Local elections

Big day in Israel as all municipalities hold their local elections. In our village, there are 13 seats on the city council up for grabs and the mayor's seat. We have a local religious party that is expecting to do very well this year. I am voting for them. I haven't decided who to vote for mayor yet. My choices are the incumbant, who has been the mayor for 30 years and is a dictator and a Likud guy who's running under Gaydamak's banner who has been trying to throw out the current mayor for years.

We threw a small get together for the current mayor at our house Saturday night. About 30 people showed up and we listened to the mayor tell us that he liked religious people and we really didn't need to vote for our party because his party would take care of us in any case. I agreed to have the get together because someone in our community asked me to do it so that the mayor feels he has support in our community. That way when we approach him after the elections, if he wins, he will feel that at least some of us are on his side.

The reaon we don't like the other guy is because he has been running an incredibly vicious, negative campaign. He hasn't said anything good that he will do, he just focuses on how corrupt the other guy is. Now for the past 5 years that I have been living in the city, it has been run very well. The city looks good and no matter what everyone is saying about education, the children are getting a decent one. There is growth and most of the problems that the other guy tries to throw on him probably aren't his fault. He did remove a 30,000 shekel debt that his daughter owed to the city and his son-in-law is making a nice salary on a job that he probably doesn't deserve, but I can't imagine that sort of thing would change with any new guy.

Also I like local dictators. I think they are a very efficient form of government. The religious politicos say that the current mayor has been giving them hell for the past 5 years and I should vote for the other guy. Other people in the community have been telling me that the mayor has helped us out in the past and because he's going to win anyways, we should support him so that he doesn't take it out on us later.

Yitzchak Rabin

Today is the yahrzeit, the anniversary of death, for Yitzchak Rabin, the former prime minister of Israel. It is a sad day for the Jewish people in a number of respects. The government instigators, lead by Avishai Raviv, have never been brought to justice for their role in the assassination. The left have used this incident to massively incite against religious Jews. But the saddest part of the day is that when we felt we didn't have enough political power to stop the terrible things that Rabin was doing, we decided to try and change history by killing him. In the year before Rabin was killed, I heard a number of people, rabbis and laymen, talking about how he had to be stopped, but I took it as empty rhetoric. Sometimes our talk is very tough, but we do not expect anything to come of it.

There are two very important things to remember on the day of Yitzchak Rabin's murder. The most important thing to remember is that killing someone you disagree with is not the answer. Obviously there are people who are worthy of death. Killing a democratic prime minister who is doing something that a large percentage of his electorate want him to, will not change the direction.

The second important thing to remember on this day when Rabin is idolized by the masses is that he was wrong. His policies were wrong, his answers to any questions against what he was doing was wrong. The peace process was wrong. What he did brought harm to the State of Israel and the Jewish people. How many of us heard him say, "If they use the guns against us, we will take them away." When they used the guns against us, the answer was "it's too late." Had he ever heard of foresight? When Sharon gave away Gaza, years after Rabin's death, he said the same thing: "If they shoot on us from there, we will take it back." The people didn't laugh at how stupid he sounded. Now we are getting it from Gaza, and we are getting it from the guns we gave them.

Because of the path that Yitzchak Rabin followed, the Jewish People live in fear in their own land. But killing him was not the answer. The killer also did not have any foresight. The automatic prime minister after Rabin was killed was Shimon Peres, who is far worse in concessions to the arabs then Rabin ever was. If he killed him to, there is the political party that backed those ideals. In order to truly end the process, he would have had to kill a large percentage of the people in Israel, which would have been far worse then anything Yitzchak Rabin could have done.

blame obama

There have been a bunch of weird things happening to the computers at work this week and I've decided to blame Barack Obama, the new President-elect of the US for this. For every unexplained incident, for example, an icon disappearing from the desktop. I have blamed cosmic factors and Obama being elected.

It's going to be a long 4 years.