I heard the other day, that President Obama may decide to intervene, at the Palestinian’s request, in the negotiations between them and the Israelis.

More »

Well, isn’t this interesting?

More »

As though more proof were needed that the Islamist world is heavily populated by fruits and nuts, we have today’s Associated Press article about Hezbollah accusing an Israeli bird of being a spy.

More »

We really are down the rabbit hole.

More »

They can’t let their populations know they’re doing it, but the leaders of several Gulf States are in high-level discussions with Israel over the overarching threat posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

More »

Two quick questions to those who pay attention to the mishigas going on in the Middle East:

More »

It appears that the anti-Jewish pendulum in the United States is definitely swinging toward the unthinkable.

More »

It seems to me that an increasing number of stories involving the Israel/Palestinian Arab situation appear in print without by-lines, and I can’t help thinking this may be a way of making it difficult to hold anyone accountable for propaganda passing as news.
It could also be a mechanism for protecting journalists from attack by Islamists, whose sensibilities are evidently easily bruised, and who tend to react to such perceived injuries in extremely violent ways. But those don’t seem to be the stories whose authors go unnamed.
Anyway, a case in point ran in today’s paper.
An Associated Press story out of the Gaza Strip, with no writer noted, was about Israel preparing to release another large batch of Palestinian Arab terrorists and murderers as a show of good faith or something for planned newly re-engaged peace talks.
The accompanying photo is of a man and his son, raising a banner in honor of one of the man’s other sons, Omar Masoud who a decade ago, with three accomplices from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, broke into a Gaza City European aid office, and stabbed to death a young Israeli lawyer working there.
Israel arrested him a month later and sentenced him to life in prison.
“Now Masoud, along with dozens of other long-term Palestinian prisoners, is up for release as part of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempt to restart Israeli-Palestinian talks after five years of diplomatic paralysis,” according to the story.
Israel is again being asked to release cold-blooded killers, who will hailed as heroes at home and who likely will at least try to kill again.
They are being asked to do this in exchange for nothing whatsoever.
In the story, Palestinian Arab leader Mahmoud Abbas says he agreed to discuss the creation of a Palestinian Arab state in part of what’s left of what Israel was originally supposed to be, predicated on Kerry’s assurances that talks will be based on everything the Arabs have demanded.
“He said the American invitation would state that the talks will be about establishing a Palestinian state next to Israel, based on the 1967 borders and with mutually agreed upon land swaps,” the story said.
This is not the first time Israel has released terrorists with blood on their hands in exchange for promises never kept, and have paid the price in more spilled blood.
The story says that Israel’s government releasing these monsters “poses the most difficult test so far of ITS PROFESSED WILLINGNESS to reach a peace deal.”
The story mentions not one, single concession being asked of the Palestinian Arabs. Not a single thing. Not even the promise of anything.
At least in the past, the PA has been made to promise to consider thinking about some issue or other, but this time, not even that.
But it’s the Israelis whose desire for peace is merely “professed.”
This is the special kind of stealth propaganda hidden in these nameless articles.
Netanyahu said that a decision to release prisoners “is painful to the bereaved families, painful to the people of Israel and very painful for me,” but that sometimes unpopular decisions must be made for the good of the state, the nameless writer wrote.
So, once again, the Jews are given little choice but to agree to a lopsided arrangement to avoid looking like the intransigent ones, because no one remembers, and journalists don’t remind them, of the countless similar arrangements that have come before and produced few positive results.
Ordinarily, journalists are expected and required to include context, background, to stories like this, so people who are “just tuning in,” so-to-speak, can understand what brought the situation to its current place. Not doing so, like in this story, leaves the impression that this is happening in a vacuum, and has no history, which is obviously, precisely what is intended.
And, I think this intentional skewing of stories on this issue, helps explain the omission of the names of the hacks that are turning them out.
Also, to provide a little context in THIS piece, which you will note, DOES include my name, the following other stories appeared in the press on the same day it was announced that the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is being required to release the killers of its people in exchange for the privilege of re-starting peace talks with just one Palestinian-Arab faction:
The Syrians are still killing each other at an alarming rate, just over one of Israel’s borders. Thousands protested in Tunisia at the funeral of an opposition leader, and a bomb exploded under a car outside a police station there. Egypt is out of control on another of Israel’s borders, as 65 more were killed in street riots, and more than 1,000 violent criminals “escaped” a Libyan prison during riots there, in “a nation overrun by militias and awash in weaponry,” according to reports.
Meanwhile, right here in the U.S. of A., Major Nidal Hasan, the man who carried out the Fort Hood massacre, released a statement apologizing to the Islamic faithful for his years in the U.S. military, and his part in our government’s “war on Muslims and Islam.”
Our Justice Department says Hasan’s mass murder was a case of “workplace violence” – that he was a regular guy who “went postal,” so-to-speak – and not an act of terrorism.
It looks to me like we are either blind or complicit in our own cultural suicide and insisting Israel be the same.

