Murdering Jewish Children Generation to Generation

Sixteen year old Daniel Viflic has died....who was he? ask those exposed only to the western media.

Everyone in Israel knows who Daniel was-- he was the boy on the back of the school bus targeted by Palestinians who aimed an anti-tank missile at that school bus. He died finally of massive brain trauma from the shrapnel that lodged in his head. He fought to live for ten days.

There have been arrests in the deaths of the Fogel family. Who are the Fogels? ask those exposed only to western media. The savage butchery of a sleeping family, which would have been headline news had it happened in the U.S., was either barely mentioned or not mentioned in the western press. BBC did cover the arrests finally, ending with the politically correct and totally inane comment:

"There are almost 500,000 settlers living on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settlements are regarded as illegal under international law although Israel disputes this."

Let's start with the obvious--what has this got to do with a horrific mass murder by two Palestinians from the neighboring village with familial ties to a terrorist organization?

Is BBC implying that three helpless children, ages 11 years, 4 years, and 3 months old, deserve to die for living in an area Arabs and Israelis dispute? Apparently so. This is "politically correct" to the moonbat Far Left BBC-types, but morally horrific -- it's like telling a rape victim she deserved to get raped because she went out to a nightclub in a cocktail dress, went dancing where it "inflamed" men's passions and her rapist then shouldn't be expected to control himself. See, it's really HER fault.

That inflammatory figure of 500,000 fails to mention that 250,000 reside in Jerusalem suburbs already conceded by the Palestinians. The majority of the rest live in former Jewish lands (Kfar Etzion, for example) or along the Green Line (an armistice line, not a "border") itself, and for which the Palestinians had previously agreed to land swaps.

And yes, Israel and Israelis dispute the "occupied Palestinian land" propaganda also; none of it is "Palestinian" since the Supreme Court disallows building on privately held land, and "state lands" are disputed because the Palestinians have consistently refused to build a state, and therefore the last "land grant" by the League of Nations by default makes that land Jewish. THAT's the law, not the highly biased politically based opining of the anti-Israel demimonde.

Palestinians deliberately shoot an anti-tank missile at a school bus. Intended consequences: mass murder of children. Palestinians deliberately break into a home, armed, and slaughter most of a family [they missed two children but stated that had they known of those two children, they would have killed them also]. One news report stated that the killers were leaving the home when they heard the baby, 3 months old, crying -- so they returned and stabbed her to death as well.

No remorse. No compassion. No heat-of-passion defense. Solely murder because the victims are Jews. History shows this has nothing to do with "Israel" or "Zionism." Current events throughout the Middle East show that Moslem Arabs routinely murder their oppressed minorities. They hate Israel because we can't be oppressed and taught to fear them.

Palestinians, from the PA apparatchiks to the common citizens, uniformly lied and denied, suggesting that the Fogels were murdered by Thai workers (DNA evidence now proves it was Palestinians affiliated with PFLP, a terrorist group) and that 16 year old Daniel was not a minor, but rather a soldier:

"...the slain Zionist was killed weeks east of Gaza City after the targeting of a bus he was traveling in by the Qassam Brigades...the dead man was a Zionist soldier who stayed in intensive care at Soroka Hospital in BeerSheva in the territories after a significant deterioration in his health." [trans. thanks to Elder of Ziyon]

In fact, Daniel wasn't supposed to be on the bus -- he hitched a ride with the bus driver, a family friend, so he could go visit his grandparents who lived on the route.

We aren't surprised by the Palestinians....Jews in Israel remember the pogroms of the 1920s and 1930s by Arabs. Jewish families all over Mandatory Palestine were attacked and slaughtered in their homes. The butchery was savage, slow and torturous. This was before the State of Israel existed; before the Six Day War and "occupation" of the West Bank; these were long-established religious communities with religious, non-Zionist Jewish households.

