Saturday, July 30, 2011

Hezbollah

He said he’d been here for six months studying at the Mir Shevia in Jerusalem. I wondered how religious this stocky American could be drinking a beer with tizit hanging from a green Murphy’s beer t-shirt. He must have been at least modern Orthodox (like normal Orthodox just less gay hating) to study at the Mir sheivaia, the only Jewish school of learning to survive the Holocaust by relocating to Japanese controlled Shanghai.

“You like it here I asked?”

“No, not really. I miss Brooklyn everyone here seems to hate each other,” he said and to an extent I had to agree with him Israelis, do constantly seem as though there on edge which makes sense when considering every ten years there nation goes to war with at least two other neighboring countries. I forgot him and went back to the pool game with Juri, a Dutch friend I had met three years ago on a Kibbutz in Northern Israel. We were playing against a cameraman from a Dutch news agency and a friend of his visiting him in Jerusalem. I can’t remember her name because it was something Dutch and hard to pronounce, but Juri says he thinks that her name might have been Hezbollah.

After we lost me and Juri walked outside the bar so he could smoke. Outside Hezbollah came up to us and asked to barrow Juri’s lighter. She told us that the cameraman was an ex-boyfriend of hers and that she was staying with. She told us that in some ways her trip to Israel had challenged her expectations, even though she was nervous at constantly seeing young soldiers walk around with assault rifles slung over there soldiers but also surprised when she found out that Israel offered free fertility clinics to Israeli citizens regardless of ethnicity or sexual orientation. Even though Holland has universal healthcare such a procedure would still be hard to acquire and in America couples often spend thousands of dollars just for the opportunity to have an in vitro baby.

From all accounts we thought we had made a new friend until the two of them switched over to Dutch, which sounds sort of like a less angry version of German. I tried to fallow along but Dutch is a very hard language to learn on the spot. I did however recognize the fallowing words; Nazi, Homo, Juden/Jewish and Palestinian. Hezbollah walked back into the bar while Juri shook his head in disgust.

“Dumb Dutch bitch. She says that we shouldn’t treat the Palestinians like the Nazis treat us. I say to her what the fuck! You see us killing homos or making Arabs walk around with fucking stars or moons or whatever? You know any gas chambers where we kill them?”

So maybe this is why Israelis are always on edge, its not the wars, but rather the blatant hatred that comes with being the only Jewish state in 2,000 years. Someone like Hezbollah comes to Israel with preconceived notions and despite witnessing the exact opposite stubbornly clings on to those beliefs. Or maybe I’m completely wrong; maybe there are secret death camps somewhere in the occupied territories that still have never been found by journalists or humanitarians. Do the dozens and dozens of Arab’s walking around downtown Jerusalem know that the Israeli police are coming to pack off into cattle cars destined for gas chambers and furnaces? How about the gay pride parade in Jerusalem last Thursday? Are they aware of the fact that the master race has sealed their fate along with the 5 million or so Palestinians living in this region?
Clearly if Israel would like to join the ranks of such genocidal nations as Spain, Germany, Rwanda, United Sates Turkey, Sudan, Japan, Cambodia and Nicaragua they have a little catching up to. I mean Jesus Christ how can you be expected to conduct genocide against Palestinians when they have an ongoing population explosion circa 1948.  
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Monday, July 25, 2011

The flight over

A while ago I dated a girl up until she left to study abroad in Rome. We said we’d still be friends which lasted for about three emails. She kept a travel blog that over some silly sense of commitment I read it until I realized that it was actually pretty boring  and that I didn’t really care what she had to say anyway.

That is why I’m scared that this travel blog is going to be just as awful at least grammatically, if not for content alone, which is was why I was hesitant to write a blog until several friend’s told me they’d actually read it. I’m pretty sure they were all high at the time, which is probably the best time to agree to read some dyslexic jackass’s travel blog. I can’t blame them for being stoned since I was a little drunk when I agreed to write this blog. So here I am sitting on a plane somewhere in the mid Atlantic wondering if there’s any polite way to tell the two little hysterical bustards to shut the fuck up.  

It’s a combination of their kicking and the three cups of coffee that’s making me just a bit jittery on this twelve hour flight to Tel-Aviv. I left on the eve of Shabbas, or as normal people call it Friday night, a holy time of the week reserved for rest and Talmudic study, where work and travel is explicitly forbidden by God (the Jewish one). So if there is any flight to the holy land that fails this year due to hijackers or mechanical failures it will probably be this one since I’m sure that traveling on Shabbas really tickles the lord pink.

Since its Shabbas there are no Orthodox Jews on this flight, just normal Jews like me. For the most part I like Orthodox Jews even though there always trying to bring those of us who don’t quite love god as much as they do, into their fold through a combination of hospitality, Jewish guilt and free meals. I have two estranged married orthodox cousins living in Jerusalem that I want to try and visit but I’m worried that somehow years of rigorous  rabbinical studying will have given them telepathic powers that would reveal my deepest secret, being that I’m a sinner with little or no remorse for the crimes against god that I’ve committed. So far these crimes include; masturbation, cigarettes, sex with shikasa, sex without shiksas, bacon, shrimp, most of the last several thousand things that I’ve eaten, dressing like a woman, going to a drag show, masturbation, having any sort of physical contact with woman that I’m not related to and then doing most of these things and more during the Sabbath.  

But then I remember that my cousins don’t study Kabalah since most tradiotnal sexts of Orthodox Judiasm forbid studying it before the age of forty. Kabala is sort of like a Jewish spell book studied by a multitude of various contemporary and historical Jewish scholars such as the Bal-Shem-Tov as well as many Hollywood celebrities like Madonna and Ashton Kutcher.  The Bal-Shem-Tov is the mystical founder of the Lubavitch movement (also known as Chasidism),  a sect of orthodox Judaism that emphasizes music, dance and Kabalah. Since Matisyahu is the only Chasidic Jew I know of I can only assume he’s there leader or at least there chief advisor in Reggae based affairs. According to some stuff I read a long time ago Kabalists were able to perform minor miracles like raise the dead and breathe life into big clay monsters that would beat up gentiles that would threaten the Jews of Prague.

To learn more about any of the stuff mentioned feel free to read a book or just be a lazy douche like mor and skim Wikipedia. Well peace out and thanks for reading this. Coming up soon Juri the Dutch guy I met three years ago whose going to be crashing with me.