Winter Fundraiser 2015, Day Five

We’re almost at the weekend of our winter fundraising Octet — two more days, and then I can sleep!

As you may have guessed, Gates of Vienna fundraisers keep Dymphna and me very, very busy. That’s why we only hold them once a quarter. More than that, and we would fall victim to Terminal Exhaustion Syndrome (TES). They’d be carting us off to the loony bin. Or maybe the landfill.

It’s one of those paradoxes — the worse I feel, the better we’re doing. A bad fundraiser is one where I go to bed before 1 a.m., get lots of sleep, and wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next morning.

By the Thursday evening of a good fundraising week, on the other hand, my head is pounding, my eyes are raw, and I’m seeing double. I can barely stumble up the stairs to the Eyrie here at Schloss Bodissey. I find mysef contsantlu hittgni the wrngo kesy on the kyebrod. I fumble the corkscrew…

And I’m pretty beat tonight. This must be a good fundraiser.

We certainly have seen a lot of donors from a wide variety of places. And a large percentage of those are new — possibly even new readers.

Thanks to both the new donors and the old faithfuls, the wolf outside our door is even now cursing his bad luck, shaking his fist, and huffing and puffing his way over to the Three Little Pigs’ house, where he might have a chance of getting a decent meal.

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As you all know by now, the theme of this week’s fundraiser is “Friends and Neighbors” meaning places on the Internet we like to visit to entertain and inform ourselves.

The Legacy Media are biased and unreliable during certain types of crisis. Factual reporting is forgotten; the Narrative reigns. And nothing brings out the biased-and-unreliable nature of our friends in the Fourth Estate more than the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians — those poor, poor Palis. Those innocent, helpless victims of Zionist aggression and imperialism.

The media don’t like to tell their viewers and readers that Jews have been seen as the #1 enemy by Islam since the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza almost most 1,400 years ago. The talking heads don’t want their audience to know — and maybe they don’t know themselves — that the Jews are repeatedly mentioned in the Koran and the hadith as despicable, inferior creatures who deserved to be killed. Allah hates Jews and wants faithful Muslims to hunt them down and slaughter them.

The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 is known by the Arabs as the nakba, the “catastrophe”, because it allowed the despised Jews to rule over territory that had been Muslim since the Arabs first poured out of Arabia in the 7th century. How could Allah permit these apes and pigs to do anything so vile? Faithful Muslims must right this wrong! The believers were required to fight until the Jews were driven into the sea and the honor of Islam restored.

This is why “peace in the Middle East” remains so elusive. From a Muslin point of view, there will be no peace in the Middle East as long as there are Jews in the Middle East. It’s as simple as that.

But that’s not the way that the major media tell the story. Whenever a new shooting war begins between Israel and the Palestinians, or between Israel and Hezbollah, the reporters toe the Arab line and focus on the wanton, callous behavior of the Jews towards their innocent Muslim victims. Never mind that every conflict begins with wanton indiscriminate Muslim aggression against Israeli civilians. Never mind that the atrocity reports are fabricated, or staged by Pallywood. The anti-Israel narrative is the one preferred by most Western journalists. That’s their story, and they’re sticking to it.

When the rockets rain down on Sderot or Ashdod or the IDF mobilizes to stop the latest Hezbollah attacks, I need something besides CNN or the BBC to tell me what’s really going on. That’s when I rely on Israel Matzav for the latest reports.

Carl in Jerusalem in invaluable during such crises. Not only does he aggregate all the stories from the Israeli media, both in English and in Hebrew, but he also has his own civilian and military sources who supply him with behind-the-scenes information.

I first started following his blog in 2006, during the Lebanon war. I needed him again for Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009, and again in 2012 and 2014.

He’s worth reading during normal times, too — “normal” in Israel meaning that there’s just an occasional mass knife attack by a Palestinian on a bus in Tel Aviv, or a few Palestinians shooting at cars in the West Bank, or the odd Palestinian crushing cars with a bulldozer in Jerusalem, or some Palestinian rockets being fired at schools and houses in Sderot.

That’s what passes for “peace” in Israel. Most of the time it’s the best they can do. They’re in a never-ending war, and it’s been going on for a long time.

Unfortunately, given the current situation with Hezbollah in the Golan Heights, things are likely to heat up again soon. That’s when I’ll rely on Israel Matzav for the real news.

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Donations came in yesterday from:

Stateside: Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, and Oregon

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, Norway, Switzerland, and the UK

Our profound gratitude goes out to all of you.

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