NJN-31.
New Jerusalem News.
10 August, 2011, 10 Av 5771
Contents:
1. Israel's Cottage-Cheese Rebellion.
2. Is Norway promoting terror? by Manfred Gerstenfeld
3. Are Nearly One Third of Iranians Homos!!
1 out of 3 young Iranian men 'gay'?
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Members of the Fogel Family from Itamar Murdered by Arab Terrorists. |
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1. Israel's Cottage-Cheese Rebellion
by Daniel Doron
The Wall Street Journal
August 3, 2011
http://www.meforum.org/2998/
israel-cottage-cheese-rebellion
Extracts:
...rising food prices in Israel have led to widespread protests this summer, dubbed the "cottage-cheese rebellion", which could grow into an uprising against a dysfunctional political system and an economic system long controlled by monopolies and cartels.
In April 2010, the Bank of Israel's annual report on the economy included a study showing that "some 20 business groups, nearly all of a family nature and structured in a pronounced pyramid form, continue to control a large proportion of public firms (some 25% of firms listed for trading) and about half of market share." Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to introduce free-market reforms, not much has improved over the past year. From diapers to cars, the Israeli consumer is at the mercy of local manufacturers and government-certified importers, monopolies and cartels that inflate prices by 100% and more.
The cottage-cheese rebellion started after a major business publication ran a series of features comparing food prices in Israel and abroad. People realized that while salaries in Israel are about half those in America, prices of consumer goods and services are about double. Exorbitant profits, fees and taxes make even the cheapest imported automobiles cost between $35,000-$40,000, and a gallon of gas costs almost $10. A small apartment can cost the average Israeli worker 12 years in annual salary. Water and electricity costs are inordinately high, and poor government-run education leads many families to spend a mint on private tuition.
Izhak Alrov, a member of the ultra-orthodox community of Bnei Brak and a cantor by avocation, was outraged by what he experienced trying to survive on a modest salary. In June, the 25-year-old opened a Facebook page and called for a consumer boycott of one staple?cottage cheese. The response was electrifying. Over 100,000 long-suffering consumers soon joined the boycott. Stores reported a steep decline in cottage-cheese sales.
At first, Israel's two huge food conglomerates, Tnuva (headed by Zahavit Cohen) and Strauss (chaired by Ofra Strauss), blamed cottage cheese's high price on rising production costs beyond their control. But relentless reporting, especially by the Marker, a pro--market business publication?revealed that the consumer was being fleeced at each stage of production, from the high-prices charged by milk-producing cooperatives and the conglomerates' own dairies, to retail chains that divvy up market share to curb competition and inflate prices. The boycott forced the cartel to cut prices.
Mr. Netanyahu has done his best to enhance competition, sharply cutting personal and corporate taxes. But a high proportion of taxes is still levied as regressive indirect taxes (Israel's value-added tax, for example, is 16%) which fall heavily on the poor.
At the same time, bureaucracy and costly regulations stymie entrepreneurship and inhibit economic growth.
...Despite then-Finance Minister Netanyahu's financial-market reforms that broke Israel's bank duopoly in 2005, a tiny fraction of the population still uses a third of all credit, which they leverage into highly risky investments, mostly in foreign real estate. Small and medium-size businesses, the most productive enterprises in the economy, are credit-starved, as are the outlying areas of the Galilee and the Negev.
The cottage-cheese rebellion is transcending its immediate cause, the high cost of food. It is spreading to other goods and services, especially housing, and it has given voice to a feeling of economic helplessness. Not surprisingly, radical elements are trying to exploit legitimate grievances to unseat Mr. Netanyahu, who is trying to overcome oligarchs' and bureaucrats' stiff resistance to reform. But the rebellion may yet bring the right kind of change to Israeli society, truly competitive markets and a more accountable polittical class.
Mr. Doron is the founder and director of the Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress and a fellow of the Middle East Forum.
2. Is Norway promoting terror?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4103213,00.html
Manfred Gerstenfeld
Extracts:
After the horrific Oslo and Utoya killings, we see increased media attention to the multi-faceted anti-Israeli incitement by the Norwegian government and the country's cultural elite. However, the Norwegian Ambassador to Israel, Svein Sevje, has not yet grasped this. After the murders, he implied that Palestinian terror against Israelis is more justified than terror against Norwegians. Alan Dershowitz reacted: 'I can't remember many other examples of so much nonsense in such short an interview.' A few days later, Sevje told Haaretz: 'The history of Norway vis-a-vis Israel is one of great support.'