More »

Things are not looking good for the Jews, folks. Not in the United States, not in the Middle East and not in Europe.
The Islamo-Fascists are violently enveloping the Arab/Muslim Middle East.
In America, one of our most respected institutions of higher learning this week, appointed an outspoken, anti-Semitic/Anti-Israel Muslim to its Board of Regents, despite strong objections from Jewish and other alumni and others. Tells you something about the way the world is turning on the academic front — the same front, particularly in England, constantly calling for the intellectual boycott of Israeli academia.
Add a new EU directive baring its members from cooperating, funding scholarships, research grants and prizes to Israeli entities even partly operating in east Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights.
The EU also now requires all documents signed with Israel include a clause “admitting” areas beyond the 1967 green line aren’t Israel and are excluded from the agreement. The Europeans may make exceptions for Israeli governmental bodies located over the green line, like the Justice Ministry, as long as its activities are carried out within the pre-1967 borders.
Of course, the Jews are obligated to listen to whatever Europe says because of its long history of fair and equitable treatment of its Jews. Not. Even before the Nazis swept through and made violent anti-Semitism the norm, Europe was already predisposed to it.
Let’s take Britain, for instance, from which all Jews were expelled in 1290.
This is a country suffering for many years from some sort of schizophrenia when it comes to the Jews.
On the one hand, it was Britain’s Lord Balfour that helped make possible the reborn Jewish state. But the Brits also blocked the entry of Jews fleeing certain death at the hands of the Nazis.
Now, Britain has officially lumped the Middle East’s only democracy in a list with countries with terrible human rights records, according to the Associated Press; states that fire on unarmed citizens from behind women, children and old people.
That story says Britain has issued more than 3,000 licenses for arms and military equipment exports “to countries where the U.K. has concerns about human rights…”
These countries include Myanmar, China, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria, and, stuck right in the middle of that list, as though its behavior can seriously be compared to those just listed, is Israel; where the army prefers to put itself in harm’s way to prevent “collateral damage,” rather than flatten their enemies with some large bomb from the sky – something it has for years been easily capable of doing.
The rest of the story – about how the government is assuring its concerned citizenry that it’s as careful as possible about who it’s sending arms to, is irrelevant, in my opinion.
It is just galling that these countries, with histories as long as your arm, of terrible human rights abuses, particularly when it comes to the Jews, would have the chutzpah to include Israel, an island of sanity in a frothing sea of hysterical violence, in a list with countries like Syria (right now involved in slaughtering tens of thousands of its own people) and Saudi Arabia (which doesn’t allow Jews to set foot on its soil or women the most basic freedoms).
Are they blind or stupid? Probably. But also, they’re infected with that seemingly incurable disease called anti-Semitism.

More »

President Obama and others in his globe-trotting administration are out there trying to put out the international fires set by fugitive Edward Snowden, who leaked information on U.S. officials spying on just about everybody at home and abroad.

