In the time that we're here today, more women and children will die violently in the Darfur region than in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Israel or Lebanon. So, after September 30, you won't need the UN - you will simply need men with shovels and bleached white linen and headstones.
[last lines] Serge Trifkovic: Miracles do happen. I do not know if it is another, maybe deadlier, terrorist attack that will act as a catalyst, or whether it will be a geopolitical confrontation in the Middle East itself, with Israel perhaps at serious peril. But I do hope and trust that a jolt will bring back into the minds and hearts of westerners the awareness of the need to stand up and be counted.
Grace Bridges: If Moses had been a woman, leading the Jews out of Egypt, she'd have stopped to ask for directions. They would've found Israel within a week.
Becky Fischer: It's no wonder, with that kind of intense training and discipling, that those young people are ready to kill themselves for the cause of Islam. I wanna see young people who are as committed to the cause of Jesus Christ as the young people are to the cause of Islam. I wanna see them as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, you know, because we have... excuse me, but we have the truth!
Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where
[interrupting the trappers' gruesome song about the joys of killing animals] George Noon: Oh, stop! James Humphrey: That's sick! Frenchy Cabazon: I agree! Nutter was singing in the wrong key! Preston Nutter: No I wasn't! It was Loutzenheiser! I was singing in E flat minor. Frenchy Cabazon: The SONG'S in F sharp major! Shannon Bell: I think they're the same thing. I mean, E flat is the relative major of F sharp. Frenchy Cabazon: No it isn't! The relative minor is three half-tones DOWN from the major, not up! George Noon: No, it's three down. Like A is the relative minor of C major. O.D. Loutzenheiser: But isn't A sharp in C major? Shannon Bell: Wait, are you singing mixolydian scales or something? Frenchy Cabazon: A sharp is tonic to C major! It's the sixth! James Humphrey: No it isn't! Israel Swan: Well, it would be like a raised 13th if anything.
David Dobel: Yoy said it yourself, you're afraid to sleep alone. That's the whole story. You surround yourself with this farrage of babysitters, this loving-disabled little sex kitten who's driving you crazy, the Jew manager, you know? And let me tell you I am of the Hebrew pursuassion, but the guy that handles you is a member of one of the lost tribes of Israel that should have remained lost. And you got this shrink who, like God, never speaks, and like God, is dead. There's nothing wrong with being afraid. We were meant to be afraid. That's why you gotta build a survival kit!
Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building
And thus to my final and most melancholy point: a great number of Stalin's enforcers and henchmen in Eastern Europe were Jews. And not just a great number, but a great proportion. The proportion was especially high in the secret police and 'security' departments, where no doubt revenge played its own part, as did the ideological attachment to Communism that was so strong among internationally minded Jews at that period: Jews like David Szmulevski. There were reasonably strong indigenous Communist forces in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, but in Hungary and Poland the Communists were a small minority and knew it, were dependent on the Red Army and aware of the fact, and were disproportionately Jewish and widely detested for that reason. Many of the penal labor camps constructed by the Nazis were later used as holding pens for German deportees by the Communists, and some of those who ran these grim places were Jewish. Nobody from Israel or the diaspora who goes to the East of Europe on a family-history fishing-trip should be unaware of the chance that they will find out both much less and much more than the package-tour had promised them. It's easy to say, with Albert Camus, 'neither victims nor executioners.' But real history is more pitiless even than you had been told it was.
Israel Swan: If you don't find a nice girl in Colorado, just remember, there's plenty of mountain sheep. George Noon: How big of mountain sheep?
Moshe Cohen: To have Israel in something so potentially dangerous to Christianity could have serious repercussions for us.
Jesus: Is your Israel free now that these men are dead? Judas: No! Jesus: Then follow me. I will show you how to be free. I am the Way.
