Israel’s News Blog Magazine: Daily Stories Video and Photos

I missed it on the site it was pulled real quick, but it was just on the news. The Kadima people put some truly strange Flash movie games on the Kadima site poking “aggressive fun” at the competition. Not quite sure what it was that I saw, but it involved anal insertion, flatulence and Bibi bending over. Some questions were raised as to Olmert’s direct responsibility for this colorful campaign. I am for one am happy to see this political campaign going online.

This is the fun section at the Kadima site.
This is a cute game called Bibi Bullshit. Where all Hamas members at the click of a button get to snap, crackle and pop Bibi over the head.

Labour and Amir Peretz are also under attack. The English is an easy one (getting a little old guys). This is a little game where you can make Peretz blurb funny things in English. Everything was taken from his notorious speech.
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Adi Nes is one of Israel’s best-known and most respected photographers. His works have appeared in European and American galleries and museums, where they were met with critical acclaim and a great deal of notice by the press. Many of his photographs have become so familiar in Israel that they have all but entered the canon of iconic images.

Nes, who is 39, got his first big international break in 1998, when his works were included in a special exhibition, called “After Rabin: New Art from Israel,” at New York’s Jewish Museum. Since then has had solo exhibitions at important museums and galleries in New York, San Francisco and Paris; one of his photographs, The Last Supper, was recently auctioned at Sotheby’s for more than $70,000.

This is the striking photograph that appeared on the advertisement for the exhibition at the Jewish Museum. It gained a captive audience of commuters when it appeared in practically all the subway trains for several months:

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What Are you Sinking About ?
To all those working on their English.
Don’t give up.

Click Play

Jill Cartwright is a 31 year-old non-Jewish woman from England who lives in Tel Aviv, where she works as a sub-editor at Haaretz newspaper and lives with her boyfriend, the Israeli singer/songwriter Saar Badishi. The following is the first part of a mini-memoir that recounts how and why she moved to Israel in the winter of 2001, at the height of the second intifada, and what it’s like to be a non-Jew in Israel.

Send email to Jill: jillcart@walla.com

One day after purchasing my open-return ticket to Tel Aviv, in the winter of 2001, I was sitting in the spacious living room of my parent’s North Yorkshire home watching the news. Images of panicked Israelis queuing up for gas masks filled the screen. A few days previously, a Palestinian bus driver had driven into a line of people waiting at a bus stop, killing eight, and just a couple of months before that, Ariel Sharon had made his infamous visit to the Temple Mount and kicked off the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

My Dad slowly turned his gaze towards me, lifted his eyebrows and gave me a “What the hell are you doing?” look. It was the first such look - but definitely not the last. From then on it was normally directed at me by one of those guys who stroll Tel Aviv beaches looking for unsuspecting single girls reading a book in a foreign language. They know foreign girls will be more polite to them than any self-respecting Israeli girl who would tell them exactly where to go (but more of that later):

Guy: “Where are you from?”
Me: “England.”
Guy: “What is your name?”
Me: “Jill”
Guy: “Are you Jewish?”
Me: “No.”

Then the eyes squint into an involuntary spasm of perplexity, the forehead wrinkles, the jaw drops loose, the shoulders shrug and the palms turn out, the head starts to shake from side to side and they just can’t help themselves: “Then what the hell are you doing here?”
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When we heard about the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest, we laughed. What a great way to take the piss out of this whole Muhammad cartoon brouhaha. And we were intrigued: who had this brilliant idea?

Turns out that it was the brainchild of Amitai Sandy (29), a graphic artist who is the publisher of Dimona Comix.

Here’s how the Dimona Comix team describes itself:

Dimona is a group of five comix creators in their late twenties who live and work in Tel Aviv, Israel.
The group members use the comics medium to tell stories about their own life and fantasies, in a wide and non-traditional variety of styles and media, very different from American “super hero” comic books.

“Very different” - indeed. Also irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny and not really for kids.

We especially like Shirley: A Sex Comedy Graphic Novella

This is what Noa Abarbanel (22), has to say about the story she wrote:
The story of Shirley is derived from our own lives and experiences with the opposite sex… What some people see as healthy enjoyable humor others find as repellent, embarrassing or just plain rude. Many people are so tight assed about sex… Will they ever learn to relax?

The Shirley trailer

The Dimona Comix team has made Shirley’s story into a graphic trailer. It’s not for prudes, not for viewing in the office and not for kids. Meaning - it’s great. Click Here to see it.
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A Danish paper publishes a cartoon that mocks Muslims.
An Iranian paper responds with a Holocaust cartoons contest.
Now a group of Israelis announce their own anti-Semitic cartoons contest!

Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel Aviv, Israel, has followed the unfolding of the “Muhammad cartoon-gate” events in amazement, until finally he came up with the right answer to all this insanity - and so he announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest - this time drawn by Jews themselves!

“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!” (read the rest here).

We think this is a fabulous example of Israeli irreverence. Nothing is sacred. And we like it that way.

Vaan Nguyen was born in Israel to parents who fled Vietnam in 1975, became boat people and found asylum in Israel.

Today Vaan is a fixture among Tel Aviv’s young, beautiful and fashionable. She sounds and feels totally Israeli. She thinks in Hebrew, but she is also very aware of the painful absurdities of being a Vietnamese Israeli in the Jewish state. Israel is her home and her nation, but because of her appearance and family origins she cannot help but feel something of an outsider.

Israeli director Duki Dror has made a documentary film that follows Vaan, together with her father, on a journey back to Vietnam. Here is how one Israeli reviewer describes the film:

“The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” describes a crucial period in the life of the Nguyen family. Hoimai Nguyen and his wife escaped Vietnam in a refugee boat and arrived at the Israeli shores, where he and other refugees were granted asylum. Hoimai’s seven children were born in Israel. Two died at birth. Five girls were raised in an Israeli surrounding and developed a complex and split identity.

The film starts at the time when Hoimai decides it’s time to go back home to Vietnam. The longing, the constant feeling of foreignness and the need to go back home, carries him to the muddy roads of his home village. He sets out to get back the family lands which were confiscated at the time of communist regime. At the same time, his daughters are starting to question their own identities. They each have to test their sense of belonging.

Reviewers have been unanimous in praising “The Journey of Vaan Nguyen” as powerful, moving and unsentimental. An edited for television version will be broadcast in Israel on Wednesday, February 15, on Channel 1 at 10.00 p.m.

More information about the film, including how to purchase it, is available here.

Here’s the trailer:

Omri Sharon, Ariel Sharon’s son was just sentenced to 9 months in prison. The court also sentenced him to 9 months on probation and a 300,000 fine. His sentence to run in 6 months due to his father’s condition. Omri Sharon pleaded guilty to charges of lying and illegal political financing. The judge in her summary of the case said “that admiration of ones father doesn’t make everything kosher”. Omri’s legal consel said they are likely to appeal the sentencing.

By Denis Schulz

When Shane called Wilson a ‘dirty Yankee liar,’ Wilson reached for his shootin’ iron. What else was he to do? He had been insulted; demeaned; defamed. And unless he responded immediately to the challenge he would never be able to show his face in Grafton again. Suing was out of the question, lawyers were expensive, and Shane didn’t have a pot to boil coffee in. So Wilson went down to the hardware store and bought some bullets. His honor was at stake-such as it was.

On May 20, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) rose in the Senate to trash the Kansas-Nebraska Act During the course of the speech, he made several insulting references to Senator Andrew Butler (D-SC), one of the bill’s co-sponsors. Butler had taken” a mistress,” said Sumner, “who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight-I mean, the harlot, Slavery”. Two days later, Butler’s nephew, US Congressman Preston Brooks (D-SC), strode into the Senate chamber and beat Sumner half-to-death with a gutta-percha cane with a solid gold handle. Uncle Andy’s honor has been at stake; Preston ‘Bully’ Brooks’ honor had been at stake; the South’s honor had been at stake-such as it was.

So it is with Islam. The less honor reposing in a person or a group, the more angry and violent the response to any challenge, real or imagined, by said person or group.

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Kevin Sites (middle) with his team.

Kevin Sites is a freelance journalist who is bringing blogging to a whole new level. He has undertaken to visit and report from every area of conflict in the world over one year. His goal is to report the stories that are not covered by the mainstream media and to put a human face on them. So far, Sites has visited eight locations - including Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. He has shot some remarkable video interviews and posted them on his site, The Hot Zone.

This week he visited Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. He did some powerful interviews with Israeli and Palestinian trauma physicians and with two women - one Palestinian and one Israeli - who suffered devastating physical injuries as a direct result of the conflict.

Take a look at the video reports shot in Israel:
Amani Al-Hissi, a blind woman who was injured by a tear gas cannister.

Kinneret Boosany, who suffered terrible burns all over her body when a suicide bomber detonated himself at the Tel Aviv cafe in which she worked as a bartender.

Dr. Raed Arini, a trauma surgeon at a Gaza hospital.

Prof. Avi Rifkind, a trauma surgeon at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital.