The Zionist Conspiracy |
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A clandestine undertaking on behalf of Israel, the Jets and the Jews. 
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Sunday, June 29, 2008
Olmert's Capitulation Citizens of Israel, there are moments in the life of a nation when it is compelled to look directly into the face of reality, and say: No more! And I say to everyone: No more! Israel will not be held hostage - not by terror gangs, or by a terrorist authority, or by any sovereign state... Unfortunately, pictures of three boys now stand in my room. Many times during the day I look in their faces, into their eyes, and embrace them in my heart. I do not forget them for one minute. They were there on our behalf and for our sake. We will do everything and make every effort to bring them home. We will do this, but not in a pattern that will encourage more kidnappings -Ehud Olmert, July 17, 2006 Thursday, June 26, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Musings 1. With the passing of George Carlin, I look forward to reports clarifying that he was in no way anti-religious, but merely opposed to religious coercion. 2. It is not Ehud Olmert's fault that Israel has not secured the return of the captured soldiers. As tragic as the fate of a captured soldier is, Israel cannot pay a limitless price for their return. 3. I am not naive enough to believe that French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who addressed the Knesset today, is really a friend of Israel, as he is being described by Israelis on both the right and left. But it cannot be denied that there has been a positive change of tone from western Europe toward Israel over the last few years. It remains to be seen what effect a Likud election victory would have on all this. 4. I'm all for paying as little as possible in a salary cap era, and I have concerns about giving a long-term contract to a player as physical as Sean Avery. But in the end the Rangers would be crazy to let Avery leave as a free agent. If Avery does depart, the Rangers will spend the new few years trying to find someone similar. They won't succeed in that quest. 5. It appears that when the new stadium opens, the Jets will charge season ticket holders thousands of dollars for personal seat licenses. For many avid Jets fans like me, that might mean the end of attending Jets games. Sports is very big business, so I'm not going to rail about PSLs. There's something about the Jets that bothers me in particular, however. Without going into specifics, I have reason to believe that for the Jets, business comes first. Winning would be nice if it ever happened, but as long as the seats as sold and the PSLs raise a few hundred million dollars, everything's fine. Contrast that to the Yankees. It's not cheap to go to a Yankee game, but nobody doubts that the Steinbrenners desperately want to win. Sure they sometimes do and say stupid things, but winning is as important as money - a season in which the Yanks make tons of money but don't win the World Series is never deemed a success. 6. Enough already about Willie Randolph. Yes, the Mets botched his firing very badly. But his team was not performing and it was time for him to go. Randolph is not exactly Byron Scott, who the Nets fired at the urging of Jason Kidd after he took them to the NBA Finals in consecutive seasons. Yet very few even questioned whether Scott was treated fairly by the Nets. Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Jerry Manuel - First Impressions Jerry Manuel has an easy act to follow, but I've been enjoying watching him during his introductory press conference. He's not the fiery type, but seems thoughtful and flexible. I like his call for players to have "career years." Under Willie Randolph, having a career year resulted in getting demoted and then waived (see e.g., Gotay, Ruben). Let's Not Forget That Willie Was Incompetent Amid the current well deserved anti-Mets media frenzy, it's worthwhile to remember that Willie Randolph was pretty clueless and classless himself. This is the man who forget to tell Ruben Gotay that he had been waived (Gotay learned this from the media) or to tell Jeff Keppinger that Keppinger was "out of the mix" in the Mets infield. Nor, during 2005 when Aaron Heilman was dominant in relief, was Willie aware of this fact. Of course, we at The Zionist Conspiracy have long been privy to Willie's ineptitude. Indeed, even before Randolph managed his first regular season game, we declared him to be a "moronic fool" for insisting on batting David Wright 8th in the batting order. In June 2005 we were on target about his "low baseball IQ." Our stance has remained consistent since then. Randolph failed to motivate his players, favored veterans at the expense of young talent, overworked his bullpen by