Ring ring
Ring ring
Hello?
Hello, um, yes, is this the Talent Agency?
Shalom.
Hi.
What’s happening?
Everything’s ok, how about you?
Everything’s fine. All good your side?
Yeah, everything’s ten by ten. Continue reading →

Finally, an Israeli action movie without all the self-flagellation we’ve grown accustomed to over the past few years in films like Beufort, Lebanon, and Waltz with Bashir. Our latest movie, formatted like a reality TV show and premiering at the Dubai film festival, forgoes all the questions about the justice of our cause, the morality of our actions, and the angst of our fighters’ troubled souls. In this movie, war is not hell, it is show business. There are no innocent bystanders, only high-value targets. There are no guns, cannons and explosions, rather lethal injections, strangulation and suffocation. Much less general, much more personal and immediate. Much better TV. This is what we always thought espionage and assassination was like. The experts were wrong when they said it’s nothing like James Bond. It’s everything we wanted it to be: disguises, subterfuge, honey-traps, fake passports and elaborate getaways. We’re tired of war movies, now we demand espionage reality TV. Continue reading →

You couldn’t ask for a more fitting secret service assassin than the Anglo Israeli. By ‘Anglo’ – meaning British, South African, Canadian, or Australian.

American immigrants won’t do – they’re too much like Israelis. Assassins need to work quietly and not attract too much attention to themselves. So sending an American oleh [one of the suspected assassins used a French passport and look what happened] on a complicated mission in a pressurized environment, with many, many cameras just won’t work. Also, they love food too much so they’re liable to get easily distracted. It would have been better to leave out the French oleh and add another German or Anglo oleh. Thank God there were no Americans on the mission – the movie as shown was already starting to look too much like Ocean’s Eleven. Continue reading →

and now in Arabic:

It is symbolic that the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff chose Valentines Day to come here to talk about the meaning of the color red. It is a passionate color that can lead to violence and warfare, or it can signal a love that transcends time, a true bond. It is the banner that leads the troops to war; and a warning of danger up ahead. Red is the color of blood, of courage and sacrifice, love, life and death.

The thinking within the Israeli military community is that when the chips are down, at the precise moment when Israel believes it has no choice but to attack Iran and no better operational window within which to do it, the US cannot stand in Israel’s way, cannot give Jerusalem a red light. Continue reading →

This just out from Tel-Aviv police. The idea is, quirky, the video – awful.

The Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes survey conducted last year paints a worrying picture of attitudes towards Jews in the Middle East.

In the predominantly Muslim nations surveyed, views of Jews were overwhelmingly unfavorable. Nearly all in Jordan (97 percent), the Palestinian territories (97%) and Egypt (95%) held an unfavorable view. Similarly, 98% of Lebanese expressed an unfavorable opinion of Jews, including 98% among both Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, as well as 97% of Lebanese Christians. Continue reading →

Terrible, vicious comments by some real crazy people:

In 2008, President Bashar Assad was a worried man.

The UN probe into the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri pointed at direct involvement of senior members of the Assad regime. Hariri’s long-time friend, French president Jacques Chirac, was clamoring for Assad’s head. The International Atomic Energy Agency was pursuing a probe of a Syrian nuclear facility, which, according to foreign media, had been bombed by the Israel Air Force. Damascus was being linked with Pyongyang, Assad with Kim Jong Il. Continue reading →

An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program will neither completely stop Teheran’s nuclear march, nor bring down the ayatollahs’ regime, according to former Swiss ambassador to Iran Tim Guldimann.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on the sidelines of this week’s Herzliya Conference, Guldimann, who knows the Iranian way of thinking well, expressed – as a personal opinion – his deep concern about the military option against Iran. Continue reading →

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran announced Wednesday it has successfully launched a research rocket carrying a mouse, two turtles and worms into space — a feat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said showed Iran could defeat the West in the battle of technology.

The launch of the rocket Kavoshgar-3, which means Explorer-3 in Farsi, was announced by Defense Minister Gen. Ahmad Vahidi to mark the National Day of Space Technology. Continue reading →

I wonder why the Israeli Government Press Office found it necessary to translate and disseminate this article by Maariv commentator Ben-Dror Yemini attacking the New Israel Fund. The GPO sends out a daily digest of headlines, articles and opinion pieces from the Hebrew press to a large list of recipients, but it is very rare that it translates and disseminates just one article. It has done so in the past on Ben-Dror Yemini’s articles, but I think only once or twice. Maybe it has something to do with a top-level decision to take on Israeli NGOs critical of Israeli government policies…

From אנדי לוטרמן
to “gponews@netvision.net.il”
date Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 11:20 AM
subject SLUSH FUND
hide details 11:20 AM (12 minutes ago)

SLUSH FUND
(Article by Ben-Dror Yemini, Ma’ariv, 2.2.10)
Continue reading →