Learn to read Hebrew

A friend of mine just asked me for a good link for learning to read Hebrew. Well, here's a good link. But if it were up to me, I'd provide some context which would both help learn to read, and teach you something about the language. So, maybe I'll do it.

I think I've already covered vowel points about as well as I can, so go look at that post for vowels and I'll skip to consonants. 

There are 22 consonants in Hebrew five of them have final forms, and three of them (in Modern Hebrew) have a stop and fricative pronunciation. All 22 Hebrew consonants have graphic cognates in Arabic. (Phonetic cognates can be found here.) All Hebrew and Arabic letters have numerical values - which are the same for both! In tabular form:

Where breakthoughs happen

An interesting promotional video for Israel. Of course, it is an advertisement, but everything in it is true. My only (mild) criticism is that it focuses too much on big, international companies. Israel is not Finland or Switzerland, playgrounds for mega-high-tech. What distinguishes it is the vibrancy of its entrepreneurship. In any case, go watch the video!

The Israeli economic "miracle"

We can thank Netanyahu's much-vilified reforms for this:

It is also becoming clear that Israel's economy is growing faster than all Western economies. Even the war did not slow the pace. The mirror of growth is employment, which has improved greatly. A total of 240,000 Israelis joined the workforce in the past three years, supporting themselves instead of relying on government handouts - and that is the most important news for society. The unemployment rate has dropped to its lowest level in a decade, to 8.3 percent of the workforce compared to 10.7 percent in 2003. The number of people receiving unemployment payments fell from 97,000 in 2003 to 57,000, and the number receiving income support decreased from 155,000 to 140,000 in the same period.

Even the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange is doing the unexpected. In defiance of all the prophets of economic doom, it has jumped by 22 percent since the end of the war, to record heights. And as the stock market sees the face of the future, it apparently envisions greatness ahead.

Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer recently joined the party, cutting interest rates to below the U.S. rate: 5 percent, compared to 5.25 in the U.S. And instead of an immediate devaluation, the shekel actually rose in response.

Will the economics textbooks need to be revised? Apparently not. There is a single explanation for all the good things described here: A responsible, free-market economic policy expressed through budgetary restraint, a small deficit, tax cuts, reforms, privatization and opening the economy to the free movement of goods, services and capital, or in short: Less government, more business.

UPDATE: Netanyahu has a new web site, with a blog. And don't miss this video.

It is possible to annihilate the Jewish people

Caroline Glick (via Solomonia, my transcription): 

I found, when I was here in 1998 through 2000 after having been in Israel for seven years, I found it disturbing in many ways to see how Holocaust memorials were springing up like mushrooms after the rainfall everywhere in the United States of America. You walk down the dock in Boston, and you think you're going to go a fish restaurant, the next thing you know you're standing in a Holocaust memorial. Why? Because. And it became this fashion among American Jewry I think in the 1990's to put up Holocaust memorials everywhere, and we keep saying "never again". We keep saying "never again". And I wonder when I look what's happening today in the world and I see the response of American Jewry whether we ever stop to think what we mean by "never again". Never again to what? What is the lesson of the Holocaust? As far as I can tell the lesson that the Jews should be taking from the Holocaust is that it is quite possible to kill all of us. That is what we should be learning. Without too much objections from too many people it is quite possible to commit genocide against the Jewish people. There may be other lessons from the Holocaust but I think that as a Jewish person, the main lesson that we should be taking away is that it is possible for this to happen. Not that is was possible but that it is possible for this to happen...

An Israeli view of Borat

Borat looks different to an Israeli audience than it does to any other, for a number of reasons. Here's one Israeli review:

I had heard that Sacha Baron Cohen - he of the grandmother in Haifa and the youth education trips from the UK to the Holy Land - mixed in a fair amount of Hebrew with his faux Kazakh in his box-office hit mockumentary Borat. I'd seen a clip of the movie's opening few minutes on YouTube, where he promises a one-armed neighbor (the genuinely disabled Nicu Tudorache) in his home Kazakh village of Kuzcek (actually Glod in Romania), in Hebrew, that he'll return from the United States with a new arm.