needlessly removing relievers after one or two batters, refused to use Ramon Castro as a pinch-hitter - even when the Mets have carried three catchers - and ultimately lost the respect of his players. Randolph is hardly solely to blame for the current mess. But the Mets won't be worse off without him. The Mets Blow Another One Willie Randolph should have been fired after last season's collapse. After failing to get the Mets back on track in 2008, his firing near the mid-way point of the season is more than justifiable. What is not justifiable is the classless and clueless manner in which the Mets - probably due to the never ending idiocy of Fred and Jeff Wilpon - handled this matter. Sending Willie and his staff to the West Coast and firing him in middle of the night after the first game of the trip is absurd. Since only some of Randolph's staff has been fired, I also strongly question the firing of pitching coach Rick Peterson. Particularly now that Mike Pelfrey is finally starting to pitch effectively on a consistent basis (he did lose it in the 7th inning last night when Pedro Feliciano made sure to let the runners he inherited from Pelfrey score), it is difficult to understand the point of changing pitching coaches. Likely, as with most things associated with the Mets, this was an ad hoc decision based hardly if at all on anything that actually relates to Peterson himself. Friday, June 13, 2008
 Bobby V: Make Me An Offer As Bobby Valentine recently told WFAN, in an interview that has not yet been reported in the South - where Tom Glavine is still considered an ace: "Whether or not I end up back in MLB or in New York that will (be) somebody else's offer and then my decision to have to make afterwards, but right now I am where I am and I have a job... "There's times I miss the wonderful stadiums and the great fans. The MLB thing is the best in the world. There is no doubt about that and there's times I will look up at the scorecard and think this isn't as good as MLB." Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Friday, June 06, 2008
Tommy Lapid On Israel, Zionism and the Palestinians While on the subject of Tommy Lapid, following is an article Lapid wrote in The Jerusalem Post in May 1995. It has since been one of my favorite articles. THE Independence Day edition of Tel Aviv's local Ha'ir weekly ran an article by the Palestinian-Israeli writer Anton Shamas, penned with his usual fluency. "Ladies and gentlemen," he wrote, "the time has come, on this festive day, to admit with complete candor, without shame or downcast eyes, that the whole business has turned out badly. The Zionist adventure has been a total failure." It's a good thing Shamas came out and said it. Because an article like this, by an authoritative Arab intellectual, is a fine opportunity to express a few truths one hesitates to voice without a suitable pretext. Shamas, my friend: Zionism is the greatest success story of the 20th century. Fifty years after the defeat of Hitler and the mufti of Jerusalem, Zionism is thriving in the heart of the Middle East, in a state of 4.5 million Jews - Jews whose survival was, for a moment, in doubt. The Hebrew language (one of Zionism's wonders) has bonded sabras and refugees from the camps, Sephardim and Oriental Jews. Within half a century, the Zionists, starting with almost nothing, have forged a state which launches its own space satellites and provides the US Navy with pilotless drones. It exports sophisticated computer programs and teaches Latin Americans how to grow melons. Every month this state exports goods worth a billion dollars and more to Western Europe, the US and even Japan; it has an exemplary democracy, one in which cabinet ministers fear the state comptroller, and judges fear only God. This state has produced an army deemed one of the world's best; there is little violent crime, and many fine concerts. People of all religions enjoy freedom of worship, and non-believers are welcome too. Ten percent of the country's citizens are new immigrants; and 89 percent think that, despite all the hardships - and the Jewish Agency - it's a good place to live in. This is a state in which an Anton Shamas is free, on a national holiday, to publish a virulent attack on everything that the Jews living in the state hold dear. Shamas might be able to forgive us for all this, perhaps. But what he cannot bear is the fact that, held up in the light of Zionism's achievements, the Arabs' failure appears so humiliating and depressing. HOW MANY Palestinians are there, my friend? One million - two, three? And how many Arab states are there around you? Twenty? Twenty countries of kings and dictators, of terror and bloodshed. There isn't a single Arab democracy, one with freedom of expression and civil rights. You talk about the failure of the State of Israel. Compared to