’s never the same.
In the 1970s, I was much like your mother. I dabbled in Yoga, pagan mysticism, taoism, Islam, communism and every “new thing”. That was before the term “New Age” came into use. In 1973, I met Jesus Christ, and put away the other things.
100 years! Wow! A blessed, long life! God bless and keep you and yours.
@Peloni Thank you, my friend. Your post made me feel a lot better.
My mother passed away Sunday morning 2 months before her 99th birthday. We have family in Samaria. Gil Leibowitz, her first cousin, of Karnei Shomron, died this year at age 100. He was an electronics engineer who made aliya in 1967. They grew up in Brooklyn.
He worked on the first generation of automated planes, I guess we’d call them drones now, that saved the lives of Israeli pilots in 1973 by serving as decoys. He once told me he had 80 descendants. She died on the last day of Shavuot. I looked it up. I had been having this craving for cheesecake without knowing the connection. Cheesecake and matzoh ball soup. I’m diabetic so that’s not so good.
She was a Jubu – Jewish Theosophist, Tibetan Buddhist Hindu yoga and mantra therapy, Chinese Gigong, holistic medicine and psychology, astrology, Sufi, Balinese mystic oriented. I guess you could say New Age though she rejected that label and when they asked her religion in the hospital time before last she just said, “universal” so they sent her a female reform rabbi. I read Kaddish and the Heart Sutra to her after she died at her side together with my three female first cousins and her grand-daughter (a friend she adopted as such) and my cousin chanted a Zen sutra. Funeral next Sunday with a reform rabbi who will accomodate whatever we want to do.
I will also play the viola and a friend will sing and play the ukelele and everybody will have a chance to speak. And we will look at her parents’ graves nearby. Afterward, there will be a party at her house to celebrate her life.
I opted to have her cremated and interred in a full size grave because Hindus and Balinese believe the soul must stick around and participate in the decomposition of the body, delaying their journey otherwise, but we won’t scatter her ashes. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. It’s what she wanted. I will go the same way and be interred next to her when the time comes. Her urn is a beautiful lavender urn I picked. Her favorite color.
The cemetery was expensive but the funeral home is a non-profit on the Upper West Side dedicated to giving every Jew a Jewish burial and they were open memorial day weekend. Isn’t that nice?
It’s so funny that but for them insisting on appeasing our mortal enemies, culturally and spiritually, my mother and I have more in common with the left. My mother was pro-Israel but it was painful for her to think about Jewish things aside from her universalist bent.
She graduated college, class of 1945, and married a Jewish Holocaust survivor who left her after 20 years of marriage. He really hated religion, though his father was secular and his mother was the observant daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, so he was irreverent to begin with, basically a Hellenist, a real one, the book he chose to take with him in the labor camp was Epictetus. He wound up having a memorial service with a female Jewish Reform rabbi in 2011.
Just babbling here. Feel free to disregard and move on. It’s 4:30 in the morning and I have to organize almost everything from here on out on site though my cousin did the heavy lifting up to now and had to fly back out of state with my other cousins who helped with research before flying back out until the day. I am alone in my mother’s apartment where I have been living, taking care of her for 4 years and soon it will be time to go.
I met Gil at my sister’s memorial concert and cocktail reception in 1990. He flew in from Israel. I was very moved.
With all of our diversity and Mishegas, we are family. I think Israelis are starting to recover from the recent madness and are remembering that. That’s just my impression.
And now, back to the World Cup in soccer. Do Israelis call it football, like the Europeans or soccer like the Americans? “So many questions, so many reports”.
I hope this doesn’t offend but Please don’t attack. I’m a bit fragile. Thinking of deleting this, anyway. Still, it was kind of cathartic to write this.
Reposted with a couple of revisions after it was just marked as spam.
@Sebastien
I am quite moved by your comment here, and I am so sorry to hear of your mother’s passing. You have my deepest sympathies. I wish you well my friend.
Israel has now made it to the quarterfinals of the U-20 World Cup in Soccer (Football). Highest ever achievement for Israeli National Soccer. They beat Uzbekistan with a goal in 97th minute (stoppage time).
This is just the beginning.
MUDAR RETWEETED THIS:
@Ted
This is excellent news!
ABEDALELAH AMAALA TWEETED TODAY:
J.O. HERE WE COME.