But I wasn't prepared for the fact that just about every "Kazakh" sentence Borat Sagdiyev utters in the entire movie is Hebrew - near-accentless, flawless, slang-filled modern Hebrew. My fellow Jerusalem audience members loved every word of it, heaving hysterically at each idiomatic pearl. 

Later:

BARON COHEN is a comedian - bright, inventive and intrepid. Depending on how much of the Borat footage was genuine and how much was scripted, he is also brave. It requires real guts to take the microphone at center field and tell a vast crowd at a Virginia rodeo that he supports their president's war of terror, run with that "joke" to bloodcurdling extremes and top off the performance by remaking the US national anthem as a paean of praise for Kazakhstan and of derision for all other nations. It requires real guts of a different kind to prance around before a global audience in that screaming green excuse for a swimsuit.

But the jokester who would prevent another Holocaust wimped out, nonetheless. Easy to play for fools an Evangelical Christian audience, swaying and clapping wildly in the grip of religious passion. But think of the truly needed alarms Baron Cohen might have set off for his audiences had he tried the same stunt in a mosque.

Read the whole thing.

Do Israelis speak Hebrew?

You might think that a subject like linguistics would have little to do with politics. Unfortunately, you'd be mistaken. Ghil'ad Zuckermann claims that in Israel we don't really speak Hebrew:

Ghil'ad Zuckermann, a 35-year-old graduate of Tel Aviv University with doctorates from Oxford and Cambridge, argues that modern Hebrew should be renamed "Israeli" and give up its claim of pure descent from holy writ.

"Israelis are brainwashed to believe they speak the same language as (the prophet) Isaiah, a purely Semitic language, but this is false," Zuckermann told Reuters during a lecture tour to promote his soon-to-be-published polemic "Hebrew as Myth".

"It's time we acknowledge that Israeli is very different from the Hebrew of the past," Said Zuckermann, who points to the abiding influence of modern European dialects - especially Yiddish, Russian and Polish - imported by Israel's founders.

It is very possible that Zuckermann is an excellent linguist. But declaring Israelis' native language to be something other than Hebrew can only be a political, rather than linguistic claim, and interferes with the quality of his scholarship. The only semi-objective basis for declaring two varieties of speech to be separate languages is the fuzzy idea of mutual-intelligiblilty, and even that is clearly violated at both ends of the spectrum: "dialects" of Chinese are not mutually intelligible, while the Norwegian and Danish "languages" are.

I think by any reasonable standard Biblical and Modern Hebrew are mutually intelligible, as the article says:

Those who disagree with Zuckermann note that an average Israeli can divine the meaning of much of the Bible's Hebrew unaided - not the case, for example, with English-speakers who try to crack open an Anglo-Saxon classic like "Beowulf".

The difference between Modern and Biblical Hebrew is more like Modern English and the English of the King James Bible. With just a little exposure, a modern speaker has no trouble understanding it. But the wrong-headedness of Zuckermann's claims is even more glaring when you look at the long history of post-Biblical Hebrew, beginning with the Mishna. For those of you who know Hebrew, go look at Maimonides' Mishna Torah, for example:

הקורא קרית שמע--כשהוא גומר פסוק ראשון, אומר בלחש ברוך שם כבוד מלכותו לעולם ועד; וחוזר וקורא כדרכו "ואהבת, את ה' אלוהיך" (דברים ו,ה), עד סופה.  ולמה קורין כן--מסורת היא בידינו שבשעה שקיבץ יעקוב אבינו את בניו במצריים בשעת מיתתו, ציוום וזירזם על ייחוד השם, ועל דרך ה' שהלך בה אברהם ויצחק אביו.  ושאל אותם ואמר להם, בניי, שמא יש בכם פסולת, מי שאינו עומד עימי בייחוד אדון כל העולם, כעניין שאמר לנו משה רבנו "פן יש בכם איש או אישה . . ." (דברים כט,יז).  ענו כולם, ואמרו לו "שמע, ישראל:  ה' אלוהינו, ה' אחד" (דברים ו,ד)--כלומר שמע ממנו, אבינו ישראל, ה' אלוהינו, ה' אחד.  פתח הזקן ואמר, ברוך שם כבוד מלכותו לעולם ועד; לפיכך נהגו כל ישראל לומר שבח זה ששיבח בו ישראל הזקן, אחר פסוק זה.

