Boker tov, Boulder!

Bush letter "misunderstood" by Israelis

Washington Post

Abbas made it clear he felt he had gone a long way toward rebutting assertions by Israeli officials that a letter from Bush to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2004 had in effect given Israel guarantees on keeping settlements on the West Bank and on banning the return of Palestinian refugees.

Abbas said the letter "perhaps was misunderstood" by the Israelis, since Bush said Thursday that such issues should be settled "as part of mutual agreement between the two sides...."

Boker tov, Yisrael.

The good news, if there is any, is that Abu Mazen sez he is not asking for all of Jerusalem, nor for the town of Safed, where he was born. Read it all.

Meanwhile, on Friday, IDF troops apprehended a Palestinian who attempted to cross a roadblock near Nablus in the West Bank with an explosive belt in his bag.

Battalion commander Yoav Zuckerman said, "On the surface it seems as if there is calm, but under it all the terror and attempts to smuggle explosive belts and devices through the roadblocks, to harm Israel's citizens, continue." YNet News

Book TV Tonight

At 8:45 p.m. EDT/ 5:45 PDT time tonight, David Horowitz will discuss his new book, about his recovery from prostate cancer. David Wolpe, the rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, introduces.

CSPAN 2

Orange Jew sighting

An Israeli opponent to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan heckles during Sharon's speech to an audience of young Jewish students from around the world in Giriat Gat, southern Israel, Sunday May 29, 2005.

Prisoner release: I don't wanna talk about it

The Israeli cabinet approved the release of 400 more Palestinian security prisoners on Sunday in an 18-3 vote.

Ministers Netanyahu, Naveh, and Katz voted against the release.

ALREADY: Latest Israeli Prisoner Release Disappoints Palestinians -The New York Times. but of course.

Liberal Values

While we're on the topic of letters to the editor, this one also appeared in the Camera yesterday.

Keep the signs, not the statue

For the last 10 years we have had a four-foot-tall metal kokopelli sculpture hand-crafted by my husband in the flower beds in the front yard of our house on Dehesa Court. Unfortunately someone has recently decided to "borrow" this sculpture. We would very much appreciate its return as soon as possible. We miss him. Thank you.

P.S. You can keep the stop sign and the street sign, as we don't miss them.

CHRIS and HARDY BULLOCK
Boulder

I would bet my SUV that Chris and Hardy are leftists. There's just something unmistakable about that combination of arrogant self-interest with the overly kind and polite approach to a thief. It's just so Boulder.

Kudos to The Husband

... who had his letter published yesterday in the local paper:

I had to laugh when I read the Camera editorial, "Left, right and wrong" (May 25). Yesiree, only 6 percent of CU-Boulder faculty are Republicans because "there aren't many conservative academics, period. Conservatives are far less likely than liberals to choose academic careers."

Right. And I suppose that historically, there weren't black academics on campus because there just weren't many black academics, period. And Jews weren't in country clubs because they had no desire to play golf.

As Howard Jacobson recently wrote with regard to the British academic boycott of Israeli universities: "There is some fancy abroad that where large numbers of people agree to close their minds together you have democracy in action. You don't. What you have is mobilized prejudice."

THORNEY LIEBERMAN
Boulder

You see that? He not only reads my blog, but makes great use of it. He's the best.

Go buy his photographs at ThorneyLieberman.com, his book Manhattan Lightscape at Abbeville Press, or some bamboo fly-fishing rods at his latest endeavor, Tea Stick Rod Co.

You can also hire him to photograph your deck (or any other combination of architecture and light). Just NO weddings or bar mitzvah parties.

Deck is $ 869,000. Comes with 2 acres just outside Boulder city limits, 3 shares in the irrigation ditch, one mountain view, one small barn, numerous birds, bunnies, racoons, squirrels, coyotes, the occasional fox, hawk or eagle, and four thousand square feet of house.

For further information, contact our realtor.

Yet another Jewish cemetery vandalized

(IsraelNN.com) Twenty-six gravestones have been vandalized in a Kazan, Russia cemetery, according to a May 26, 2005 report by the local news agency Intertat.ru. [I couldn't find the original.]

Swastikas were painted on several of the tombstones on the morning of May 25, including that of the recently deceased head of the Jewish community, Leonid Sonts.

This report at Arutz Sheva is the only one listed at Google News. Nothing whatsoever at Yahoo News about it.