Kari Lake loses appeal over Arizona gubernatorial election loss
As Robert Barnes explains:
The Poles should not go there, but they did:
Noa Kirel mentions the Holocaust – and raises a storm in Poland
You arrogant, insolent, condescending putz. The Poles were very much the accomplices of the Nazi’s taking their blood toll upon our people both before the Nazi hammer fell upon Poland and for a long time after the Germans left. To this day, the property acquired by Poles which had formerly been that of the now dead Polish Jews lies allocated to the arms of others without recompense to the few family members who survived the combined efforts of the German and Polish people to extinguish the Polish Jews from the earth. Your arrogance emboldens you to condescend to this young woman whose entire family nearly failed to escape the clutches of the Polish people, yet this is more than mere chutzpah, but rather a cynical attempt to intimidate we few remaining Jews into accepting your carefully crafted narrative in place of the true history which you yourself are responsible for failing to teach to your own children. And what might be that true history which your children will never hear from your own education: That as much of a victim which the Polish people became during the war, they themselves played a decisive role in obliterating the Jews from the ranks of the living, and these Jews who suffered and died under the management and participation of the Poles were themselves Poles. You murdered your own citizens precisely because you saw them from the same perspective as the Nazi’s did, so much so that the butcher bill upon the Jews continued for years after the Nazi’s fled the approaching Red Army. Indeed, you say that the Poles were not accomplices but merely victims, but you fail to mention that in this charade you paint, it was the Poles, themselves, who even hunted those Jews who were able to seek out refuge in the forests of your nation. The Righteous Gentiles who number among your forefathers stand as a testimony of what could have been achieved had these heroes whose decency and humanity marked them apart from the greater Polish society to which they were merely the exception. The actions of the Polish people stand as a testimony of their role in the Holocaust and shades your attempt to intimidate this young woman who only lives today because she is descended from the small fraction of her people which your people failed to eliminate during the calumnies which they took part in during, before and after the arrival of the Germans. As in Ukraine, it would be well if history were taught in your institutions rather than the carefully crafted, self-serving, fables which instantly absolve the Polish people in the crimes committed against our people, which of course does include the Holocaust, but not limited to it.
Mudar tweeted on May 18/23.
Not a good day for Mother Russia
https://nypost.com/2023/05/13/four-russian-aircraft-shot-down-near-ukrainian-border/
Coincidence. Never heard of it before.
https://www.jns.org/opinion/why-sebastia/
Trump Townhall with the Nasty Lady
CNN was not ready for Trump, but Trump was ready for CNN. This was fantastic.
The Looney Left are losing their minds over CNN having given Trump a forum, even an overtly biased forum, from which to connect to voters, which he clearly did during the many rounds of applause for his comments during the Townhall.
This comment relates to the article discussing the proposed postponment of the demolition of the illegally built Arab village near Betlehem. Having seen the government drag its feet on this and similar issues, the Israeli public needs to ask itself if this is what they were asking for when they voted. If, on the other hand, the Supreme Court were blocking this and other decisions, the public has the right to expect the current coalition to fulfill the promises they made that got them elected. My understanding, maybe false but based on the headline, seems to point to the coalition trying to impede its own policies.
Having seen the government drag its feet on this and similar issues, the Israeli public needs to ask itself if this is what they were asking for when they voted. If, on the other hand, the Supreme Court were blocking this and other decisions, the public has the right to expect the current coalition to fulfill the promises they made that got them elected. My understanding, maybe false but based on the headline, seems to point to the coalition trying to impede its own policies.
Regular Russian unit liquidated outside Bakhmut; Wagner reinforcements suffer heavy losses.
https://youtu.be/uBWGSIQd-Co
It appears that Candace Owens has fallen off the Desantis wagon:
Where in the World Is Ron DeSantis?
https://youtu.be/qADlPe03R88
I like the bunker buster/ warthog combination: powerful and survivable
@Ted @Linda When I was in school 30 years ago, being an anti-revisionist independent Marxist Leninist, I had to mentally compartmentalize three times over.