To expose the fallacy of Sevje's last statement, one can provide many examples of Norway's accommodation of anti-Israeli terror, with this is being executed in three ways. The first method entails applying double standards and being soft on terror by criticizing Israel, while mentioning little or nothing about murderous Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians and Hamas' genocidal program. The second entails statements that indirectly encourage terrorism. The third method is financing organizations that do the same.
Regarding the first method: In 2002, several members of the 1994 Norwegian Nobel Committee who granted the Nobel Peace Prize to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat i.e. Bishop Gunnar Stolsett, Sissel Ronbeck, and former Norwegian Prime Minister Odvar Nordli - expressed their disappointment in Peres. A fourth member, Hanna Kvanmo, said she wished there was a way to take the prize back from Peres. She also said Peres was on the verge of being considered guilty of war crimes.
Kvanmo was jailed after World War II, as a Nazi collaborator. Nevertheless, the Socialist Left party had selected her for the Nobel Prize Committee, which is comprised of political appointees. Then-bishop of Oslo Stolsett described the involvement of Nobel Laureate Peres in human rights abuses as absurd. He remained silent about Yasser Arafat, who had continued to order the murder of Israeli civilians even after he had received the Peace Prize. In 2004, the Jerusalem Post published an article noting that the members of the Nobel Committee still stood by their choice of Arafat. By that time, Israel had publicized a list of the terrorist operatives Arafat financed and showed that his signature was on the page listing the amounts paid to the murderers.'
Modern-day blood libel
Last month, a day before the murders in Oslo and Utoya, Norway's Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere spoke at the anti-Israel incitement camp of the AUF, the youth organization of his Labor party. He called for the dismantling of Israel's security barrier. Stoere knew well that it was built to prevent further murderous Palestinian terror attacks. He was thus indirectly promoting terrorism against Israelis, one day before some in his audience would become terror victims themselves.
In the past, even while acknowledging the threat of terror against Israel, the Lutheran Church demanded that Israel?s security barrier be dismantled.
Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse, two extreme left-wing doctors, came to Gaza during the Cast Lead War in 2008-2009, claiming that they wanted to provide medical assistance to the Palestinians. After the September 11 attacks, Gilbert stated that he supported the terrorist attacks on the United States. He and Fosse were interviewed extensively by the Norwegian and world press, and made serious accusations against Israel. According to Norway's largest paper Verdens Gang, their trip to Gaza was paid for by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry.
Gilbert and Fosse failed to mention that the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza where they worked had been used for military purposes by Hamas. Later it became known that Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh and other Hamas executives took over an entire ward of that hospital during the war.
Gilbert and Fosse later wrote a best-selling book on their stay in Gaza. They were once again silent about the Hamas military presence in the hospital. Their claim that Israel had gone into Gaza in order to kill women and children is a contemporary mutation of the classic blood libel. This book, with its anti-Semitic message, had back cover comments written by Stoere and former Conservative Prime Minister Kare Willoch.
Finally, there is Deputy Minister of the Environment, Ingrid Fiskaa, who delights in visions of terrorism against Israel. A year before she entered the government, Fiskaa told a newspaper that she sometimes dreams about the United Nations firing rockets into Israel.
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld has published 20 books. Two of these address Norwegian anti-Israelism and anti-Semitism
3. Are Nearly One Third of Iranians Homos!!
1 out of 3 young Iranian men 'gay'?
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/
gnxp/2011/08/1-out-of-3-young-iranian-men
-gay/#more-13356
Extract:
I take the figure for Iran to mean that 29% of sexually active unmarried men in Iran are engaging in activities with other men. Does this mean that 29% of men in this sample are gay? I don't think so. As you likely know Iran's state imposes conservative sexual mores upon its population. Though Iran is not Saudi Arabia there are still hazards when it comes to men and women entering into relationships before marriage. But it also turns out that many Iranian men at their peak of sexual ardor are unmarried. A recent paper reports that 40-45% of men aged 25-29 were unmarried.
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