There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don
Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs... Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home
I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots
Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler's former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state's application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming 'A-Day' under the non-uplifting slogan: 'You can drink
Israel Swan: Let's build a snowman! We can make him our best friend. We can name him Tom or we can name him George! We can make him tall, or we can make him not so tall. Snowman! He'll have a happy face, a happy smile, a happy point of view. If you build me a snowman, then I'll build one for you. So, let's build a snowman! We can make him our best friend. We can name him Bob or we can name him Beowulf! We can make him tall, or we can make him not so tall. Snowman! Hey! He'll have a happy face, a happy smile, a happy point of view. If you build me a snowman, then I'll build one for you. Snowman! Snowman! Snowman!
Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always
[singing] Israel Swan: Maybe we'll all get really sick. And maybe we'll all die... Sooooooooooooo, let's build a snowman
Dixie: Since I wasn't officially in the band, you know how it goes, it ain't easy. Detective Skinner: Yeah, sure. That's not exactly why I'm here. Israel Goldkiss was pushed from the roof. That makes you a suspect. Dixie: Jesus bleeding Christ! Are you paying attention? I'm talking The Beatles, here. The Fab Four. John understood. That's why they had him killed, you know? Now they're trying to kill me, because they finally realised who's behind all those songs. But I ain't seen no royalties. Detective Skinner: Yeah, that's tough. But either you cooperate, or I book you. Dixie: I've been doing nothing but cooperate my whole fucking life. That's what it's all about to be in a band. I'm not saying they weren't creatively involved... but most of the time, they were off with that Maharishi. You know, India, whatever, you know. There I was, all alone in the studio with my brilliant ideas... Thank God I had George Martin. George... Oh, that album in particular, we grew together like this, me and George.
I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as 'Abu Nidal' ('father of struggle'), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat's main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when Abu Nidal asked me if I would like to be trained in one of his camps. No thanks, I explained. From this awkward beginning there was a further decline. I was then asked if I knew Said Hammami, the envoy of the PLO in London. I did in fact know him. He was a brave and decent man, who in a series of articles in the London Times had floated the first-ever trial balloon for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. 'Well tell him he is a traitor,' barked my host. 'And tell him we have only one way with those who betray us.' The rest of the interview passed as so many Middle Eastern interviews do: too many small cups of coffee served with too much fuss; too many unemployed heavies standing about with nothing to do and nobody to do it with; too much ugly furniture, too many too-bright electric lights; and much too much faux bonhomie. The only political fact I could winnow, from Abu Nidal's vainglorious claims to control X number of 'fighters' in Y number of countries, was that he admired the People's Republic of China for not recognizing the State of Israel. I forget how I got out of his office.
We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attacks on the twin towers and the pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq. These events swung American public opinion in our favor
Actually
I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry did settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history.
Peace can happen in 24 hours....just like war can happen in 24 hours.
If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it's already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in 'Judaea and Samaria,' let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it's flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable 'solution.' There's that word again...
All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (god having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers.
How much longer is the world willing to endure this spectacle of wanton cruelty?
Palestinian and Israeli leaders finally recover the Road Map to Peace, only to discover that, while they were looking for it, the Lug Nuts of Mutual Interest came off the Front Left Wheel of Accommodation, causing the Sport Utility Vehicle of Progress to crash into the Ditch of Despair.
The Jews are a peculiar people: Things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people, and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it. Poland and Czechoslovakia did it.Turkey threw out a million Greeks and Algeria a million Frenchmen. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese--and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.
I never ever thought that I was a giggler. I was the one who could hold it together but I didn't on this... - Ashley Jensen
2 - people who like it Add to favorite
They're not clothes that Ashley would wear. But the thing is, you can't stand out. At first I thought, ... - Ashley Jensen
1 - people who like it Add to favorite
I know what I look like. I'm not a babe who's automatically going to be the leading-lady type. I think ... - Ashley Jensen
0 - people who like it Add to favorite
Wow, that's a lot. Basically I have been trying to build a career for myself. I learned early on what to... - Alana Evans
The only person who beat me was Jenna Jameson and that kicks ass.... - Alana Evans
I've learned to think in terms of having a long career. Actors can have very long careers that last unti... - Bryce Dallas Howard
