Clipmarks | arifsali's 'israel' clips

Sarah Palin and the Jewish community

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 17:43:07 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Biden, of course, was the more conventional pick - especially for the Jewish community.

senator

is one of the most well-known and respected politicians among American Jewish leadership.

Palin is another story. She is an exceedingly odd choice for a party which has spent the better part of the past year loudly exclaiming that it was reaching out to Jewish voters

First, Palin has absolutely no foreign policy experience

Palin has never visited Israel and besides signing a pro-Israel resolution passed by the state legislature, she has apparently never spoken out or focused on the Jewish state.

ON DOMESTIC issues she is totally out of step with public opinion in the Jewish community.

The Jewish vote in 2008 has been a hot topic of conversation in the media. John McCain's fist major decision of this campaign - picking Palin for his running mate - leads us to believe that the Jewish community's concerns are not so high on his priority list.

Tags: politics, united states, jews

Dead Sea Scrolls go from parchment to the Internet

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:07:08 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.cnn.com

JERUSALEM (CNN) -- More than 2,000 years after they were written, the Dead Sea Scrolls are going digital as part of an effort to better preserve the ancient texts and let more people see them than ever before.

The high-tech initiative, announced Wednesday, will also reveal text that was not visible to the naked eye.

Over the next two years, the Israel Antiquities Authority will digitally photograph and scan every bit of crumbling parchment and papyrus that makes up the scrolls, which include the oldest written record of the Bible's Old Testament.

The images eventually will be posted on the Internet for anyone to see.

Tags: bible, internet

71% of Americans say U.S. gov't shouldn't take sides in Mideast conflict

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:57:07 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.haaretz.com

A public opinion poll released by a research institute at the University of Maryland shows that 71 percent of Americans believe that the United States government should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The survey, which measured attitudes of nearly 19,000 respondents in countries around the world, found that in 14 of the 18 nations studied, a large majority favored an even-handed approach to the conflict.

In none of the countries did a majority support taking Israel's side. Of American respondents, 21 percent said the United States should take Israel's side, and only 3 percent, the Palestinians.

Tags: united states, world, survey

Why do non-Jewish Americans support Israel?

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:08:36 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.haaretz.com

Walter Russell Mead is one of the most revered American foreign policy scholars in the U.S.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Walter Russell Mead's The New Israel and the Old:

The American public has few foreign policy preferences that are this marked, this deep, this enduring -- and this much at odds with public opinion in other countries. In the United States, a pro-Israel foreign policy does not represent the triumph of a small lobby over the public will. It represents the power of public opinion to shape foreign policy in the face of concerns by foreign policy professionals."

Tags: united states, israel

ROME (GAY) PRIDE 2008

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:32:40 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: The earlier clip where it was held in Israel. Wow, what are the odds?

Clip Source: peraspera.megablog.it

Tags: rome, gay, parade

'Jewish settler attack' on film

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:58:11 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Footage from a video camera handed out by an Israeli human rights group appears to show Jewish settlers beating up Palestinians in the West Bank.

An elderly shepherd, his wife and a nephew said they were attacked by four masked men for allowing their animals to graze near the settlement of Susia.

So far, no-one has been arrested.

Baseball bats

Over the brow of the hill walk four masked men holding baseball bats. To the right of the screen, in the foreground, stands a 58-year-old Palestinian woman.

Thamam al-Nawaja has been herding her goats close to the Jewish settlement of Susia, near Hebron in the southern West Bank.

Within a few seconds, she, along with her 70-year-old husband and one of her nephews, will be beaten up.

As the first blows land, the woman filming - the daughter-in-law of the elderly couple - drops the camera and runs for help.

Tags: israel, palestine, human rights

Tel Aviv - Gay - Pride Parade 2008

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:26:45 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: Freedom of Speech in Israel? Yes!

Clip Source: www.linkinn.com

Tags: gay, israel

$5.88 million for Israel.com

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 20:19:56 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.haaretz.com

Prior to the transaction, the owner of the domain was Joel Noel Friedman, a 46-year-old Jewish American. According to the auction Website www.auctioninfo.org, Friedman said that he didn't expect the domain name to be valued so high when he bought it in 1994.

Friedman explained that he originally registered the domain name under his name for fear it would be misused by someone else. He added that he put the domain up for auction as a tribute to Israel's 60th anniversary.

Tags: israel, internet

U.S. cancels Fulbright grants to Palestinian scholars

Thu, 29 May 2008 23:05:08 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.iht.com

The State Department has withdrawn all Fulbright grants to Palestinian students in Gaza hoping to pursue advanced degrees at American institutions this fall because Israel has not granted permission for the students to leave Gaza.

Israel's restriction is in keeping with its policy of isolating this coastal strip, which is run by the militant group Hamas.

The United States consulate in Jerusalem said the grant money had been "redirected" because of concern that if the students were forced to remain in Gaza the grant money would go to waste

Abdulrahman Abdullah, one of the seven Gazans who received the letter, was in shock.

"If we are talking about peace and mutual understanding, it means investing in people who will later contribute to Palestinian society," he said. "I am against Hamas. Their acts and policies are wrong. Israel talks about a Palestinian state. But who will build that state if we can get no training?"

