Israellycool

I may be a little slow on this story, but surely you didn’t expect me to let it pass without comment.

Marijuana is not kosher for Passover, a pro-cannabis advocacy group says, advising Jews who observe the week-long holiday’s special dietary laws to take a break from smoking the weed.

The Green Leaf Party announced today that products of the cannabis plant have been grouped by rabbis within a family of foods such as peas, beans and lentils that is off-limits to Jews of European descent during Passover.

The Green Leaf Party, which has made several unsuccessful attempts to win election to Parliament on a platform urging marijuana’s legalisation, said it was issuing its advisory as a service to Jews who don’t want to break ritual law.

But it said the rabbinical ban for the holiday beginning at sunset on Monday, during which many Jews eat matzos, or unleavened bread, could be a blessing in disguise.

“Logic dictates that if the rabbis say cannabis is non-kosher for Passover, it is apparently kosher during the rest of the year,” Michelle Levin, a spokeswoman for the party told the YNet news website.

The Top Five Other Reasons for Banning Marijuana on Passover

5. Moses said to Pharoah “Let my people go”, not “Let my people go and light up some doobies.”
4. We already eat way too much matzah. The munchies is all we need.
3. What do you think that bush was, and why was it being burned?
2. We crossed the Sea of Reeds, not the Sea of Weed.
1. “One little bud, that father bought for two zuzim” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Former NBA backetballer Micheal “Sugar” Ray Richardson has shown his not-so-sweet side - dribbling from the mouth, committing a few foul language plays, and throwing up a few anti-Semitic alley oops for good measure.

“I’ve got big-time lawyers,” Richardson said, according to the Times Union. “I’ve got big-time Jew lawyers.”

And you’re going to need them. You’re going to need them.

When told by the reporters that the comment could be offensive to people because it plays to the stereotype that Jews are crafty and shrewd, he responded with, “Are you kidding me? They are. They’ve got the best security system in the world. Have you ever been to an airport in Tel Aviv?

An airport in Tel Aviv? Like there’s more than one?

They’re real crafty. Listen, they are hated all over the world, so they’ve got to be crafty.”

At 6-foot-5, I’m guessing he has big feet. Which means he must have a helluva huge mouth.

And he continued, “They got a lot of power in this world, you know what I mean?” he said. “Which I think is great. I don’t think there’s nothing wrong with it.

That’s a double negative, so what he’s really saying is that he thinks there is something wrong with it. He’s also saying he can’t talk real good.

If you look in most professional sports, they’re run by Jewish people. If you look at a lot of most successful corporations and stuff, more businesses, they’re run by Jewish. It’s not a knock, but they are some crafty people.”

No, that is a knock.

And anti-Semitism is so back in style.

Update: Some commenters do not think he was being anti-Semitic. Feel free to weigh in.

For my mind, Al Gore and Alex Baldwin are looking more and more alike these days, probably due to being on the same seefood* diet.

*The spelling is intentional

You may recall that regarding yesterday’s Gaza “sewage tsunami”, the residents blamed the municipal government.

It was not immediately clear what caused the sewage to erupt from the reservoir, but local residents blamed the municipal government for failing to address the mounting sewage problem.

Yeah, about that:

The collapse has been blamed on residents stealing sand from an embankment.

—-

Gaza City Mayor Majid Abu Ramadan, who leads a council of Gaza municipalities, blamed the collapse on endemic lawlessness.

He accused local residents of stealing the dirt and selling it to building companies for 300 shekels ($A86.80) a truckload.

We also saw Hamas blaming the international community.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum blamed international “sanctions against Palestinians, including Gaza and the West Bank” for the condition of Gaza’s infrastructure. Most foreign donors froze aid to the Palestinian government after Hamas swept to power in a 2006 general election, but Shepard said the Umm Naser project had not been affected by the boycott.

Yeah, about that (thanks to Elder of Ziyon and Soccer Dad):

A Palestinian from the Gaza Strip who worked as a metal merchant at the Karni crossing between Israel and the Strip was arrested by the Shin Bet last month for allegedly selling pipes he bought in Israel to terrorist groups that used them to manufacture Kassams, it was released for publication on Sunday.

On February 9, the Shin Bet arrested Amar Azk, 37. During his interrogation, he confessed selling the pipes to Hamas and other terrorist organizations that manufactured Kassam rockets, fired almost daily at Israel. The Shin Bet said Azk’s activities began with the start of the second intifada in 2000 and were only brought to a halt by his arrest. The agency could not say how much metal Azk traded, except that it was “significant.”

The pipes that were sold to Zak were intended for the construction of a sewage system in Gaza.

The Shin Bet has been unable to determine the amount of metal that actually made its way to the terror organizations, and how much went to the sewage project 

What’s clearer than the water in Gaza is that the palestinians are to blame for their own mess…yet again.