Arab hate has nothing to do with Zionism, or Israel, or "occupation" or "settlements" -- it has existed in this land since Arab invaders moved in and oppressed Christian and Jewish natives in the name of Arab and Moslem supremacy. And the mewling moon-bats of the Left, willfully ignorant of history, are simply useful idiots for Palestinian propagandizing.

Israel remembers these deaths, and all of our deaths. Peace is impossible with Arab-Islamic supremacist murderers whose raison d'etre is killing Jews.

The Un-Ceasefire Up-date

On April 10th, following at least three open and various back-channel pleas by Hamas for a cease-fire, Israel finally agreed to stop responding to Palestinian rocket, mortar and missile fire from Gaza.

The Usual Suspects all breathed a sigh of international relief and proclaimed a "cease fire."

Thirteen rockets and missiles were fired into Israel anyway. Hamas always has to have the last word.

Then on Wednesday, April 13th, another round of missiles were fired at local farming villages.

Then on Friday, April 15th, Grad missiles were fired into Ashdod, a major city on the Israeli coast and the biggest port in Israel.

It is, coincidentally, where I go with my family in warm weather because it has cleaner and less crowded beaches than Tel Aviv...and parking!

Forecast: clear and sunny with a chance of drizzling missiles later in the day.

WHAT "cease-fire?" It was just the Palestinians, reloading.

Chametz Cleaning

I love Passover. I love the food, the songs, the Haggadah, the friends, the whole celebration!

I hate cleaning for Passover.


There are all levels of cleaning chametz out of the home before Pesach. Even my most secular friends here in Israel make their homes free of chametz which is any leavened food, forbidden to Jews during the Passover week.

Note to Jew-haters: blood is forbidden year round, so you can quit spreading that rumor any time....

What is chametz? It's bread, obviously, and not so obviously it is any combination of water and grain that ferments. Specifically, it is any of the five grains -- wheat, spelt, barley, oats, and rye -- which has come into contact with water for more than 18 minutes. It includes such basic food stuffs as breakfast cereal, crackers, cookies, cakes and.....beer!

The Husband is already feeling withdrawal pangs.

Chabad points out, correctly, that since chametz can be present in the ingredients of prepared food items, one should buy only "kosher-for-Pesach" labeled food items.

Okay, I see the point in this, and when we lived in a Chabad community, we followed that as closely as practicable....if there is an upside/downside to living in Israel, you find that Chabad is correct if one is a Lubavitcher, but that there are other, more lenient interpretations also.

I don't keep bread and cookies and beer in my house during Pesach.

Generally, anything already opened and used in the kitchen and dining room is also chametzdik, to be on the safe side, so the open container of cottage cheese which had a knife in it that previously had contact with crackers (to spread the cottage cheese) is something that goes. Unopened cottage cheese stays.

OTOH, I see no reason to get rid of my sealed yoghurts. The label says "kosher" but not "kosher-for-Pesach"....so I looked at the ingredients and failed to find anything that remotely suggested chametz in the ingredients. The yoghurt stays.

I do NOT throw out all the spices in my cupboard which have been opened and used. But I put them away in the "chametzdik" cupboard and sell them for the week, and buy new unopened spices for that one week. Heck, I always need extra turmeric, cinnamon, and curry anyway...

Ditto for the dried fruit. Unopened packages are okay for Pesach, and the opened ones get put away in the "chametz" drawer.

People's practices vary depending on their degree of religious observance and also on the time available. Pesach cleaning was never intended to be a prodigious spring-cleaning, although I know a lot of women who treat it as a major household overhaul. Even rabbis caution against this -- Pesach cleaning is to rid the house of chametz. Period.

Why the fixation on what seems to be such an ancient ritualistic rule?

First, G-d commanded it. If you don't believe that, then I can't help you.

Second, any Jewish community, no matter what its level of stringency, or not, loves its customs that have come down from antiquity in our annual celebration of the Festival of Freedom.

