Tueslinks

From Ian:

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Honest Reporting Searching For Israel's Capital (Video)

Israel Made Me Beat My Wife

'It's truly amazing just how far The Guardian can go when it comes to blaming Israel. Angela Taylor takes a look at the status of women in Gaza and carries out some interviews.'

PMW: PA: Israel is octopus with fangs and burning flames, in PA Ministry of Education publication UNWATCH Syrians slaughtered, but U.N. too busy condemning Israel 3 times Hamas Forces Attack Judge & Family in Gaza

'The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) strongly condemns the attack carried out by members of the 'Izziddin al-Qassam Brigades (the armed wing of Hamas) against a judge and his family in 'Abassan village, east of Khan Yunis. The attackers beat and insulted the judge, in addition to treating him cruelly and inhumanely at the Palestinian police station. PCHR calls upon the Attorney General in Gaza to open an investigation into the incident and bring the perpetrators to justice.'

Israel indicts man suspected of spying for Syria
A Druze resident of the Golan Heights studying in Syria is arrested on espionage charges 16 Year Old Stopped From Suicide Attack in Israel

'A 16 year old boy was arrested near the Kerem Shalom kibbutz recently in connection with a planned suicide attack against Israeli Jews.'

Turkey's Press Freedom Day: 95 Journalists Behind Bars

"The courts sentenced eight suspects to nine years in jail and five suspects to pay fines in the amount of 29,880 TL [$16,580], three of them directly to the person of Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Ergogan."

Pakistani Owner of Swanky Santa Monica Hotel: 'Get the [expletive] Jews out of my Pool' Libya Jew returns to UK post-Benghazi jailing

'Businessman Raphael Luzon held, interrogated by 'preventive security' for four days, doesn't advise any Jew to go to Libya.'

Hava Nagila inspires USA's Aly Raisman to victory at the empy seat Olympics.

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Also:
When the Right Is Right About the Left

Ehud Barak sings praises of Obama administration

Romney's Warsaw speech

"Israel is "like an octopus... flames shooting out between its fangs"

The Israeli Wild, Wild West

(h/t Yerushalimey, Stan)

The Siyum HaShas

Tomorrow evening, some 93,000 Jews will gather in MetLife Stadium, along with hundreds of thousands of other Jews worldwide (including in Tel Aviv's Nokia Stadium and Jerusalem's Teddy Stadium), to celebrate the 12th Siyum HaShas of Daf Yomi.

Daf Yomi is a study program initiated in the 1920s by Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Poland. His idea was that Jews worldwide would study a folio (2 pages) of Talmud every day, in sync. The entire Talmud - 2,711 folios - would be completed in roughly seven and a half years. (The English Artscroll translation spans 73 volumes, and each folio of Talmud is between 6-10 English pages.)

The Siyum HaShas is the celebration of the completion of the entire Babylonian Talmud.

Think about it: Every day, tens of thousands of Jews take time out to study the day's "Daf." Many go to lectures in synagogues or in ad-hoc workplace conference rooms, and some have been doing it on the Long Island Railroad for over twenty years. Lectures usually take an hour or so.

Others started off the current cycle in 2005 listening to lectures on cassette tapes or CDs; now many listen on MP3 players, or online. Still others learn it in pairs, or by themselves.

Sample page of Artscroll translation of theTalmud

Through business trips, holidays, births, bar mitzvahs and weddings, the people who follow the program kept going.

The Talmud, the richest source of the Jewish legal tradition, discusses every conceivable topic, from fanciful stories of ancient rabbis to heavily detailed discussions of the dimensions of every portion of the Temple and all its parts, from the laws of blessings to the laws of sex, from geometry to astronomy. It records intricate arguments using a unique logical framework, painstakingly parsing every letter in some Torah verses to extract hidden meanings. Pairs of rabbis became famous for their arguments with each other - Hillel and Shammai, Rav and Shmuel, Abaye and Rava.

The arguments are perhaps the most fascinating, and integral, part of the Talmud. The two sides must not only back up their arguments, but they must show how their arguments are consistent with the teachings of earlier, more authoritative rabbis, how they are not redundant, and how they are consistent with their own teachings in other areas of law. Each side would bring challenges to the others' arguments and they must defend themselves, each building an edifice of logic that ensures consistency even as they come to different conclusions. (Or, as often happens, one of them fails and cannot answer the final challenge. ) Sometimes the arguments are three- or four-way, and sometimes there are disagreements as to what the earlier arguments were, where the later interpreters must defend their own ideas of the basis of the earlier discussions.

(And this is only in the Talmud itself - I'm not even talking about the arguments among the commentaries, written hundreds of years later!)

Page from Latin translation of Mishnah

Seeming non-sequitors are introduced, and it can take pages before their relevance to the topic at hand is revealed. Stories can be brought up which brings up more stories; questions are not just asked on how rabbis thought but on how they acted.

Jews learn to argue from the Talmud.

And, in a sense, much of the entire Western legal system was heavily influenced by the Talmud as well, through the early innovators such as John Seiden, who was amazingly prolific in portions of Talmudic law. (The entire Mishnah - which outlines the Talmud - was translated into Latin in the late 17th century, along with commentaries by Maimonides and the Bartenura; here it is.)

