The Arrogant, Fish Eating Tribe - the origin of Jews and their shabbat according to a sheikh from A-Sahel

 This I heard from a loyal fan of a A-Sahel sheikh. This is an Arab community in northern Jerusalem.

"Jews descend from a famous tribe that lived by the sea. The tribe was known as very arrogant and snobbish. They were fishermen, and they fished the whole length of the seashore. They fished so much fish that they never had to worry about their livelihood.

God was upset at their vain behavior. One day he made the sea retreat, and the tribe was no longer able to fish. This was the tribe's sabbath day. The tribe cried to God, and he commanded them to spend the day praying, and eat fish to remember how they were punished for their arrogance."

I think you also didn't know this.

Iced Coffee From Thailand, and a 200 Liters Of Raspberry Puree.

Near a construction site this was found in the litter. TASCO is a British grocery chain. This "iced" coffee was made by Vara Foods in Thailand. The product has the Hallal stamp of approval. A typical Jewish question: why does it need to be Hallal? Just like in kashrus, to make sure it was not made with the equipment that processed ham? Or some Thai employee not dropped a piece of pork rind in the coffee metering valve?

And at another construction site, behold this huge drum that held raspberry puree. A typical squat drum that is used by oil and chemical industries holds 55 gallons. In Europe they state to hold 200 liters. This drum looks bigger, maybe to hold 250 liters. I can't imagine a plant or a restaurant anywhere near Jerusalem that produces raspberry-containing dessert. Maybe there is one in Ramallah. Looking up the initials in the upper corner of the label, I found that it is SVZ, of Netherlands, and a leading supplier of aseptic fruit in Europe. They do have kosher and Hallal products. Now we know. The drum is just too handy to pass up when you need to pour a pillar of concrete.

Jewish graffiti in Arabic

No local Arab could understand what this is. It turns out to be a Jewish name 'Hananel, חננאל, April 2019.
It's not clear why Arabic people could not make sense of it. Someone almost got a Google Translate rendition as 'HNNEEL'.

Arabic graffiti at a construction site

Arab construction workers may be underestimated as having an artistic streak. December 2017.

الحب وتحية من ايتسيك الرجل المزعج

محمود يحب ربيكا ابنة صموئيل
طلب مني شراء تذكرة سفر من قطر إلى إيلات.

The Jordanian-Israeli Kafkaesque Chaos

Raeeda, a college graduate, could not find decent employment in Jordan. Using her savings she did what many other Jordanians and the West Bank Arabs do – sneak into Israel for social benefits and free medical care. Using her tourist visa, given freely to Jordanians, she made her way to Tel Aviv’s sprawling Dan suburban region. There she stayed at cheap hotels and worked cleaning houses and stairwells.

Just as she calculated, in a matter of two moths of all work, cheap food and no wasting money on fun, she built up respectable savings. She rented a room in a nice apartment that she shared with legal foreign workers from Romania, Philippines, and Nigeria. One of the workers started taking Raeeda along on jobs to clean luxury penthouses in Tel Aviv’s Ramat Aviv neighborhood.

Eventually her financial situation has improved. She could afford to buy an entertainment center, quality cookware, winter clothes, evening language courses at the Gotham City-like Central Bus Station, and, most importantly, an expensive, six-month extended stay visitor’s visa.

While cleaning one of these penthouses, she had to throw away a pile of junk mail in which she found a collection of CDs. She rescued the CDs. Among the standard fare of mediocre Israeli pop songs, there was a CD produced by Amnon Itzhak, an Israeli charismatic leader specializing in returning the lost back to the Judaism. The CD contained a lecture on basic values of Judaism and character development.

It made sense to the educated Raeeda, and soon she started attending a women's circle at her neighborhood synagogue. The unsuspecting women, convinced by her classic, genuine Semitic speaking style, and impressed with her polished manners, readily accepted Raeeda.

The women soon persuaded the single Raeeda to think about getting married. She agreed to a series of blind dates, one of which eventually made her fall in love and proposed marriage. She confessed to the man that she was an Arab, and is working illegally in Israel. That turned out to be no obstacle, and she quickly became a happy wife.

