One Canard Down...
Not that it will matter to anti-Semitic propagandists, but Israel has been cleared of wrongdoing in the famous USS Liberty attack, by the National Security Agency, of all things.
"New documents released this week by America's National Security Agency support Israel's version of a long-festering controversy between the two countries: Israel's ( Read more... )
"New documents released this week by America's National Security Agency support Israel's version of a long-festering controversy between the two countries: Israel's ( Read more... )
i was really impressed with your interests list. you are teh second person to find me through my zataar reference. weird. and yes, i love halloumi. plus i found it charming that you included in your interests (individually) "hungarian women, persian women, turkish women, georgian women, azerbaijani women, kyrgyz women, brazillian women, etc"
btw, what is a "systems engineer"....is that kinda liek industrial engineer? and dont you have to be good at math to do that?
im not sure what i do well. no--i eat well and i live well. and im honest (sometimes). thats about it. and i am a yoga queen. i can do this weird side bending thing better than anyone..its not that amazing, but lots of ppl dont do it right...its called the half moon pose (and some other sanskrit name), and i shoudl be the model. :))))E)RE).
btw, im pasting somethgin tthat was on the "israeli-arab" community...whcih i thought you woudl find interesting.
The Forgotten Middle East Refugees
I recently read an article about jewish refugees from arab lands. It made me think about so many conversations I have had with arabs where they have always said "why should we be punished for something the europeans did to the jews?" Well, it wasn't just the europeans. After 1948, jews were treated disgustingly in many arab lands. Many jews were murdered, terrorised, robbed of their property and exiled. This is an issue many arabs are happy to gloss over and some even deny it in entirety.
great website - http://www.jimena-justice.org
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I can tell from your journal and what I can sense of your personality that you'd be that way. It's very cool and something I admire and appreciate a lot in a person. When I was younger, I often went hungry rather than having to eat most western foods, which was taking it a bit too far. But in college and after, I was totally obsessed with Asian food, which I found to be immeasurably more interesting, and I was pretty partisan about it. I had Korean friends train me to make two kinds of Korean barbecue. I also learned a good deal about curry.
Since then I've branched out a lot, and I'm passionate enough about it that I'm compiling a sort of ethnic food map of New York City -- but mostly Queens, which is probably the most ethnically diverse neighborhood on earth.
So, if you were in town and wanted to go on a food adventure, I could bust out the mental databank and take you to the canonical places serving any of the following: Filipino barbecue, Korean tofu dishes, West Indian comfort food, Romanian or Georgian food, Brazilian churrascaria, a Serbian-Hungarian-Romanian butcher shop run by strapping Slavs from the Banat, et cetera ad nauseum. Besides working what is mostly a crap job and writing, this lumpen Anthony Bourdain thing is my life.
"i was really impressed with your interests list."
Hehe. I spent a crapload of time on that. No artifice, either, it's all true.
As for the girls, I guess my kaleidoscopic curiosity governs my tastes there as well. But most of all, I like my Canaanite queens and their phenotypical kin.
"btw, what is a "systems engineer"....is that kinda liek industrial engineer? and dont you have to be good at math to do that?"
A Systems Engineer is generally someone who cobbles together "systems" -- meaning accretions of computer hardware, software, networks and the policies that govern their usage -- in order to satisfy a company's business needs. For my big, nasty media conglomerate, I have built systems that provide services ranging from the utterly mundane -- say, IP address to hostname translation -- to the lofty -- such as the data-mining server clusters that warehouse and crunch the financial data that gets reported to the SEC every financial quarter.
"im not sure what i do well"
I imagine you do a lot of things well. You seem smart and good-hearted. You seem to kick ass with language. What else? Are you musical? What are you studying in school?
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if im in nyc ill let you know! btw, so you dont get a false impression not fluent in any of the languages i use...just have a "working knowledge" give or take...:)
i am definitely NOT musical, althought i LOVE music. and im not especially coordinated (as in dancing, sports, cant even ride a bike) although i love nature, being active, hiking, etc. i HATE driving, which is why i left la, where i grew up. i hate talking about politics, but i love listening. i love reading, i dont mind studying, and my concentration is getting stronger, probably out of necessity. yah, i love languages and food, and beautiful (and some not-so-beautiful) things. i just like to have fun and be happy.
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I do find that fact interesting, but it's something I knew about.
But do consider the parallel Jewish expulsion from Arab lands during the War of Independence (1947-48). Reasonable historians estimate there were around 600,000 Jews evicted from Arab lands while Palestinians fled or were booted out of what was to become Israel. Pretty big deal, and yet it's rarely if ever mentioned. You even gambled that I might not know about it, and I'm clearly obsessed with the situation over there.
That rhetorical asymmetry should tell you a whole lot about how many people read the Arab-Israeli conflict. You don't have to be some Jewish victimologist who reflexively assumes Israel's critics are antisemitic, or blind to Israel's faults or Palestinian suffering, to observe this and protest it.
For the record -- and you don't seem to suspect me of it, but just in case... -- I am not some anti-Arab Jewish bigot. For someone staunchly pro-Israel who makes a sub-life out of ferreting out the innumerable piles of bullshit that attend the Middle East debate, I have some "progressive" positions. I want to see a Palestinian state, I think the settlements should be rolled back, and overall I affirm the humanity of the Palestinians. (The latter is a no-brainer.)
What I won't do is sit by and watch while socialists, fascists, academics, antisemites, idiotarians and fatuous fartknockers, whose agendas range from UN bureaucraphilia to Third-World Marxibation, smear a vast Rorschach of ideological excreta on Israel's back while it faces a genocidal threat. I do not believe that Israel should show noblesse oblige. While I will not excuse Israeli wrongdoing, I will not ignore the elements of Arab culture and society that perpetuate the conflict. Doing so hurts Jews, but the underreported flip side is that it also consigns Arabs to stagnation and misery.
I'm not some religious-right demagogue. I only ask people to eschew propaganda and ideological readings of the conflict. When they refuse, that's when the rhetorical guns come out.
Never again, motherfuckers.
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im actually pretty confused about the issue, im not an expert, but i do know enough to understand the basics...and its really hard for me to see a single right and wrong answer...
i think that people all around might call me a coward for feeling that way, or a hypocrite, but the truth is that i just think some things are plain out wrong, and some are sort of right, and it all screws with my brain a lot b/c i guess im so intimately connected to israel by virtue of being jewish (which to some is 90% of the problem).
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Well, I have strong opinions about it, but I certainly don't think you are a coward or hypocrite for not thinking it's a black and white situation. It's not. Not even close.
Certain elements are, e.g.:
The terrorist murder of civilians is wrong.
Israel has an unequivocal right to exist.
Most of it is not, e.g.:
If Arabs can live in Israel, why can't Jews live in Judea or Samaria?
Can it be a legitimiate military act to suicide bomb a group of soldiers on duty in the territories?"
Etc.
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