L'Chaim - to Life

I have been reading so many lies and half-truths about Israel and, not surprisingly there seem to be so many people who feel that the world would be a better place without it. It seems that every liberal and his brother, sister, parents, cousins, etc is quick to criticize Israel.

They not only seem to question Israel's very right to exist, but also question what benefit Israel has given to society. While several e-mails have gone around touting Israel's technical achievments, I wanted to promote some more achievements - mainly on the medical front and the democratic front.

On the medical front, Israeli innovation and research is saving and enriching lives every day. Some of the medical advances in Israel over the past few years include:

• A swallowable 'pill cam' that a patient digests and can take accurate pictures to help better diagnose gastro-intestinal problems.
  
• Israeli researchers re-implanted a frozen embryo back into a woman which she carried to full term and produced a healthy baby girl. What's so special about that? She had been menopausal for two years due to chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. This gives new hope to young women with ovarian cancer that they can be treated and possibly still have kids of their own.
• Israeli scientists have created the ability to remove or reduce scars using laser therapy. This therapy can also be used to remove cellulite.
• Israeli researchers are working on a revolutionary new drug that will regrow bone cartilege and soft tissue. This will ultimately make it possible to fix joint injuries without the needs for screws or other materials.
• Israeli scientists are continually innovating in the areas of agriculture and water treatment and have successfully applied those technologies in Israel and other countries to provide fresh drinking water and grow crops in places where it was previously impossible.
• Two of the world's largest manufacturers of Genetic Drugs - Taro and Teva - are Israeli companies. These companies help reduce drug costs by producing lower-cost alternatives.
  

In addition to those significant contributions to bioscience, Israel as a democracy has done some things that even the US hasn't accomplished:

• It's had a woman Defense Minister before women in the US were even allowed into US service academies
• It was the second major democratic nation to be led by a woman (Golda Meir was only second to Ghandi).
• It, to this day, is one of the few militaries in the world that has women in combat positions
• All citizens of Israel - regardless of race or religion, have equal rights, and are able to vote.
  
• Even though Israeli Arabs (the ones who live in the 1948 borders) are small in number, they elect a proportionate number of arab delegates to the knesset.
  
• The only time that Muslims or Christians have not been able to access their holy sites under Israeli rule is when there are fears of rioting and public safety.
  
• All solely Christian and Muslim sites are relatively autonomously run by their own clergy.
• Arab Israeli citizens have more rights than the vast majority of Arab citizens in Arab countries.

I wish that the rest of the world saw this Israel. The Israel that is saving lives and making lives better every single day of the Year. Maybe if enough people read this post, people will be able to look beyond the lies of Hamas and Hezbollah, and see for themselves that the world needs Israel.

The Fuzzy Math of Casualty Counting

In an 'Irony of Ironies' sort of way, I feel that I need to post more because of the situation in Israel, yet because my life at work and at home is heavily wrapped up into it, I have had a lot less time to do so. But nevertheless I wanted to share some 'Fuzzy Math' with you.


The biggest problem I have with newspapers is that corrections never appear on Page 1. More so than ever, this war between Israel and the Hezbollah is being fought as hard on the Internet, TV, and print news as much as it is being fought in the streets of Beirut and Haifa. Hezbollah has been working the media by emphasizing its usual tactics - it's soldiers don't wear uniforms so that they can easily be mistaken for 'civilian' casualties and its policy of firing from within heavily populated areas puts Israel on the spot as taking out rocket sites will undoubtly cause civilian causualties.

Of course because of the high ratio of Lebanese and Hezbollah killed vs. the numbers of Israelis killed the anti-semites of the world try to lead the unsuspecting outsider to think that Israel is using excessive force - surely they must be. Why else would there be 6 Lebanese/Hezbollah killed for every Israeli? The answer of course lies in the Fuzzy math, being employed by the left-leaning, anti-Israel spin doctors of the media. I want to take this opportunity to point out several facts that the general media doesn't seem to be emphasizing too much on purpose:

1. The Media, Hezbollah, and Lebanese Officials have been artifically inflating death tolls. First there was Qana, where even organizations that are not friends of Israel pointed out that the initially reported death tolls doubled the casualty numbers. Then on Friday, Lebanese officials insisted that there were 900 dead, yet most media reports had confirmed only 600 or so. Today Lebanese Prime Minister claimed that 40 people were killed on an IDF attack on the village of Houla - which he retracted a few hours later, when only one person was confirmed dead. However, while the media is quick to jump on claims by AFP, Retuers and the like as they come over the wire, they don't give as much attention to the updates and retractions.
   
