stop me before I rant again

[Gerry Storm]

Mike,
I would like to see Sharon and his policies fail and be replaced by a more
moderate stance. I would like to see Perle, Wolife, Feith,et al fail and
spend the rest of their lives in Abu Ghraib or San Quentin. I would like to
see all governments as secular institutions. I would like a break in the
daily news from the constant fights in Israel.
G


----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Eisenstadt" <michaele@HotPOP.com>
To: <mesmo@gilanet.com>; <austin-ghetto-list@pairlist.net>
Sent: Monday, September 06, 2004 12:42 PM
Subject: Re: stop me before I rant again


> Gerry,
>
> I dont know how much you want to know about
> Israel considering your heritage ;-) but I thought
> I'd bring to your attention a book I just finished
> reading, Real Jews by Noah Efron, an Israeli
> professor. (you might ask for it through Interlibrary
> Loan at your local public library).
>
> It is about the Haredim, the super orthodox,
> not to be confused with religious West Bank
> settlers, these are the old timey jews in black
> studying the bible being their main occupation.
>
> It is a more or less sympathetic look at them,
> written primarily to inform secular Israelis who
> resent the Haredim as corrupt free-loaders.
> According to Efron, the Haredim are about
> 10% of the population and as far as one can
> tell, this percentage is not changing very much
> despite the large families they have. Apparently
> a lot of their children abandon the faith and
> become secular. The reason they have such
> political clout is, in part, because they practice
> massive fraud in elections with faked IDs,
> multiple voting, and voting the cemeteries.
> At recent elections, secular poll-watchers were
> in place at Haredim precincts but it turned out
> to be very hard to closely surveille the IDs of
> the voters as regards their real identity.
>
> But it is not as you say. Israel, surprisingly, at
> this moment is having an economic boom with
> a strong growth rate.
>
> As best I can tell from reading Ha'aretz and
> the Jerusalem Post, the Israel I defend is NOT
> on the ropes. If anything their internal strife that
> you speak of seems far less than that here in
> the US. Why do I get the sense that it would
> delight you if they WERE in internal strife?
>
> Could it just be that you got an attitude towards
> these folks? I hope not.
>
> Nice though that you remember the Israel of
> the 50s which was a far less corrupt society
> than it is now (the way it changed was explained
> to me by an Israeli math teacher/rabbi on a
> Pan Am flight from NYC to Houston in 1979).
> It's a complicated country.
>
> Mike
>
>