With the apparent murder of Pakistan’s cricket coach Bob Woolmer no closer to being solved, two Pakistani fans wanted by Jamaican police for questioning are claiming their innocence. At the same time, there are those who believe he was murdered by someone involved in match-fixing, while Pakistan cricket board officials are claiming he died of natural causes.

And my opinion? If a name is anything to go by, I think we should be keeping our eye on this man.

Sometimes, devoting all your time and money towards killing Jews can cause some unwanted complications.

At least six people were killed Tuesday when the wall of a large cesspool collapsed, flooding the northern Gaza Beduin village of Umm Naser with mud and some 56,000 cubic meters of raw sewage, Palestinian officials said

Officials said dozens were injured and about 11 people missing, with some saying up to 10 people were killed. The rest of the village’s 3,000 residents fled or were evacuated by rescue crews.

A 70-year-old woman, two toddlers and a teenage girl died in the sudden flood, and 25 people were injured, said Dr. Muawiya Hassanin of the Palestinian Health Ministry.

387 houses were deemed unhygienic and 96 of those houses were either destroyed or deemed unsafe to live in. Up to 4,000 people are being affected by the flooding, officials said.

Rescue crews and Hamas gunmen rushed to the area to search for people feared buried under the slide of sewage and mud.

An official in Gaza City said the raw sewage was presenting a particular danger to health and that the situation was not yet under control.

The Palestinian Medical Relief Society, which has a functioning health center in the area, plans to test all people in the region for diseases. Results will take seven to ten days, according to Dr. Abdul Hadi.

UNRWA is providing some 300 tents while the International Red Cross and the Palestinian Red Crescent are distributing hygiene kits, portable latrines, food parcels, mats and blankets. UNICEF is providing clothing to those affected.

Officials say all local and international institutions are coordinating their relief efforts and are working at a high emergency status.

Not surprisingly, Hamas are blaming the outside world.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum blamed international “sanctions against Palestinians, including Gaza and the West Bank” for the condition of Gaza’s infrastructure. Most foreign donors froze aid to the Palestinian government after Hamas swept to power in a 2006 general election, but Shepard said the Umm Naser project had not been affected by the boycott.

But residents aren’t buying it.

It was not immediately clear what caused the sewage to erupt from the reservoir, but local residents blamed the municipal government for failing to address the mounting sewage problem.

And they have their own unique way of articulating this.

Newly appointed Palestinian interior minister Hani al-Qawasmeh rushed to the scene to inspect the damage, but angry villagers chased him off by firing guns at his convoy and wounding two policemen, witnesses said.

Meanwhile, it is important to note that Israel offered assistance straight away, despite the fact the palestinians are trying to drive us into the sea. We were initially turned down, but now it seems as though the palestinians would rather suffer accepting help from the sons of monkeys and pigs, than live like pigs.

Israel’s Mekorot Water Company is to give humanitarian assistance to the village at the instruction of National Infrastructure Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer by helping pump the sewage using a 700-meter hose and other equipment, as of Wednesday morning.

The Palestinians plan to use the hose to temporarily move sewage to prevent a further disaster to an open area which was a former settlement in the north of the Gaza Strip close to the village.

The assistance came after an appeal by Palestinian Water Authority Director General Fadel Kawash.

Earlier, Defense Minister Amir Peretz offered the Gaza Liason Administration any assistance necessary.

Sources at the administration said that they had been in touch with their Palestinian counterparts and offered medical aid, as well as the raw materials needed to fix the wastewater wall that caved in.

On Wednesday, Israel representatives of the Palestinian Water Authority and World Bank will meet at Erez Crossing to consider further options.

Of course, had they had not accepted our help, I’m sure they could have relied on help from other sources.

What makes a story about an Australian female Elvis impersonator Israellycoolworthy?

When she’s my cousin.

And here I was thinking I would be the famous one.

Strategic consultant and former senior advisor to Ariel Sharon, Ra’anan Gissin, has a suggestion regarding how to improve Israel’s image in the face of a hostile media (hat tip: Jewschool).

Gissin’s stop in San Francisco is part of his month-long tour of the United States with the JNF Caravan for Democracy program. Currently out of government, Gissin is working on a yearlong research project at the Herzyliya Institute on ways to spread Israel’s message despite an indifferent and often hostile media. That is more or less what Gissin speaks about in American cities.

For example, Gissin said, instead of a giving diatribe about Islamic terror and Israel’s virtues, why not try telling a couple of jokes?

“You can make the same message by retelling 4,000 years of Jewish history and boring [your audience] or by telling two good jokes in 30 seconds.”

What kind of jokes, you might ask?

“I don’t have any jokes!‚” Gissin blasted at a decibel level roughly equivalent to a steam train plowing into a drum factory.

