Yom Reva’ee
Wednesday
20 Av 5782
August 17 2022
The Photos of the Day
A new variety of watermelon!
Anyone who has been to Israel knows that Israelis are obsessed with avatiach (aka watermelon). Every supermarket has large bins of watermelons out front for consumers to knock until they find the perfect one.
The problem with watermelons is water–each regularly sized watermelon consumes about 56 liters of water per kilogram, overall about 4-500 liters per watermelon. At a time of shrinking water supplies, this is not good.
Enter Israeli scientists at the Origin Zeraim company who have developed two new varieties of watermelon named “Essence” and “Maxima”. These varieties consume 30% less water and . . . are 10% sweeter.
A milestone for Nefesh and Israel: Kolakevod!!
Israel received 225 new immigrants from North America at Ben Gurion Airport today on an El Al flight organized by the amazing organization Nefesh B’Nefesh.
The reception was marked by the 75,000th new immigrant that Nefesh has brought here over the years.
Also the flight included 40 young people who will join the IDF as lone soldiers–adding to the ranks of some 3,500 lone soldiers already in the IDF.
TODAY’S BLOG
Bereft Of Any Claim To Morality
Through the years, it has been sickening to see how arch-terrorist Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen) has been laundered.
In Israel, it was a process that started with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres who were desperate to find “partners” for their Oslo Accords. T
Thus, Yasser Arafat, his right-hand man Mahmoud Abbas, and the rest of their PLO cohorts were cleaned up and no longer called terrorists. Instead they were instantly transformed into “peacemakers” who had abandoned their terrorist ideology which sought the destruction of Israel.
In short, Arafat, Abbas, and the PLO became the good guys.
And Hamas became the bad guys.
Even in the years from 1995-2007 (Arafat died in 2004) when more than 160 Palestinian suicide bombers blew more than 1100 Israeli men, women, and children to pieces, leftist Israelis and Western governments continued to incomprehensibly look to Ramallah as a “partner for peace.”
In 2007, Abbas became the de facto Palestinian president for life.
About ten years later, on October 25, 2016, your humble servant wrote this in blog:
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“Mahmoud Abbas, unelected president of the Palestinian Authority and Chairman of the PLO, has never been one to brook any opposition.
Over the years, his rivals have been ruthlessly imprisoned and tortured, deported, or simply killed. Abbas’ real talent has been to accomplish this elimination of the opposition while hugging and kissing international idiots who come to Ramallah to embrace him as a ‘man of peace.’
Nothing that Abbas does stops him from being the darling of the West. Not the fact that he wrote a “dissertation” at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow about how the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated, not the fact that he was the financial mastermind behind the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes, not the fact that he constantly rails against all things Jewish–none of this diminishes the adoration he receives.”
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And the money continues to pour in from Europe and the United States. The European Union in particular, with Germany in the lead has financed the PLO to the tune of billions of Euros.
Which brings us to yesterday.
Arch-terrorist Abbas was in Berlin holding a press conference in the German Chancellery with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. That the Germans would invite such a person to Germany is beyond the pale.
Inasmuch as he helped organize and fund the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes in 1973, Abbas was asked by a surprisingly enlightened reporter if he would apologize for the massacre.
Feeling very comfortable among his long time German friends, Abbas blithely refused to answer the question and angrily ranted: “I have 50 slaughters that Israel committed: 50 massacres, 50 slaughters, 50 holocausts.”
This remark is no surprise to anyone who has followed Abbas over the years. It is exactly the same thing he has said a hundred times in Arabic.
Of course immediately after his “50 holocausts” statement, we had the Germans condemning his remarks followed in short order by our leftist Israelis including PM Lapid and “Defense” Minister Benny Gantz.
Gantz issued this disingenuous statement:
“Abu Mazen’s words are despicable and false, and are an attempt to distort and rewrite history.
The unfortunate and unfounded comparison between the Holocaust, which was carried out by the Germans and their helpers in an attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, and the IDF, which protects the rise of Israel in its land and the citizens of Israel and its sovereignty from brutal terrorism, is Holocaust denial.
Those who seek peace are expected to acknowledge past crimes and not distort reality and rewrite history. We will continue to learn from history including its distorted and dark elements, strive for peace and preserve our Jewish security and resilience.”
Benny Gantz.
The same Benny Gantz who has given concession after concession to Abbas and his PLO cronies.
The same Benny Gantz who invited Abbas to his home in Rosh Ha’ayin and who regularly travels to Ramallah to meet Abbas.
Knesset Legislator Hauser put it concisely this morning: “In Berlin Abu Mazen denies the Holocaust, in Rosh Ha’Ayin he sits down for coffee with Gantz.”
These are the final questions your humble servant would like to pose today:
What is the moral disconnect that permits the Gantzes, Lapids, Rabins, Pereses of the world along with European leaders, American administrations, and others to overlook the most hideous evil?
How can any Israeli with a conscience sit down for coffee and have a pleasant conversation with a terrorist whom we know degrades the Holocaust, and whom we know helped carry out the Munich massacre, and whom we know is responsible for inciting the Palestinian population to hate and murder Israelis?
How can any Israeli or anyone else so compartmentalize his or her morality that even a person who is viciously anti-Semitic and has perpetrated continuous crimes against Jews and Israelis becomes exempt from anger and outrage?
In your humble servant’s opinion, a person, or country, or union of countries that compartmentalizes their morality so that they can sit down with a terrorist is no better than the terrorist themselves.
They are bereft of any claim to morality.
A student from Malawi, who had worked with an Israeli health volunteer in his country battling AIDS, came up to us as we walked down the street in the UC-Davis Picnic Day Parade and wanted to carry the Israeli flag.