The YouTube clip, set to the tune of the 1985 charity single We Are the World, features Israelis dressed as Arabs and activists, waving weapons while singing: "We con the world, we con the people. We'll make them all believe the IDF (Israel Defence Force) is Jack the Ripper."While the Israeli government has apologized for distributing links to the video, Israeli government spokesmen nevertheless maintain that the video is "fantastic" and "what Israelis feel." And not just any Israelis: the video was produced by and stars, among others, the Jerusalem Post's deputy managing editor Caroline Glick.
Noam Jacobson, a 35-year-old musician and songwriter who portrays Mavi Marmara skipper “Captain Stabbing” in the Latma video, said on Sunday that since it hit the Internet he has received a great deal of positive feedback from people, which he says has been very moving.posted by orthogonality at 9:54 PM on June 6, 2010 [23 favorites]
Jacobson, who performed in the video while on leave from IDF reserve duty near the Lebanon border, said that “the point of the video wasn’t to be provocative. In my eyes what we were saying is the mainstream of the Israeli mainstream. It’s satire and satire that doesn’t aggravate isn’t satire.”
Jacobson is one of three actors employed regularly by Latma, and can be seen in previous clips portraying White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel calling himself a “Capo,” and in semi-blackface (“autumn-face”) as US President Barack Obama, in whose guise he sings of his hatred for “dirty Jews” and his hope that the Koran will rule the world and the Jews will drown in the sea, before calling for Iran to strike Israel with a hydrogen bomb.
Jacobson said he believes that such videos don’t cross the line between good taste and bad taste and “are obviously satire and must be taken as satire, and not word for word. People must take them with a sense of humor.”
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In a posting on her Web site on Thursday, [Caroline] Glick called the video “an important Israeli contribution to the discussion of recent events” and referred to Latma [the web site that produced the video] as an initiative of the Middle East media project run by the “Center for Security Policy,” a Washington, DC, think tank where she is the senior fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs.
“GAZA Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity” declared the Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday, as though announcing the discovery of some hitherto unknown body of water. Citizens of other nations have long since resigned themselves, of course, to sailing those crowded waters, but for Israelis — and, indeed, for Jews everywhere — this felt like headline news.--
Let's say you were a cartoonish, Ahmadinejadesque lunatic fixated on destroying Israel. How would you go about achieving your goal?The thing is, Ahmadinejad is just not that smart. A cartoonish villain would never do something like this. This is the kind of thing that would be done if somehow you could merge malevolence of Ahmadinejad with amoral genious of a guy like Lloyd Blankfein (CEO of Goldman Sachs)
Sorry, I must be dense...what exactly is the video satirizing?Except it's not really a satire is it? Parody, perhaps.
The recent Freedom Flotilla brouhaha.
The Jew and the Arab have always been friends. The Jew needs the Arab, and the Arab needs the Jew. It is only those in the higher places [meaning government] that make fire on the earth. But talking to them is like talking to a wall [and at this point he knocked on the wall for emphasis].It's my personal hope that more people in the region will come to this realization of interdependence and recognize that, as usual, their common enemy is those who use fear to maintain power.
Last fall, I was in Israel for a two-week visit and conducted a few formal interviews with various Israeli officers, journalists and scholars. I met for coffee one morning with a retired Israeli general officer to discuss the fighting in southern Lebanon during the 1990s, and before too long, the two of us were engrossed in conversation about guerrilla warfare, Lebanon, the learning process that militaries go through in combat, and a host of related subjects. One hour became two, and two hours became three. The two of us must have downed three cups of coffee apiece, and my hand cramped from all the notes I was taking. At the end of the conversation, though, this retired officer took my hand, squeezed it hard, and said, "Andrew, just remember one thing: the Muslims are like shit. They stink, and there are plenty of them for all of us."walter russell mead lays out why there is no solution (if it was easy it would have happened by now; there's not enough trust and, in any case, not enough people want it/are willing to compromise) -- AS speaks of 'tribalism'.
8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.Also significant to the Zionist mindset is the next passage:
When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.The Zionists have solved this problem by taking the entire world as their enemies, as seen in the claims of universal Judeophobia we've seen advanced by the defenders of Israel..
Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
It was just a few short years ago that Abe Foxman's Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, B'nai Brith International, and the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs all joined forces to beg Congress to deny the historical fact of the Armenian Genocide. Now they are slightly embarrassed about this, because it turns out that the Turks were not willing to return the favor by allowing Israel to kill a bunch of Turkish citizens without getting the Turks getting all upset about it.Um... the fuck? Hell, no. This linked story is even more rage-inducing.
For Lakatos, what we think of as a 'theory' may actually be a succession of slightly different theories and experimental techniques developed over time, that share some common idea, or what Lakatos called their ‘hard core’. Lakatos called such changing collections 'Research Programmes'. The scientists involved in a programme will attempt to shield the theoretical core from falsification attempts behind a protective belt of auxiliary hypotheses.I've always felt Lakatos's description of science applied to normal ideas more than to scientific programs, to tell the truth.
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