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Civilization X
By Israel Shamir
The organisers of the conference could not find a better
place to discuss its topic, for Ukraine is the borderlands between
Civilizations; the ground where these ultimate personae of human
history check their valour and vitality by prayer and sword.
Italiano: Civilizzazione X
Read in Russian (Стена)
Read in Italian
(The
Wall)
Read in French
Le Mur
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The Wall
at the
Heart
By Israel Shamir
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We watched Pink Floyd's The Wall in a small, bare and
shabby cinema called Semadar, The Vine Blossom in the quaint
German Colony of Jerusalem. Emptied of ethnic Germans by the Jews in
1948, it still preserves its old stone houses roofed with red tiles,
gables with immured plaques quoting Psalms inscribed in Gothic
script, ivy creeping up its masonry and the mysterious Templars'
Cemetery beyond heavy gate.
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The
Shadow of Zog
By Israel Shamir
In Luc Bessonšs delightful film, The Fifth Element (with
perfect Milla Jovovich and supreme Bruce Willis), an absolutely evil
force, the Shadow, Messenger of Death, comes from Outer Space to
destroy human life on our planet. It is impervious to bombs and
missiles, and regardless of what people do, it closes in, and its
cover ever thicker upon the earth. Yet in order to succeed the
Shadow needs some human help. Who will, for personal profit, assist
the satanic Shadow in his quest to destroy our Mother Earth? In the
best tongue-in-cheek tradition of Swift, Besson gave the monstrous
volunteer, that servant-of-profit, a scary name: Zog. .
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Divine Wind
- A Homage to Simone Weil
By Israel Shamir
Walls of cold rain and hail encompassed my Jaffa. Streets
turned into ferocious streams and snow touched palm trees and
whitened the sidewalks of subtropical Tel Aviv, in violent
counterpoint to the violet skies hanging low, just a handbreadth
above the belfries and minarets, as the hurricane rushed masses of
sand and rain clouds over the deep cleft of the Dead Sea into
Palestine. A sandstorm of unheard-of magnitude broke all over the
Middle East, stopping American tanks in the desert, blinding the
pilots of their planes, covering the crosshairs of their weapons,
threatening to capsize the monstrous battleships in the Gulf. A
hundred armoured troop carriers were savaged by the sandstorm. Such
a Divine Wind had saved Japan from the Mongol landing of Kublai
Khan; such a storm had preserved Elizabethan England from Spanish
occupation..
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Italiano: Vento divino
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23-year old American Peace Activist was deliberately crushed
to death by a DC9 Bulldozer in March of 2003 as she
attempted to save a house from demolition by IDF soldiers.
To date, the IDF has flattened over 12,500 homes, several
with the occupants, specifically the elderly or infirmed
still in them.
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The Maid
and the
Ogre
By Israel Shamir
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A dreadful monster assaults the city, kills its brave
defenders, and advances to devour the citizens. At the last moment,
a young maiden demurely walks forward to meet the monster. Her very
sight, the sight of feminine innocence, vulnerability, spirituality,
certainty of the right cause, stops the ogre in its tracks. The
beast suffers her to tie her belt to his mighty neck and walk away,
tamed. It is the story of St. Genevieve and of other beautiful and
virtuous saints; a part and parcel of human heritage, and the
subject of many ggu apestries and paintings.
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Italiano: La fanciulla e l'orco
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Midas Ears
Les oreilles de Midas
Η Γαλλική Δυσφορία
أودوني
ميداس
By Israel Shamir
A new spectre haunts America. It enters the well-protected
boardrooms of newspapers and banks, shakes the deep foundations of
its towers. It is the spectre of glasnost: the dark secret of Jewish
power is out. Just recently it was 'third rail', touch-and-die,
deadly dangerous to mention, certain end to a career. Just recently,
Joe Public snapped his TV from an eminence with an Israeli passport
to a member of a Jewish think-tank, and muttered to himself: Surely
it is just a coincidence that so many important and largely
unelected people in our country happen to belong to this small
minority group.