“But young people, bloggers, could do a marvelous job of this counter-insurgency warfare in the media without using weapons.”

Bloggers, by the way, are high on Gissin’s list of what Israel and her supporters need more of. He claims that mass-blogging revealed the identity of the man who conveniently dug up an infant’s corpse from a Lebanese apartment leveled by an Israeli bomb as throngs of photographers giddily snapped away was the same man who unearthed a baby for the cameras in 1996.

“I know news editors at major networks who, instead of tearing off [copy] from the wire and rewriting it, are browsing through blogs to find stories and elements they missed,” he said.

What is pleasing to me about this is not just that he sees the importance of bloggers, but also the fact that he has clearly been influenced by what he heard at the recent Media as a Theater of War conference in December, which I attended. I am guessing that he learned about Green Helmet Guy - the man “who conveniently dug up an infant’s corpse from a Lebanese apartment leveled by an Israeli bomb as throngs of photographers giddily snapped away” and who “was the same man who unearthed a baby for the cameras in 1996″ - from the bloggers at this conference. As for his suggestion that bloggers can do a “marvelous job of ..counter-insurgency warfare in the media”, many of the bloggers in attendance dealt with this topic. In fact, this was exactly what I dealt with in my presentation, including the importance of using humor, and something I spoke with him about after the conference.

Of course, I cannot be sure that Ra’anan Gissin formed his opinion about bloggers, as well as the use of humor, from what he heard at the conference. But I would like to think it had a not insignificant part to play. In any event, it is very satisfying to realize that blogging can make a difference, in the sense of influencing not only the average person at home, but also policy makers and those whose opinions are valued by policymakers. It is this realization that keeps me blogging every time I flirt with the idea of giving it up.

By the way, I strongly reject Ra’anan’s claim that he doesn’t have any jokes. In fact, he told me the following joke during our chat:

Three hunters are out on safari — an American, a Brit and an Israeli. They are captured by cannibals who start getting the cooking pots ready. The cannibal chief tells the hunters they can have one last wish.”What’s your last request?” he asks the American.

“I’d like a steak,” he replies.

So the cannibals kill a zebra and serve the American his steak.

“What do you want?” the cannibal chief asks the Brit.

“I’d like to have a smoke on my pipe,” which they let him do.

Then the chief asks the Israeli: “What’s your last wish?”

“I want you to kick my rear end.”

“Be serious,” says the top cannibal.

“C’mon, you promised,” says the Israeli.

“Oh, all right,” says the chief, who delivers the requested kick. Whereupon, the Israeli pulls out a gun, shoots the chief and a few other cannibals while the rest run away.

The American and Brit are furious.

“Why didn’t you do that in the first place, so we wouldn’t have had to go through all this?” they demand.

Replies the Israeli: “What? Are you mad? The UN would have condemned me as the aggressor.

Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani, and one of his creations

AP reports:

A woman with three crocodiles strapped to her waist was stopped at the Gaza-Egypt border crossing after guards noticed that she looked “strangely fat,” officials said Monday.

That’s what I call tipping the scales.

The woman’s shape raised suspicions at the Rafah terminal in southern Gaza, and a body search by a female border guard turned up the animals, each about 20 inches long, concealed underneath her loose robe, according to Maria Telleria, spokeswoman for the European observers who run the crossing.

“The woman looked strangely fat. Even though she was veiled and covered, even with so many clothes on there was something strange,” Telleria said.

The incident, which took place on Thursday, sparked panic at the crossing.

“The policewoman screamed and ran out of the room, and then women began screaming and panicking when they heard,” Telleria said.

But when the hysteria died down, she said, “everybody was admiring a woman who is able to tie crocodiles to her body.”

Or relieved she wasn’t wearing a bomb belt.

You may not have known this, but today was Hamas’ Palestinian Officer Training (POT) Day, a day in which Hamas terrorists trained and showed off their impressive skills. Let’s take a brief look at some of today’s highlights.

In the morning, forces wore camouflage as they demonstrated their skills. Apparently, this camouflage included plants and a fake beard.

For the most part, training went smoothly, except for one tragic incident in the early afternoon, in which Hamas fighter Abu Zayeh was a bit too zealous with his shooting in the air, leaving fellow fighter Khalil Numbnuts - who happened to be climbing on the rope ladder above him - with a painful reminder of the urgent need for safer gun practices.

No such pain, however, was felt during the dirty dancing session. Just a number of weird sensations not felt since Uncle Yasser used to come around for an inspection.

Looks like the palestinians have been developing some weapons of their own. Such as this one - the four-legged human water fountain.

I’m not sure what the hell he’s supposed to do.

Actually, that’s not true. He’s supposed to kill Jews. I’m just not sure how.