September 07, 2010
Kvetcher-in-Chief: They Talk About Me Like a Dog
This is what happens when Obama goes off teleprompter:
“Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true,” he told a crowd largely consisting of union members.
Okay, I'm not a dog owner. But on my block there are several dog owners. Bleary-eyed, clad in pajamas, they walk their dogs at the crack of dawn. They talk to their dogs in such loving tones I wonder if these people are aware that dogs are not human. Dog owners spend enormous amounts of money on medical insurance for their pets. Dog owners bury their dogs in much the same manner as they bury beloved relatives.
In short, Americans love their dogs.
You know who hates dogs?
Muslims.
According to Islam, dogs are unclean. In fact, when Palestinians get together and chant against Israel, they sing out:
“The Jews are our dogs.”
In the Muslim world dogs are to be kicked to death.
So: a few notes to our kvetcher-in-chief:
1. Nobody likes a whiner, man-up already. In case you haven't noticed, you are the President of the United States.
2. Your first sentence is, um, incomprehensible. I know you went to Harvard and you're the smartest president evuh, but really...
3. The powerful interests who dominate the agenda are you, the Democrats, and the liberal media.
4. Don't go off teleprompter, ever. You sound like:
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:21 AM in Obamacare | Comments (6)
September 06, 2010
Staring at the Walls for Fun and Profit
I spend a lot of time staring at this wall.
It's Labor Day weekend here in Los Angeles. Thus, a few words about work are in order.
I've been a Hollywood screenwriter for over twenty-five years. I get up early in the morning, bind tefillin and pray, eat breakfast while reading the Wall Street Journal, then take twenty-five steps into the office we built in the back of the house.
I switch on the computer, check my favorite blogs, author this blog, and then dive into my imagination.
Screenplays are all about structure, so I spend a huge amount of time on the outline, building a narrative that is without blemish.
But of course, every story has a fault-line. There are no exceptions. Nevertheless, I labor away, imagining a perfect yarn that moves like sniper's bullet.
I write in almost violent bursts, trying to tell my story with as little dialogue as possible, using compelling images like building blocks. And when I do use dialogue, I make sure the words are spare but resonant. Each bit of dialogue must be rich in subtext and go to the heart of character, mood and plot.
Good movies are driven, primarily, by strong visuals—that's why no matter how clever any sitcom, in the end, it's just filmed radio and bores me to tears.
Exposition is deadly—the enemy of drama—and should be threaded into the story in such a way that it's invisible.
It is a delicate balancing act, this marriage of image and dialogue, hence I spend most of my time cutting lots and lots of words. I move them around like chess pieces until I've achieved the desired effect. Sometimes I'm flying blind, not sure what it is I'm looking for but certain—well, almost certain—that sooner or later, it will reveal itself.
Two rules I live by:
1. Writing is rewriting.
2. Less is more.
After writing a few scenes, one long scene, or a complicated montage, I feel drained. For long periods of time I'll just sit and stare.
I'm in a kind of trance, lost in the narrative, a make-believe world populated by make-believe characters who have become more real to me than reality.
When I stare I'm staring at a movie that is flickering away in my mind's eye. I can sit like this for a very long time.
And in the past, when Karen or the kids would drop into the office, they would frequently find me in this odd, suspended state.
When our son Ariel ZT'L was about 8 years-old someone asked him what his father did for a living.
“He stares at the walls in his office,” said Ariel.
I smiled when I heard that because in away, it was a fine description of my work.
Have a wonderful weekend, and remember ladies, no white shoes after Labor Day.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:39 AM in Labor Day | Comments (25)
September 03, 2010
Five Smooth Stones
When visiting a Jewish grave, it is our custom, not to leave flowers—a sign of life—but to place stones or pebbles on the headstone. The rocks suggest the power of memory, as solid as stone. Further, one of G-d's names is, “The Rock of Israel.” Thus the rock is a reminder of His presence, whose love is stronger than death.
Karen and I always take smooth, black, river-stones to our son Ariel's grave. The stones are readily available, they sit decoratively in the courtyard fountain and as pavers in the driveway.