First, the accepted view in the West was that one named a system after the ruling party, so countries ruled by Communist parties, even where they had named themselves Labor parties, Socialist parties, or something else, were Communist countries. which have always referred to themselves as Socialist countries because in the Marxist schema, Socialism is the transition phase in which the work of building towards Communism, the classless stateless society is continued by the representatives of the proletariat, i.e., factory workers, the Communist parties, led ideologically by renegade bourgeois who see their long-term class interests, because a) the bourgeoisie will not complete the work of simplifying society into 2 classes and creating so much abundance they put themselves out of business because they see what’s coming and make alliances with reactionary forces and put in place liberal reforms to freeze history in its tracks. And, left to their own devices, workers would just become anarcho-syndicalists, running things themselves, how dare they 😀 , Lenin said, good leaders are not born by the hundred,” and tge East German workers rose in revolt and were crushed in 1946.
Second, the Marxist movement split in the early twentieth century under t ge ideological inspiration of Eduard Bernstein who preached a gradual movement towards socialism rather than violent upheaval as Marx had said could only happen in the United States because of the absence of a military industrial complex though he called it something else.
This gave birth to the parties of the Second International which created Social-Democratic systems in Western Europe and Israel which became dominant after World War II. Bibi refers to Israel as a Socialist country he made free market reforms to starting when he was finance minister under Sharon. This movement was also informally divided between pure reformists and revolutionaries by the ballot box which strategy the CPUSA adopted after WWII.
So, in Marxist circles, I/we used the term Socialist in the Marxist way, but in class in the ” bourgeois” way.
Third, the Communist movement split between the anti-revisionists who opposed Kruschev’s and later Deng Shao Ping’s (and Gorbachev on steroids, though Gorbachev was inspired by the first market Communist, Bukharin) market reforms, and the anti-revisionists who looked to Enver Hoxha’s Albania as the last Socialist holdout, who said that making each enterprise having to pull its own weight in sales and calculating in terms of profit, was state-capitalism not Socialism.
It should be noted that the “soft” left, i.e. Socialists in the Western sense used to be anti-Communist, and pro-Israel, as well. The hard left, have subsumed them, including the liberal churches, and now they are all “Progressives” another term they have subsumed, though they do have a lot in Common with Woodrow Wilson’s WWI America.
And now, seemingly, nearly everyone, left and right, have adopted their definition.
The left has been busy redefining the language and that,’s no accident as these are cultural Marxists with their roots in Gramsci and his successors.
As Marx said,”The ruling ideology is always the ideolog.of the ruling class (except during revolutionary periods, I am paraphrasing)”
Hence, I call welfare state capitalist Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, etc. Socialist and countries run by Marxist-Leninists, “Communist.”
What is wrong with this picture:
Court presses government to commit to eviction of illegal Arab outpost Khan al-Ahmar
After 14yrs, the govt seeks yet another delay on the demolition of an illegal Arab outpost.
I don’t recall such a request being put forward by the govt prior to the razing of Or Chaim, an outpost commemorating the memory of Rabbi Haim Druckman.
Jerry Springer just died but his legacy lives on as the whole society. It’s like the Star Trek episode: A Piece of the Action.
This is signal, not noise. President Xi has effectively eliminated all his PEERS, making himself China’s GRANDFATHER. It would be like the Biden Regime eliminating Harris, Schumer, Trump, McCarthy, Obama, etc. and replacing them with Hunter’s pals. It means that any pretense of balance and competition in China will only come with Xi’s forcible removal — by political murder or political suicide. Unfortunately, people of this degree of exaltation generally pull millions of innocent victims into the grave with them (cf. Hitler, Napoleon).
Biden’s Declaration of War (in Sudan!)
I cannot over-emphasize how dangerous this is. It commits “boots on the ground”, in a conflict with no exit plan, with the expressed expectation that the conflict will widen.
For those who cannot remember, this is Vietnam — but far worse.
Anger escalates in Iran as regime continues chemical attacks targeting schools
Latest update – 10:00 pm CET
https://english.mojahedin.org/news/live-report-iran-regime-chemical-gas-attacks-schoolgirls-poisoning/
https://palwatch.org/page/33039
The conflict in Sudan pits the US-Egypt-Tripoli-Turkey-backed government against Russian-French-UAE-Chad,etc -backed.rebels, with tentacles that leas to Syria, Rojava, Iran… (But why stop there?)
No comments on Israpundit?
Meanwhile, Biden has shut off embassy services to 16,000 US citizens in country.
