Kinda Scary

As a recent switcher to the Mac (soooo much happier) I have to say I found this picture hilarious.
(This is a picture that was taken at an airport on the Arrivals/Departures display)

Building vs Terrorists? What's the Question? A short histroy

I'm getting kind of tired of the whole "Israel's 'settlers' are the obstacle peace." I was just reading something on Al Jazeera that pit the claims of both sides, Israeli and Arab against each other. The Arab claim that Israel hasn't stopped the building of "illegal settlements" and the Israeli claim that the PLO hasn't put a stop to terrorism.

Are you joking?!

All right, let's say that the Arabs did have a rightful claim, Jews are building homes, they're in the process of building. Not hurting anyone last I checked. The Arabs don't want the Jews to build for one reason. They're afraid that if enough Jews settle in that area of the Land of Israel they will eventually, a few generations down the road, be unable to claim that land as their own (which it never was to begin with).

Let's flip over the other side, the demand that Fatah (not Hamas, they're a terrorist organization remember?) has to shut down all terrorist activities.

Seeing that pretty much everything that Fatah does is in some way connected to a form of terrorism, this is a little much to hope for. Terrorism against Jews as well as Arabs, particulary Arab women.

But there's no contest, you can't compare terrorists with settlements, it's compared to apples and oranges.

I remember a few months back getting into a debate with this issue with someone, the the settlements were the obstacle to peace. I think that's ludicrous. First of all Judea & Samaria are part of the State even if they were never officially annexed. Those areas were where the kingdom's of ancient Israel were, so we have that to back us up.

The Arabs who lived there during the time when Jews were exiled to other lands, were few and far between. There was never the population that there was today. The land was unable to support a large population.

It just so happened that when the Jews returned the land started to gice forth it's fruit. The Jews were quite comfortable in the whatever land they had been exiled to and the early Zionist's numbers were quite small. They wanted to settle the land, so who did they hire to help them? The local Arabs.

Not another interesting tidbit, the land that these Arabs had lived on had been bought by wealthy Arabs during the time of the Ottoman Empire. They did not buy the land from the Arabs who lived there, and they pretty much made the people who lived there work for them for no money and very little support.

When the Zionists started coming from Europe, they bought the land from these wealthy Arabs, and hired the local Arabs to help them settle the earth.

Poor Arabs from surrounding countries heard the gates of Palestine were open (when I say Palestine, I'm referring to what the area was called, a name given to the place by the Romans who drove the Jews out. In order to spite the Jews, the Romans named the are Phillistia, which today has come across as "Palestinian." There was never a country there however, it was no man's land, that's just the name that it was refered to as) so the Arabs started coming down in large numbers to find work.

Before you know it there are millions of Arabs who want jobs, and in the meantime, in villages that used to be poor now had great wealth from the work that they had been doing for the Jews.

Fast forward to 1947 when the surrounding Arab countries told the local Arabs in Israel to get out so they would not be mistaken for a Jews and accidentally killed in the war that there were planning for the almost created Jewish state.

A number of them did leave, they went to Syria, Iraq, Jordan (of course they weren't actually called that yet) and decided to wait for Israel to be Juden Rein so they could go and take the land that the Jews bought.

Of course the Jews won and the Arabs who had fled no longer had their homes because they had left. They were then not allowed to enter the newly formed state because whatever country they were in viewed Israel as an enemy and had no relations with them.

During the whole commotion at the UN as to what land should go to whom, Jordan and Egypt came in and illegally occupied what is today know as the West Bank and Gaza.

These areas never actually belonged to anyone, they had just passed along the no-man's land statues that they had had before Israel was created.

Fast forward to 1967 when Israel was attacked, and yes they were attacked by Egypt and Jordan, Israel captured both those areas of land in a defensive war.

Just a small side note, the media today likes to say that Israel pre-emted that '67 war because they launched the first strike.

