Tic ...Toc ... Israel

[The Green Barbarian]

Lighten up.

I think you need to take your own advice, especially where Israel is concerned. And also - educate yourself.

[sobrohusfat]

From Egyptian Muslim to Israel defender - Hussein Aboubakr Mansour

Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, 27, was born to a Muslim banking family in Cairo, Egypt, and today is a self-proclaimed Zionist. He endured brutal torture in his homeland before leaving behind everything he knew. It all started when he was a young teenager, seeking more information about the supervillain he had grown up learning to hate: Jews.

“We all get handed the narrative of who we are. The narrative I received was that I was a member of the best country. Anything not the direct product of our culture was inferior. The main enemies were the infidel West who want to take our resources.” On 9/11, for example, his middle-class family rejoiced at news of the attacks on the World Trade Center and called their friends to turn on the TV. In their view, the infidels were being punished.

The main antagonist in this narrative was Israel.

“The biggest shock was when I started to examine Israel as a culture from up close,” he relates. “In Israel there’s an accepted standard of human decency. To my surprise, I found Jews have a much higher standard of tolerance and don’t focus on killing Arabs the way Arabs focus on killing Jews. This huge moral gap opened my eyes.”

“Every time I wrote something state security didn’t like, they came to arrest me. I promised to stop,” he says. “They put me in a military prison for two months and and tortured me, stripping me naked, hitting me with belts and calling me a Jew lover. There was no trial, judge or lawyer. It was the worst time of my life.”

On Dec. 26, 2010, they released him from prison. A month later, the revolution began that led to the ousting of Egypt’s president. Mansour felt hopeful. But then the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, attacks on minorities worsened, and he started getting arrested again for writing about his hopes for peace with Israelis.

“If I were in Israel I wouldn’t have been put in prison for sending an e-mail to the wrong person,” he told the audience. “It’s the only decent country in the Middle East that offers humans a life of respect and decency. It’s that moral gap that makes me support Israel.”

Mansour managed to obtain a visa for the United States and has lived in California since 2012. Today he devotes himself to teaching Hebrew, educating people about Israel and helping students fight anti-Semitism on college campuses through the pro-Israel organization StandWithUs.

Mansour wrote, “I was born an Arab; I know how violent, hateful, intolerant and aggressive Arabs are. So I support the right of the free people of Israel to have their own independent country.
I support the civilized man against the savage,
I support honesty over dishonesty,
I support life over death,
I support freedom against slavery,
I support intelligence over stupidity,
I support rationalism over terrorism.
Thus, my dear reader, I support Israel.”

exerpts from full article:
http://www.aish.com/jw/s/From-Egyptian- ... mobile=yes

[Queen K]

http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/ ... li=AAggNb9

Hold off on settlements?

Does not Trump realize he's going to fail where every single president has failed? In the quagmire that is the relations in Israel?

Someone else might argue that Trump's new approach will garner some respect from both sides though.

[sobrohusfat]

"Bibi just hold off until i can get my people involved, you'll see - it'll be great, so great, the best settlements you've ever seen - it's true - huge."

[Queen K]

Are you making fun of Donald Trump?

[unclemarty]

51 Facts About Israel That Will Surprise You

1. There are over 100 sushi restaurants in Tel Aviv…

2. …making it the city with the most sushi restaurants per capita after Tokyo and NYC.

3. Israel has the third highest rate of entrepreneurship in the world.

4. It has the highest rate of entrepreneurship among women and people over 55 in the world.

5. Israel was the first country to ban underweight models.

6. Israeli banknotes have braille markings on them.

7. Israel won the Eurovision song competition three times.

8. The last time they won, they were represented by a transgender pop star, Dana International. The only other time that’s happened is this year’s winner, Conchita Wurst, from Austria.

9. Israelis consume the third most amount of vegetables and sweets in the world.

10. When Golda Meir became prime minister of Israel in 1969, she was only the third woman elected to lead a country in the modern world.

11. The largest known dog cemetery in the ancient world was discovered in the coastal city of Ashkelon.

12. There’s a rollerblading party that happens every Tuesday night in Tel Aviv.

13. Out Magazine names Israel the gay capital of the Middle East.

14. The country has the most Bauhaus buildings in the world.

15. Israel has 137 official beaches (but only 273 km of coastline).

16. In regards to its population, Israel has the highest ratio of college degrees.

17. The same goes for the ratio of its museums…

18. …and startup companies!

19. Motorola developed the cell phone in Israel.

20. Voicemail technology was developed in Israel.

21. The first antivirus software for computers was created in Israel in 1979.

22. Israel has two official languages: Hebrew and Arabic.

23. Israel published more books translated from other languages than any other nation in the world.

24. The city of Beersheba has the highest number of chess grandmasters per capita in the world.

25. Only two countries began the 21st century with a net gain in their number of trees; Israel was one of them.

26. The opening scene of the Al Pacino film The Insider was shot in Israel.

27. Haifa, Israel has one of the smallest subway systems in the world with a 1.8-km track and only four carriages — how cute!

28. Israel is one of only three democracies in the world without a codified constitution. The other two are New Zealand and Britain.

29. The Sea of Galilee — located .212 km below sea level — is the lowest freshwater lake in the world (and the largest in Israel).