More »

I find it most interesting that when they didn’t realize anyone was listening, Egyptian politicians recommend spreading lies about its foes to influence public opinion and rile up the crazies to do their dirty work for them.
According to the Associated Press, politicians in Egypt, meeting with its president on the issue of Ethiopia’s threat to build a massive dam over the Nile River, suggested action against that country.
Evidently unaware that the meeting was being televised live, these politicians’ suggestions included backing rebels and carrying out sabotage, to stop it from building the dam, the AP reports.
To me, Egypt’s water issue is less interesting here than its tendency, exposed to outsiders for maybe the first time, to intentionally lie to the world to sway public opinion — something the Arab/Muslim world has been doing to Israel for decades to disturbingly effective success.
One leader of an ultraconservative Islamist party in Egypt reportedly said the country should back rebels in Ethiopia or, as a last resort, destroy the dam. A liberal politician proposed “spreading rumors about Egypt obtaining advanced warplanes to scare the Ethiopians,” according to the AP report.
Get it, now?
This is what they do.

More »

So, a review by Germany’s Finance Ministry on the agency’s behavior during the Holocaust, shows it was used to “strip Jews of their money and possessions.”
The timing of this investigation couldn’t be better for use as an object lesson for Americans and others on what happens when a powerful government bureaucracy adopts an agenda outside that for which it was intended.
The release of the results, a book called “Bureaucracy and Crimes” by historian Chrisiane Kuller, will also be helpful in combating historical revisionists, which already deny the Holocaust even while eye witnesses still live, and promises only to become worse and more prevalent when they’re all gone.
According to the Associated Press, the first part of an independent commission’s investigation into the ministry’s Nazi past, shows “civil servants played an important role in Hitler’s anti-Semitic agenda.”
It found that though the functionaries within the department, when questioned after the war, claimed merely to have been “following rules and regulations they were given,” Kuller said she found “the long-term employees used their knowledge with ‘high efficiency’ to apply existing regulations ’systematically in a racist way.’”
Nothing at all like the United States’ Internal Revenue Service targeting groups whose politics aren’t in lock-step with the current administration, right?
I suggest a trip in the near future to the passport office to make sure that thing’s up to date. If you start to notice bonfires of certain types of books, or people goose-stepping down the street, it’s too late.

More »

Meet Alicia Keye’s newest fan.

More »

In my experience, Buddhists tend to be largely a non-violent bunch.
But, even the most peaceable people can have limits, and, evidently, for the Buddhists in Myanmar, it’s having “a Muslim man reportedly splash gasoline on a Buddhist woman and set her alight.”
The Associated Press called what happened after that “anti-Muslim violence,” and didn’t get to the cause of the “unrest” that “left one person dead and four injured,” until the article’s second-to-last paragraph.
Even so, it seems to me, that going around lighting people on fire is not the best way to win friends and influence people. Neither is beheading people or running them down with cars and chopping them up with knives — just a couple of examples of the type of behavior too many of the world’s Muslims seem too often to favor.
“Most if not all of Wednesday’s attacks in the town of Lashio appeared to be carried out by Buddhists on Muslim targets,” the AP report says. The man who set the woman on fire was arrested, the story notes, “but Buddhist mobs took revenge by burning a mosque, a Muslim school and other buildings.”
What a nerve those violent, intolerant Buddhists have, burning buildings just because someone felt like turning a woman into a Roman candle.
I honestly don’t know how much random, horrible deadly violence the world is expected to take from these crazy, bloodthirsty barbarians before striking back.
And the Islamic community, rather than work strenuously to get a handle on the savages in their midst and loudly and often decry their behavior, instead complain, loudly and often, that people are mean to them.
They hit the West, for instance, in its collective guilty conscious by accusing it of racism, knowing we will fall all over ourselves to disprove that accusation, to the point, apparently, of cultural suicide. And I’d bet that’s exactly what the Islamists are counting on.
Why do the press and others seem to pander to this; to play right into their hands, propaganda-wise? It seems to me it really shouldn’t be so hard to outwit mindless savages. Let’s try it, why don’t we?