In reality, in the days leading up to the war Egypt had set up a blockade against ships traveling to Israel and had banished the UN peace keeping force from the Israel-Egypt border. They then proceeded to set up troops along the border in preparation for striking Israel. Israel just decided to attack first and not sit around like a fish being shot out of a barrel.

Anyways last I checked land captured in a defensive war is land that belongs to the capturing country. Also given the fact that Israel wasn't driving another country from their land, they were just expelling an illegal entity and acquired the no-man's land, which strategically enabled them to have more defensible borders.

Anyways, I should make this argument stronger, but you can see where I'm going with this. All Israel is guilty of is settling land that never belonged to anyone. Whereas the Arabs are actively seeking to kill as many Jews as possible.
No comparison.

Hey! Some Truth!

I want to remember this day, the day when Al Jazeera quotes when the first Israeli roadblocks were put into place and their purpose.

Barriers were set up during the first Palestinian uprising in the late 1980s in order to hamper armed attacks on Israeli targets.

Thank you Al Jazeera! I've been looking for a source for this.

How to Get music off of you Ipod Part 2 for Mac

This is a follow up article to something I posted back in October about getting music off of your Ipod without having to buy any external programs. That was how to get if using Windows, now I'm going to tell you how to do it on a Mac.

Yes, I have finally converted over to the wonderful world of Macintosh computers (soooo much happier), anyways here's how to get the music off of your Mac Ipod.

The truth it's much easier to do it on a Mac because instead of having to do it manually there's actually a free, open source program that you can download.


The program's called Senuti and you can download it here.


I have not actually tried this program myself because I now run my Itunes library directly from my Mac. If anyone tries this program let me know.

For other free open source programs for mac you can go here and try out some of these programs

An Update...and a Death

Whew! It's been a while since I last posted. I figured that when I was on vacation I would have more time to write, and I found that I had less free time then when I was in school! But now that the semester's started I can start to have more free time.

I guess I'll just give you an update on everything that's happened in the last month before I get onto today's topic.

At the beginning of January I was visiting family in New Mexico. I love it out there, it really gives you a feeling of true serenity, being out in the desert and hearing absolutely nothing. Especially out on my uncle's ranch. My uncle is a very strange fellow, he had one goal in life, and that was to get as far away from humanity as possible. So he and his wife moved out to this beautiful 800 acre piece of land just outside of TorC.

I'll admit the lifestyle of living out of the city away from the "noise" of humanity is appealing, but I, as a Jew, can't go into hiding like that. I need to make a difference, one of the reasons I'm moving to Israel, I can get some of the serenity (at least the nature side of it) but still be making an intense statement about to future of the Jewish people.

Oh and speaking of Israel, I sent my Nefesh B' Nefesh application in last week. Hopefully everything will go smoothly and I'll get my grant and hove no problems with my Aliyah.

Now to today's story. As most of the people reading this know, this past Sunday was Super Sunday in America. A day of watching football for the guys and watching commercials for the women. It is the most expensive air time of the entire year and the cost of advertising is appoximetly 2.7 million dollars per minute.

In other words this is the ultimate in gratifying our physical desires. The guys want to watch other large men, reminiscent to the Coliseum in ancient Rome, basically try to kill the opposing players, with the excuse of a suicidal maniac running with a ball. Whereas the women want to watch the ads, ads that are meant to sell things to satisfy our physical wants. Last I checked you don't see many Super Bowl ads for things like bread, milk and toilet paper.

But Yishai Fleisher I think summed it up the best, because the next day there was a Jew killed in Dimona, a city near Be'er Sheva. A suicide bomber went into a crowded area (and it has to be a crowded area) and blew itself up.

Now just to give you an idea how sick these people are after a the medical teams had come and a crowd had gathered around, it was discovered that there had been a second terrorist who had been walking around waiting for a crowd to build up so it could set off its bomb in an even larger crowd of people.

Thank G-d it was discovered and killed, but the point, as Yishai put it, how many Jews could tell you about this attack and how many Jews could give you a play by play blow of the football game, that now really doesn't matter anymore (if it ever did).

Something to think about.