The notion that Modern Hebrew is so influenced by "modern European dialects" that it is no longer a Semitic language might seem to make sense, and there is a lot of evidence for it. But however much sense a claim might make theoretically and however much evidence you have, you only need one counter-example to disprove a claim. The above paragraph (as well as the rest of Maimonides writings, and, in fact, the entire body of medieval Hebrew) does just that. Maimonides wrote in the 12th century, and his native language was Arabic. The only thing in the paragraph that gives away its medieval origin is the use of qorin (קורין) instead of qor'im (קוראים), which is the Biblical, rather than Mishnaic form of the word. So should we stop calling this language Hebrew too? Would it be more accurate to say "Maimonides wrote in Israeli" than "Maimonides wrote in Hebrew"? In fact, while Maimonides consciously adopted the language of the Mishna, his analytic style is much closer to that of Modern Hebrew. That Maimonides is a thousand-year-old Arabic-speaker conclusively disproves the common claim that this style is a recent, European-based innovation. In fact, Modern Hebrew represents the culmination of rather smooth 3000-year transition from the language of the Bible.

Is this what I sound like?

I did spend four years in Philadelphia, but I don't think anyone there would think that I sound like one of them... In any case, you can take the test here (via Razib). I took an test like this once before, here.

Israeli/Lebanese peace/war songs

In September, my old friend, Richard Isaac, co-hosted a radio show on KBCS 91.3 FM Seattle/Bellevue devoted to Israeli and Lebanese songs about peace and war. It is being re-broadcast Sunday evening, 26 November 2006, at 7:00 p.m. PST. (10 p.m. on the
East Coast, 5 a.m. in Israel on 27 November), you can listen to it here. He has also posted it here. Enjoy!

Iraq was building an atom bomb!

According to the New York Times, Iraq was a year away from building an atom bomb:

The Web site, “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal,” was a constantly expanding portrait of prewar Iraq. Its many thousands of documents included everything from a collection of religious and nationalistic poetry to instructions for the repair of parachutes to handwritten notes from Mr. Hussein’s intelligence service. It became a popular quarry for a legion of bloggers, translators and amateur historians.

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

Live free or Die

Sean's comment on this post echos my sentiments:

For myself I do believe that I would prefer daily chaos and surviving by my wits to being tended to like a lamb by my government (lambs can be led to the slaughter).

I am constantly amazed when people seem to have not learned basic Star Trek, Saturday westerns, Kipling-esque lessons about human life and the state of captivity. Ours is a species that can will itself to die rather than live as a slave. So why does everyone give so much weight to issues of basic survival under a dictator? Even if one could live safely under Saddam (and that is far from certain, ask the Kurds or the Shia... two thirds of the country) is that enough? Even if life is riskier now (and I don't know that it is) isn't it still better to live in chaos as a free human?

When did Americans become the "live unfree or die" backers?

Derb & God

John Derbyshire has a very interesting "Faith FAQ" online, in which, among other things, he declares himself a Mysterian. One of the things that I find interesting is that he continually refers to his Mysterian beliefs as a loss of faith. Yet, it seems to me that Mysterianism is the very essence of Judaism! John describes it like this:

My God is at, or possibly just is, one pole of the great two-poled mystery of everything: the origin of the universe, which passeth all human understanding. He is the Creator. Since He was present in the cosmos then, I assume He is now (or “now,” since He is obviously outside spacetime); and since I can apprehend Him, I assume He is aware of me. The two poles of mystery, the Him and the Me (I mean, the invidual human consciousness, the I, the Me — that’s the second pole) are in contact somehow, and may actually be the same thing...