More »

What a tragedy that someone as intelligent in some areas as British physicist Stephen Hawking, can be so stupid or weak in others.
In what is unfortunately a big win for the forces fighting to destroy the Jewish state, Hawking capitulated to the demands of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement and cancelled his plans to attend a major international conference in Israel in June. He apparently cited “his belief that he should respect a Palestinian call to boycott contacts with Israeli academics,” the Associated Press story notes.
Boycotting academics because one has a quarrel with their government is as ugly and unfair as boycotting athletes for the same reason – it’s bullying; it’s blaming individuals for the policies of their government. It’s wrong. Particularly in a free country where the government is not overseeing the academics or the athletes. Academia, like athletics, is supposed to be above the political fray, but, of course, the refusal of the International Olympic Committee to hold a moment of silence for the Israeli athletes murdered during the Munich games proves otherwise, so, this should not be such a surprise, I guess.
Rumors flew for hours the other day when the story broke in the notoriously anti-Semitic British rag The Guardian.
He was boycotting, then he cancelled for health reasons, then he was boycotting again.
The AP headline read “Stephen Hawking backs boycott of Israeli academics.”
Wow.
What a fine plan, to boycott one of the world’s most academically productive countries, where things are developed to better mankind all day long, in favor of the folks whose biggest claim to fame is the suicide bomber.
What kind of a moron is this guy, to lend his name to such an effort?
I will never be able to see him in the same light, again. And, hopefully, his stock in the academic world will suffer a fate similar to that of former movie great Mel Gibson, whose star has faded to the point that people think first of his anti-Semitic leanings rather than his latest film, when his name comes up.
My question to Mr. Hawking would be, was he unaware of the Israel/Palestinian conflict when he first agreed to attend this conference? Did this decades-old conflict come as news to him, so that rather than just not attend if he sides with the Islamists over the Jews, he had to hand the anti-Semitic anti-Israel forces a publicity coup? Does he not recognize the repugnant nature of depriving the world of what could be gained by including Israeli academics – arguably among the world’s most accomplished – in favor of an ill-conceived movement that threatens the entire region and the world?
The A.P. story says that “the University of Cambridge released a statement Wednesday indicating that Hawking had told the Israelis last week that he would not be attending ‘based on advice from Palestinian academics that he should respect the boycott.’”
University officials said they had “previously understood” that Hawking’s decision was based solely on health concerns, but were later informed otherwise by Hawking’s office.
No one said so, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the good professor had received threats against himself or his loved ones that helped him reach his decision.
In any case, his decision is the wrong one, and the respect I had for the man before this has vanished like the morning fog. I hope I’m not the only one feeling this way, and that Mr. Hawking soon comes to understand the breadth of the wrongness of his decision and his handling of the matter.

More »

