12 Nov 14

News from Israel, from a friend who just returned from there:

“Jerusalem is depressing. Garbage and debris everywhere. Definitely ‘third-world!’

By contrast, Tel Aviv is clean, modern, and vibrant. Lots of new construction. It is a growth area!

Haifa is very clean, and upscale. Nice place to stay!

I saw many Israelis, not in any kind of uniform, openly carrying pistols, as well as ARs and M1 Carbines, in public. Others paid scant attention to them, so the practice is obviously common, and becoming more so with each day. Many others are likely carrying concealed, but it is not a subject that is openly discussed.

Mount Herzl Military Cemetery is beautifully maintained. Every headstone is the same, without notation of rank. So many, at their deaths, were only nineteen and twenty. Israel has paid, and keeps paying, a stiff price for its continuing existence!

The Holocaust Museum (Yad Vashem) is something every civilized person should see, but it is a most difficult site to walk through. As you might say, ‘It takes your breath away!’ It’s nearly impossible to believe such an event, on such a scale, actually happened in our ‘modern age!’

BHO is disliked and distrusted by everyone there, and I mean everyone! Israelis universally believe him to be a crypto-Moslem, and his professing ‘Christianity’ to be a cynical and unconvincing pretense. They are astonished that some American Jews still support him.”

Comment: Some day, I’d love to visit Israel, particularly Jerusalem, and enthusiastically reacquaint myself with all the history inherent to the area. But, not any time soon. The entire region, indeed the entire world, is tottering on the brink. These days, CONUS is exciting enough!

“War is the father of all things. Peace is but a parenthesis.”

Epaminondas. The “First Man of Greece.” In 371BC, he rebuked naive pacifists in Thebes with the grave warning that they courted slavery, not peace.

/John