A Petition to the German Government

This open letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and foreign minister Guido Westerwelle has come to my attention. It expresses dismay at Germany's recent UN vote against Israel. The petition has so far garnered 3,500 signatures and they are targeting 10,000. While many of the signatories are just concerned German citizens, it includes some respectable journalists and intellectuals.

If you know any German citizens that wish to maintain their country's modern role as a friend of the Jewish people and the state of Israel, please bring this petition to their attention.

It was translated by a native German speaker and further edited by me:

To: Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle

The Arab world is burning. But the UNSC has nothing better to do than to debate for three hours Israel's settlement policy with the goal of label them as illegal.

You, honorable Ms. Merkel, and you honorable Mr. Westerwelle have promised the world that Germany will not disappoint when it occupies a seat in the UNSC.  But now, you support a resolution that is part of the propaganda war of the Palestinians, instead of prompting the Palestinians to negotiate with their peace partner Israel a mutual agreement in regards to the future borders of the Palestinian state.

This makes it clear that Germany does not measure up to its own expectations with respect to its position as 'Friend of Israel' exactly when it is called upon to back years of lip service with concrete actions. Here, one would expect Germany's equivocal 'No!'.

However, by consenting to the UNSC resolution you support the one sided conviction of the only democracy in the Middle East based on the falsification of history.

Video - Live Fire Against Libyan Rebels

This video is from yesterday in Derna. The title says 'Peaceful Demonstrators'. I don't know, a heck of a lot of them seem to carry pretty large rocks. They are not peaceful demonstrators, but rebels. Rebels against a brutal, insane dictatorship, but still rebels.

I wish them luck and international assistance.

-QP

Mid-afternoon Coffee Snack

Rmi Kleinstein - Tapuhim u'Tmarim

Video - Gaddafi's Mercenaries in Action

Spring Time of the (Arab) Peoples

Anyone who has followed my blog with respect to the recent wave of unrest in the Arab world, must have realized that I tend to liken the current it to a very important hinge-point in European and world history, the popular revolutions of 1848 otherwise knows as 'Spring Time of the Peoples'. In that year, a wave of popular unrest swept most of the continent after a successful revolution toppled the French constitutional monarchy.

Robert Zaretsky, a Texas based history professor, also likes this analogy:

The dead weight of brutal and autocratic rulers; a young and professional middle class deprived not just of liberty, but jobs; a deep and persistent economic crisis; and a revolution in communications that renders traditional borders obsolete and, finally, the bursting of the dam that unleashes a surge of revolution that sweeps across a continent: these conditions describe not only North Africa and the Middle East today, but Europe in 1848. If nations from Tunisia to Bahrain are, in fact, reviving the so-called “springtime of peoples”, the winter of political disenchantment may not be far away.
The backgrounds to the two series of revolutions are eerily similar. The Great Recession of recent memory was a blip compared to the economic depression, known as the “hungry years,” that flattened Europe in the 1840s. Disastrous harvests pushed up grain prices across Europe; city dwellers, spending more on food, bought fewer commodities; industrial and commercial activity slowed to a near standstill.

Scary Video from Libya

Tripoli - Gaddafi's forces spraying bullets at rebels. 

Israeli Arab Sheikh Threatens an Uprising

Israeli Arab Sheikh Abbas Zakhour, who until recently occupied a seat in the Knesset, Israel's national parliament is warning that unless discrimination against Israel's Arab minority stops, a similar type of popular uprising as seen in the Middle East recently is imminent.

This is coming from a person who merely last year traveled to Libya to kiss Gaddafi's ass to the dismay of many Israelis. While some of the Israeli Arab leaders who traveled to Libya last year expressed reservations regarding the visit (at least retroactively), to my Knowledge the Sheikh hasn't. 

It's important to note that individual members of Israel's Arab minority have access to far more political and economical rights than any other Arab individuals in the Middle East. That's without mentioning the large number of affirmative action programs that was legislated by the state in recent years.

Are things perfect? No... but it's mostly because of douches like the Sheikh who wants to push his constituents towards petty ethnic warfare rather than represent their many (legitimate) aspirations in the Knesset, which is what he was elected by them to do.

If anything, I think Israeli Arabs should enact a similar day of range against their own community leaders, who would rule just as a typical Middle Eastern autocrat were they given the chance.

-QP