They are, for stones, lovely.
The other day, I took five stones and placed them on the floor of my office. I stared at the stones for a while. Then I took a stick of blue pastel and inscribed a line down each stone.
I put the stones back on the floor and just left them there.
Karen stepped into the office for a short visit:
“What are those?”
“Stones.”
“The blue line, you did that right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How come?”
I shrugged. “Dunno. I was bored.”
But a few minutes later I understood the stones, understood the blue line.
Karen and I could not attend the funeral of those Jews massacred by Palestinian terrorists. We cannot leave a stone at their graves.
These five stones are the best we can do for Yitzchak & Talia Imas and their unborn child, Avishai Shindler, and Kokhava Even-Chaim.
The blue line references the Israeli flag.
May God comfort you [the families] among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
Karen and I wish all our friends and relatives a lovely and peaceful Shabbat.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:49 AM in Friday Fotos | Comments (12)
September 02, 2010
Remove the Check Points!
Another terror attack on Jewish civilians in Samaria.
But because they were settlers, it's no big deal. In fact, it's all their fault.
Sort of like abused wives who make their husbands beat them to a bloody pulp.
Anyhoo.
I have a fab-u-lous idea. Israel should dismantle even more check points as, y'know, a confidence building measure.
It will make the genocidal-yearning Palestinians even more confident that killing Jews is not only fun, but easy and made easier by Barack Obama who demanded the dismantling of vital check points in Judea and Samaria.
Case in point: a while ago I flew to N.Y. and there was a typically horrendous, snake-like security check point here in Los Angeles. It was like a block long and manned by surly and really rude TSA workers.
Right in front of me, a little old lady was pulled out of line—she was baffled, looked on the verge of a heart attack—and yanked into a private area for, I assume, a thorough body scan. Look, can you blame the TSA geniuses? Tons of terrorists fit her profile: Caucasian, Christian, about 75 years old, walking with a cane.
Your government at work.
But seriously, airport check points—brought to you overwhelmingly by Palestinian terrorists—should be dismantled.
Think about it.
Check points humiliate the traveler, strip him/her—and let's not forget all the beloved medicated pets—of their inherent human/animal/whatever dignity.
Check points are a sign of international aggression against, well, international peoples.
Check points are an insidious form of imperialist, colonialist, capitalist, Zionist/Jewish occupation.
It's also a breeding ground for sexual harassment of really pretty women and, heck, let's face it, really pretty men.
Things in burqas have nothing to fear. No one knows if they're animal, mineral or vegetable, and if a TSA guy/gal tries to find out you can be sure CAIR and the ACLU will bring down dozens of law suits.
BTW, my wife Karen gets a lot more attention than yours truly. Go figure.
And talk about inconvenient. I often spend more time at check points than in flight to my destination.
Here' the thing that really drives me nuts: Stinky feet. Noxious socks. The airport smells like, well, a mosque or an NFL locker room. This is definitely something Al Gore should look into. I'm sure there's some humongous glacier melting into an ice cube because of all the foot emissions.
Look, dismantle the airport check points and maybe a few hundred planes will get blown out of the sky every month—c/o your peace-loving Islamists—but heck, we need confidence building measures with the Arab Muslim world.
Remove the airport check-points and peace will, um, explode.
Just as it has in Israel every time check points are dismantled.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 09:59 AM in Jihad Watch | Comments (11)
September 01, 2010
The Murder Process
Yesterday, Seraphic Secret wrote about the Muslim desecration of Har Hazeitim, the Jewish cemetery on the Mt. of Olives.
We concluded:
When Arab Muslims trod on the graves of our dead, you can be certain that they have no regard for living Jews. The fiction of a peace process is a dangerous illusion. You cannot make peace with a culture that marinates in such barbarism.
A few hours after posting the piece, Palestinian terrorists murdered four Jews.
Here are the slain:
Yitzchak, 47, and Talia, 45, Imas, who leave behind six orphans aged 2 to 24 . Talia was nine months pregnant when she was murdered by the Islamist terrorists.
Avishai Shindler, 24, murdered on his first wedding anniversary.
Kokhava Even-Chaim, 37, a teacher in Efrat—where Karen and I have friends and family—is survived by her husband Maimon, a Zaka volunteer who discovered that his wife was one of the victims when he arrived on the scene. Kokhava leaves behind an eight year-old daughter.
These victims were traveling in a car near Hebron. When they halted at an intersection, Palestinian terrorists, lying in ambush, opened fire with automatic weapons. They dragged the wounded Jews from the car and then fired dozens of rounds at point-blank range. It was a brutal massacre, a Palestinian specialty.
H'YD, May HaShem avenge their blood.
Hamas and the Palestinian media referred to the murdered Jews as “settlers” and “rapists.”
Elder of Ziyon reports that The New York Times echoes this sentiment by labeling the victims settlers. In short, demonizing and blaming the victims.
Soccer Dad also takes the NYT times to task.
The dead were Jews.
Period.
That's why they were murdered.
And according to the Hamas covenant all Israelis are settlers because the entire state of Israel is considered occupied territory and part of a future Islamic caliphate.
Killing so-called settlers is simply a tactic designed to garner support from the useful idiots in the West for killing Jews. Especially the European useful idiots whose only regret about World War II is that Hitler's Final Solution was not, y'know, final.
Minutes after the murders took place, spontaneous celebrations broke out in Palestinian towns. Make no mistake about it, there is a groundswell of popular support among the Palestinians for eliminating Jews from the face of the earth.
There was a standard denunciation from the PA:
PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said the attack was "against Arab interests."
Disgusting. Not a word about right and wrong. Asserting only that the murders are bad publicity for the Arabs. I'm pretty sure it's the same language used by Arafat even as he unleashed his terrorists on the Jewish state.
Jews of conscience are reacting sensibly and with determination. The bigoted building freeze imposed by Barack Obama has been suspended immediately.
And Jews should build several towns in Judea and Samaria in memory of the four Jews who were slaughtered.
In fact, every time a Jew is murdered in the land of Israel, a new town should be founded. In this way, the Islamists know that there are consequences to their murderous actions.
The peace process is a farce. The murder process is a more apt description. Does anyone believe that the building freeze appeased the Palestinians? In fact, it emboldened them. They reasoned, quite logically, that they could not allow Barack Obama to be more Palestinian than they.
There is no reason to negotiate with an entity who is sworn to your destruction, save an appetite for national suicide, which is the ideological heart of the internatonal left.
Some conflicts are intractable. The U.S. and its allies during World War II understood that the only resolution to genocidal Nazism and Japanese Imperialism was total victory. Annihilate the enemy armies, destroy their homeland, dictate an unconditional surrender, and then build functioning democracies.
At some point, Israel and the freedom loving west will be compelled to follow the same strategy towards the Islamist Palestinians and the Islamist world.
The Islamists and their enablers must be brought to their knees and humiliated beyond endurance.
And please, don't talk to me about moderate Muslims.
They are about as relevant as were moderate Germans and moderate Japanese.
There is no substitute for total victory.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:53 AM in Jihad Watch | Comments (22)
August 31, 2010
Muslim Tolerance in Action: Desecrating Jewish Graves
Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives deliberately destroyed by Arab Muslims.
You know how the Ground Zero Mosque Islamists claims that the purpose of the massive structure is to promote tolerance and interfaith dialogue.
Well, that was the intitial fiction. But that's been dropped because the aggression and rigidity are, well, obviously so not tolerant, so hostile and Islamist, that now, Mr. Feisal Abdul Rauf—“I don't believe in religious dialogue”—and his supporters tediously repeat the lie that this is about, ahem, religious freedom.
Well, religious freedom is not a problem in America.
The real problem is, gee, what a shock, in the Muslim world.
The Mount of Olives, an ancient—from biblical times Jews have buried their dead here—and a holy cemetery in Jerusalem, is being used by Muslims as a garbage dump.
Jewish graves have been desecrated and destroyed. Muslims regularly lead their donkeys across the gravestones.
