I have often wondered why it is that although I live in Israel and I follow the news closely, I rarely write about what is going on here. I think I have found a couple answers to the question. The first is that what is happening to us in terms of external threats is not pleasant. It is daunting to think that Iran has decided that it doesn’t want us to exist and that it is making plans and preparations for carrying out their final solution. It seems that only Israel and the US are taking them seriously. It makes me wonder how much good Holocaust education has actually done. All of the memorials in Europe to dead Jews don’t seem to have taught Europeans that when a people is threatened with extinction, that the threatener is deadly serious.
Instead, Europe is tripping over its own feet to apologize again and again and more and better for the cartoons that offended the Muslims. Whether of not they were in bad taste or offensive, to my small mind, seems beside the point. When I am offended I have ways of dealing with it that don’t involve destruction and violence. And were I to become destructive and violent, then I suppose I should be incarcerated rather than apologized to. But that’s only my thinking and what do I know about the world?
Meanwhile, AbbaGav has written a brilliant satirical piece in his blog http://abbagav.blogspot.com “Top 10 Discipline Tips for Unruly Children of the Jihad†that points out exactly what we are dealing with at our doorstep where we have an entity whose raison d’etre is our destruction.
Internally, we face a government that is rife with corruption. Our acting Prime Minister recently sold his Jerusalem home to someone’s offshore corporation for $2.7 million and is living in it for $2250 a month. Let’s see. We can all do the math. If we take off a zero, it becomes a bit clearer…. It is as if he is living in a $270K house for $225 a month. I’d say he got a pretty good deal.
One of his ministers has been advised by the attorney general, appointed by the head of his own party, Ariel Sharon, to resign because of charges of corruption, but he refuses to resign and has been given full support by the acting Prime Minister.
This, of course, is the same acting Prime Minister who sent police and army to bash in heads of Jews a couple of weeks ago in Amona. Bleeding heads of non-violent youth, people, including three Knesset members, who were brutally injured, pummeled in their stomachs with clubs, people who were trampled by horses, don’t seem to move the political establishment from their righteousness. Results of investigations into that documented, televised live on TV brutality are likely to be influenced by political pressure.
Is it any wonder that I would rather write about weddings and birthdays?
It all reminds me of a commercial that appeared on Armed Forces TV in Germany when we were living there in the late 1970s. A little girl is asked what she thinks about racism and she answers, “I don’t like to think about what I don’t like to think about.â€