Third, there is a spiritual aspect to ridding one's home of chametz, which is, sadly, often overlooked or lost in the hectic rush. As one rids the home of leavening, one should be ridding one's soul of the schmutzi stuff we've accumulated over the year. It's time to let go of ego, let go of anger, let go of pettiness, let go of injured feelings, false pride, revenge fantasies, despair and hurt.

If you clean your house but don't try to clean your soul, you're sort of missing the point, apart from "First" noted above.

The importance of this commandment regarding ridding ourselves of chametz is discerned in the way it is applied: first, it is the only time Jews are commanded to do without something communally for a week; and second, it is the only food that cannot be nullified by the 1/60 admixture rule during this week.

Now, there is chametz cleaning and then there is OCD chametz cleaning. My rebbetzin tells tales of people who actually put cheesecloth in the water pipe between the street main and the pipe into the house to prevent chametz from entering the home. Sorry, but this is just too over-the-top for me...when was the last time you turned on your faucets and saw bread crumbs pour out, after all?

We do what I think is pretty basic: eat all the chametz items we can before Pesach.

Clean every room that has had food in it. This is every room except the bathrooms and our bedroom. The Boy eats at his desk in front of his computer, the Husband and I both eat at our computer desk, and of course there is the living room/dining room area...

Prodigious laundry stuff. Wash sheets, wash tablecloths, wash clothes, wash dishtowels, etc.

We clean for chametz. Way too many people do "Spring Cleaning"...as much as I love the fact that my husband cleaned all the windows in the house, I don't remember ever eating on the windows.....however, I'm not complaining since he cleaned the refrigerator for me tonight (a job I loathe, and which he does better and faster than I do...).

In addition to the 'fridge, we also clean the cupboards, stove, the burners, kasher the sink and line it, and boil the granite countertops. I specifically got granite countertops so I wouldn't have to line them. And also scrub the backsplashes...I'm even known to take toothpicks to pick the schmutz out of the cracks....

Now if I could take those toothpicks to grimy parts of my neshamah as well....

Lying To Their People: School Bus? What School Bus?

People who live outside of Israel, Jewish and not, ask all the time, "Why can't you all just get along?" or words to that effect. Sometimes they simply short cut straight to "You (meaning Israel) need to do something to make peace." In diplomatese, it is frequently pronounced as "Israel needs to take bold steps to advance the peace process."

You'll notice that almost no one asks what the Palestinians need to do to "make peace."

Peace is like dancing -- it takes two.

One does not make peace with a governing body which educates its people to slaughter you. The United States did not run after al Qaeda following 9/11, crying "peace, peace!" but instead bombed Afghanistan into the Stone Age. Speaking of disproportional force....

The British did not rush to the conference table, with warm invitations to the IRA to join them for tea after the Irish "freedom fighters" bombed London. Instead, they invaded Ulster, imposed martial law, arrested people without cause, detained and tortured anyone they felt like, and threw up an Apartheid Wall to separate Catholic citizens of the same country from the Protestant pro-British milieu.

Yet these world powers, among others, have been strangely silent over the barrage of missiles and rockets hurled by the Palestinians at Israeli civilians these last couple of weeks.

And the icing on the cake came from the Palestinian Authority, who told its population that the perfidious Jews are making a big deal out of nothing in order to attack the righteous Palestinian people [insert sarcasm here]:

"Israel is a country that was founded on aggression and colonialism, and it lives on the continuation of bloodshed, war and violence. The racist Israeli apartheid state is incapable of turning to peace and coexistence between nations... This aggression is currently focused on Gaza, under the pretext of a shell being fired at an Israeli bus. The [school] bus wasn't that badly damaged, but Israel wants to use the attack on the bus as an excuse for its latest war crime against our people."

"Pretext?" Hardly.

A Palestinian fires an anti-tank missile, which has to be sighted on its target, which is a clearly labeled school bus which had just discharged a group of students, and fires it -- this is a deliberate targeting of children, and beyond being criminal, is morally indefensible.

And the PA knows it -- which is why this particular rant omitted any mention that it was a school bus or any mention of the child critically wounded in the attack.