Meanwhile, the government had instituted a policy under which Raeeda was denied citizenship to which, she assumed, she was entitled having married an Israeli. The act of applying for the citizenship itself had triggered the bureaucratic machine to terminate her comfortable status as a visitor and to order her to leave the country.

Just as she and her husband started an appeal process, they realized they were expecting a baby.

Meanwhile, she started attending classes for potential converts into Judaism. Being very spiritual and studious helped her pass the stringent oral test, known for being administered by the pedantic Ashkenazi rabbis. She proudly joined the women’s league at the synagogue. One woman’s husband, a lawyer, realizing that Raeeda was entitled to an unconditional citizenship, started legal papers on her behalf. In another couple of weeks she gave birth to a boy.

The clouds hung on the threshold. A mere month after the birth of their baby, Raeeda’s husband was killed in one of the terrorist bombings in Tel Aviv. Raeeda was still a visitor and a widow. According to the socialist policies of the Israeli government, regardless of her religious status as a Jew, she was still regarded as an Arab, and, as in all matters Arab, must be taken care of by Arab social workers.

To complicate the hardship, the government, then just having gotten rid itself of the religious factions, informed her that despite her religious status she must leave Israel, or be deported to Jordan.

The social workers assigned to her case informed her that her baby was considered to be Arab, and, since she had no income, the baby could be handed over to an Arab foster parents.

While still grieving for her husband, she had to open the door to the prospective foster parents with the social workers in tow. Pointedly speaking Arabic, the hopeful foster parents informed everyone of their impatience for the paperwork to go through and to receive the baby so that they “could raise him as a shaheed, who by sacrificing his life would atone for the transgression she committed by marrying a Jew.”

Raeeda promptly picked up and left the city to settle in an undisclosed location where she was helped by the religious community to assume a new identity. The social workers, the foster parents and the Arab media meanwhile have launched a search for the woman, and, most importantly, for her Arab son.

Eventually, the crusade to reclaim the boy to the Arab fold became cynical when it received direction from the administrator of a prominent Arabic school that is famous for having among its alumni the Jordanian youth who blew himself up in Jerusalem's Sbarro pizza shop.

The whereabouts of Raeeda and her son are unknown; the anti-religious Israeli government is still functioning along its usual Orwellian guidelines while looking over its shoulder at the anti-Israeli Arab members of its own Knesset; the Arab world has since spun stories accusing Israel of trading in Arab babies; and the latest news, according to Shofar.net News, is that the Kafkaesque authorities have given Raeeda the long-awaited Israeli citizenship though they are still bent on taking away her son.

by permission from a Tefillon blog

Jordan Comeback No.1

There is this Jewish woman that made aliya from Jordan. The most unusual aliyah.

Over 20 years ago her mom met an Arab man from Gaza. They got married and went to live in Israel proper. Soon after marriage the State of Israel found out that the man had been associating with terrorists and their charities. Israel expelled him.

They had a daughter who they raised a s a devout Muslim. She used to sneak out at night just to catch the night prayers in the back of men's only Islamic shul. She was on the way to becoming a mother to a Jihad warrior.

Something happened. In her early twenties, just like in the Polish comeback story, she accidentally found out that her mother is really Jewish. Nobody had a clue that this girl (young woman already) had a change of direction in her idealistic pursuits.

She personally told me that she all of a sudden felt complete (the way Islam is supposed to make one feel, hence the name). She felt that she was Jewish, and she had to be back in Israel.

She already had a business degree, and according to her plan that nobody suspected, got a job at the Jordanian Embassy in Israel commercial section as a secretary. As soon as she got put up at the embassy, she went to the Western Wall, and still dressed as an Arab, asked for directions to the actual location. "Jews go here, and Arabs go there," she was told, and immediately felt the pangs of being torn from her own heritage.

Back at the embassy she prepared her essential bags, and waited for an opportune moment. In no time at all she found herself at the Ministry of Absorption, and then at a local synagogue's office, where they told her that she needed no conversion or special classes to be a Jew. She was directed to a women's course in the Sorotzkin neighborhood, where she learned the laws pertaining to Jewish women and Jewish ethics.

