Dudu Mimran Blog

Bad YouTube Experience

Yesterday while I was viewing a video on YouTube I was aggressively interrupted by a video/flash based commercial with sound. I am not sure whether that was a glitch but someone need to pay attention to the fact that people can not hear two different soundtracks at the same time. Two videos is easy since you can focus your eyes on a certain area but two sounds is too much for me:)

Phoney faces everywhere over Israel's self defense

After watching quite a bit of the news from our little war in Gaza, both in local and foreign networks something has dawned on me. People, mainly in Europe but not only, treat Israel the country and its basic rights as if it was questionable. Somehow the critic level focused towards our country is disproportionate in comparison to what we are actually doing. It is not even comparable to what others being criticized for much bigger things with far less justified reasons. I know we are small country and rather new in comparison to countries who exist for hundreds of years but still we are a given fact as anything else on this planet! People or organizations in the western world who feel Israel's rights is somehow comparable to Hamas's the terrorist group or others who are considered terrorists by the same people who criticize themselves is just mistaken.

I am not talking about Palestinians or others highly affiliated with them who see the sufferings and sympathize with them personally. These have all the right and the same feelings that rise when see someone dead on our side happens the same there I guess. I am talking about people who seat in their convenient coffee shops and put themselves in the chair of god almighty.

I am also a bit angry at some of our spokesmen who take the strategic path of making "good" excuses to why we have the right to do what we do. Every western and so called "enlightened" country on earth would take far more drastic measures at some kind of terrorist group who sends missiles constantly at their citizens. That is the basic job of every government. Somehow the fact that we are lucky (god forbid but I can't explain otherwise our low casualty rate) is on our side does not make our rights less important.

I liked the interviewing tactic of Binyamin Nethaniahou our ex-prime minister whom instead of making excuses responded with the same questions directed at him towards the interviewer putting the other side in our place. Things such as missiles on London, Copenhagen, Ankara and any other big city in the world would have probably created a far more furious and very "non-considerate" response towards the offender. Regardless of the offender's "historical" reasons or ambitions for doing so. There are ways to communicate and missiles on civilians is not considered one of them in the western world.

Maybe it is our problem, our "Jewish" warm heart, big conscious and basic guilt that we even give an open stand to those who oppose what we do. In this war the cost for killing one terrorist while making sure we keep the lowest number of civilians casualties possible (what can you do when they hide within civilians) has risen dramatically. Before we bomb a building, where we know terrorists are there, we call each and one of the people living there to give them a 15 minutes notice. We also send a dummy missile just to make sure they can run away without getting hurt. This is unheard of in terms of being considerate towards the "enemy" But still people see us as the bully.

I remember from kindergarten a very basic thing, never be a bully but if someone tries to hurt you then you have to defend yourself in similar measures. There are those who attack first or respond very harshly but self-defense is a minimum.

Israel is a miracle to survive in this so much "unfriendly" environment where our "best" neighbor is the water in the sea and most of your "neighbors" just wish we did not exist. It would have been just reasonable to expect the rest of the world to help us sustain our western frontier towards the extreme Islamic world in our harsh location and instead we just get cold water at our face. Only when some opposer for our policy, seating in his/her safe haven in some calm European city, get a terror attack or some kind of threat then they start thinking of us warmly. Well, now it is cold for us!