It's hard for Palestinian officials to sputter indignantly at the camera, while seeking the moral high ground, about "Palestinian schools being attacked [because rockets were launched from them]" when you yourself are targeting Israeli school kids in school buses.

This same pronouncement was also wholly devoid of any mention of Palestinian rocket and missile attacks on civilian towns and cities, which drove over one million Israelis into bomb shelters for the better part of a week. Since the week-long barrage was what the Israeli military was responding to before the attack on the school bus, the omission of this critical fact is an enormous lie of omission.

Carpet bombing and then re-occupying all of the Gaza Strip would be an appropriate response, a la Coalition Forces in Iraq, or the British invasion of Ulster. After all, if it's permissible for the Great World Powers to bomb indiscriminately and occupy countries tens of thousands of miles from them, I'm sure they'd understand our taking similar steps. Right.

But the Israeli government, unlike the Palestinians and the neighboring war-mongers-in-chief, isn't looking for a war.

We may end up with one. Judging by the steady build up of weaponry by Hezbollah and Hamas, its only a matter of time.

But it is moments like this that the world press needs to cover, instead of ignore: one cannot make peace with a leadership which consistently lies to its own people about the state of the conflict, playing the "victim card" when they themselves are historically the aggressors. This creates a scenario where, because of generations of lies, the leadership cannot compromise, cannot make peace, and cannot educate its people to compromise in favor of peace.

This is why we can't make peace with the Palestinians. There really is no peace partner on the Palestinian side. There is no real desire for peace, but simply a desire to negotiate or war for the greater advantage. The Palestinians have been taught nothing by their corrupt leadership but hatred of the "other," to extol murder, to glorify war, and to seek revenge for an invented victimhood. Peace could be at hand, but the Palestinian mafia governing its people rejects it every time for maximalist demands and strident calls for killing Jews and destroying Israel.

About That Cease-Fire

I love listening to France 24 and BBC. They are both so pro-Palestinian that it hurts for them to include facts that the entire blogosphere knows. You can almost see Annette Young wincing at the bad-for-Palestinian facts.

For example:

France 24: "Twenty Palestinian men have been killed, as well as a child." No mention that the twenty Palestinian men were Hamas terrorists engaged in firing weapons into Israel. They leave out that pertinent fact so that it sounds like 20 guys on their way home from work got offed.

BBC: Mentions as an afterthought to its portrayal of Palestinians being killed that, oh, by the way, this Israeli response was in retaliation for a barrage of missile and rocket attacks on Israel's civilians -- while playing video of the school bus hit by a Hamas anti-tank projectile, and totally omitting the fact that the kid on the bus is at death's door.

Hamas has been talking since April 8th about a cease-fire. Not unsurprisingly, the France 24 correspondent in the field was down south, and told Anettele that Israelis thought any cease-fire was probably pretty fragile, since during his interview he could see a Grad missile launched towards Ashkelon, a major Israeli city.

Hamas is trying their past tactics: fire missiles, look like "resistance fighters;" do as much damage to Israel as possible, and then shout "Cease-fire!" before the our jets get off the tarmac.

Not buying, guys.

Targeting our school bus took us to a whole new level...which I'm sure you noticed as we are now bombing YOU instead of tunnels.

In the interests of showing Hamas's true intentions regarding the mythical cease-fire, I give you today's Qassam Count:

3:19pm: A Qassam rocket was fired from the northern Gaza Strip and exploded in the southern Ashkelon.

2:37pm: Two mortar shells fired from northern Gaza landed in the Eshkol Region.

1:21pm: A Qassam rocket fired from northern Gaza Strip landed in the Eshkol Region.

12:53pm: Two rockets fired from northen Gaza landed in southern Israel.

10:21am: Qassam rocket was fired from the northern Gaza Strip and exploded in the southern Ashkelon, Israel.

6:52am: 3 mortar shells fired from the Gaza Strip hit western Negev in Israel.

WHAT cease-fire?

