Tomorrow (Sunday 21st February) the Israeli Air Force is holding a press (and thanks to the amazing IDF Spokesperson’s Office) and bloggers event to demonstrate Israeli’s newest Unmanned Aerial vehicle (UAV). This event is scheduled to start at 13:15 Israel time which is 11:15 GMT, 06:15 on the East Coast of the US and too early for anyone on the West Coast to get up for!

I will take along my iPhone and try to stream the event live from Ustream. When I start sending video I will put a tweet out on my twitter stream: @brianoflondon .

When the show goes live, I believe it will appear here too:

Video clips at UstreamNow if this thing somehow goes all Green Goblin on us then that’s going to be some kind of crazy stream isn’t it!

Unfortunately my friend’s relative was found dead in his apartment on Monday morning and suicide is the most likely reason.

While I was at the cemetery today I noticed a row of graves next to the path. Each had Olympic rings on the top and when I looked carefully at the names (I can just about read Hebrew now) I recognised them.

Welcome to the quiet, understated and desperately sad world of Palestinian “Olympic achievement”.

Well that company went south with the collapse of Asia and degenerated into a dogs breakfast of breakups, liquidations and other investors stealing things from locked warehouses in the middle of the night. The only good thing to come out of it was meeting my wife on one of my many trips to Israel and the avowed intent never to do business with those kinds of people again. Things went badly wrong when we hired a local business manager who was a complete shark, there was something about the 9mm he carried in his briefcase that always made me nervous in meetings.

So when I had the chance to set up my own business from the start in Israel (instead of just putting money and time into someone else’s pre-existing mess) I still thought very hard about it.

But it all came down to the people. This time I felt I could trust everyone I’m working with. Most important is my local business partner who is also my brother in law. That is a double edged sword of course, some say to avoid business with family but in this case he is an ace guy. Fiercely loyal to his friends but rock solid and strong with anyone else in a professional sense. It’s really his business into which I brought overseas connections, business knowledge and some capital. He couldn’t do this without me, and very importantly, I’d be mad to do something here without him.

For one thing he can both read and write Hebrew. I’m in awe. I mean he’s functionally literate. He can even, by and large, do the same in English so he’s like way ahead of me there. If your going to come to Israel and set up a business it really is useful to have someone you can trust, reading all the documents.

A few ground rules: I’m going to shy away from directly identifiable information. Dave does this too so it shouldn’t be so shocking. The business I’m in is a fairly basic story of importing goods and selling them but we don’t sell (by and large) to the general public. The goods might be considered high tec, but really its the most basic form of business: buy at one price, sell at another and try to make sure the second price is higher than the first. My brother in law was in this field for years so he knew everyone in the market and, because he’s a decent guy, he’s liked in the field.

The story so far: I packed up in the UK, spent a little time in the US (to set up a few things) and then made Aliyah and came to the only place in the world right now that is truly welcoming for Jews.

Long time readers may remember me for posting mostly about Jihad and its consequences and as the host of the Shire Network News Podcast (which I do plan to return to one day when I have a quiet enough place to record in).

It’s a strange phenomenon, but as Barry Rubin told me would happen and as has happened, one really starts to care a lot less about the big existential threats when one moves to Israel. I’ve not forgotten that the global Jihad is frothing, foaming and generally fighting its way to my door to kill me, and, of course, I know that some of its strongest outposts are only 15 miles away. No, I know all that but truly, I  don’t care so much.

What I do care about is family, of course, and the business I started up in Israel. I’ve been closely involved with other businesses but this really is the first big (big-ish) business I’ve ever started so kicking it off in a country in which I’m functionally illiterate is rather a bold move (some would use the world dumb).

Yes, I’m frequently in the position of holding cheques to put in the bank upon which the name of my company is not complete and having to ask a waitress in a coffee shop to complete the name of my company being sure to add the Hebrew for “Ltd.” to the end or else the damn bank will reject the cheque and charge me a fee.

If there is a demand for it (or at least there aren’t a barrage of comments on the blog telling me not to) I’ll try to blog some general posts about the experience of opening a business in Israel. It’s a bit of a roller-coaster ride and maybe it will help someone else make the leap and come here.

Follow me: http://twitter.com/brianoflondon

or here for the search page (to see the entire “conversation”)

You can see all my comments and join in the chat with this Twitter Search Page.

Glam it up, book those gay themed parties and put the Barcadi Breezers on ice! Dave, how about a live blog?

Aussie Dave: Here’s the Israeli duo’s performance:

And here’s the results being announced:

When the Jew is lying in a coma in a hospital bed with a fever over 102 caused by end stage leukaemia.

OK?

But that’s the bad news, the good news is that the fantastic Mish is back blogging again. She’s the IDF soldier who’s currently having a few health issues and who I met when she complimented me on my defense of Israel. Yikes… something to live up to. It seems that she received a little unfriendly fire from some people thinking she should repent and accept someone else’s Messiah into her life.

She’s a feisty one: you might like to read her response.

Keep Miryam Elisheva Bat Rachel in your prayers if you’re so inclined, she’s still fighting on.

Head over to SNNSite.com for the new show.

The undeniably left wing (but the nice sort who know what they’re talking about) web site Harry’s Place has an informative post on the troubling nature of some of the key charities that will benefit from money raised on Red Nose Day. And they’re not big friends of Israel.

Harry’s Place advice to the UK: don’t give to Red Nose Day. Pick some of their charities and give “a-la-carte” so to speak.

And let us remember how the other major BBC led charity drive, Children in Need, ended up paying for great outdoor fun in the Welsh mountains for disadvantaged young men, or training courses for London’s very own cadre of Islamic suicide tube bombers.

BBC’s Children in Need funded 7/7 terrorist propaganda, says Newsnight

Thousands of pounds raised by Britons for the BBC’s Children in Need charity could have been used to recruit and train the homegrown terrorists involved in the 7/7 terror attacks on London.

Dave picked up on this the other day but I just wanted to say something too. The other day I was posting on Twitter my usual defense of Israel stuff in my own sarcastic (Meryl would say snarky) way and I got a response back from someone thanking me for defending Israel. Well the respondent’s bio listed her as having been in the IDF for 4 years so I thanked her for her service REALLY defending Israel. And then I looked at her previous tweets and eventually realised that she is very ill and fighting leukemia in hospital.

And then she stopped twittering and her blog went silent and her condition deteriorated. As was written by one of the her family and friends on her blog a few minutes after she wrote to me:

Mish suffered a near fatal hemorrhage and is in critical condition.

Well it really made me think so hard about all the very minor inconveniences and hurdles I’m jumping over and how insignificant they are.

If you’re inclined to pray, please include Miryam Elisheva Bat Rachel in your prayers. She’s thankfully back on the computer and twittering again. You can read about her struggles on her blog.