30. The Dead Sea is the lowest place on Earth. Period.

31. People can easily float in the Dead Sea due to its unusually high salt concentration. It’s almost impossible to dive into it.

32. Israel is the only country to revive an unspoken language and establish it as its national tongue.

33. Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives is the world’s oldest continuously used cemetery.

34. El Al, Israel’s national airline, set the world record for the most passengers on a commercial flight.

35. The world’s largest pepper was grown in Israel’s Moshav Ein Yahav, as recorded by The Guinness Book of World Records in 2013.

36. Life expectancy at birth in Israel is at 82 years (two years more than the OECD average).

37. Eilat and the Hula Valley Reserve are some of the best bird-watching sites in the world

38. Israel’s national bird is the hoopoe.

39. Heart tissue regeneration is possible in the U.S. thanks to Israeli stem-cell technology.

40. A cooking oil developed in Israel is capable of breaking up cholesterol and other blood fats.

41. An Israeli company has developed the world’s first jellyfish repellent.

42. Israel is one of only nine countries in the world that can launch its own satellites into space.

43. AOL Instant Messaging was designed by an Israeli software company.

44. Yityish Aynaw became Israel’s first Ethiopian Miss Israel in 2013.

45. Israeli scientists have discovered the cause of chronic bad breath and an easy way to fix it!

46. More than 44% of all lawyers registered in Israel are women.

47. Israel chose its first woman president of the Supreme Court, Dorit Beinisch, who served from 2006-2012.

48. Israel has the world’s second highest per capita of new books.

49. A group of Israeli artists have started bus stop libraries that are available free of charge to commuters traveling across Israel.

50. Israel’s national flower is the Cyclamen persicum.

51. Last Valentine’s Day, 60 million Israeli flowers were sent to Europe for sale.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/rethinkisrael/ ... llVxWGpReL

[unclemarty]

- 2012 -

Have the skeletons of the Temple Mount massacre been found?

Veteran journalist Benny Liss releases movie he filmed of underground cave on Temple Mount where he found a mass grave • He believes the skeletons are the remains of Jews massacred by the Romans when they destroyed the Temple Mount, but urges the authorities to properly examine the area.

Remains of thousands of Jews massacred by the Romans on the Temple Mount at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple may have been uncovered in Jerusalem, according to a veteran archaeological journalist.

During a conference on Thursday at Megalim – the City of David Institute for Jerusalem Studies, journalist Benny Liss screened a movie recorded a few years ago that clearly shows thousands of skeletons and human bones in what appears to be a mass grave.

Liss, veteran archaeological correspondent for Israel's Channel 1, told the amazed audience that the film had been shot in a spacious, underground cavern in the area of the Mercy Gate, near the eastern wall of the Temple Mount, but just outside it. Liss raised the possibility that the skeletons were the remains of 6,000 Jews, mostly women and children, killed on the Temple Mount when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple, as described in the writings of Flavius Josephus, who witnessed the destruction.

The movie shows a group of people accessing the cavern with construction tools. Liss goes in first, followed by a lighting technician and cameraman. The three first pass through a narrow passage and then enter the cave with the skeletal remains. Liss says he tried to work out the size of the pile of remains by putting his hand in as far as he could, but he could not reach the bottom. The movie shows Liss crumbling some of the carbonized materials near the skeletons. As soon as Liss left the cave, Antiquities Authority staff resealed the cave, he says.

During the lecture, Liss also cites historical sources that show that in the area of the Old City where the Muslim cemetery now stands, there was once a Jewish neighborhood and cemetery, which was moved to the Valley of Josaphat. He basis his theory that the skeletons are the remains of the people killed on the Temple Mount on the site of the mass grave, the soot in the cave and the written history.

"The Romans stayed on the Temple Mount for a month after the destruction of the temple until going on to conquer the upper city [today's Jewish Quarter],” says Liss. “They had to get rid of the thousands of decomposing bodies and the most obvious place to do this would have been the natural caves on the upper slope of the mount, around Mercy Gate." ...

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newslet ... hp?id=5216

[maryjane48]

http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.777007

[unclemarty]

Hillel Neuer...



...like a BOSS!

[Glacier]

There are so many people out there who say they despise Zionism. There are even Israelis who claim to despise Zionism. Many claim to be “anti-Zionist” but not anti-Semitic. When asked to define Zionism, most who vociferously criticize Zionism tend to go silent. They know they hate Zionism because they’ve been told to, but they have no clue what it is.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/zionism-defined/

[sobrohusfat]

[seewood]

The Nobel Prize is an annual, international prize first awarded in 1901 for achievements in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. An associated prize in Economics has been awarded since 1969.[1] Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 881 individuals,[2] of whom 197 - 22.4% - were Jewish or people of Jewish descent,[Note 1] although Jews and people of Jewish descent comprise less than 0.2% of the world's population [3]

Thought this was kind of impressive.....although from Wikipedia

[Glacier]

Thought this was kind of impressive.....

It's also highly Islamophobic.

[seewood]

It's also highly Islamophobic.

Thought this was kind of impressive.....

It's also highly Islamophobic.

Perhaps you may think so but I don't and that is what is important to me... just a fact I heard about a couple of years ago and thought I would share....

[Ub2]