To study the entire Talmud is a remarkable achievement, and it is almost beyond belief that so many people have managed to do it. The current Daf Yomi cycle started before Twitter existed, before Facebook was anything beyond a college phenomenon, before the iPhone. Over seven years of dogged study have occurred in every Jewish community worldwide.

Daf Yomi is a modern manifestation of Jewish unity - and a remarkable proof of Jewish continuity.

The Siyum is a real celebration for every Jew, whether you have ever studied Talmud or not.

But even if you haven't - the new cycle starts on Thursday. Feel free to join!

Morsi's surprising letter to Peres (UPDATE)

From the Ha'aretz' Barak Ravid via Twitter, and verified by the MFA:


The MFA writes:

President Peres has previously sent two letters to the Egyptian president. The first was sent upon his election as president and the second was sent on the occasion of the month of Ramadan. In his first letter, President Peres congratulated President Morsy for winning the elections, emphasized the importance of peace between Israel and Egypt and expressed his hope for the continued cooperation between the two nations. In the letter, dispatched on 28 June, President Peres wrote: 'As a person who participated in the process that led to the establishment of the peace agreement between your country and mine, I know that both Egypt and Israel attach supreme importance to the peace and stability that serve the interests of all peoples in the region. All of us in Israel respect both Egypt and the Egyptian people, which served as the pioneer that outlined the path to peace and reconciliation in the region. We know that the work is not yet finished. The people of Israel congratulate you on the democratic elections and hope that under your leadership Egypt will meet the complex challenges facing your nation. We look forward to continued cooperation with you, based on the peace agreements that were signed more than 30 years ago. It is our duty to preserve and nurture these agreements for the benefit of both our peoples. Peace has saved the lives of countless young people in Egypt and in Israel. Our commitment to the younger generation will always be valid. Unlike war, peace means victory for both sides.'

Prior to the Ramadan holiday, President Peres sent an additional letter of greeting to the Egyptian president, in which he expressed his holiday blessings to President Morsy and the Egyptian people.

UPDATE: Egypt denies sending this "telegram" and said that Morsi has not initiated any contact with Israel so far.

Maybe because it is a fax, not a telegram.

(h/t CHA)

EoZ regarded as "controversial" by Israeli/American writer at AllAfrica

From Joel Schalit at AllAfrica.com:

On May 23, Hatikva had the dubious distinction of hosting the worst race riots since Israel's founding. Egged on by politicians from Israel's governing Likud Party, local Jewish residents brutally assaulted migrants and looted their stores.

For followers of Israeli politics, none of this was surprising. In the preceding weeks, right-wing activists and politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had been attacking African migrants, repeatedly calling them a threat to Israeli society and security. It was just a matter of time before something like this happened.

In the wake of the violence, conservative media activists-accustomed to going on the offensive to support Israel's policies toward the Palestinians-found themselves with an entirely new kind of problem. They had to defend the government against charges of supporting anti-African racism. Ill-prepared, they relied on media normally used for other purposes, like flyers that had been intended for Apartheid Week.

Featuring a black and white photo of a group of laughing Ethiopian Jewish kids, one flyer highlights an old headline quotation from the late New York Times columnist William Safire that reads: "For the first time in history, thousands of black people are brought into the country not in chains but as citizens." In larger bold type appears the word "Apartheid?"

The work of the pro-Israel organization Stand With Us, the flyer was distributed by the controversial Elder of Ziyon blog. As an Israeli journalist, I received an emailed copy from someone who thought I would find it useful. A right-wing activist I know similarly plastered Reddit with links to it in the days immediately following the rioting. There was nothing especially unusual about the activity. It was the flyer itself that was noteworthy.

As propaganda, it's relatively straightforward: How can Palestinians and leftists argue that Israelis an apartheid state if it officially encourages black African immigration? Never mind that these Falashim, or Beta Israel as they are also called, happen to be Jews (or, at least, recently Jewish, according to religious authorities).

I never heard of Schalit, but I am disappointed that he didn't have enough confidence in his thesis that the refused to link to, or post, the poster that got him so hot and bothered:


He is also factually wrong in saying that StandWithUs made the poster and I distributed it - it was actually the other way around.

I was intrigued that he referred to me as "controversial." As I wrote in a comment to his article,

I was not aware that my blog was "controversial." Is there a controversy I am unaware of (or have forgotten about) or do you just consider opinions you disagree with to be "controversial"? I hope you will admit that using a term like that is prejudicial; you could have said "well-regarded" or "popular" and been at least as accurate, I suppose.

His main point in the article - which seems to be that Israelis are inherently racist - is just as sloppy as his fact checking.

Not to mention that someone on Reddit using my poster as an argument against Israeli racism is hardly the work of the organized Zionist community as he implies.

But he is apparently above such concerns. After all, he is a former editor of the nutty-left journal Tikkun and current editor of equally far-left European-American webzine Souciant. Which I suppose is "mainstream" in his opinion.