Thursday, July 13, 2006

המצב HaMatzav, the Situation in Israel as it now stands

Two katushas launched from Lebanon have hit Haifa and seven have hit the holy city of Tzfat. This is war!

In Haifa, Jews, Druze, Muslims, Christians, adherants of the Bahai faiths, all live in peace, but now they are all under attack.

Apparently Hizbullah is denying any role in the attack on Haifa.

I am also hearing reports of the Israeli recapture of Gush Katif in Gaza.

I find it very important to keep as updated on news as possible. There are a couple of good websites for Israeli news from many ranges of political ideology.

-The Jerusalem Post is good for its quick snippets, is considered to be relatively unbiased, and allows for user talkback, a feature which I have taken advantage of on occasion. The thing I like most is that they have an RSS Feed (if you use Mozilla Firefox, you can add it when you are at the Jerusalem Post website by clicking on the orange sound icon on the right side of the URL bar) which means I can access a list of their most recent or most prominent articles when I am anywhere on the internet

-Next we have Israel National News put out by Arutz Sheva, which is pretty right wing.

-Ha'aretz is considered to be a good left-wing news source

-Yedioth Achronot has the most print readership in Israel and I present its English edition.

-I was just told about Debka by my uncle. It looks like it is quickly updated. I am not sure of its political affiliation

-If you understand Hebrew (and I guess they exist even if you don't) there are Hebrew news sources which are given much more attention than the english editions and if you understand Hebrew, you are best reading these, the original hebrew versions of news sources I have already mentioned: ידיעות אחרונות, הארץ, ערוץ 7. (It's really cool, by the way, how my Edit program turned this listing right-to-left)

-As for international news sources, I am not objectionable to CNN's coverage. Though I completely disagree with their one-sided approach against Israel, because they have an RSS feed that already comes bundled with Firefox, I also read BBC's Middle East Report. I should probably read MSNBC and FoxNews, shouldn't I?

-I am a proud member of the JRants network, an aggregation of Israel and Jewish-themed blogs. There is always a wide range of opinions on Israel and Judaism. Definitely check this out and you may find someone whose opinions you would like to read.

Alright, so these are increasingly tense times and war is looking very likely, against Lebanon, against Hamas, and perhaps against Syria (maybe even Iran!). We must pray for the victory of Israel and of ultimate peace. I will continue to update this article as I see fit or add new ones.

I just watched on CNN the Lebanese army goosestepping and in flag formation, a blatantly Nazi reference. They were dressed in colors and from overhead looked like the Lebanese flag, the Hisbullah flag, and the Palestinian flag.

I think that we may see a repeat of the 1982 Lebanese war when we captured their capital city of beirut. We have already taken out their main airport.

UPDATE 2:20 PM PDT: I heard a report that the Katyusha rockets that hit Haifa, which Hisbullah is denying actually came from Iran! If that is true, oh man, time for a regional war.

UPDATE 7:50 PM PDT: I've been fasting since 11 PM, so I may not be so coherent right now, but I find it ironic that one of the most right-wing voices in Israel right now is Amir Peretz (Hebrew; Yiddish), head of the leftist Labor party and Minister of Defence ([sic], they use British spelling in Israel). Maybe this is because the Palestinians keep bombing his village, Sderot with Qassams... Anyway, he is saying that they will not allow Hizbullah to remain in the south of Lebanon on Israel's northern border and even in the unlikely chance that Lebanon returns their hostages safely to Israel, I think that Israel will continue until they blot out the حزب الله terrorist organization from the south.

2 comments:

Marco Oliveira said...

What was the damage in Haifa?
Were the baha'i gardens or buildings damaged?

Matt said...

As I understand it, both of the Katyusha rockets hit Mount Carmel and came quite close but did not damage the Bahá'í gardens. There have also been some reports that they were actually fired by Iran, but I don't know if that is actually the case. I think that I saw that in an CNN, MSNBC or Fox News report that the gardens were untouched but that the missiles came dangerously close to them.