There was this article in the Associated Press this week that, with a seemingly simple tale, really tells the whole story of the Israel Palestinian conflict.
It was titled, Disabled Gaza baby lives in Israel hospital, and it described the life of Palestinian toddler Mohammed al-Farra, who has never lived anywhere but “the yellow-painted children’s ward in Israel’s Tel Hashomer hospital.”
Because he was born with a rare genetic disease, the baby’s hands and feet had to be amputated, so his parents abandoned him. The Palestinian government won’t pay for his care, so the 3 ½-year-old lives in the hospital with his grandfather.
“There’s no care for this child in Gaza, there’s no home in Gaza where he can live,” said the grandfather, Hamouda al-Farra. “He can’t open anything by himself; he can’t eat or take down his pants. His life is zero without help.”
So, where is this child – a product of the people bent on the destruction of the Jewish state and the extermination of its people – being cared for? In Israel, naturally, by Israeli medical personnel.
This seems to me to say everything one needs to know about who each side of this conflict is.
But, there’s more.
The story goes on to explain that “Mohammed’s plight is an extreme example of the harsh treatment some families mete to the disabled, particularly in the more tribal-dominated corners of the Gaza Strip… and it also demonstrates a costly legacy of Gaza’s strongly patriarchal culture that prods women into first-cousin marriages and allows polygamy, while rendering mothers powerless over their children’s fate.”
So, what we see illustrated here is that the Palestinians have some very serious cultural issues that, if not corrected, doom them, and therefore their neighbors, to a terrible future, and that the Israelis possess all the compassion and humanity in the equation.
The story says that “Mohammed was rushed to Israel as a newborn for emergency treatment” because “his genetic disorder left him with a weakened immune system, crippling his bowels, and an infection destroyed his hands and feet, requiring them to be amputated.”
His mother was forced to abandon him, the story says because her “husband, ashamed of their son, threatened to take a second wife if she didn’t leave the baby and return to their home in the southern Gaza Strip,” where “polygamy is permitted but isn’t common.”
Incest, sexual slavery, no women’s rights, no compassion or mechanism for caring for the disabled, appear to be just the tip of this group’s cultural/societal deficiencies.
“In deeply patriarchal parts of Gaza — not in all the territory — men believe they have ‘first rights’ to wed their female cousins, even above the women’s own wishes,” the story says. “Parents approve the partnerships because it strengthens family bonds and ensures inheritances don’t leave the tribe.” It goes on to say, “Repeated generations of cousin marriages complicate blood ties.”
One doctor at the child’s hospital said “one third of patients in his department are Palestinians and most have genetic diseases that were the result of close-relation marriages.”
Then, having corrupted the gene pool and produced these disabled children, the children “are often stigmatized,” the story says. “Some families hide the children, fearing they won’t be able to marry off their able-bodied children if the community knows of their less-abled siblings. And they are seen as burdens in the impoverished territory.”
The article says nearly 11 percent of Gaza’s Palestinian Arabs “suffer some kind of disability that affects their mental health, eyesight, hearing or mobility,” and that “two thirds of young disabled Gazans are illiterate and some 40 percent were never sent to school, suggesting either their parents kept them home or did not have the means to educate them.” Over 90 percent of the disabled are unemployed, the story said.
What a set-up.
So, while these in-breeding parents (or others of their in-bred clan members) plot ways to damage or destroy Israel, this little boy’s grandfather stays with him in this Israeli hospital as his Israeli doctors raise funds to cover his bills.
The story notes that inside this hospital in Israel – a country the Islamist propaganda machine is convincing an anti-Semitic-leaning world is an anti-Muslim apartheid state – “patients and medics chatted in Hebrew and Arabic. Women in Muslim headscarves strolled in a corridor. An Orthodox Jewish woman affectionately patted Mohammed on his head. She nodded kindly at (his grandfather)…. as doctors’ fundraising has covered Mohammed’s years of treatment and one donor provided $28,000 for Mohammed’s prosthetics.”
The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is supposed to fund transfers to Israeli hospitals, but stopped covering Mohammed’s bills six months after he arrived, an increasingly common practice, according to the story.
It seems like just one more way the Palestinians are using the Jews’ compassion and expertise against them, in the same way the 9/11 terrorists used the U.S.’s freedom of movement against it.
The grandfather, who is only 55, says he’s caring for the child to save his daughter’s marriage, as “a good deed,” but wants his life back.
He said wished he could find a foster home or caregiver for Mohammed.
“He needs many things in his life,” he said, “He needs a home.”
I would bet money that offers of that very thing have poured in since that story ran, and I would bet they came from the Jewish and not the Arab side of the Gaza border.

