The Pope’s recent visit to Bethlehem was one of the most blatant displays of capitulation to terrorism that has been seen in recent years. How well I remember the way Christians were treated by Arafat’s henchmen, including Mahmoud Abbas his right hand man, during the Intifada. The Christian community was decimated, and is now only twenty percent of the population, when it was once the majority. Christian girls were kidnapped, raped, and forced to convert to Islam. Christians were kicked out of their homes by gunmen, who used Christian neighborhoods to set up sniper nests from which they shot into Jewish homes in Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood, and passing cars on the road (Dr. Shmuel Gillis, on whom I patterned the hero of my book, The Covenant, was killed on his way home from treating cancer patients at Hadassah Hospital by such a sniper.)

And then there was the siege of the Church of the Nativity. The priests and children held hostage by Arafat’s gunmen. The church desecrated. Priests holding up signs at the windows to Israeli soldiers “Please help us!”

The Pope, standing side by side with Abbas, chose to forget these things.

His words:

“Mr. President, the Holy See supports the right of your people to a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of your forefathers, secure and at peace with its neighbors, within internationally recognized borders.” Read more >

Great analogies take many paragraphs to develop so here is a peak at the end.

For 16 years now, Israel’s elites have been living in a make-believe world in which Jews are to blame for nearly everything and Arabs are merely expressing “frustration” at being “mistreated” for so many years by Jews.

And the psychological war mounted by Israel’s elites against national pride, dignity and self-respect – indeed against national existence – has been accompanied by a set of diplomatic policies expressing little more than self-loathing – policies that in effect allow no act of Arab violence to go unrewarded.

A TALE OF TWO BEGGARS

Steven Plaut

Once upon a time, somewhere in the steppes of Eastern Europe, in the Pale that contained many a Jewish village, there roamed two beggars. One of the hobos was a Jew, the other a gentile.

The two transients were friends and far too lazy to hold any job or do any real work. So they wondered carefree, aimlessly and uselessly from village to village, begging for food, sometimes collecting discarded things to sell, here and there stealing some eggs or fruits off farm trees. It was a hard life and they often found themselves on the brink of starvation.

One day, as the two were looking for someone from whom they could shnorr some food, they came upon a shtetl whose residents were all buzzing about, hurrying, scouring pots and pans, cleaning their homes and cooking.

The Jewish beggar suddenly realized it was but a few hours before Passover was to begin.
Read more >

Seraphic Secret has a post about Muhammad Al-Dura, the boy actor who played dead in a September 30, 2000 France2 TV production. The video, shown around the globe, catapulted Muhammad into an icon of the Palestinian uprising. Despite the bad acting, the entire population of planet Earth believed that Al-Dura really died. Masterful editing by Charles Enderlin, a Jew-hating French Jew, did the trick. Enderlin simply erased the weak scenes, like the one showing the boy move moments after an Arab chorus dramatically pronounced him dead.

Muhammed Al Durah is alive. My guess is that he’s in a madrassah somewhere in Pakistan or Sudan. Meanwhile, his father makes a nice living traveling about the Muslim world signing pictures of his “dead son” much like O.J. Simpson signing memorabilia at sports conventions.

Unlike Al-Dura, Yuval Abedeh and Dorit Benisian are dead, victims of a Kassam rocket fired by Al-Dura’s relatives from Gaza. Their death did not induce global outrage, no UN resolutions, but the very fact that they existed illuminates the greatness of the Jewish soul and the magic that is the state of Israel.

In the early 1990s when our wife was studying Hebrew in an Ashdod Ulpan, the place was swarming with newly arrived Ethiopians. The kids urinated in the washing machine, confusing it with a toilet. Today those kids are engineers in the the factory that produces washing machines. That is the miracle of Israel. In less than a generation, a mere ten years after their parents escaped a primitive life in Ethiopia, Yuval and Dorit could look forward to life as scientists, engineers, or artists. We mourn their loss and cry with the Jews of Sderot.

Yuval Abebeh

Sept 29, 2004 – On the eve of the Sukkot holiday, Yuval Abebeh, 4, and Dorit Benisian, 2, both of Sderot, were killed by a Kassam rocket fired from Gaza.
Read more >

German researchers have demonstrated that chimpanzees make better survival choices than Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister of Israel.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig studied the chimp’s choices by using an economic game with two players. In the game, a human or chimpanzee who receives something of value can offer to share it with another.

If the proposed share is rejected, neither player gets anything.

Humans typically make offers close to 50 percent of the reward. They also reject as unfair offers of significantly less than half of the reward, even though this choice means they get nothing.

The study, however, showed chimpanzees reliably made offers of substantially less than 50 percent, and accepted offers of any size, no matter how small.

The researchers concluded chimpanzees do not show a willingness to make fair offers and reject unfair ones. In this way, they protect their self interest and are unwilling to pay a cost to punish someone they perceive as unfair.

The study appeared in the Oct. 5 issue of the journal Science.

Mahmoud Abbas, “President” of the PLO, is demanding that Olmert, make a generous offer. Read more >