In fact, I agree with most of what John says in his FAQs (the part about Catholicism being a major exception) - which mostly chronicles the things he has learned which led him away from religion. Yet, I find none of it even remotely challenging to my religion. It makes me feel very lucky, being a Mysterian from birth.

Understanding Tangut

I've been following Amritas's Tangut analyses for quite some time now. From Wikipedia:

Tangut (also Xixia) is an ancient northeastern Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the Tangut Empire. By some linguists it is classified as belonging to the Qiangic languages. It is only distantly related to Tibetan and Burmese, and possibly also to Chinese.

Among the Qiangic languages one also notably finds Qiang and Rgyalrong.

This is the ancient official language of the Tangut empire (known in Tibetan as Mi-nyag and in Chinese as Xixia 西夏) which obtained its independence from the Chinese Song dynasty at the beginning of the 11th century, and was annihilated by Činggis Qaɣan (commonly known as Gengis Khan) in 1227.

The Tangut script, which Sofronov (1968) considered with reason to be one of the most complex in the history of humanity, was created by a decree of the emperor Li Yuanhao (李元昊) in 1038. The invention of the script was bestowed on Yeli Renrong (野利仁榮), a scholar close to the imperial family. After the destruction of the empire, the writing did not completely disappear, and it was used at least until the end of the 15th century.

The weird thing about Tangut is that we have a tremendous amount of knowledge about the language: 10,000 volumes of literature, most of which are translations of works we know from other languages, plus a native tradition of linguistic/grammatical analysis! But we still can't figure out how the Tangut script works! According to the Wikipedia link:

The script is presumed to have been designed by "The Teacher, Iri" under the supervision of the Emperor of the Tangut state, Li Yuanhao. It consisted of approximately 6,600 logographic characters built from radicals, in much the same way as they are in the Chinese script.

If the script were designed, you wouldn't expect it to consist of 6,600 random symbols. Take a look at Amritas's latest Tangut post. As you can see, the characters look much less like pictures than Chinese characters. But can you imagine memorizing 6,600 random characters like those chicken-scratches? Moreover, if you look at the characters long enough, vague patterns begin to emerge. Too vague to be definitive but too suggestive to be random. Amritas's favorite hypothesis, and the one that I'm convinced is correct, is that there are really two Tangut languages, which he calls Tangut A and Tangut B. Tangut A is the one for which we have phonetic knowledge. But Tangut B is the one which the characters represent phonetically. This isn't as unlikely as it sounds - Japanese has that sort of relationship with Chinese. What makes it less likely is that Chinese is the pricipal language of East Asia, while Tangut B is even more obscure than Tangut A.

However, there are several appealing things about this theory. For one thing, it would explain how Tangut writing could persist for hundreds of years after the Tangut empire was destroyed - in such a circumstance it must be relatively easy to learn.  But most of all, it would exactly explain the vague patterns we do, in fact, see - which I have tabulated below. Of course, the big problem with this theory is that there's no independent evidence of Tangut B. Oh well.

Alumni, of course!

For some time I have been wondering about how to organize an organization so that it doesn't become a self-perpetuating priesthood. How do you build in outside control that won't be captured by the bureaucrats? How do you make sure that the organization stays on course, doing what it was set up to do, rather than serving its own bureaucracy? At least for universities, I think I've found the answer: alumni. Of course! (Via Instapundit.)

Israeli-Lebanese dialog

Take a look at this dialog between Lebanese blogger Rania el-Masry and Israeli blogger Lisa Goldman (via Lisa). It is sponsored by the BBC. No doubt they picked Lisa because they know that she hails from the Israeli far left. Unfortunately for them, they didn't know that though she's a leftist, she's honest, and doesn't distort or overlook relevant facts. Notice how Rania's arguments sound convincing as long as you don't know the facts. After trying to avoid confrontation, Lisa gives it to her. Her response is so good that I can't let it lie in such an obscure location. I'm reproducing it here in full:

Dear Rania,

The only thing that you and I agree on is that negotiations are preferrable to war. Other than that, I found your response to be puzzling and disingenuous.