2. There is no way to separate Hezbollah Causalties from Lebanese Civilians. Because Hezbollah doesn't have uniforms, there is no way to tell if a person lying in the rubble of a bombed out building was an innocent guy preparing his dinner when the missiles hit, or someone who was just at the controls of a missle launcher. Even if we can tell he was innocent, there is still no way to verify if he was there out of his own volition. Israel claims that it has killed almost 200 hezbollah fighters - or approximately 30% of all Lebanese causalties, yet Hezbollah denies those claims.
   
3. Hezbollah's weapons haven't had much success. It's hard to believe, but Hezbollah has fired more than 2000 rockets into Israel. fortunately, only a handful of them have actually caused death in Israel. Chalk it off to the inaccuracy of the Katyushas, Israeli countermeasures and civil defence policies, or an act of G-d, in any case, imagine if every Katyusha killed 1 person. That would mean that 2000 Israelis - primarily civilian, since most of Hezbollah's missles were fired at civilian targets - would have lost their lives by now. Who then would be using excessive force?

I am not sure what the media's fascination with Hezbollah is, but why is it making up lies and ebellishing the truth to support them.

Talking to my kids about war and anti-semitism

I, along with many of you, have been glued to the news channels on my tv over the course of the past week to keep abreast of the situation in Israel. My kids of course, have taken notice. Especially since I am not so willing to change the TV to the Disney Channel or Noggin in the morning. They want to know why, all of a sudden, that Daddy insists we watch the news.

How do you explain what's going on to your kids? How do you explain to them, that there are some very evil hateful individuals in this world that want to blow up houses and kill people simply because they are Jewish like us, and live in the land that G-d promised us? And of course, the bigger kicker - that its okay for us to bomb them back.

Before you flame me, I believe that Israel is 100% right in what it is doing, but nonetheless, how do you tell your kids that it is wrong for them to blow us up, but it is okay for us to bomb them back into the stone age. Kids don't understand the complex nature of individuals. They don't understand that there are people in this world like Nasrallah, Ahmednijad and Assad that don't value a life the way that we do. That don't care how many people they kill or how much damage they cause because their goal is to destroy us. How do you explain to a child that someone that they have never met, and that they will never even likely be in the same room with, hates them from the moment that they were born and wouldn't hesitate to kill them. Then explain, while they fire weapons at us without warning, how we first blanket the area with leaflets telling people to leave, lest they be blown to bits.

We are a nation that prides ourselves in bringing back not only our captured and our injured but our dead, and their body parts too. We are a nation that has been bullied for six decades by all of our "poor defenseless neighbors" and the terrorists that they harbor. If they kidnap 3 people and we give them 3000, we all know what the outcome will be - they will kidnap more of our people.

Regardless of your opinion on the matter, and regardless of who is to blame, the end result is that tens will die, hundreds will be wounded and thousands more will be adversely affected by all that's going on. Let us up that this madness stops soon.

As for my kids, for now, I have left it as "There are some bad people who don't like the Jews and Israel." When they ask "why do they hate us so much?" my only answer is "I wish I knew. Because if I did, maybe we could fix the problem."

What Israel needs - to go back to the days of Chutzpah!

For those of you who don't know the meaning of the word Chutzpah or can't use it in a sentence, I will not be naive enough to presume that I can translate it well. But, IMVHO, chutzpah is epitomized by something that happened 30 years ago last week. While the USA celebrated its 200th anniversary of independence, a group of Israeli commandos flew 2000 miles through the night into Entebbe, Uganda, and released 100 hostages from a hijacked jet. It was a bold and daring move that every world leader involved in the "War on Terror" wishes that they could match. It took bravado, planning, skills, cojones and a ton of chutzpah to get that raid done. It was the true exhibition of the tenacity of the then young State of Israel and a prime example to show the terrorists that their crimes against humanity will never bear fruit.

Yet only ten scant years after that, we learned the hard way that the war on terror didn't end in Uganda, but rather it is still an uphill battle. Ron Arad has been captured and in captivity for 20 years. So have so many other countless soldiers been kidnapped and in the past few weeks Gilad Shalit, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, have joined their ranks. Of course, the insane despots that hold the three of them captive are more than willing to give them up in exchange for 1000's of known murders and terrorists - as if Gaza and Lebanon don't have enough of them already.

How sad is this, that in order to save our precious soliders we're expected to send 100 murderers free. Imagine for a moment, that three US Soliders are taken captive and their captors ask us to free everyone at Gitmo, or to free 3000 rapists, arsonists and murderers out of Sing Sing. What do you think our reaction would be? We'd come in shooting. Just like we did to Khadaffi, Koresh, and Saddam. Heck, we've spent five years blowing up camels and horses in the Afghan hills looking for Osama. Yet somehow the world expects Israel to allow missles to rain down on Tzfat, Haifa and Nahariya and sit perfectly still while they prepare to release 1000's of degenerates in exchange for 3 people.

