Labels: Chicago, personal stuff, travel
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:23 AM
0 comments
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS, FONDLING OUR JUNK: Huge security lines force passen... https://t.co/fH89LbKlLh via @instapundit— Instapundit.com (@instapundit) May 17, 2016
Labels: Chicago, Israeli airport security, strip or grope
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:42 PM
4 comments
ALERT Air France #AF416 to Chicago is returning to Paris CDG. More to come. pic.twitter.com/y6p5el6Y1W
— AirLive.net (@airlivenet) May 29, 2015
Developing....Labels: Chicago, France, hijacking, Paris, terrorism
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:55 PM
2 comments
Labels: Chicago, Detroit, illegal immigration, offensive Palestinians, Palestinian terrorism, Palestinians, terror victims
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:21 AM
0 comments
The pro-Odeh narrative runs something like this: Odeh was just a political activist prior to Israeli arrest, picked up as part of a mass arrest of 500 or more people with no evidence of involvement in terror. Odeh gave a false confession after 25 days of horrific sexual torture, including gang rape, being forced to watch another prisoner tortured to death, and failed attempts to coerce her father into raping her. Odeh was denied the ability to defend herself, was denied access to counsel in the Israeli military court, and did not receive a fair trial.
That narrative does not hold up based on the record.
The demonstrable facts show that:
■ Prior to her arrest in Israel, Odeh was a military participant in and organizer for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
■ Odeh confessed in a highly detailed account just one day after arrest. The timetable of her confession is inconsistent with the multi-week torture narrative. Other co-conspirators also quickly confessed; one of whom directly implicated Odeh as the mastermind in a 2004 film documentary.
■ After arrest Odeh was allowed to and did defend herself in the Israeli military court, where she was represented by counsel. Israel called witnesses to rebut the torture allegations.
■ An observer from the International Red Cross was present for the entire six-month Israeli trial, and stated afterward that the Israeli military court "had given the accused every chance of defending themselves, and the trial was – in his opinion – a fair trial."
...
The only victims in the Rasmea Odeh story are the two Hebrew University students killed in the 1969 supermarket bombing.Read the whole thing. Then ask yourself how much hypocrisy the Obama administration is showing by asking us to release these people.
Labels: Chicago, Detroit, illegal immigration, offensive Palestinians, Palestinian terrorism, Palestinians
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:04 AM
0 comments
Labels: Chicago, flash mob, Hashem Melech, Key Tov Orchestra, Sabbath music video
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:59 PM
0 comments
The indictment was handed down in Detroit, where at least part of Odeh's naturalization process took place. Odeh moved to the Chicago area shortly after gaining citizenship in Detroit in 2004, said Khaalid Walls, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Prosecutors said she was arrested Tuesday morning at her home in Evergreen Park, southwest of Chicago.
If convicted of immigration fraud, Odeh could face up to 10 years in a U.S. prison. She could also be stripped of her U.S. citizenship.
Her attorney, James Fennerty, declined to comment Tuesday about the allegations, but said Odeh worked as an associate director at the Arab American Action Network, a Chicago-area nonprofit group that advocates for new immigrants and tries to combat anti-Muslim and anti-Arab prejudice.
According to the indictment, Odeh was arrested over a 1969 attack in which bombs were planted at a crowded Jerusalem supermarket and at the British consulate. One of two bombs placed at the supermarket exploded, killing two people and wounding several others. Israeli authorities said the attacks were planned by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
It must be 'Islamophobia, right?
An Israeli military court sentenced Odeh to life in prison in 1970, but she was released 10 years later in a prisoner exchange with the PFLP, when Israel released 76 prisoners in exchange for an Israeli soldier captured in Lebanon, according to Odeh's indictment.
Labels: Chicago, illegal immigration, Palestinian terrorism
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:54 PM
2 comments
Indeed. And the declaration is long overdue.And then there’s President Obama. Obama has continuously forced Bibi into settlement freezes as he hopes to recommence peace negotiations with Abbas. At tremendous political cost, Bibi halted settlement construction in 2009, under the ruse that Obama would get Abbas to the table. While the US voted against the UN motion on Palestine, the US did not threaten to cut off aid. Abbas never tried this under George W Bush – yet he has tried it twice and now succeeded.
- Chicago's murder rate is up 31 percent over 2011. Gun violence is up 8 percent. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been useless at protecting his citizens since taking office. Yet, he has the audacity to tell Israel what we should do with their country. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his administration have proven that they know what is takes to protect their citizens. Can the same be said for Rahm?
- While Ban Ki Moon says that the settlement constructions are a fatal blow to peace prospects, he ignores upgrading the Palestinians to a Nation Status while Abbas hasn't done anything commence peace negotiations. Heck, he doesn't even control half his country. That’s a fatal blow.
- Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said building in E1 "destroys the two-state solution.” What? I thought we had two states now?
- Palestine will be officially an apartheid state; Abbas is a holocaust denier himself.
The events of last week in the United Nations have left Bibi (facing re-election and with aforementioned pressures) with no choice but to effectively declare peace negotiations dead in the water.
Labels: Abu Mazen, Ban Ki-Moon, Barack Hussein Obama, Binyamin Netanyahu, Chicago, European hypocrisy, hypocrisy, Judea and Samaria construction, Rahm Emanuel, Saeb Erekat, UN hypocrisy
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:24 AM
0 comments
In a vicious and personal assault rarely conducted at the highest level of U.S. politics, White House senior adviser David Plouffe repeatedly told reporters aboard Air Force One that Romney was “dishonest.” With the president of the United States in a cabin just a few steps away, his top adviser pushed out the new campaign theme that the man who had bested him in the debate Wednesday night is an untrustworthy scoundrel.
Generally presidential campaigns leave such personal attacks to surrogates, at least preserving the appearance that presidential candidates are above such things
Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki opened Plouffe’s remarks by airing for reporters the new Obama campaign ad, “Trust,” which claims that Romney is lying about his tax plan and can’t be trusted to be president.
On a separate front, top campaign adviser David Axelrod convened a phone call with reporters telling them that the “question” for them “is really one of character and whether or not a candidacy that’s so fundamentally rooted in hiding the truth and the facts from the American people and deception is the basis of trust on which you assign the presidency to a person.”
Axelrod announced that this would be the new theme of the Obama campaign. “That is what we are going to focus on moving forward,” he said.I guess that if you can't discuss the issues because your record is so awful, this is how you run a campaign.
Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, Chicago
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:41 PM
2 comments
UNRWA issued an appeal for $300 million for all the 'poor Palestinians' in Gaza. But after cutting the appeal amount in half, they are still $35 million short, i.e. they have raised $115 million out of $300 million. Maybe this (from an interview with UNRWA director Chris Guness) has something to do with why. There is also deep discontent about the removal of over 100,000 people from your food distribution lists. What is going on?I would bet that those 14,404 families who didn't apply for the food assistance are also 'no longer in Gaza.' Could it be that UNRWA counts 'refugees' like Chicago counts Democratic voters?
About 100,000 people have come off our food distribution lists because UNRWA is now using a more accurate poverty assessment system to determine eligibility for food assistance. This change in the eligibility system is meant to ensure that UNRWA can prioritize its resources on the poorest of the poor and avoid providing emergency poverty relief assistance to those who are not needy.
Many business people, wealthy merchants and property owners have come off the lists and interestingly very few people are complaining as the vast majority realize that the new system is much fairer. In this regard, the poverty survey represents a great improvement over the former system.
Thanks to the poverty survey UNRWA has been able to increase assistance to the abject poor (around 300,000 refugees) by doubling their rations.
Thousands of families who were poor and destitute but were excluded from UNRWA food assistance until now based on the previous income based system from the PA or UNRWA will be able to receive assistance. The food distributed to thousands of families who were not in need of assistance but received food until now can now be given to the poorest and most destitute refugees.
There are four categories of people who were eligible for food last round whose coupons have not been issued this food distribution round: 14,404 families who had not applied to the poverty survey by the middle of June despite each receiving a letter from UNRWA requesting them to apply over the last three months if they wished to continue being considered for food assistance; 9,251 families who applied to the poverty survey but were found to be non poor after the social worker visit; 1,388 families classified as abject or absolute poor by the poverty survey but failed to pick up their rations since the beginning of the year 2011, suggesting they may be out of Gaza; and 305 families who were found to be non poor after the second visit (complaint) and necessary verifications.
All families listed above with the exception of the 305 families in the last category can receive food this round upon applying for Poverty Survey, with their final poverty to be determined after reviewing their case through the poverty survey. If these families apply before the end of the month of July, UNRWA will ensure that they receive their food assistance during the month of Ramadan.
The protesters who closed down UNRWA’s Gaza office say they were doing this to fight for the rights of the refugees whose assistance is being slashed. What's your response to this?Heh. Read the whole thing.
Gunness: This protest action was entirely counter-productive. By keeping hundreds of UNRWA staff out of their offices, the organizers were harming the very refugees on whose behalf they claim to be protesting. The Gaza office is the "command and control" center from which we run our programs across the entire Gaza Strip.
We need access to our computers to service projects, to manage our education, health, relief and social service programs. It's where the personnel department is based for, for example, paying staff salaries, it's where our IT department is, it's where the radio room is for security and without these things our full programs become unsustainable very quickly.