Garland clutches pearls:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/04/22/merrick-garland-identified-official-misleading-congress-hunter-biden-tax-probe/
After the many thousands of lethal terrorist attacks that have failed to murder Jews, one has to wonder if maybe somebody up there likes us.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/no-injuries-after-israeli-bus-comes-under-fire-in-northern-west-bank/
By Caroline Glick:
The ruling class must regain its senses
JUST RELEASED: Donald Trump’s Testimony To New York AG’s Fraud Probe Investigators
https://youtu.be/M1KACPC8kUw
@seb
It could be that your commenting difficulties have to do with the fact that you are commenting many times in rapid fashion. If you leave a little more time between comments, you shouldn’t have any trouble.
Bermuda And The Abandonment Of The Jews
@Ted Thank you.
@Seb
Many comments of yours ended up in Spam and in Trash. I approved them.
I also did something which may help to prevent this from happening.
“Major Judicial Reform Compromise revealed”: One lump or two? 😀
@Sebastien
This is a good point, but since the American occupation and transformation of Japan from its pre-war feudal society into its current iteration, such political violence is very alarming and very unusual in the current era. Of course, the Japanese are always good for a parlaimentary tussle:
https://www.france24.com/en/20150918-japan-brawl-lawmakers-parliament-controversial-security-bill-military-abroad-wwii
but this is very different from political assassinations.
Yes, this is another curious point, the connection of which I failed to note. Good observation.
@Peloni Maybe Japan needs stronger pipe bomb control laws like Israel needs knife, rock and car control. (Rock, paper, scissors? ? ) After 9/11, we had box cutter control laws, for a few years. Seriously.
“The Car” (1977) Official trailer.
https://youtu.be/j6-yVoJTCo8
But, seriously, I googled your question and found this:
https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/before-abe-a-brief-history-of-political-assassinations-in-japan/
Apparently, in the 20’s and 30’s, political assassinations were common in Japan.
Maybe it just has something to do with national character, who is killed, what weapons?
Palestinians murder Jews with any weapon available. In the U.S., guns are a perrenial favorite.
Maybe, it’s a cultural thing. The motives given don’t usually make much sense.
like, “Abe murder suspect says life destroyed by mother’s religion”
https://apnews.com/article/shinzo-abe-religion-japan-social-media-68f18b50c5698bb65f024ff5c5d2c3ba
huh?
@Peloni Maybe Japan needs stronger pipe bomb control laws like Israel needs knife, rock and car control. (Rock, paper, scissors? 😀 ) After 9/11, we had box cutter control laws, for a few years. Seriously.
“The Car” (1977) Official trailer.
https://youtu.be/j6-yVoJTCo8
But, seriously, I googled your question and found this:
https://thediplomat.com/2022/07/before-abe-a-brief-history-of-political-assassinations-in-japan/
Apparently, in the 20’s and 30’s, political assassinations were common in Japan.
Maybe it just has something to do with national character, who is killed, what weapons?
Palestinians murder Jews with any weapon available. In the U.S., guns are a perrenial favorite.
Maybe, it’s a cultural thing. The motives given don’t usually make much sense.
like, “Abe murder suspect says life destroyed by mother’s religion”
https://apnews.com/article/shinzo-abe-religion-japan-social-media-68f18b50c5698bb65f024ff5c5d2c3ba
huh?
@Peloni Japan needs stronger improvised weapon control laws?
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida Survives Assassination Attempt – Suspect Carried Two Pipe Bombs, One Exploded
How does this keep happening in Japan of all places???
https://www.jns.org/israel-philharmonic-orchestra-hires-longtime-assistant-to-classical-musics-new-international-pariah/
Nasrallah just accused Israel of bombing Lebanese banana plantations. Now, it occurred to me that if this were true and if Israel were a halachic state, this would pose a philosophical challenge even for the fabled wise men of Chelm.
See, Deuteronomy 20 says:
“19When you lay siege to a city for an extended time while fighting against it to capture it, you must not destroy its trees by putting an axe to them, because you can eat their fruit. You must not cut them down. Are the trees of the field human, that you should besiege them? 20But you may destroy the trees that you know do not produce fruit. Use them to build siege works against the city that is waging war against you, until it falls.”
Now, it recently came to my attention via Facebook, that banana trees have no wood in them. They are actually giant herbs not trees. But they Are fruit bearing.
It’s a conundrum.
😀
Semi–fictional drama about Varian Frye coming to Netflix.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-jewish-history-behind-the-wwii-rescue-that-inspired-netflixs-transatlantic/