The Arab League Wants A "No Fly Zone"

The Arab League wants a "no-fly-zone"imposed over Gaza to protect the Palestinian civilian population from Israeli air raids.

Of course, if Hamas were not firing barrages of missiles, rockets and mortars into Israel from Gaza on a daily and nightly basis, there wouldn't be any Israeli retaliation that endangers the allegedly innocent Palestinian civilian population. I say "allegedly" because that is the population that elected Hamas, and seems to cheer, dance in the streets and hand out candy every time a terrorist kills a Jew, regardless of how young.

However, let's assume that as civilians they are non-combatants and hence should be protected.

Hamas could protect their civilian population by firing its varied arsenal of weapons from the open spaces away from densely crowded city centers. Hamas chieftains could hide in bunkers someplace other than below their major hospital, full of civilian patients. Hamas could stock their ammo dumps in places other than mosques and civilian homes. Hamas could stop firing Kassams from schools. Hamasnikim combatants could wear uniforms instead of civilian dress.

Israel does its best to take out the terror chiefs and not the general population, however, collateral damage is a fact of war, and when cars are blown apart by a missile in a targeted killing, the intent is not to wound the civilian 20 feet away, but frankly, there is no way to protect against the hazards of shrapnel. Note please, that unlike Hamas, Israel is targeting military targets instead of school buses.

Even Goldstone finally got around to recognizing that there is a difference between deliberately targeting civilians and the unfortunate hazards of shrapnel in crowded areas.

So, in sum, Hamas has a couple of options:

1. Stop firing weapons into Israel proper and stop targeting civilian locales; and/or,

2. Use non-civilian venues for war purposes; and/or

3. Hamas could even wear uniforms instead of civvies in order to make it clear who is the fighter and who is the civilian, but apparently identifying one's self as a "shaheed" is too risky for always-civilian-clad terror squads.

Hamas has declined to take any steps to protect its civilian population and all evidence points to their fighters deliberate embedding in civilian locales and populations in order to use those civilian as human shields.

And this just in: any cease-fire agreement, according to Hamas, specifically means that Israel cannot target terrorist cells preparing to launch rocket attacks on Israelis. In other words, we have to give them a "free shot" before we can fire back....News For Hamas: this is NOT a basketball game. You "prepare to launch" and you're fair game.

So why is the Arab League in a lather?

Well, let's start with the obvious.

The Arab League is not calling for a "no-fly-zone" over Syria, which is committing daily massacres of unarmed Arab civilians. The Arab League is not calling for a no-fly-zone over eastern Turkey, where fellow Moslems, the Kurds, are strafed and shot on a routine basis by Turkey's air force and army. The Arab League did not convene a special meeting to call for a "no-fly-zone" over Yemen last year when Saudi forces invaded it in order to stamp out terrorist training camps, whose denizens had killed a Saudi police officer.

So, why is the Arab League treating Israel's justifiable response to its civilians being shot at as some sort of atrocity that needs stopping?

Because it's Israel, that upstart Dhimmi state that under Sharia law has no right to exist, and its population should be exterminated or at least brutalized into knowing their places as second class untermenschen of the Moslem Arab world hierarchy.

It's okay with the Arab League if Moslems slaughter other Moslems, as in Turkey (or Kurdistan, where the killing fields are); or if Arabs slaughter other Arabs, as in Syria and Lebanon and Yemen and Darfur and South Sudan and Somalia and....well, you get the idea.

But it's NOT okay for anyone else to defeat and kill genocidal Arabs who are killing non-Arab civilians, because THAT is an affront to "Arab honor" and must be prevented--preferably by NATO so the Arab world doesn't have to run any risks.

It doesn't worry Israelis. First, because we're sure the sane world (NATO powers, not the U.N.) will see this ploy for what it is; and secondly, so what? Even if the world falls for this comedy, Israel has a pretty fabulous track record of shooting down Russian and British pilots. Come one, come all -- our Air Force is demonstrably better than your Air Force.