I’ve seen those COEXIST bumper stickers around for some time, and on occasion amused myself when stopped at traffic lights trying to figure out what all the symbols stood for. The only one I could never figure out was the E. But now I know, thanks to the poster below (via PowerLine):
Click to enlarge
Another video found at Power Line. It’s longer than most — about 12 minutes long — but worth it for me. And fascinating, as well. I have always loved stories told in the form of live-action drawings. That is, you get to watch the artist draw the illustrations before your eyes as the narrator tells the story. That’s the first element of “fascinating” for me.
The second is the brief history lesson documenting how all this Israeli-Palestinian conflict and controversy began and evolved. I have long believed the Israelis have every right to their Jerusalem, but what I did not really understand, and what this video depicts is how much the Israelis have bent over backward to give the Palestinians their own independent state (while neighboring Arab states have done anything but) and how frequently the Palestinians have said to their offers, “No! We don’t want two states. We want you gone and us in your place!” or, more succinctly (and this is closer to a direct quote): “We will only be satisfied by the extermination of Israel.”
I will add the caveat that I have not yet had the opportunity to research all the claims made on this video, but it’s a good place to begin.
Remember the You Tube video I posted last week from the Flotilla Choir singing “We Con The World?” Well, seems it went viral since last Thursday when it was posted. Power Line blog, where I found it, says it’s already had over 3,000,000 views. So naturally, YouTube has pulled it. Apparently YouTube has a history of pulling things positive to Israel. Though Werner-Chapelle who owns the copyright to the hit fund-raising song “We Are the World” the choir used for their parody, and has claimed they’re in violation of copyright, many think this is not really the issue.
As an aside, I’ve always thought that song (ie, the original) was too dumb to listen to. I couldn’t stand the words and always left or turned the channel before I heard much of it. So it wasn’t until I found the Flotilla Choir parody that I actually heard the tune, which has been a true earworm for me… listen to the thing once and I’ve got the tune running through my head for the rest of the day. And maybe the next, too. It doesn’t help that the new lyrics crack me up. Particularly after I went and looked at the original lyrics.
I much prefer “We’re waving our own knives” to “We’re changing our own lives.” What an idiotic concept! But I’ll desist from my commentary on that, since this isn’t about that, but rather people trying to shut down Jewish voices.
Because apparently under the fair use doctrine US Copyright law does allow use of a tune for the purposes of parody. And in fact, there are allegedly several other parodies (including one on Barak Obama) using the same tune still up on YouTube. Caroline Glick, who is editor-in-chief of Latma TV and also contributing editor to the Jerusalem Post, discusses it on her blog here.
Today it’s gone to a new host, Daily Motion. So if you want to enjoy it again… click here.
I woke up this morning thinking about the message in the song performed by the Flotilla Choir, all the lies flying around about the “peace activists” being peaceful, the Israeli’s being brutal, and so forth. The truth is obvious to anyone who wants to see it, but as Prime Minister Netanyahu pointed out recently, many, many people — practically the whole world, don’t want to see that. They jump on the bandwagon that “Israel is guilty until Israel is proven guilty” with eagerness and great conviction. Don’t bother us with the facts. We have no need of them.
The irony in it is that this same attitude was practiced by the Pharisees of Jesus’s day with regard to His position as their prophesied Messiah. He did miracles, He taught with authority, using the Scriptures, He argued them into silence because they had no words with which to respond. He fulfilled something like 600 prophesies of the coming Messiah, and yet they, the most knowledgeable of all the Jews when it came to the Scriptures, didn’t see it. Instead of going to those Scriptures and looking at the prophecies and how the elements of His life and person matched up, they preferred to accuse Him, test Him, argue with Him, insult Him, discredit Him, and ultimately kill Him. When He told them the truth, they became enraged. When people said they thought he was the Prophet, they’d fixate on one element — “Surely the Christ is not going to come from Galilee, is He? Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David and from Bethlehem, the village where David was?” (Jn 7:41,42)
How hard could it have been to find out that He had indeed been born in Bethlehem (Micah 5?2), and gone to Egypt and been called out of it (Hos 11:1) and now from Nazareth, a Nazarene (Is 11:1 branch = Naytser) These are the scripture experts, the ones who supposedly had memorized the whole thing down to the least jot and tittle.
But they refused to see. The Word says they had a veil over their eyes — the veil of negative volition. (2 Co 3:14)
And even as they were not interested in facts, only in believing their own lies in those days, so they are now. I recently read a fascinating book called Why Are Jews Liberals? by Norman Podhoretz, who is editor of the conservative political magazine Commentary. In the book, Podhoretz poses the question of why, despite the fact that the Conservatives are now unquestionably the side of the political spectrum that most faithfully and even adamantly supports the Jews and Israel, the Jews themselves remain steadfastly liberal. Refusing to see the Anti-Semitism of the left, they dismiss it with the idea that the liberals don’t mean it, or in the case of antagonism toward the state of Israel (which not all of them support), by agreeing with Israel’s critics.
The very first thing Podhoretz brings out is that the main reason Jews aren’t Conservative is because they are terrified of Christians. Terrified that should they ever come to power that they will forge a new state church that will begin anew all the persecutions the Jews have endured over the last two thousand years and only recently escaped. Even though it was socialist/Nazi Germany and communist Soviet Union though administered the greatest attacks against the Jews in history. And were the most recent to do so.
I’m not saying that Christianity as an institution (as a religion, really — and I don’t believe that true Christianity IS a religion) hasn’t had its dark days with regard to how it’s treated the Jews, but nothing it did was ever so dark as what went down under those two “liberal” or “progressive” regimes in Europe.
The book traces the fascinating if necessarily brief story of the Jew’s history in Western Europe and the US, because that history is definitely part of their reasoning for siding against Christians. But history isn’t all of it. Many of the Liberal Jews have the same unreasoning, illogical, irrational, hard-hearted antagonism toward Christianity as their Muslim/Arab enemies have toward them.
And I find that ironic.
More on the book tomorrow (If I get back from my mother’s cancer treatments with a reasonable amount of time left in my day… unlike last week)
Really cool opinion piece by Charles Krauthammer (I really like his writings) in the Washington Post on the world’s viewpoint of Those Troublesome Jews. Why won’t they just go back to Germany, Poland… Auschwitz (quotes from White House Press Queen Helen Thomas and Turkish Flotilla Passengers) ? It’s not a long article, really clarifies what’s going on with respect to the Gaza situation and these alleged aid flotillas, and discusses the Jew’s three avenues of defense (Forward, Active and Passive) which have systematically been eroded to the point they are left only with the Passive (blockades). Once that, too, is de-legitimized by the world, they will have to just “curse God and die!” (to quote Job’s wife). Just what Satan wants. Because if there’s no Israel, then God can’t keep His promises and Satan has won the Angelic Conflict (Or so he thinks).
One more sign we truly are living in the last days…