More »

It doesn’t take a law degree to see what was behind our state’s archaic rape laws, now that it’s been brought into sharp relief by the recent case of Julio Morales.
Associated Press reports that Morales was initially convicted of impersonating the boyfriend of an 18-year-old woman so he could have sex with her while she slept. The woman filed rape charges after realizing the man in her bed wasn’t her boyfriend, the story notes.
Being a contemporary jury, living in today’s world and recognizing the equal rights of people of both genders, the rapist was convicted of the crime.
However, California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal overturned the conviction in January, citing an 1870s state law that says perpetrators in such cases can only be guilty if the victim is married and the assailant pretends to be the spouse, according to the story.
Wow. I can’t believe such a law is still on the books.
But, I understand there are a slew of laws throughout the United States that are so outdated that they recall a different world or, in some cases, maybe an alternative universe.
For instance, in Missouri, it’s illegal to drive with an uncaged bear and in Maine, it’s illegal to keep your Christmas lights up after Jan. 14, according to various websites.
Those sites say that in Connecticut, it’s illegal to walk across a street on your hands while in Ohio, it’s illegal to get a fish drunk. Here, in California, women can’t legally drive in a housecoat and no vehicle without a driver may exceed 60 miles per hour.
It boggles the mind to imagine the circumstances that triggered the adoption of these laws.
Clearly, this impersonating a spouse law is left over from the days when sexually active unmarried women were damaged goods.
This law is more about property rights than human rights.
So, I certainly hope SB59, a bill introduced by Democratic Sen. Noreen Evans of Santa Rosa, which fixes this outdated statute, passes the Assembly as it recently did the Senate, 37-0. If it fails, take down the names of those that voted “no” and remember them at election time.

More »

At the conclusion of World War II, as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower surveyed the evidence of the carnage in Europe, he ordered photos taken and a permanent record made because he predicted that one day there would be those who would try to say it never happened.
And he was right.
Despite the existence of overwhelming documentation and even the first-hand accounts of still living survivors and witnesses, there are those who seek to deny the Holocaust and in so doing, blame the victims and set the stage for a repeat performance.
These things are happening worldwide in ever-increasing numbers.
The Simon Wiesenthal center reports that “Vicious attacks on the memory of the Holocaust from denial, to distortion, to revisionism are erupting in countries around the world.”
They note, for instance, “the senior Egyptian official in charge of appointing editors of all state-run Egyptian newspapers declares, ‘The myth of the Holocaust is an industry that America invented.’”
It also notes that, “led by Iran’s government, Iranian media, schools, books, speeches and religious teachers deny the Holocaust ever happened while threatening to finish Hitler’s genocidal vision against the Jewish state.”
In its attempt to prime the Iranian people for its plan to commit genocide in their name, that government “uses Holocaust denial as part of its… propaganda assault on Israel, labeling the Jewish people as serial liars and criminals, and depicting the Jewish State as a cancer,” the center notes.
And, unfortunately, this is not limited to the Arab world, unless you consider the parts of Europe being overtaken by Islamists as part of the Arab world, as the Islamists surely do.
The center reports that the UK’s Sunday London Times editors “published a cartoon on Holocaust Memorial Day depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall cemented with the blood and bodies of Palestinian men, women and children,” and in Lithuania, “authorities are whitewashing their own nation’s Nazi collaborators while claiming Nazi crimes should be commemorated along with the victims of communism among whom were those who aided and abetted Nazi Germany.”
An extremist parliamentarian in a far-right Hungarian political party calls for the government to create a list of Jews in that country who pose threats to national security, “eerily reminiscent of Nazi policies during the 1940s,” center officials point out.
And this stuff isn’t contained only to Europe and the Arab world. Just this week, the Associated Press reported on a New York high school English teacher who was suspended after school officials learned she had assigned her students a project to make persuasive arguments proving Jews are evil. The idea, the story says, is that the students were to research Nazi propaganda and “assume their teacher was a Nazi government official who had to be convinced of their loyalty.”
The assignment was brought to administrators’ attention by one student’s parent, the story says, adding that some students refused to write the assignment.
Like the case earlier this year in which a Manhattan teacher caused controversy by assigning fourth-graders math homework involving scenarios about killing and whipping slaves, this teacher’s assignment, which told students they “must argue that Jews are evil, and use solid rationale from government propaganda to convince me of your loyalty to the Third Reich,” just can’t be what it sounds like, it seems to me.
How stupid would a public school teacher have to be to out themselves as so hopeless a racist/anti-Semite as these assignments would imply, especially if they really were. Such people tend to sneak their poison into their lessons more stealthily than this. But, maybe the sensitivity training the latter case provoked will help. It couldn’t hurt. That kind of stuff can turn into the kind of stuff being experienced in much of the rest of the world, if left unchecked.

