The Israeli Government is recruiting a team of touts to inform on Jews suspected of wanting to marry Gentiles.

An $800,000 radio and TV campaign launched this month aims to stop the assimilation of young Jews in the diaspora into wider society by identifying those “at risk” and persuading them to move to the Jewish State. The opening ad, voiced over by one of Israel’s most popular news anchors, describes assimilation as “a strategic national threat”, warning that those who “marry out...are lost to us.”
The campaign is targeted mainly at North America, most of whose 5.7 million Jews now belong to liberal tendencies which accept intermarriage.
The fear is of a shortfall in the number of Jews willing to leave their homelands to settle illegally on Palestinian land.
After the first broadcast, more than 200 viewers rang a hotline to report Jews abroad who might be contemplating marriage to a Catholic, Muslim, atheist or whatever.
The 30-second pitch featured a series of missing-person leaflets on walls and telephone boxes showing images of obviously Jewish youths above the caption “Lost”. The voice-over promised, “Together we will strengthen their connection to Israel, so that we don’t lose them.”
Adam Keller of the peace group Gush Shalom says the campaign reflects the fact that few Western Jews need to come to Israel for material reasons any more. So they have to be persuaded by appeals to sectarian solidarity. “They come from ideological motives which can be used to encourage them to settle in the West Bank.”
The launch was accompanied by a news feature showing a plane-load of immigrants, mainly from the US, being greeted at Tel Aviv airport by a cheering crowd waving Israeli flags. Cameras accompanied the new arrivals as they travelled in convoy to the settlement of Efrat near Bethlehem in the West Bank where they are to strengthen the garrison population in defending the outpost against any effort by the indigenous people to recover their stolen lands.
This is colonial occupation pure and simple, on land cleansed of its original inhabitants, which the Palestinian people have a right to resist by any means necessary.

I met more than a few folk at Electric Picnic who concurred with my contention that freeing the weed wouldn’t be the end of the world. But some suggested contradictorily that decriminalising cannabis might encourage demands for lifting the ban on cocaine etc., too. And that, they reckoned, would be a dangerous road to go down.
We are used to nonsense like this from callers to Joe. But at the Carnival of Cool?
That noise you may have heard occluding the sound of the Alabama 3’s brilliant rendition of “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” on the main stage was me groaning.
In his just-published and thoroughly recommended The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World, Tom Feiling notes the similarities between anti-drugs zealots and crack addicts. “Both live in fear of ill-defined phantoms. They also tend to have short attention spans, be committed to repeating past mistakes and have a seeming inability to admit responsibility for the problems they create.”
The vast majority of cocaine users aren’t addicts. The largest-ever study, conducted in 2007, found that of 35 million Americans who admitted to having used coke, only six million reported having had a blast the previous year.
To say that lifting the ban on a drug would result in a huge escalation in its use is to say that the main reason people don’t do drugs is that they are illegal. This is plain nonsense. Think of all the people you know who don’t do smack: is it the law which has dissuaded them? If the law were changed, would they be found skulking through the streets in the morning looking for an angry fix?
It’s not drugs but the laws against drugs which create mayhem and murder.

The families of members of the PSNI are now legitimate targets. So says our most active liberation army, the Real IRA.
Around our way a couple of weeks back, a bomb exploded outside the home of a policeman’s parents. Later the same night, his sister’s home was the target of another potentially lethal attack.
That’s fathers, mothers, sisters (and presumably brothers) who can legitimately be bombed.
How about sons and daughters? Can they be stiffed in the name of freedom, too?
Cousins? A grey area, I suppose.
What about a Republican family where a son or daughter has joined the police? They fair game for the midnight bombers too?
You don’t have to like the cops or be starry-eyed about the role they play to know that there is nothing in revolutionary morality to justify blowing somebody to bits because a relative has joined the police.
Wise up, fellas.

I am surprised more attention hasn’t been paid to the case brought by Tom McNally of Longford challenging the constitutionality of the new law making it a criminal offence punishable by 10 years and/or a fine of three hundred grand to sell mass cards which haven’t been authorised by the local bishop or boss of a religious order. Tom sells cards by arrangement with the Most Rev William Pascal Kikoti, Bishop of Mpanda, Tanzania, to whom the usual percentage is passed.
This case raises a number of doctrinal issues touching on matters eschatological to which, I fear, I will have to return.