You say that Israel should stop oppressing the Palestinians. Well, in Israel there are 1.2 million Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. The deputy mayor of Haifa is Palestinian; his name is Walid Hamis and he is a member of the Balad party. When my friend was taken to Tel Aviv's Ichilov hospital after a minor accident, the neurologist who treated him was named Dr. Firas and he was a Christian Palestinian from Nazareth. In Israel there are Palestinian members of parliament, Palestinian professors, journalists, lawyers and actors, high tech workers and businessmen.The stars of Paradise Now, Ali Suleiman and Kais Nashef, are Israeli citizens who studied at Beit Zvi, Israel's most prestigious acting school.

There are also Palestinians who are active members of the Israeli Open House, the gay and lesbian group. I have met and interviewed Palestinian gays who ran away from the West Bank, where their relatives threatened to kill them simply for their sexual orientation, and found refuge in Israel, which is an open, liberal and secular society.

All the Palestinians who live in Israel (I am not talking about the West Bank, which is occupied territory) are fully enfranchised citizens. Yes, they do face social discrimination. And yes, I do think that discrimination is very wrong. But a Palestinian who experiences discrimination in Israel can fight through the court system. What recourse does a Palestinian living in Lebanon have if he is faced with discrimination?

Is it not true that Palestinians who came to Lebanon in 1948 are inegible for Lebanese citizenship? Is it not true that Palestinians who are classified as refugees are not allowed to practice law or medicine in Lebanon? According to my Palestinian friends, many Palestinians live in squalid refugee camps and the Lebanese government does not allow them to better their lives by doing something as basic as renovating their homes. And finally, Lebanese Christians massacred Palestinians in Lebanon on several occasions in the 1970s and 1980s. So, what have the Lebanese people ever done for the Palestinians? And what in the world does Hezbollah, a Shi'a organization, have to do with the Palestinians, who are Sunni and Christian? I fail to see the connection.

When the Israeli Air Force bombed Dahiyeh and various Hezbollah villages in southern Lebanon during the first two days of the conflict, many Lebanese Christian and Sunni bloggers were quite happy. Some of them told me so directly. They did not even consider Dahiyeh to be part of Beirut, but rather an ugly, frightening place they were forced to pass on their way to and from the airport. They wanted to get rid of Hezbollah and they hoped that Israel would do the job for them. They changed their minds when the bombardments expanded into other areas of Lebanon. And yet, while I see that southern Lebanon has indeed been severely damaged, I cannot help noticing that Ashrafiyeh and other neighbourhood of West and East Beirut look completely intact when I watch the BBC World Service, Al Arabiyya and LBC broadcasts from Beirut.

On July 12, Hezbollah guerillas entered Israeli sovereign territory and attacked a group of Israeli reserve soldiers who were patrolling the border. They killed eight of them and kidnapped two. At the same time, Hezbollah launched hundred of missiles on Israeli civilian targets.

I would like to emphasise very strongly that the Hezbollah bombardment of northern Israel began before the Israeli military response, on the morning the soldiers were kidnapped. Hezbollah continued to launch up to 200 missiles per day at Israel for the duration of the war. Their targets in Israel were exclusively civilian. I was there, and I experienced that bombardment. Hezbollah never even pretended that they were aiming for military targets. Hundreds of thousands of Israeli civilians were forced to live underground or flee south. Arab, Druze and Jewish civilians were killed; the missiles did not discriminate between them. Some of the Arabs and Druze who were killed have family in Lebanon. Huge tracts of forest have been burned to the ground. Houses, lives and businesses have been destroyed.

