It's the most wonderful time of the year....

 Hi All,

Happy Christmas everyone!

[And i'm glad i'm not one of those whose Sunday is seemingly to be perpertually being in supermarkets. Can people cope with them being closed for... a day?!]

Shabbat Shalom!

 Hi All,

Shabbat Shalom and open thread as usual!

Latest BBC Controversy

 Hi All,

Well I can see the funny side of this latest controversy from our national (and direct taxed imposed upon us to access any tv) broadcaster :

I have to say it is amazing how this person can flip to the professional monotone once she realises she is on camera. But for me this is pretty much my reaction to the latest Dr Who series.... lol,.

Happy Hannukah !

 Hi All,

HAPPY HANNUKAH!

What's the point?

 Hi All,

Just in case you were worried- we're all okay. 

But it is just that everytime I think (or Sarah for that matter) about writing something, either we get distracted or simply can't be bothered. But hopefully we can now. 

Which brings me to this one. Dr Who is back for the 60th year and they have several specials, having in desperation brought back the original show runner from the reboot Russell T Davies and arguably the most popular of the new Whos, David Tennant as the 14th Doctor, before another actor takes over. 

Am I going to comment on the show and the first special? 

I did watch it and the answer is no. I also incidentally watched bits of the Jodie Whitaker era and thought I'd try this one about. But I've come to the conclusion that for me Dr Who -as with many other beloved franchises- is now dead to me and I won't bother. I'm semi interested that on the BBC- I player that they have every single episode of Dr Who- i.e. the old series- to watch. But right now Dr Who stopped being Dr Who at the end of the Capaldi era. The Jodie Whitaker era was trash because the total change in the show's canon and mythos, not just the gender swap which caused a lot of people to stop watching it and be called bigoted etc, which was made worse by the force fed 'wokeness' or as they call it the 'message'.

 The special on Saturday night doubled down on the wokeness and it simply isn't for me anymore. This is a long journey, but it has been going on for a while and in fact has happened to other sci-fi franchises such as Star Trek, Star Wars and thing like the MCU. Go woke and go broke as they say and the money made/viewing figures reflect that, but for whatever reason they have been taken over in a bloodless woke coup. If you dissent you are cancelled and called a bigot and that's putting it midly .I cannot be bothered with arguing over it anymore because 'it'  is- in  any case the prize the woke leftists have  now got- and what they are applauding are shells of their former selves as the wokeness drove stories but the stories themselves and their characters were so bad, so lame and so overpowered that any of the old successful franchises are simply not worth watching . It is like taking over a stately home and trashing it, but still thinking that they are magnificant works of art, but have been turned into lifeless husks which no-one outside the bubble cares. No one watches them or buys the merch.

What can be done is that rather than lamenting the demise of a once great franchise, like Gibbon and the Fall of Rome, is to be positive and create your own sci-fi, music and other such 'counter cultural' stuff. Well if the Daily Wire can do a production of Snow White, why not? 

The not so nice part of the protestors

 Hi All,

For the past couple of weeks, London and other cities have been flooded with 'protests' against Israel- note no-one held mass demos when Jewish people were being butchered in the pogrom- and this is the sort of thing that's been going on and what the media fails to report. It's saddening and scary at the same time  :

Latest 'news' (from the impartial BBC)

 Hi All,

Factual news from the BBC - as ever- or is it a pardoy account? Who can tell the difference? 😀

Bennett tells the BBC like it is

 Hi All, 

After 2 weeks of spewing out pro-Palestine propaganda, finally, finally,  it is about time someone , in this case the former Prime Minister of Israel, took the smug lefty BBC to task ! 

Adon Olam

 Hi All,

Lord of the Universe. Two different tunes, great hymn.

Translation: 

The Lord of the Universe who reigned before anything was created. When all was made by his will He was acknowledged as King. And when all shall end He still all alone shall reign. 

He was, He is, and He shall be in glory. And He is one, and there's no other, to compare or join Him. Without beginning, without end and to Him belongs dominion and power.

 And He is my G-d, my living G-d. to Him I flee in time of grief, and He is my miracle and my refuge, who answers the day I shall call. To Him I commit my spirit, in the time of sleep and awakening, even if my spirit leaves, G-d is with me, I shall not fear.

Amen

Shabbat Shalom!

A week of pain

 Hi All,

Today is apparently, according to terrorists Hamas,  supposed to be a day of 'global rage' against Israel. Unfortunately I have better things to do than attack a small, great country of my heritage and I have no time to follow suggestions by child butchering, evil maniacs that the Waffen SS would approve.  

The shocking reality has come out this week and it was worse than we thought. Not only old and young, women and men were slaughtered or taken as hostages, but also children . Yes children: burned alive or beheaded, often as their parents were forced to watch as these terrorists gave their sacrifice to Moloch, which seems to be the 'real' deity of Hamas. 

What evil! 