what? Algeria? Egypt? Iraq? How many Arabs live between the Atlantic Ocean and the Persian Gulf? A hundred million? Two hundred million? And how many Moslems are there? A billion? All of them pray to the same Allah, in the name of the same prophet, Mohammed. And all of them together can't solve Gaza's sewage problem. For 47 years you've been preparing for Palestinian independence, and yet you're still not collecting the garbage in Jericho. With all the oil in the world, you can't muster the Arab brotherhood needed to build a hospital in Deir el-Balah. And all the gold faucets in Saudi Arabia and all the jacuzzis in Kuwait aren't enough to provide clean drinking water for Jabalya. When all's said and done, my friend, you know very well that if almost a million Jews lived in Gaza, surrounded by 20 Jewish states, Jewish Gaza would be paradise on earth. Palestinian laborers would be lining up at the Erez Junction facing the other way to get work in Gaza. If there were a billion believing Jews in the world, Gaza's Jews wouldn't need handouts from the UN; the world's Jews would have taken care of Gaza's Jews, and they would long since have converted Gaza into the pearl of the Mediterranean. You know all this, Anton Shamas, and that's what's eating you. Envy has led you into irrationality. Thus the time has come, with complete candor, without shame or downcast eyes, to conclude: It hasn't worked out, this whole business: The Palestinian adventure has been a total failure. Tommy Lapid, ZT'L One of the Jblogosphere's more bizarre spectacles has occurred this week, following Sunday's passing of former Popolitika talk show host and Shinui leader, Tommy Lapid. At first, the kind remarks about Lapid from Orthodox Jbloggers seemed to be a welcome and refreshing contrast to the all-too-frequent coarse and nasty rhetoric toward adversaries. But Lapid's purported virtues have been extolled - and his negative attributes completely ignored - to such an extent that it would not be unreasonable to expect that at the current pace, Artscroll will publish a book about him in time for his shloshim. The first distortion concerning Lapid has been that he merely opposed religious coercion, and had no problem at all with Judasim or religious Jews. What nobody bothered to consider is what exactly "religious coercion" means. "Coercion" is defined as "the use of force or intimidation to obtain compliance." In Israel, secular Jews are not forced or intimidated into keeping kosher or shabbos, or halacha generally. When secular Israelis refer to "religious coercion," they are either being paranoid, or are referring to inconveniences like closure of certain stores on shabbos, lack of public transportation on shabbos in certain cities, the law regarding the sale of bread during Pesach, and the fact that in Israel, the religious have dominant control over issues involving marriage, divorce and burial. Even if these kinds of things can be deemed to be "religious coercion," it is obvious that Lapid's agenda vis a vis the religious went far beyond these issues. Which leads to the next distortion among Jbloggers about Lapid - that he merely opposed charedim, not all of the religious. Lapid indeed opposed draft exemptions for yeshiva students, increased child allowances for large families, and government funding of charedi schools that failed to offer a secular curriculum. He certainly had a right to these positions, and it is not unreasonable for religious Jews to agree with him on some of these positions. But Lapid did not merely oppose charedim on policy issues. He repeatedly used invective against them and made charedi bashing an essential part of Shinui's election campaigns. He exploited concerns about whether charedim were getting too much from the government by inciting hatred of charedim. In any event, Lapid clearly did not only oppose charedim. During the summer of 2002, when few people were visiting Israel yet several thousand North Americans made aliyah via Nefesh b'Nefesh, Lapid said that Israel would be better off without the new olim, who were mostly religious (but mostly not charedi). Lapid expressed opposition to the hesder units of the national religious sector. Under his leadership, Shinui even campaigned against Rabbinut kashrut certification on the basis that the cost was passed on to consumers, and hence was a "kosher tax." None of this suggests that following his death - or during his life - hatred should be directed by religious Jews toward Lapid. Indeed, positive sentiments about and toward Lapid that are based on reality are a good thing. So are questions regarding whether and how the religious also have contributed to a rift between religious and secular. Not highlighting Lapid's negative attributes is okay too. But the whitewashing of what Tommy Lapid stood for is not appropriate. | "
