Liebmann of Arabia

Through the wonders of the Internet I have come across this photo of the valiant Jewish fighter of Tobruk mentioned in my last post: Felix Liebmann on an Israeli website by historian Meir Mindel. 

What's in a Streetname?

My local shopping street in Jerusalem is called Pierre-Koenig.  I've never thought to ask why it has this name.   From this email I've just received, it's nice to know the answer ... 

“The war was not going well for the British in early 1942. Rommel and his Italian allies were pushing back the British relentlessly. Losses were staggering for the British. They were being decimated in Libya and needed to retreat, to regroup, rest and resupply. British loss, after loss, British defeat after defeat, the ability of retreating in order, without disaster, was very questionable. If the Allied forces could not retreat in an orderly manner, the North African war would be lost. It did not look good. A delaying action was ordered by the British high command.
In a remote area of the Libyan Desert, near an old Turkish fort, the Free French Forces were ordered to stand and fight. The fort was built near an oasis. It was called Bir Hakeim and was the key to the great port city of Tobruk. A line was drawn ahead of the Germans. The First Free French Division, led by legendary General Marie-Pierre Koenig was ordered to hold. The French dug in. Thousands of individual fox holes were dug. Mines were laid in thick fields to slow the Germans. The French waited. A British brigade, unknown at the time to General Koenig, was hastily sent to hold the far end of the French line near Bir-el Harmat. They were a battalion of mine layers, poorly armed and provisioned, without heavy weapons, or anti-aircraft equipment but with a grim, teeth clenched determination. 

They were a battalion of 400 Jewish Palestinians under the command of Major Liebmann from Tel Aviv. It was May 26, 1942. The Jewish fighters dug in.
A German tank column approached the heavily outnumbered and out gunned Jewish position.
Raising a flag of truce the German commander came near to the Allied position and demanded they surrender or be annihilated. Noticing the strange flag flying, the German asked who they were. To the amazement of the German officer, Major Liebmann told him they were free Palestinian Jews fighting for the British government. They would not surrender. The flag was the flag of the Jewish people. It was June 2, 1942.
German 88mm canon opened up with terrible effect. German Stukas bombed and strafed, and bombed and strafed. Hundreds of sorties were eventually flown. German tanks advanced and attacked ferociously. Several were destroyed in the mine fields. A few penetrated the center of the lightly armed Jewish position. Jewish soldiers jumped on the tanks destroying them with Molotov cocktails, incinerating the German tank crews inside. Without even a radio to contact the French fighting a few miles up the line, the Jews held. Heavy black smoke billowed from the burning German tanks as the Germans retreated; their dead left on the hard, dry desert.
German and Italian armor attacked again and again on June 5 and June 6. The Jewish position held. Daily the Stukas bombed the Jews. German artillery was unrelenting, eventually destroying the Jewish water source. Still the Jewish position held refusing to surrender, even without water. Astonished the Germans continued attacking with no success. The Jews refused to surrender or be conquered.
June 10: Orders from the British 8^th Army reached the French at Bir Hakeim and the Jews at Bir-el Harmat: retreat. The British 8^th Army was safe. It had retreated in good order with its equipment and supplies. The delaying action could be called off. In the dark of the night of June 11, the French and the Jews slipped away, unbeknownst to the Germans. They had done the impossible.
Over the next few months, the reorganized and reequipped British 8^th Army fought and defeated Rommel's famed Africa Corps at El Alamein. It was the beginning of the end for the Germans and their Italian allies in North Africa. The bloody tide of war had changed.
General Koenig watched as the ragged, unknown Allied survivors from the far end of the line staggered in to the French command center at Gasr-el-Abid. They dragged their wounded as best they could. Major Liebmann reported to a concerned General Koenig. Speaking in perfect French, he told General Koenig they were Jewish Palestinian soldiers. Of the 400 men who made up the battalion, over three hundred, 75%, had been killed or wounded. They were the survivors.

The General observed their flag flying proudly. It was being taken down and folded by a very tired Jewish soldier.
What is that man doing? Koenig demanded of Liebmann. Liebmann told the French General that British regulations did not let them fly their flag, the blue and white flag with the Star of David. The British did not want to see it. An instant command was barked. General Koenig ordered the soldier to stop folding the flag. Koenig ordered it placed on the front of his Jeep to fly next to and equal to the flag of France.
Turning to his officers, Koenig ordered all his soldiers to stand at attention and salute as the flag of the future state of Israel went by. It was the first Salute.
General Koenig remained a committed friend and advocate on behalf of Israel for the rest of his life.

In the lower Galilee, near Nazareth, trees grow in the soil of a free Israel; the Marie-Pierre Koenig Grove.”

(After writing this blog entry I found Liebmann here)

Check-in with the Saudis

Amazing that those Saudi hackers managed to penetrate the EL AL website.


Most of the time we King David members can't even check-in online.


Why bother with Israeli proteksia when Saudis could get you the best seats and upgrades?

Putting the piss in perspective

I suddenly took a liking to Rick Perry.

He may be irrelevant to the campaign with poll numbers equating to other candidates' margin of error. He may have made some gaffes in the debates.