Like the Lebanese, Israelis will rebuild. Life will go on. But the long-term damage is another story. Israelis dream of living in peace. We sing about peace and we write poems about peace. Do the supporters of Hezbollah write poems about peace? And look how far away peace seems to be now! Look how much damage has been done to relations between Israel and Lebanon. I keep on asking myself why, why, why. You can sit there and say that Israel did this and Israel did that, but let us be honest: if Hezbollah had not attacked Israel - not once, but on many occasions - then there would have been no Israeli military actions in Lebanon.

I write this not to enter into a contest of "who suffered more." I hate the victimization narrative and I do not think there is a prize for suffering. I also wonder if Lebanese would be satisfied if more Israeli civilians had been killed, because that is the way it sounds. The way I see it, we all suffered and the source of our suffering is Hezbollah. I feel equal sympathy for Israeli and Lebanese civilians, for the damage done to both our countries.

And frankly it is beyond my ability to comprehend why a female academic at a secular university would support a fundamentalist religious organization that believes in full implementation of Shari'a in place of civil law.

Israel and Lebanon have no territorial dispute. The border between the two countries is internationally recognized by the United Nations. The July 12 incident was the catalyst for the Israeli military response, not the reason. The goal of the military response was not to rescue the two kidnapped soldiers, since everyone knew that could not be accomplished by military action, but to stop Hezbollah from continuing its attacks on Israel. The undisputed fact is that Hezbollah has attacked Israelis on many occasions since the withdrawal of 2000.

In October 2000, nearly six months after Israel withdrew completely from Lebanese territory, Hezbollah guerillas kidnapped three Israeli soldiers from inside Israeli territory. Their names were Adi Avyitan, Binyamin Avraham and Omar Sawaid. No information was ever released to their families about their whereabouts or their physicial condition. In fact they were dead, but Hezbollah did not have the decency to inform the families via the Red Cross. The bodies of the three men were returned three years later in a prisoner swap.

In February 2005 Hezbollah bombarded Al Ghajar, an Alawite village that is located inside Israeli sovereign territory. The residents of the village are Israeli citizens. Hezbollah guerillas tried to enter the village dressed in UNIFIL uniforms, driving a UN vehicle, in order to kidnap some of those Alawite Israeli citizens. Then Hezbollah bombarded Al Ghajar so fiercely that the children were screaming in terror on the phone to their parents, who were working in nearby Kiryat Shmona. I heard them; the phone calls were played on the nightly news broadcast.

Over the past six years Kiryat Shmona has been bombarded on many occasions by katyusha rockets launched by Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon.

Israel did not respond militarily to any of these incidents. The incident of July 12 was simply the last straw. The Israeli consensus was in favour of the military response not because anyone wanted to see Lebanese civilians hurt, but rather because they felt that Israel needed to protect its citizens from Hezbollah's constant attacks. Israelis do not have any dispute with the Lebanse government and I have not heard one Israeli express anything but sadness regarding the Lebanese civilians who were killed.

Hassan Nasrallah was educated in Iran. His movement is armed by Iran and has very close ties with that country. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran and supporter of Nasrallah, has said several times over the past year that Israel should be wiped off the map. I have watched many of Hassan Nasrallah's speeches and I have heard him call Israel "Palestine." If he does not even recognize the name of my country, and if he launches missiles at my country's civilian areas with no provocation, then in my eyes that means that Nasrallah does not accept Israel's right to exist and he wishes to destroy it.

You can argue with Israel's military tactics, no problem. I have been very critical of my government's military actions over the last month. But the undeniable fact is that Hezbollah has chosen Israel as its enemy for absolutely no reason. There are no Shi'a living in Israel. Israel does not occupy any Lebanese territory. Hezbollah provoked this attack, and they should take responsibility for the destruction they have brought upon Lebanon. Your anger is misdirected: you should be angry at Hezbollah, not Israel.

Yours,
Lisa

The assumption that we are the victorious and evil side

In a private email, a friend of mine said something to the effect that Israelis are ahead of everyone else in perceiving the Islamist threat. Well, I'm not so sure that they are, and if so not by very much, and only because of our circumstances. The message in this article by Gadi Taub (via On The Face) holds true just about anywhere in the West:

The truth is that there is a deep arrogance behind this type of degenerate "left-ism." It's appeal is relevant only when we win. Its criticism is valid only on the assumption that we are the victorious and evil side. But in this case? It seems we are neither.

Even if we made terrible mistakes, we are not the guilty party. Anyone with eyes in their head sees the Iran inspired Islamic brand of fascism, and no elaborate explanations are needed to understand why it is evil.

But even more unusual for this branch of the left is that this time, it is unclear even that we are the stronger side. There is are huge forces gathering against us, bold, ruthless, and well-armed. This radical leftist arrogance, which grew out of the occupation, assumed that we were always Goliath. But here in the New Middle East, there is a new Goliath.

This reminds me of an old Jewish joke, which I used to think was funny because it was absurd. But now I think it's funny because it describes so much of the social posturing I see among those who presume moral superiority:

It's Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year. During a short break in the service, the Rabbi approaches the ark to say a personal prayer. "Master of the Universe," he says, "I am nothing!" At just this moment, the President of the synagogue passes by. Overcome by the Rabbi's fervor, he too approaches the ark and exclaims, "Master of the Universe, I am nothing!" Just then, the synagogue's janitor passes by. Overcome by the President's fervor he rushes up to the ark and cries, "Master of the Universe, I am nothing!"

The President leans over to the Rabbi and says, "now look who thinks he's nothing!"

Descrating the remains of Israelis

If you read any Arab blogs - and I have been reading the most moderate ones I can find - you will see that a common topic is indignantly protesting Israel's "claim of moral superiority". Well, one thing that happens every time an Israeli corpse falls into Arab hands is that it gets mutilated. This, despite the fact that Islam has stricter notions of respect for the dead than are commonly held by most Americans (they are actually quite similar to Jewish views on the subject). Via Allison Kaplan Sommer:

I saw an incredibly disturbing segment on the Wednesday August 16th “Mosaic” program broadcast on Link TV (Mosaic features Middle East news unedited and translated from state and private networks like Al Jazeera.) In a segment entitled “Hezbollah’s Stronghold in a Southern Lebanese Town” from Future TV, Lebanon, south Lebanese villagers were shown displaying “Israeli booty” from the fighting there, including what was described as remains of Israeli soldiers. These included parts of a scalp, a skull, and the charred remains of a torso, all dumped out of a duffel bag and onto the ground for the benefit of the cameraman. There was no doctoring of images in this case.

Allison declines to post the link, but I presume it is here. I don't have Quicktime, so I can't watch it. Not that I want to.

UPDATE:  Somehow my Qucktime started working (it must have updated itself from the Internet). I had the window open in the background while I did other things, and suddenly I hear it playing. So I watched it. The segment described above is about two-thirds of the way through. It's not an "objective" news broadcast, but a paean to Hizballah's "victory". They're not embarrassed by what they're doing, they're proud, they're boasting. Here's my transcription of a part of it:

This body belongs to an Israeli soldier [a bag is turned upside-down and some charred remains fall out. a charred hand is visible] and this is what is left of another soldier's head [I can't make out what I'm seeing] and this is the skull of a third soldier [a scalp with some hair attached is shown on the ground]

As the voiceover continues to describe how a "resistance fighter" killed and wounded 30 Israeli soldiers, in the background, people are tossing around the body parts previously shown, plus what I presume are some other body parts.

Noam Meirson, of blessed memory - נועם מאירסון זכרו לברכה

A week ago I went to a wedding. The groom had just come back from Lebanon. He was given a one month leave of absence in order to get married. Today I went to a shiv`a (שיבעה) - the one-week period of morning for a close relative.  Noam Meirson, the son of a friend of mine, was killed when an anti-tank missile struck his tank's turret. He was to be married in one month.

Making News

What gets me is that you'd think that the real scoop would be the news of systematic fraud in the media. I guess the mainstream media are not interested in real news: 

On August 1, Orin Kerr suggested that, if David Bernstein's