A freak snowstorm hits Israel and buries the area in snow.
A snowman at the Kotel
Just the other day I was on the phone with a friend of mine in Israel and she was complaining about how much she missed our Montreal winters, and how jealous she was of me for having gone skiing and how she wished she could be here. All I can say is, be careful what you wish for. I don’t think Haifa (where she lives) will see much snow – probably just rain – but still . . .
More empty threats by the UN to Saddam Hussein:
U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said Monday that Iraq must begin destroying its illicit al-Samoud missiles by Saturday and he did not expect any more talks with Iraq on the issue.
[ . . . ]
Blix last Friday ordered Baghdad to begin destroying the missiles, their warheads, engines, launchers and other components by Saturday after concluding they exceeded the 90-mile range set for Iraqi rockets by a Security Council resolution.
But without the U.N. agreeing to take any kind of action if these demands are not met, this threat is as empty as a scrawny kid telling the schoolyard bully to stop stealing his lunch money “or else”.
I’ve come to the conclusion that going to bed at 4am when you have to be up for work at 7 is NOT a smart idea.
The National Religious Party and Shinui agreed yesterday to join Sharon’s coalition government.
This despite Shinui’s anti-religious stance. Although Shas has so far been excluded from the government, in keeping with Lapid’s promise that Shinui would never join a government that includes Shas. At any rate, it looks like the NRP and Shinui have made a couple of key compromises:
The NRP received assurances that religious education would remain independent and budget cuts for national service for religious women would be repealed.
The coalition guidelines will include an agreement reached between the NRP and Shinui which calls for the Tal Law that grants IDF service deferments to all yeshiva students to be canceled and replaced by a new arrangement. The Large Families Law, under which state support for families increases sharply from the fifth child, will be replaced by a law granting an equal allotment for each child.
The key issue to watch there is the Yeshiva deferment one. This has been in place since 1948, when Ben-Gurion made a concession to a small number of Yeshiva students, exempting them from army service in attempt to preserve the small number of religious scholars from Eastern Europe who survived the Holocaust. It quickly ballooned into a huge loophole, through which virtually all religious men and women are able to defer their army service by declaring themselves too religious to serve. It will be interesting to see what the law is replaced with. I personally suspect it won’t be too different from the status quo, because Sharon would never risk alienating the entire Haredi population of Israel at this point.
Shinui and the NRP give Sharon a very narrow majority. If Am Ehad joins the coalition, it will be a bit more secure. Labor, however, still seems to be holding out, and it’s starting to look like Mitzna may actually stay out of the government. Yes, I know I predicted otherwise, but hey, who says I’m right?
The world media is decrying this as being bad for the peace process, saying that Sharon has formed a right-wing government that opposes peace. The NRP is opposed to Palestinian statehood as a matter of record, but I suspect that won’t matter much, as the parties have agreed to consider President Bush’s “road map” – if only to help the ailing Israeli economy for now.
L. Ian MacDonald was on CHOM this morning talking politics with Terry DiMonte, like most Monday mornings. They were discussing Iraq, and how if we lined up George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein and asked Canadians to choose, about half of them right now would choose Saddam – the guy who (and I’m paraphrasing from memory here) “used mustard gas on his own people and rapes children in front of their parents as a torture technique. Nice guy, eh?”
Both were saying how ridiculous that is, and how they don’t understand it. And MacDonald said how there’s a difference between legitimate criticism of war priorities and of what would happen in the region after Saddam was ousted, and irresponsible blanket criticism based on “a wave of anti-Americanism in this country, which is not unlike antisemitism in that they’re both based on envy.”
I always liked that guy.
I was just watching The Agency on CBS.
Between “Reality TV” and prime-time soap operas, I thought I’d seen it all. But this hour of TV just set a new low. In the show – which is about the CIA – the Americans travel to Israel to attempt to broker a deal between the Israeli Mossad and the Palestinian Authority. (Yeah right!)
Even more ludicrously, an assassination attempt on the CIA staff is traced back to “extremist Israeli settlers” – including an IDF captain and a high-ranking Israeli security officer – who, according to the script, are so against peace efforts that they liaised with Hamas in order to make and detonate bombs. The entire scenario is so ridiculous, I had a hard time keeping a straight face. Never mind that right-wing Israelis, although portrayed by the media as fanatics, have never been involved terrorism, as the show suggests. And they would never in a million years dream of working with a Palestinian terror group like Hamas.
I guess the scriptwriters were afraid of seeming as though they were taking sides. But attempting to paint both sides with the terrorism brush is incorrect and unfair.
The scenes where one of the characters, ostensibly a high-ranking member of the Israeli Mossad, was speaking the most awful Hebrew I’ve ever heard, were rather amusing. (Although his boss seemed to be fairly fluent). The thing that made me literally laugh out loud, though, was when the CIA – in attempt to stop a cell phone from being used as a bomb detonator – decided to block all cell phone signals in Jerusalem. Anyone who knows how reliant Israelis are on their cell phones would understand.
Only on TV.
Went to an amazing Bon Jovi concert last night.
I’ve always been a little bit of a closet Bon Jovi fan . . . it’s one of those guilty pleasures, like eating raw chocolate chip cookie dough. I’m one of the only people I know who not only owns, but actually listens to These Days. My copy of Crossroad is almost entirely worn out, and my Keep The Faith CD isn’t far behind.
The concert itself was great – the Goo Goo Dolls played an incredible opening set that was practically worth the ticket price on its own, and Bon Jovi’s music is tailor-made for large arenas. Of course, with such a large repertoire of hits, disappointments were almost a guarantee. Notably absent from last night’s setlist were such hits as Keep The Faith, Bed of Roses, Blaze of Glory, and the song that turned me into a huge fan at age fifteen: Always. Among others. The band played for two hours and squeezing in all their great songs would have taken at least twice that.
No political commentary, though. Just rock n’ roll. Gotta appreciate that.
The roof collapsed at a Toys ‘R’ Us store in Maryland, injuring two people. That’s just disturbing.
Update: Reports now indicate that at least 9 people have been injured. At a toy store! That’s just so wrong!
A few years ago, Disney had a smash hit with the movie “Cool Runnings”, about Jamaica’s first bobsled team to qualify for the Olympics, in 1988.
Now it looks like Israel wants to follow suit.
The men hope their ambitious entry into winter sport will cheer the people of Israel, a country where snow is a rare and the newly formed Israeli Bobsled Federation was forced to invent a Hebrew word for bobsled: “mizhelet bob.”
The team members so far, David Greaves, Adam Zeff, and John Frank, are Americans or Canadians who are in the process of getting their Israeli citizenship. So it’s not as if they’ve never seen snow. Zeff and Frank are both expert skiers. John Frank is a former football player with two superbowl rings to his name. They’re serious athletes and this isn’t likely to be reminiscent of the Jamaican story.
They won’t be medal contenders even if they do make it to the Olympics, but the notion of Israel entering the bobsled race is pretty neat.
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