Soon after that she went on dates, and after a reasonable time of picking her future husband, got married. By the time she had her second child, I got to know her husband, and they introduced me to my future wife, and everyone lived happily thereafter.

Secret election campaigns in Jerusalem

A casual walk along the Herzl Avenue yields intriguing discoveries of what must be a shadow, alternative, anarchistic even(?) movements roiling amidst the tempestuous political scene of Jerusalem, the city divided and to be divided by any influential politician, and along any imaginable opinion lines. We are not talking about Kadima, Mafdal, Likud, Hadash, UTJ, Labor, United Arab Front, the Organization To Kill Zionist Entity, Fateh, Hamas, Hizbullah, PFLP, The Al-Aqsah Martyrs.

Since the shadow-anarchist-underground movements seem to avoid standard commercial methods of advertizing, they seem to resort to the ubiquitous graffiti ( more here), especially on concrete blocks that the city likes to use to hold up utility poles (since it saves them man-hours needed to drill, dig and fill for the poles). These are just samples:



Along the same avenue, the list of contractors for the Jerusalem's Light Rail transformer station by the Shaarey Zedek Hospital is printed up as a mixture of political and commercial advertizing, unsurpassed exponent of political cronyism and bid rigging(? - when common sense suggests a trolley bus system, a few street cars serving along the only thoroughfare is a far cry from moving public through traffic jams):


Keep in touch for the impending results of our election campaign research.

The Fast of 9th of Av

The of Av has just passed and the whole world has not even blinked. If the nation only knew that the real peace might be available through the Temple, rebuilt, on the Temple Mount, accessible by anyone front these nations of the world. They would be fasting, too, if they knew how much they need it. After all, they do need it, to go up to Jerusalem and ask a Jew to come to the Temple of G-d and pray together (for the Feast of Tabernacles, see the Pentateuch, Leviticus)

The trick to fasting for me was to conserve energy, to walk up to the Avrichim Kolel minyan, which is air-conditioned, to sleep till 6:40 pm, and pray the Afternoon and Evening service at the Great Beit Knesset.

Meanwhile, Peres, the new figurehead of the State of Israel, has made a lasting impression on everyone by casting himself again, as a national sage. As if the state could not otherwise survive without him.

“I always look ahead,” he said. “The (Israeli) people must be taught…” or something to that effect. We are going to witness the resurgence of Shimon Says websites.

Something is definitely going on, because the gunship choppers and jets have been roaring in the sky all day long.

Potemkin's Light Rail

The hilariousness of the light rail construction in Al-Quds is more than laughable. Someone else would say, "sad." I find it entertaining. Even to a person totally unfamiliar from civic engineering, watching the whole project would suggest that it is run either by nincompoops, or by a cohort of corrupt contractors.

Nobody can even guess why the Al-Quds Municipality totally ignored the possibility of using electric trolley buses. Instead, they went for a bare-bones light rail line running a pathetic fleet of Alstom's sleek, sexy Eurodesign short trains.

The Herzl Avenue that is already suffering from the fate of continuous excavation (for the ever-incomplete sewer, main, and cable rework), the circus on the supposed terminus of the line at the Mount Herzl can be described as a dig-pour cement-pour another layer-drill and insert rail fasteners-install rail track-uninstall-scrape the top layer of cement-wait procedure.

The continuous traffic jams are exacerbated by the construction of the Calatrava Bridge, which seems to be tinkered with by another team of contractors, that could have been the Keystone Cops moonlighting as construction company. They found a hugest crane in Israel, had it hoist the pieces of the curved bridge, paint it all white, only to cut it with blowtorches in places different from where the original pieces were welded. This whole construction show can teach an ignoramus how not to build bridges and railroads.

Maybe all of this is caused by a government bureaucrat driving around in car bought for him with the 120% new car tax, and due to his MS Outlook being full of X-rated, interoffice PowerPoint slideshows.

On top of it all, the municipality is all huffed up and proud of the pygmy rail line propelling the Al-Quds into the futuristic vision of socialist-dreamed up 22nd century.

I will wear a wide-brimmed hat while walking to Beit Hakerem, 15 minutes or so, along the route of this dog-and-pony show. Helicopter are buzzing, F-15 are roaring.