May 26, 2007

May 26, 2007

Last night, Erev Shabbat, I went to services at the Kabbalah House and then to a birthday party for a girl in my Hebrew class. People at the party asked me if they were successful in brainwashing me into Kabbalah. They really didn’t try. I just thought I would check it out. The party was on the roof of an apartment building. All were twenty-somethings, reminding me of the great house parties that we used to have in the Virginia Highlands in Atlanta when I was that age. It was pretty international with the people from our class plus a lot of Israelis. I assume that since most of the foreign women have Israeli boyfriends, they had them bring their friends. Of course, it was thrown by a bunch of girls so I was shown the extent of the Israeli’s English vocabulary with slang phrases such as “sausage fest”.

I saw the sweet couple that picked me up to go to Netanya last week to play with the kids that had been evacuated from Sderot. They introduced me to the head of their organization, Friends for Israel or FFI, who travels to other countries to set up chapters of FFI. His name is Lior. He described to me what happened to him last Monday while he was in Sderot.

He was speaking with a group next to a gas station when he heard a whistling sound. The Qassam rocket landed just 30 meters from him. Normally, there is a siren that gives you about 15 seconds to take cover. There was none this time. He ran to get his camera from his car to show the carnage. The video begins one minute after the explosion. He drives his car back to the site. To respect the dead, the carnage is edited out.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7JPCEouiHc

If the rocket had gone just 20 more meters toward him, the gas station would have blown along with dozens of people. In this instance, 2 were killed. One died from the direct hit and the other from a heart attack. 73 were injured/wounded, etc. These are families with children, not soldiers. FFI http://www.friends-for-israel.org/en/ is there to show the people that the country is with them and that they are not alone.

If you look to the right of this blog entry, you will see links to various news sources. Most of which, focus on the Israeli military reaction to these bombings. The terrorist group, Hamas, knows that these blatant provocations they are doing gets them the international news coverage and sympathy as the “little guys against the big army”. You can see the bias that is stated or implied in most of these articles. No one doubts that Hamas is provoking Israel. Yet, the articles leave you with a feeling that Israel is overly too aggressive toward the Palestinians. A government’s first and foremost role is to protect its citizens. I have stated before that Israelis believe as I do that if Cuba fired one missile into Florida, we would decimate Cuba with the majority of Americans behind the government. Clearly, the Israeli government (who’s Prime Minister I think needs to step down) feels that the angry neighbors of Israel react better to Israel showing strength then Israel turning the other cheek.

When the media talks of the number of civilians killed along with Hamas “militants”, they fail to distinguish the difference between a pinpointed attack by Israel against a terrorist and Hamas targeting random unarmed civilians. I saw an article talking about the number of civilians killed by Israel recently. How many civilians did the US kill in Afghanistan while carpet bombing? How many civilians did the U.S. kill with its remote ship and land-fired missiles into the densely populated cities of Iraq? Israel is targeting (and pretty much pinpoint targeting) known active terrorists. The article stated the number of Palestinians killed by Israelis and stressed the fact that there were many more Palestinians killed in the last year than Israelis. Perhaps Bush should go ahead and allow a few thousand more Americans to die along with the Iraqis. That would be fairer, wouldn’t it? The media periodicals and others refer to the 911 hijackers as “terrorists” but not those intentionally bombing random unarmed civilians in Sderot. Why are there “suicide bombers” and not “suicide terrorists”?

The U.S. gives huge military aid to Israel and should therefore be concerned about its investment. However, that does not seem to be the focus whatsoever in the media’s articles. It seems the media is obsessed with the actions of this country of 7 million. I won’t even start about the United Nations’ bias against Israel. I could ramble on about this for a long time…

Lior is also a tour guide here. It takes two to three years to get certified as such in Israel. I have always thought that if I were to move here, that’s what I’d like to do. On my four trips in buses to this country, I was always captivated by what the guides were saying about the deep history of this tiny land. I always felt that I was the only one listening so intently. Anyway, I may go to Sderot this week. The journey to the city is the most dangerous. The bombs are not that powerful. If they pack them with nails or ball bearings, they do more damage, of course. But, they are not accurate. They can blow out your eardrums, though. They are meant to terrorize, really. Once there, you can stay close to buildings or go underground to bomb shelters.

Shalom,

Randy