More »

Jews save wounded Syrians.

More »

It was nice that the U.S. government, in the person of Secretary of State John Kerry, called the Turkish prime minister’s most recent anti-Semitic remark “objectionable,” and everything, but there are still problems with how the episode is portrayed in the press.

More »

I had always thought most of the humanitarian work Israel does around the world was being intentionally ignored by an anti-Semitic international press.

More »

Once again the Arab/Islamists prove themselves hypocrites of the first order – or people blind to even the most outrageous irony or avid students of the Joseph Goebbels school of propaganda.

More »

The Islamists in Egypt are evidently going full bore after the country’s Christians, and perhaps using the same blood libel-style ploy as has been used for millennium to such stunning effect against the Jews.

More »

Armies move on their stomachs, they say, which may help explain why the Russian army forgot all about its soldiers’ feet for several hundred years.
Associated Press reported that Russia’s new defense minister recently realized the country’s soldiers have been using foot wraps since the 17th century and no one gave a second thought to this since.
Called “portyanki” in Russian, these rectangular strips of cloth are carefully wrapped around bare feet to prevent blisters from the soldiers’ tall, heavy, lace-less boots, the story says. I’ve seen these in movies, but never in person, and actually didn’t realize until now that these guys were using these instead of socks on purpose.
Czar Peter the Great evidently adopted the custom from the Dutch army in the late 17th century and then never looked back.
Now, though, this Russian official says “it’s time for the nation’s soldiers to switch from foot wraps to socks,” the story says.
The official, who took the post two months ago, reportedly said he was surprised to learn that some soldiers are still using “portyanki,” and told them to use socks instead.
At a televised meeting with military officers recently, he reportedly said, “In 2013, or at least by the end of 2013, we must forget the word portyanki.”
I suppose, if the wraps were considered the best alternative because of the lace-less boots, changing to socks would only be a better alternative if the boots have improved since the 17th century, which I suspect they have, though you never know.
Not earth-shattering information in any way, but interesting, I thought.

More »

More »

For more than 20 years, a self-confessed monster lived among us here in Vallejo, and only, it seems, by the grace of God, probably didn’t kill anyone until he apparently recently murdered his 90-year-old mother.

More »

It’s a new year, but like toilet paper stuck to a shoe, the old one is being dragged into it all over the world, particularly in the certifiably insane Muslim world.

More »

In an unbelievable display of chutzpah and/or a spectacular example of irony, a new Muslim Brotherhood official “called on Egyptian Jews to return to Egypt and leave Israel to the Palestinians,” JTA reported.

More »

Recently, the following information came to light, for those of us scouring the newsfeeds less taken, that I thought you might like to know. And, just so you know, I saved the worst for last.

More »

It may be time for whatever tiny Jewish community remains in Turkey, to flee that place.

More »

Really, how am I supposed to present Judaism and the Jewish people as unlike the enemy in, among other things, their treatment of women, when women keep getting arrested for wearing prayer shawls at Jerusalem’s Western Wall?

More »

Things are deteriorating for the Jews of Europe almost as fast as they are in the Middle East.

More »

I’ll tell you what – if I were a woman in Egypt (or someone who loves or cares about a woman or a girl there), I’d be making urgent plans to flee that place.

More »

Evidence mounted this week that much of the world is heading again for the edge of the same abyss that swallowed most of it in that black episode we call the Holocaust.

More »

It seems clear that the terrorists in Gaza are trying to provoke a war with Israel by lobbing hundreds of rockets and missiles into the country.

More »