But he's the least politically correct of the candidates.

Unlike the shrill and sanctimonious reactions on the 'Pissing on the Taliban' story he takes the view that they're just kids. 

"These kids made a mistake, there's not any doubt about it," he said. "[They] shouldn't have done it, it's bad—but to call it a criminal act, I think is over the top," Perry told CNN.  "Obviously 18, 19-year-old kids make stupid mistakes all too often and that's what's occurred here."

Absolutely right!  These 18-19 year-olds have to live every hour of every day in Afghanistan in fear of being blown to bits by IEDs planted at the roadside by these Taliban animals, who wear no uniforms and subscribe to no Geneva conventions. These animals don't piss on dead American soldiers ... they mutilate and behead live ones.

Sure it's morally wrong to do what they did.

But don't expect these kids out in the hell of war to have the same PC education and diplomatic fragrance of Hilary Clinton or others in the ruling class

Her troops may have been pissing on the Taliban, but her boss has spent far longer pissing in the wind.

2012 - Arabs throw Jews out of Israel

This message just reached me from the valiant Women in Green:

Jews out!

Women in Green’s reaction to last night’s destruction in Mitzpe Avihai-Kiryat Arba

At 2:30 in the middle of the night, with 0 degrees outside, some 20 children were dragged away fom their beds together with their parents and were told:

“Jews-OUT!”   Immediately thereafter the tractors ran over and destroyed their homes.

The Mitzpe Avichai neighborhood was built on land that belongs to the municipality of Kiryat Arba Hevron and was already destroyed ten times.

Every destruction brings about construction, especially in Mitzpe Avihai,  and thank G-d the neighborhood has already 8 families and public buildings.

Once again the IDF used Arab workers to do the dirty work of expelling Jews from their homes ; and these Arabs by the way stole from the expelled Jews jewelry and work utensils.

Women in Green call upon all to donate funds in order to rebuild the neighborhood . We also call upon the Prime Minister to stop hiding behind Ehud Barak and finally

start building the Land of Israel proudly. This is the one and only answer to Yair Lapid and Sheli Yachimovitz.

The government of Israel has to stop the game of jumping once to the right  and once to the left. It does not help at all.

Only with a clear policy of applying Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, the building of thousands of homes, the spreading of the population from the shore to the mountains-

only this way will deterrence be built.

Only this way will our country be built.

www.womeningreen.org

All about jobs ...

From Poland to Beit Shemesh

Someone sent me this wartime picture taken at tram-stop in Poland.  The sign says: "Jews to the back".


The Yellow Star can clearly be seen on the lady's armband.


A sign of the times for the bus segregationists of Israel.


This was the Nazi way.
It is not our way.

Our Satanic 'peace partners' ...

No-one tells it better than Sarah Honig ...

Another Tack: Good manners and high morals

There sat Palestinian Authority chieftain Mahmoud Abbas in the front pew of the Church of the Nativity, reverently observing the Christmas midnight mass. He appeared so meek – the model of admirable moderation, good manners and high morals.

TV anchors and scribblers worldwide fell for his consummate act and expressed solemn appreciation for the affectation. Critical appraisal was conspicuously absent.

Abbas – the on-and-off and now on-again political ally of Hamas and Islamic Jihad – took great pains to quasi-usurp Christmas from Christendom and impart the impression that Christmas is intrinsically also a Muslim celebration, “a Palestinian holiday” from which bogeymen Jews alone deserve exclusion.

Significantly this aroused no protests – the subjugation of Christians in Muslim societies, and foremost in Bethlehem, notwithstanding.

This supposed Christian-Muslim front comprised the gist of the homily delivered by the Mideast’s most senior Roman Catholic, Patriarch of Jerusalem Fuad al-Tuwal, a Jordanian Arab.

He effusively welcomed Abbas, congratulating him for “his unfaltering efforts to achieve a just peace in the Middle East, a main thrust of which is the creation of a Palestinian State.” The patriarch commiserated with the Palestinians, who “recently turned to the UN in the hope of finding a just solution.” According to his monologue, “they were asked to reengage in a failed peace process,” which “has left a bitter taste of broken promises and of mistrust.”

And guess who embittered the pitiable Palestinians? Guess who cast a dark, sinister shadow over their Muslim Christmas? Those Jews, of course. Who else?

Living up to the ecclesiastical hype, Abbas wished the worshipers “love and peace” and, presumably in that spirit, proceeded to slam Jewish settlements as “immoral and indefensible.”

“I wish for the Palestinian people that next year will be the year that peace will be implemented in the occupied Palestinian lands,” he said. “We, my brothers, believe in peace and are working to implement peace.”

Had any further elucidation been needed about his concept of peace, Abbas furnished it pre-Christmas when traveling to Ankara to shower affection upon the convicted terrorists deported to Turkey as part of the Gilad Schalit swap.

Outstanding among them was Amna Muna – tangible proof that evil can come in attractive guises. Abbas hugged her warmly and sat down for a chummy chat, not to mention his hefty financial reward.

Muna was actually supposed to be released into Gaza, but refused, citing her secularism as problematic in the Hamas fiefdom. In actual fact, though, she feared retribution.