Muslim children play soccer among the dead.
Of course, this is nothing new:
Jewish burials were halted in 1948, and massive vandalism took place from 1948-1967. During the nineteen years of Jordanian rule, 40,000 of the 50,000 graves were desecrated. King Hussein permitted the construction of the Intercontinental Hotel at the summit of the Mount of Olives together with a road that cut through the cemetery which destroyed hundreds of Jewish graves, some from the First Temple Period. After the Six-Day War, restoration work began, and the cemetery was re-opened for burials.
More here.
The Muslim world is a sea of Jew-hatred and intolerance.
The outrages continue. Even today, our dead are not spared.
...there was no area of Har Hazeisim [Mount of Olives] that was spared the wanton destruction, filth, and abuse. He said that neighboring Palestinians use the cemetery roads as a shortcut and on evenings parade their donkeys through the area. “I witnessed Palestinians walking on graves as if it were a pedestrian mall,” he said. His heart-wrenching video confirms the findings of State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss that Har Hazeisim has all but been abandoned by the Israeli government. Lubinsky met with officials in the Prime Minister’s office to lodge a strong protest at the government’s turning a blind eye to the systematic destruction of Har Hazeisim.
Snip.
Levin’s video shows graves that were recently deliberately destroyed by Palestinians living in nearby villages and in the cemetery. He found a fully functioning soccer field on Har Hazeisim with the goal posts being broken fragments of graves. He also found at least one dead animal between the graves, roving dogs, drug paraphernalia, and garbage strewn everywhere. Many of the Committee participants reported being victim to stones being hurled at them by youngsters and at least one participant had a Molotov cocktail thrown at his car.
When Arab Muslims trod on the graves of our dead, you can be certain that they have no regard for living Jews. The fiction of a peace process is a dangerous illusion. You cannot make peace with a culture that marinates in such barbarism.
Full story here.
The tombs of the Prophet Zecharia and of the Hezir family on the Mount of Olives.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 08:16 AM in Jihad Watch | Comments (10)
August 30, 2010
The Ground Zero Mosque: The Constitution, Decency and Indecency
Mark Helprin, one of America's greatest novelists—and a veteran of the Israeli Air Force—weighs in on the Ground Zero Mosque controversy in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
Building close to Ground Zero disregards the passions, grief and preferences not only of most of the families of September 11th but, because we are all the families of September 11th, those of the American people as well, even if not the whole of the American people. If the project is to promote moderate Islam, why have its sponsors so relentlessly, without the slightest compromise, insisted upon such a sensitive and inflammatory setting? That is not moderate. It is aggressively militant.
Disregarding pleas to build it at a sufficient remove so as not to be linked to an abomination committed, widely praised, and throughout the world seldom condemned in the name of Islam, the militant proponents of the World Trade Center mosque are guilty of a poorly concealed provocation. They dare Americans to appear anti-Islamic and intolerant or just to roll over.
But the opposition to what they propose is no more anti-Islamic or intolerant than to protest a Shinto shrine at Pearl Harbor or Nanjing would be anti-Shinto or even anti-Japanese. How about a statue of Wagner at Auschwitz, a Russian war memorial in the Katyn Forest, or a monument to British and American air power at Dresden? The indecency of such things would be neither camouflaged nor burned away by the freedoms of expression and religion. And that is what the controversy is about, decency and indecency, not the freedom to worship, which no one denies.
Helprin explains that the Constitution also gives voice to those who, in protest, can refuse to build the mosque, and for citizens of good conscience not to cross picket lines manned by 9-11 families, firemen, police, and various construction guilds.
Read the full piece here.
And by the way, let us not forget that under Obamanomics federal spending is growing at an unprecedented pace. We are adding $4.8 billion—I cannot even imagine that number—to the national debt every day. At this pace, under the Democrats, our national debt, in two to three years, will be greater than our GDP. This is not only unsustainable, it is fiscal madness.
So it's not much of a surprise to learn that our tax dollars are being used to help fund The Muslim Brotherhood.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at 07:49 AM in Ground Zero Mosque | Comments (19)