Searching for more information, I stumbled upon this blog post by a Jewish woman who went to support pro-Israel students of NYU in their efforts to educate the public. Along the way, she encountered a wretched hive of scum and villainy, including people advocating the destruction on Israel, a British couple unmoved by the Fogel family murder, an Iranian rage boy, and a demented old hippy.

Here’s some video “highlights.”

Read the whole thing.

Passersby in Washington Square Park on Monday may encounter a terrifying situation.

A group of nonprofits that support Israel have created an immersive multimedia exhibit called The Bomb Shelter, in an attempt to give New Yorkers a taste of the terrorism fears that many Israelis live with on a daily basis.

From 1 p.m. until 4 p.m., a siren will sound periodically and participating park goers will have 15 seconds to get from where they are in Washington Square to a bomb shelter that will be installed in the park. That is the same length of time that people facing rocket attacks in Israel have to reach safety before the rockets strike. Then, in an attempt to simulate what people experience living in Sderot, a town in Southern Israel that often comes under attack from rockets launched from Gaza, visitors will hear the sound of explosions all around them.

“(We) wanted New Yorkers to viscerally feel what Israelis went through this week during the bombing of a Jerusalem bus stop and repeated rocket strikes,” said Craig Dershowitz, president of Artists 4 Israel, the nonprofit that created the installation.

The bomb shelter will be decorated with work by graffiti artists from New York, and will include pictures made by the children of Sderot. After New York, The Bomb Shelter exhibit will travel across the country to college campuses. Birthright Israel Alumni Community, a group of people who have gone on the free “Birthright” trips to Israel, is funding the project for an undisclosed amount.

“After so many years, it becomes easy for Americans to just read past the headlines,” said Natalie Solomon, associate director of the Birthright Israel Alumni Community. “We hope this will help people better understand what it is like to live under terror and renew their passion to see it end.”

The exhibit isn’t the only art project currently addressing the Arab Israeli conflict. The new Julian Schnabel film, Miral, about the plight of the Palestinians, opens Friday. It is already creating an uproar from the Jewish community.

Something besides the Iranian leader’s nuclear plans or calls to destroy Israel  seems to be bothering residents of the Big Apple and guests at the hotel in which he is staying. The New York Post reported that hotels guests complained of a foul odor in the hotel caused by the food cooked especially for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The leader of the Islamic Republic does not eat the food prepared by the hotel chefs for guests, but instead brought his own personal chef from Iran to cook his meals for him.

Guests told the New York Post that his meals “stunk up the hotel,” prompting them to leave the hotel and seek lodging elsewhere.

The hotel in which Ahmadinejad is staying did not comment.

On Thursday, a short time prior to his speech before the UN General Assembly, a number of Iranian exiles protested against the Islamic leader together with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

I guess he may as well get used to the smell.

Meanwhile, here he is stinking up the place with the kind of bile to which we have grown accustomed, claiming amongst other things that the US was behind the September 11 attacks, in a conspiracy to protect Israel.

A few observations on this anniversary of 9/11:

• Seven years on, and people still don’t get what this war is about. Heck, most people still don’t get that we are in a war at all.
• Nice to see how Google has commemorated this day:

• Al Jazeera (predictably) reports a poll which suggests that more than 50 per cent of people “reject the official belief that the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, were carried out by al-Qaeda.” Of particular interest:

Of the countries surveyed, Egypt and Jordan had the highest percentages of people who believed Israel was behind the attack, polling 43 and 31 per cent respectively.

Ain’t peace grand?

G-d bless America and the free world.