This insolently unrepentant and most aggressive despot of the women’s prison security wing tortured noncompliant fellow inmates by, among other means, pouring boiling oil and wax on them.

Turkey was understandably her preferred destination. She now plies the school-lecture circuit there, vowing to return to active “combat against the Zionists” and exhorting pupils to become shahids (martyrs).

Muna – for those who forgot – is the fetching Fatah operative who via Internet contact lured 16-year-old Ophir Rahum to a cruel death on January 17, 2001. In a way, her atrocity is even more gruesome than the more common forms of Arab-inspired carnage. She might not have claimed as many lives as some of her compatriots, but what she did was spine-chillingly up-front and personal.

She schemed to get her hands on a Jewish kid, chose her victim with coldblooded deliberation, falsely befriended him and lured him in a premeditated hunting expedition that began long before 20 AK-47 bullets riddled Ophir’s young body.

The homicide was meticulously and maliciously plotted and executed painstakingly over months, in scrupulously calculated phases, to wrest an unsuspecting boy from his protective environment and trick him into a rendezvous with a hail of bullets.

Ophir yearned to make love not war. He embodied the shared Israeli dream of peace and bliss. With stars in his eyes, he was enticed. He wanted to believe the pretty decoy who flirted with him, the sly impostor who posed as “Sally.”

The striking seductress arranged to meet the smitten schoolboy. He traveled from Ashkelon to Jerusalem; she picked him up at the bus stop and drove him away. Eventually her accomplices shot his kneecaps and she, as per her own crowing account, stood there, taunting him and cackling mirthfully as he screamed in pain before being put to death. She still often derisively mimics his last cries.

One would expect that Abbas, feted abroad as the prince of moderation, would at least wash his hands of murderous Muna and condemn her unequivocally. Instead, this supposed man of peace has made Muna his Ramallah regime’s poster-child – the object of reverence and compassion, and a model for emulation.

That speaks volumes, because the lionized icon’s underlying moral code inevitably characterizes the collective that sponsors and supports her.

[Read more here]

Condell - my favorite shabbas goy

Sorry I didn't share this 2 months ago when I first saw it. 

Sign of the times

Let them eat pork!

It's bad enough that most Charedim in Israel evade army service, but if they call a serving IDF soldier a whore, that crosses the red line.  


Pictured here is the unrepentant Shlomo Fuchs, sitting in court where he was indicted on Thursday for sexual harassment and banned from using public transport until his next court appearance.  Instead of apologising, he blames the Israeli media for getting him into trouble.


Hopefully this man will be given a custodial sentence - if only for 30 days - to reflect on his disgusting behaviour and as a deterrent to other Charedi groups who laud him as some kind of folk hero. If he goes to jail, doubtless those same groups will organise the usual rock-throwing and bin-burning demonstration (probably on Shabbat) of the kind that follows any justice meted out to Charedim, whether for wife-beating or child abuse.  Hopefully the mounted police will then properly show the same force as they most improperly  used against the settler women of Amona. 


Setting aside the concurrent nuisance of Jewish-Taliban nutjobs in Beit Shemesh, the Fuchs case is not just about abusing a young girl, or insulting the army he refuses to serve. It's about that ubiquitous bad behaviour by Charedim on public transport that most of us have witnessed countless times and will continue to see to our shame and disgrace.


Wherever you fly, there is always at least one of these bearded brothers making a nuisance of himself. Whether it is bartering overweight allowances at the check-in desk (they can't wedge their heels into the new scales anymore!) or being the last to turn their phones off and the first to turn them on, or being the last to board and the first to jump up and empty their luggage from the bin, and then push to the front to be first off the plane.  [REDACTED]

 Now, I am sure that any cross-section of the population has the same proportion of such derelicts. But we don't have to do this wearing a badge!  I don't see many Christian vicars, or Buddhist monks misbehaving on planes. And Muslims may well be trying to blow up planes with their underpants but at least they don't steal the soap and headphones.


I was on a 10-hour Virgin flight not long ago where these two velvet yarmulkas were making a total nuisance of themselves, and boasting about the number of trips they make in a year. When we disembarked I asked them if they would do me and all of our people a huge favour by wearing keffiyehs on their future flights.


Personally - and speaking an an orthodox Jew myself - I hold the rabbis and yeshiva heads totally responsible for this. They are supposed to teach Torah with Derech Eretz  ..  literally - respect for 'the way of the land'. 


I am no rabbi, but I am as convinced as I can possibly be that all the Torah that people like Fuchs and his airplane equivalents have learnt - or will ever learn in the future - is worth absolutely nothing when weighed against the Chillul Hashem they create both amongst secular Israelis (biased as they may be) and the outside world.  


As for the rewards they may expect in the next world, they would all be better off flying every Yom Kippur eating British Airways ham meals bareheaded. 


If Charedi parents and rabbis are not prepared to face this challenge in upbringing and education, let us at least update the Tefillat Haderech (travellers' prayer) to include protection from having to witness this dreadful behaviour, let alone [... REDACTED].

(Note: Two sections have been redacted at the request of a Rabbi whom I respect and wishes not to throw fuel on this fire)