I DID find articles, however, about swastikas on cars "and other surfaces" in Queens (NYC); on flags at soccer games in Argentina; a home in Houston; inside an apartment in Arkansas; on a road in Lufkin TX; on the walls of a Hispanic market and restaurant in Tennessee; on CFI (Chicago Friends of Israel) posters in the library at the University of Chicago; on a memorial to Polish soldiers in Berlin; on tennis courts in Norristown PA; on about a dozen tombstones at the Washburn Street Cemetery in Scranton PA; synagogues in Geneva and the Ukraine; on houses, apartments and cars in New Brunswick Canada; on the Herzog House in Ireland (residence of Israel's former chief rabbi of Ireland, Halevy Herzog, whose son Chaim became Israel's sixth president) [Also this month in Ireland: on the gates of the Central Synagogue, at the Jewish Museum, at a home for Jewish Senior Citizens and on the gates of two -pardon me, the two- Jewish cemeteries], on a bridge in a park in Spring Lake/Ferrysburg MI; in the prison cell of a former UN official -a German national- who committed suicide at the NY upstate correctional facility; carved into the sides of cars in Sharon MA; and one, perhaps unintentional, on the ceiling at the Twin Cities Metrodome.

If I'm not mistaken, these were all in the last month or so. At least the stories about them are current. All I did was search Google News for "swastikas." Got more than I bargained for - I suddenly feel very tired. No, I think I feel sick.

Just think, I probably only scratched the surface.

Orange Ribbons = Incitement

(IsraelNN.com) With Prime Minister Ariel Sharon continuing efforts to repress opposition to his Gaza/Shomron Disengagement Plan, Tzfat (Safed) police prevented youths from distributing orange Gush Katif/Shomron solidarity ribbons to passers-by.

Two youths were placed under arrest and they were released only after promising to cease their “inciteful” activities.

HOT SPIT! -- (IsraelNN.com) A group calling itself Secular Israelis Against Disengagement has begun launching activities against the planned expulsion of Gush Katif and northern Shomron residents.

The group is headed by Likud Central Committee member Yaron Olami who is also a Herzliya Councilman.

Olami emphasizes the non-Sabbath observance lifestyle of supporters in an effort to remove the misconception that only Sabbath observant Jews oppose the planned expulsion.

Protests were held in shopping centers on the Sabbath with participants holding up anti-disengagement signs including “The Transfer Won’t Work.”

Organizers plan to step-up their activities next week, targeting the Tel Aviv pedestrian promenade.

I'm nervous

President Bush welcomes Abu Mazen to the White House, May 26, 2005:

"Any ... changes to the 1949 Armistice lines must be mutually agreed to."

During Clinton's final days in office, the Palestinian Authority president "thanked me for all my efforts and told me what a great man I was," Clinton writes.

"'Mr. Chairman,' I replied, 'I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.'"

See also
Shteinitz: US No Longer Supports Defensible Borders for Israel

The Chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee says Thursday's Bush-Abu Mazen meeting is a great blow to Israeli-U.S. relations, and proves that Sharon is deceiving the public.

The committee chairman, Likud MK Yuval Shteinitz said today that everything Sharon has long said he was promised by U.S. President George Bush amounts to zero, because "Bush said yesterday that the basis for everything is the pre-1967 borders."

Prime Minister Sharon has long boasted that Bush has promised him that he would support Israel's right to retain large settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria in any final-status arrangement. However, Shteinitz said, Bush's remarks on Thursday represent "a regression even from previous American positions in favor of UN Resolution 242, which talked about 'defensible borders.'"

In fact, Bush referred not to the 1967 borders, but rather to the 1949 Armistice Lines, which are even less generous to Israel in some areas.

And ... ZOA Regrets President Bush's Public Demands on Israel While He Praised PA's Abbas

Same day, different planets universes

"... our struggle never ever been ONLY for a state rather it was all along for the rehaibilitation of our refugees to their homes, so, if the refugees are not going home, and the UN decided West Bank including E. Jerusalem as occupied territories, then we can wait, up to 3000 years (like the Jews) to go home and create our state. -- Ahmad Abouali, Nablus, palestine, in a comment at YNet

"The demonstrators who are burning our roads are our destroyers and do not deserve to live in this glorious country. Let us proudly wave the Blue and White and stop the foolishness of that meaningless orange... " -- Rachelle and Saul Isserow, Jerusalem, in a letter to JPost