While I don't like where this is going, I am proud that Olmert has the Cojones to take on the Hezbollah and Hamas, and I am glad that President Bush is so far backing him (despite Secretary Rice). Once and for all, we need to show the world that our chutzpah didn't die in Beirut the first time, that we have many more Osiraks and Entebbes left in us, and that it is all still very much worth fighting for. We need to cut off Hamas by their balls, and suffocate Hezbollah's oxygen.

But more importantly, we need to go after Iran. Syria is toothless (ironic, seeing its president is a dentist) , and I am 90% sure that both Jordan and Egypt want no part of this war. Neither to the Saudis and the other countries on the Peninsula. Iran, quite frankly scares the daylights out of me. Ahmednijad is such a lunatic and loose cannon that he actually makes Saddam and Hitler seem almost normal.

We need to go after that kook before he does any harm and show the world that the spirit of Yoni Netanyahu and Elan Ramon is still with us, and that we still have all chutzpah in the world to stand up for ourselves.

At least we don't use it as an opportunity for propaganda like you do!!!

I am not the world's biggest futbol (uh, Soccer to my fellow Americans) fan, but during the World Cup I must admit I caught a bit of Football Fever. While Israel tends to excel in many sports on the international scene, soccer isn't one of them. If I am not mistaken, Israel has never been in a world cup. Yet somehow, the lowlife spin doctors in the Arab World have decided to use the World Cup platform as a way to take further potshots at Israel.

First, there was the whole John Pantsil incident. John Pantsil, who plays on the Ghanian national team, is also a member of Hapoel Tel-Aviv. When Ghana one its first Game against the Czechs, he celebrated by waving an Israeli flag as a tribute to his fans who came from Israel to see him play. Of course all of the Arab members of FIFA complained.

Now, Al-Jazeera is arguing that Israel has launched a Genocide campaign agasint the palestinians while the rest of the world is watching the world cup. Of course the propagandists at Al-Jazeera also neglect to realize that this campaign was actually started by Hamas who decided to kidnap Israeli soldiers and fire missiles on Israeli cities.

Even during an event that is supposed to stop wars and bring peace, somehow the hateful arabs of the world and their propaganda press have found a way to create another web of lies surrounding Israel.

The most demeaning Yeshiva Punishment?

As one would imagine, there has been a lot of buzz lately discussing the spate of abuse scandals within the Brooklyn Orthodox community. First, there were the very serious allegations of sexual abuse in a Brooklyn Yeshiva - strong enough that they are battling it out in court. Now, a friend of mine pointed out posts on the 'Chaptzem Blog' and a new blog entitled Rebbes and "Mechanchim" who will live in infamy
that harp on the notion of 'Abusive' Rebbeim.

As a child in a Brooklyn Yeshiva in the 80's, I got my fair share of corporal punishment. I also received punishments that were both mentally abusive and demeaning. But, thankfully, I can look back at those years and laugh. Our Rebbeim were tough on us. Some of them were off the deep end and definitely crossed the line into abuse. Others were more stable, but ocassionally had to use a 'frask' as a reminder to a student (and to the rest of the class) as to who exactly was the 'Rebbe' in the room.

However, there is a big difference between punishing a student and abusing them mentally or physically. For example, my Grade School Principal, who was unequivocally unqualified for his job or a teaching job (and I'm being nice), once suspended me for getting a 73 on a Gemara (Talmud) exam, because he felt that I could do better (I am not making this one up, I hope my grade school buds will comment and vouch). Or the Rebbe in Junior High that made me right 1000 lines of 'I will not hang out the window like an illiterate on welfare'. Or the third grade Rebbe whose favorite punishment was to put kids in his 'Doghouse' - as he like to refer to the footwell of his desk.

Those individuals were abusive, and in retrospect had abusive personalities. Personally, the Rabbis who doled out the punishments above shouldn't have been teaching anyone's kids.

So I'll ask you this - what was your most demeaning Yeshiva punishment? Didn't go to yeshiva - that's okay, feel free to post!

Zimirot - Oh Baby !

As a kid, the highlight of the Shabbat table was singing zimirot. Zimirot are ancient kabbalistic hymns that are sung to accompany each sabbath meal. Each of us had a favorite song and a favorite tune to go with it, and when we couldn't agree on which tune to use - fast vs. slow MBC (Miami Boys Choir) vs. MBD (Mordechai Ben David) - we would oftentimes sing both. We sang sefardic tunes and even matched our lyrics to the beach boys.

This was something that until recently was lacking at my own table. But now that my big guy is old enough to sing along, we have started singing zimirot on Friday night and on Shabbat afternoon. My son is really getting into it, and despite his butchering of some of the words, seems to enjoy it with the same enthusiasm that my siblings and I had as children.

Enjoying your religion is great, but enjoying it through your children's eyes is greater - because that is pure nachas.