To my blog followers....

Friends often ask why I am not blogging as much as before. 
The answer is that I find Twitter a much quicker means of venting during a business day. And the limitation of 140 characters is a marvelous discipline. 

Much maligned as a dumb gossip network for people without a life - I discovered the power of Twitter during the Gaza rocket campaign and was getting news faster than any other medium. 

So I recommend you sign up to Twitter and subscribe to the real and instant news reporters ... ordinary citizens of Israel, Egypt, Syria etc. and plug into the vast array of support for Israel which pervades cyberspace but which the BBC, Guardian and others of their ilk choose to ignore.

I am getting my Tweets posted automatically to this blog, so you can follow.

Or join Twitter yourself and follow me at @ZalmiU . Then choose from those feeds that I follow and discover new ones you'd like.

Best wishes  - Z.

Vegetables never killed anyone ....

The EU is so quick to label lettuce as Israeli ...  but still won't label Hezbollah as terrorists.

With Hezbollah so earnestly assisting Assad's slaughter in Syria, what could possibly explain this bizarre policy?

Shared interests? 

Talking heads were indignant this week about the Americans proposing peace talks with the Taliban, saying that this was an affront to victims of the Afghan war and the families of fallen troops.  ‘These guys have killed and maimed soldiers and civilians and are totally unrepentant about it … and you want peace talks with such monsters?’

 

Well, the easiest answer is that one makes peace with enemies not friends.

Others might say: what do you expect when this US president told the enemy exactly when he would be withdrawing the marines from Afghanistan? If you run the war in such a farcical manner, how can you expect the peace process making any sense either?

The whole thing is very sad and, yes, a dreadful betrayal of the sacrifice by America’s fighting men and women.  The harsh reality is that, these days, Western troops are sent into battle with one hand tied behind their backs.  If a commander is sending troops into battle, the mission statement must be to achieve total destruction of the enemy or its unconditional surrender.

No question, the Taliban was an enemy that needed to be totally destroyed. No question America had the firepower to achieve this.  Sadly there was simply not enough political will.

But I come back to the talking heads.

These are the same pundits who keep pressing Israel to talk to Hamas. 

‘These guys have killed and maimed soldiers and civilians and are totally unrepentant about it … and you want peace talks with such monsters?’  

What hypocrisy!

[If you're in any doubt about what kind of monsters we are dealing with, click the following link .... but ONLY if you've got the stomach for it. Really ... TALIBAN ]

Hilarious Knesset Scene

Forget Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah, Arab Spring, BDS, John Kerry ... nothing gets in the way of a good laugh in the Knesset.

Here is new education minister Rabbi Shai Piron delivering a brief statement on behalf of an absent colleague. The subject? New penalties for the smuggling of cellphones and other forbidden objects into Israeli prisons.

He had not seen the text before starting to speak, but it was rather unfortunately drafted as 'this serious phenomenon of the penetration of prohibited items into prisons' .  

Soon as Piron got to 'penetration' he cracked up ... never to recover. 

LOL.