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The Malaysian
Solution
By Israel Shamir
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Take a country populated by diverse communities, the
indigenous and immigrant, of roughly equal size. These communities
profess different religions and ply different trades. The immigrants
are better at business; the natives prefer to till their soil. It
could be a description of Palestine with its native Palestinians and
the immigrant Jewish communities. But here the comparison ends. In
Malaysia, the communities live in peace without UN peacekeepers,
they pursue their cultural and religious interests without
submitting to bleaching multiculturalism, their country prospers
while rejecting the IMF recipes, and it is a native son of soil who
stands at the helm of good ship Malaysia. |
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The City
of the
Beloved
By Israel Shamir
Their names bear a touch of medieval morality plays, but
instead of Hope, Penance and Mercy, the three sisters are called
Amal, Taura, Tahrir, or Hope, Revolution, and Liberation. Dressed
like ordinary college girls they were - they would not stick out at
Yale or Tel Aviv University. Their books and CDs are the same ones I
saw this morning on my son's shelf. But their smiles, their
wonderful happy smiles and high spirits, are quite out of the
ordinary, considering their circumstances.
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The City
of the
Moon
By Israel Shamir
An arch is homage to the moon, as it is formed by two
mirroring crescents. Full moon produces the perfectly round barrel
vault favoured by Romans; the pointed Muslim arches are formed by
waxing seventh-day crescents. In Nablous, there are arches for every
day of the lunar month, even upturned arches composed of waning
moons. A diligent student of architecture could compose a conclusive
History of the Arch in this ancient Palestinian city.
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The
Green Rain of Yassouf
By Israel Shamir
Most soothing, tender and sensual to the touch, picking
olives is akin to telling beads. Oriental men wear 'mesbaha' beads
of wood or stone on their wrist, reminding of prayer and calming
down frayed nerves, but olives are much better: they are alive.
Olives are tender but not fragile, like peasant girls, and picking
them has a touch of comfort: nothing can go wrong. Olives detach
themselves from the branch without fear and remorse, smoothly enter
the palm and roll down into the safety of the ground sheets
stretched to catch them.
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Italiano: La verde pioggia di Yassouf
Mamilla
Pool
By Israel Shamir
Things move really fast nowadays. Just yesterday we hardly
dared to call the Israeli policy of official discrimination against
Palestinians by the harsh word 'apartheid'. Today, as Sharon's tanks
and missiles pound defenceless cities and villages, the word barely
suffices. It has become an unjustified insult to the white
supremacists of South Africa. They, after all, did not use gun-ships
and tanks against the natives, they did not lay siege to Soweto.
They did not deny the humanity of their kaffirs. The Jewish
supremacists made it one better. They have returned us, as if by
magic wand, to the world of Joshua and Saul.
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Italiano: Mamilla Pool
The Good Men's Crime
By Israel Shamir
At the height of the Great Cultural Revolution, the Chinese
had the temerity to embark upon a monumental, nature-changing
enterprise: they decided to exterminate ALL flies. The spirit of
their solidarity was so powerful that they succeeded. For a while,
they enjoyed peaceful summer evenings without this great annoyance.
No buzz, no fuss: life was great without flies!
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The State
Of
Mind
By Israel Shamir
The steep slopes of Wadi Keziv in Western Galilee are walled
by squat local oaks and thorny bush. On the streambed, oleanders and
cypresses look into shallow ponds formed by its springs. I like this
secluded canyon. On hot summer days, one can hide in an intricate
deep cave and laze in its cool, clear waters, waiting for deer and
hoping for a nymph. On cooler days, you can climb up a steep spur
that rises from the depths of the gorge. It is called Qurain, the
'Horn' in Arabic, hence the Arab name of the valley, Wadi Qurain.
Astride the spur, the Crusader castle of Monfort raises its donjon
high and gazes towards the distant Mediterranean Sea.
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Italiano: LO "STATO" MENTALE
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