Labels: Chicago, Chris Gunness, Gaza plenty, Palestinian refugees, UNRWA
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:54 PM
0 comments
I think I finally figured out why Barack Obama is so enamored with the 'Palestinians.' They're kind of like Democrats in Chicago. Once they get on the voter rolls, they never die. The extraordinary coverage of the 1948 war notwithstanding, the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem during the five-and-a-half months of fighting, from the partition resolution of November 29, 1947, to the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14, 1948, passed virtually unnoticed by the international community. Nor for that matter did the Arab states, burdened as they were with a relentless flow of refugees, or even the Palestinian leadership itself, have a clear idea of the dispersal's full magnitude, as demonstrated by the mid-June 1948 estimate of the prominent Palestinian leader, Emile Ghouri, of the number of refugees at 200,000: less than two thirds the actual figure. A few weeks later, after thousands more Arabs had become refugees, a Baghdad radio commentator was still speaking of 300,000 evacuees "who are forced to flee from the Jews as the French were forced to flee from the Nazis." Taking their cue from these claims, W. De St. Aubin, delegate of the League of Red Cross Societies to the Middle East, estimated the number of Arab refugees (in late July) at about 300,000, while Sir Raphael Cilento, director of the UN Disaster Relief Project (DRP) in Palestine, set the number at 300,000-350,000 (in early August).[1]Read the whole thing.
Paradoxically it was the Israelis who initially came with the highest, and most accurate, estimates. In early June Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was told by Yossef Weitz of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that "some 123,000 Arabs left 155 villages in the Jewish state's territory; another 22,000 left 35 villages outside the Jewish state: a total of 145,000 evacuees and 190 villages. Seventy-seven thousand Arabs left five cities in the Jewish state's territory (Haifa, Beisan, Tiberias, Safad, Samakh). Another 73,000 left two cities [designed to remain] outside the state (Jaffa and Acre). Forty thousand Arabs left Jerusalem: a total of 190,000 from eight cities. All in all, 335,000 Arabs fled (including 200,000 from the UN ascribed Jewish territory)."[2]
A comprehensive report by the Hagana's intelligence service, comprising a detailed village-by-village breakdown of the exodus, set the number of Palestinian Arab evacuees in the six-month period between December 1, 1947 and June 1, 1948, at 391,000: 239,000 from the UN-ascribed Jewish state, 122,000 from the territory of the prospective Arab state, and 30,000 from Jerusalem. Another exhaustive Israeli study set the number of refugees (in late October) at 460,000, almost evenly divided between the rural and urban sectors.[3]
This estimate was substantially higher than the 360,000 figure in the report of the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, submitted to the General Assembly on September 16, or Cilento's revised estimate of 400,300 a couple of weeks later, and was virtually identical to the supplementary report submitted on October 18 by Bernadotte's successor, Ralph Bunche, which set the number of refugees at 472,000 and anticipated the figure to reach a maximum of slightly over 500,000 in the near future.[4]
By now, however, the Arabs had dramatically upped the ante. In a memorandum dispatched to the heads of the Arab states and Arab League Secretary-General Abdel Rahman Azzam in mid-August, the Palestine Office in Amman, an organization operating under the auspices of the Transjordan government, estimated the total number of refugees at 700,000, of whom 500,000 were in Palestine and the rest in the neighboring Arab states. The memo struck a responsive chord, for in October the Arab League set the number of refugees at 631,967, and by the end of the month official Arab estimates ranged between 740,000 and 780,000. When the newly-established United Nations Relief for Palestine refugees (UNRPR) began operating in December 1948, it found 962,643 refugees on its relief rolls.[5]
Labels: Chicago, Palestinian refugees, UNRWA
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:36 AM
0 comments
Here's a claim that one of the bombs shipped by UPS from Yemen was only 17 minutes from exploding - and therefore could not have been intended for a Chicago area synagogue. According to French Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux, one of the two mail bombs addressed to Chicago synagogues, intercepted last week by authorities in the UK and UAE, was caught just in the nick of time.And for those of you saying - like I did - but weren't these bombs meant to be exploded by cell phones....
Tipped off by Saudi Arabian intelligence agents, investigators pulled the bombs from cargo planes at airports in England and the United Arab Emirates.
Sappers managed to disarm the device only 17 minutes before it was set to go off, according to Hortefeux, who refused to release further details in an interview on state-run France-2 television. He also would not reveal the source of the information on the timing.
Although the packages were addressed to two Chicago synagogues, the addresses were out of date – and the names on the packages included a reference to the Crusades, fought between the Christians and Muslims.
As a result, officials are now saying they do not believe the synagogues were the intended targets.
Because the communication cards were removed, and the cell phones could not receive calls, U.S. officials have said it was likely that terrorists intended the alarm or timer functions to operate as detonators.Hmmm.
Labels: Chicago, package bomb, UPS, Yemen
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:55 AM
0 comments
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
Like what you see? Please hit my tip box below!
Jerusalem |
 |
 |