Tags: israel, united states, scholars

Israeli award goes to Palestinians

Mon, 26 May 2008 19:46:37 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: english.aljazeera.net

A US scientist is reported to have donated his share of an Israeli mathematics award to a Palestinian university and its students.

Professor David Mumford of Brown University in Rhode Island said he was donating part of his $33,333 portion of the Wolf Foundation Prize for Mathematics to Bir Zeit university in the West Bank.

"I decided to donate my share of the Wolf Prize to enable the academic community in occupied Palestine to survive and thrive," Mumford told Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper.

"I am very grateful for the prize, but I believe that Palestinian students should have an opportunity to go elsewhere to acquire an education," he told the newspaper.

"Students in the West Bank and Gaza today do not have an opportunity to do that."

Tags: israel, palestinians

Ancient flint tools, animal remains found in Galilee cave

Thu, 22 May 2008 21:05:31 GMT

clipped by: arifsali
clipper's remarks: So now can we return the land to its rightful owners?

Clip Source: www.usatoday.com

Archaeologists say bears and buffalo once roamed, and prehistoric men chipped flint into tools, in what later became the Holy Land, Israel's Antiquities Authority said Thursday.

They found the evidence in a huge cave in the Galilee in Israel's north.

Israel's Antiquities Authority released a statement saying the cave was discovered by accident. Workers were excavating for a sewage line when they came across it.

Experts date the cave to the Upper Paleolithic Period, which began 40,000 years ago. They found ancient flint tools used by early man, as well as remains of animals that are no longer in the region, including bears, buffalo and red deer.

The antiquities authority said it's the first cave with artifacts from that period to be found in more than 40 years.

Tags: archaeology, israel

Youth burns religious books

Tue, 20 May 2008 20:42:59 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.haaretz.com

Orthodox Jews set fire to hundreds of copies of the New Testament in the latest act of violence against Christian missionaries in the Holy Land.

Or Yehuda Deputy Mayor Uzi Aharon said missionaries recently entered a
neighborhood in the predominantly religious town of 34,000 in central Israel, distributing hundreds of New Testaments and missionary material.

After receiving complaints, Aharon said, he got into a loudspeaker car last Thursday and drove through the neighborhood, urging people to turn over the material to Jewish religious students who went door to door to collect it.

"The books were dumped into a pile and set afire in a lot near a synagogue," he said.

The newspaper Maariv reported Tuesday that hundreds of yeshiva students took part in the book-burning. But Aharon told The Associated Press that only a few students were present, and that he was not there when the books were torched.

"Not all of the New Testaments that were collected were burned, but hundreds were," he said.

Tags: religion

Dead Sea Scroll Put on Rare Display in Israel

Wed, 14 May 2008 04:36:16 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: news.nationalgeographic.com

One of the most important Dead Sea scrolls is going on display in Jerusalem this week—more than four decades after it was last seen by the public.

The 24-foot (7.3-meter) scroll with the text of the Bible's Book of Isaiah had been in a dark, temperature-controlled room at the Israel Museum since 1967. It went on display two years earlier, but curators replaced it with a facsimile after noticing new cracks in the calfskin parchment.

The museum decided to put the scroll back on show for three months as part of Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations.

The priceless manuscript, written by a Judean scribe around 120 B.C., was in a long glass case Tuesday, its neat rows of Hebrew letters distinct and legible.

The Isaiah manuscript was the only complete biblical book discovered among the Dead Sea scrolls, one of the great archaeological finds of the 20th century.

(See a time line of early Christianity.)

Tags: dead sea scrolls, jerusalem, religion

Israelis Claim Secret Agreement With U.S.

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:29:53 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.washingtonpost.com

A letter that President Bush personally delivered to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon four years ago has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president's efforts to forge a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians during his last year in office.

Ehud Olmert, the current Israeli prime minister, said this week that Bush's letter gave the Jewish state permission to expand the West Bank settlements that it hopes to retain in a final peace deal, even though Bush's peace plan officially calls for a freeze of Israeli settlements across Palestinian territories on the West Bank. In an interview this week, Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed this understanding in a secret agreement reached between Israel and the United States in the spring of 2005, just before Israel withdrew from Gaza.

Tags: united states, israel, politics

U.S. Jews get a new voice in Washington

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 20:15:07 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.iht.com

American Jews have formed a new pro-Israel lobby as an alternative to traditional organizations that they assert have often been impediments to progress in the Middle East because of their generally reflexive support of Israel.

Officials of the new group, called "J Street," say they believe the best way to bring security and peace to Israel is to help political candidates who support that country but will occasionally question some of its policies, like maintaining or expanding settlements in disputed territories.

For many who follow the intense and complex world of lobbying on Middle East issues in Washington, there is little doubt about the role J Street hopes to play in domestic U.S. politics - upsetting or at least diluting the influence of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the formidable lobby that has long been the dominant voice of American Jewry with regard to U.S. Middle East policy.

"They're trying to be the un-Aipac,"

Tags: jews, united states, politics