The Israeli defence minister referred to these terrorists as 'animals', but that is wrong. A tiger will kill and tear things to shreads, but it has no malice or evil  in doing so as it is acting on a base instinct of food or survival, in other words it has no agency or capacity to go beyond that which makes its biological makeup. Human beings can and do have the free will to be good or evil (at least in Jewish tradition). These Hamas terrorists are not 'base' or 'human' animals as they are capable of choosing good or evil and they have deliberately and wilfully chosen the path of  evil and an evil which has seen more Jews killed in 24 hours than that since the holocaust- 1,300 dead and thousands more wounded- with 200 hostages being held in god knows what hellholemas terrorist. Hamas terrorists are clearly a modern version of the Nazi Waffen SS Einsatzgruppen, who were tasked with specifically killing any Jews they encountered and often in a brutal fashion. 

Israel has every right to declare war in such circumstances and both President Biden and Prime Minister Sunak have been resolute in saying so. Unlike the BBC, our Prime Minister has taken sides,  attended Synagogue with the Chief Rabbi and made a moving speech (below) and both Parliament and Downing Street have been lit up in the colours of the Israeli flag. The US has sent in a Carrier Battle Group and even the UK, normally an 'Arabist' country, is reinforcing the military bases on Cyprus with several warships being sent to the eastern med, to help enforce the blockade of weapons and aid is being sent to Israel.

Also Douglas Murray gives us his support on the current crisis and notes we should treat Hamas like ISIS (which is true) : 

Unfortunately the 'usual suspects' have, like rats up a drainpipe, appeared to deliever their usual mixture of crap &  the celebration rallies of the butchering of Jews, refusing to acknowldge the slaughter of Jews or even that this was a wicked event, rather people of this ilk justify it as either 'well it's been a long time coming and is deserved because of the occupation of Palestine' or 'well what about the Palestinian children [Who've been killed]' These people haven't grasped this fact - 

1) In what way is it ever justified to deliberately burn to death and behead children, to murder men and women, girls and boys? To paracutte into a music festival and begin to massacre people?

2) Israel uses rockets and bombs to defend her civilians, Hamas use their civilians to defend their rockets and bombs. Thus Israel does not deliberately seek out children to kill, but Hamas does. Israel does not wontly kill civilians, but Hamas hide their weapons in Mosques, hospitals and other areas that they known, under laws of warfare shouldn't be used. As for cutting off the power and aid to Gaza, where is the condemnation of Egypt which does also have a border with Gaza and also blockades Gaza. Why does Egypt not want to take in fellow muslim arab refugees? 

3) Israel has persistantly agreed on the idea of 'land for peace', even before the creation of modern Israel, with the acceptance of the UN plan, a plan which the Arabs rejected and despite winning against the odds in every other war Israel has been forced to fight, the Arabs continued in their refusal for peace. These pro -palestinian groupies suggest that Israel should simply give all of this up, but where is the honest partner for peace? Do they know that the idea of a settlement via Hamas is for all Jews to be killed or exiled from our homeland and that Palestine free from the river to the sea is a Palestine without Jews?

Then there is  The  BBC - to whom I have now cancelled our license fee- refuses to call terrorists, terrorists because to do so would mean 'taking sides', strange given that under UK law Hamas is a terrorist organisation. 

To end is the following prayer :

Acheinu Kol Beit Yisrael

'Our brothers and sisters the whole house of Israel, who are in distress and captivity who wander over sea and over land — may God have mercy on them, and bring them from distress to comfort, from darkness to light, from slavery to redemption, now, swiftly, and soon. And let us say: Amen.'

Shabbat Shalom!

Israel under attack

 Hi All,

"I say to the L-rd, “You are my God.”
Hear, L-rd, my cry for mercy.
Sovereign L-rd, my strong deliverer,
you shield my head in the day of battle.
Do not grant the wicked their desires, L-rd;
do not let their plans succeed."

Psalm 140

So we are almost at the end of the Jewish 'high holidays', which began with New Year, then Yom Kippur, Sukkot and today Simchat Torah, which is by tradition a day of celebration. I was looking forward to coming back to blogging, but now there is the news from Israel. 

 The terrorists of Hamas, bankrolled by Iran,  have been responsbile for what some are saying is Israel's '9/11' or in another way a  massive murderous pogrom against Israelis, foreign visitors and members of Israel's minority communities such as the Bedouins. 

 Hamas  fired 5,000 rockets, attacking by sea and by land, the bloody brutal killing of people on the streets and in their houses,as the streets run with blood, so far 300 murdered and 1,600 injured. Then there is the  taking of hostages- including women and children- parading them around in Gaza like they are in a slave market with it all put onto social media for the world to see.  I  think of my brother, sister in law, neices and nephews who live there and pray for their safety and our collective resolve against these savages. 

There will doubtless be some form of backlash here in the diaspora as Israel merely seeks to defend itself and her citizens against these barbaric animals, but then this would happen whatever the context, but the context here is that Hamas are an exestential threat toward Israel and the Jewish people. It also gives a window as to what would happen if Israel either surrendered the West Bank or suffered defeat. Let us pray that this does not happen and that Israel will prevail!