One Bad Apple

According to CNN:

Handset world: Don't speak for us, Steve Jobs
"It may be true that no cell phone is perfect, but the handset world isn't taking too kindly to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' public assertion that other smartphones suffer from the same antenna and signal problems that have been widely reported regarding the iPhone 4.

And, in what's turned into an ugly back-and-forth PR mud fight, Apple is firing back by making its internal signal test results public to insist that it's not just pulling rivals' flaws out of thin air.

Hui-Meng Cheng, chief financial officer at HTC, told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that "the reception problems are certainly not common among smartphones," and a representative from Samsung said that it "hasn't received significant customer feedback on any signal reduction issue for the Omnia 2," one of the phones that Apple singled out as suffering from similar reception issues if held in a way that blocks the antenna.

The two Asia-based companies are by no means the only ones to come out swinging against Jobs' remarks that "every phone has weak spots" at the press conference that addressed the reports of poor reception."-more

History Repeats Itself (1981)

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon done 29 years ago this month, in 1981. It's a contender for the all-time best cartoon in the "I could run this today with no changes" category!!

I had to reread each panel a couple of times myself.
Uncanny!
No?

Iranian Dictatorship

You would think the kind of genocidal behavior displayed by the Ahmadinejad government in Tehran would be in violation of international law! Well, apparently there are some experts who also think so. The legal petition for action mentioned in today's cartoon is real. Here's Irwin Cotler (Canadian Liberal MP and former Justice Minister of Canada) as quoted in the Ottawa Citizen:

"We are witnessing in Ahmadinejad’s Iran the toxic convergence of four distinct dangers: the nuclear threat; the genocidal incitement threat; state-sponsored terrorism; and the systematic and widespread violations of the rights of the Iranian people.

Accordingly, a consortium of international law scholars, human rights advocates, former government leaders, parliamentarians and Iranian activists for democracy and freedom — The Responsibility to Prevent Coalition — has released a report on the danger of a nuclear, genocidal, and rights-violating Iran.

Let there be no mistake about it: Iran is in violation of international legal prohibitions against the development and proliferation of nuclear weapons; Iran has already committed the crime of incitement to genocide prohibited under the Genocide Convention; Iran is a leading state-sponsor of international terrorism; and Iran is engaged in widespread and systematic violations of the rights of its people." - more

Arafat's Flotilla (1988)

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon done 22 years ago in 1988.

Back in 1988, Yasser Arafat attempted to stir up international support by a boat-based public relations plan. It was the first version of the Gaza "Flotilla"! It didn't work out. Notice that the Palestinian terrorists in the cartoon are wearing ski masks. Such a popular terrorist fashion of the day that everyone who saw the cartoon back then would have immediately recognized the speakers as terrorists.

I've posted several previous golden oldies and columns about Arafat's "Refugee" Boat campaign which made waves back in 1988. Today's cartoon marked the final sinking of the enterprise.

For one posting click here.

For another click here.

Two Sea Stories

Sea story one.
According to the Voice of America:

Israel Urges Lebanon to Block Gaza Aid Ships
"Israel is bracing for another attempt to break its blockade on the Palestinian-ruled Gaza Strip.
Israel has appealed to the United Nations to prevent two ships in Lebanon from sailing to Gaza, in defiance of the Israeli blockade. In a letter to the U.N. secretary-general and the Security Council, Israel accused organizers of trying "to incite a confrontation and raise tensions" in the Middle East. The letter called on the Lebanese government "to demonstrate responsibility" and stop the ships from departing." -more

Sea story two.
According to ABC NEWS:

North Korea threatens 'sacred' nuclear war
"The Korean peninsula is on high alert today, with Pyongyang threatening a nuclear response to massive war games being held by the United States and South Korea.

Hundreds of war planes, dozens of ships and thousands of military personnel are taking part in the four-day drill designed as a show of force to North Korea after the sinking of a South Korean corvette four months ago." -more

How's Things?

1. Sometimes it helps to step back and take a look at the big picture.
2. Sometimes it's fun to just do a silly cartoon for a laugh.
3. Sometimes we get so involved with our cause that we spout our assessment of the situation to anyone who'll listen.

Today's cartoon is an attempt to deal with all three ideas.

Have a great weekend!

Bibi Negotiates (1998)

Yesterday's cartoon made reference to Prime Minister Netanyahu's being sucker-punched on Jonathan Pollard back in 1998 by then-President Clinton.

A "loyal reader" asked to see what I did on the topic at the time.

TV at Grandpa's House

This is my second grandfatherly cartoon this week.

In this one I stuck a grandchild into Mr. Shuldig's chair. It's the same old-style, over-stuffed, flower-print chair I've been drawing since 1973, but it's the first time I stuck a kid into it. No need to point out that Shuldig's TV is not a flat giant plasma wonder. And it uses "Rabbit Ears".

* * * On February 28, 2001, Dani Naveh, (Israeli Minister without Portfolio) set the record straight about what happened back in 1998. In a speech to the Knesset he officially revealed what Israelis already knew. He said that:

"...The former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, made an explicit commitment to the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, to release Jonathan Pollard.

This promise was made prior to the Wye Summit and [again] during the course of the negotiations at Wye... This was not a personal promise made to a particular prime minister... This was a promise made to the State of Israel and to the People of Israel..."

-more

* * * The Israeli Prime Minister that Clinton duped back then was Bibi Netanyahu ...our current PM! Which is why I was surprised to read the recent news. Here's the item as reported by YNET:

PM asks Bill Clinton to help release Gilad Shalit

Published: July 08, 2010, 20:29

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with former American President Bill Clinton and asked him to help in the efforts to release kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity.
Netanyahu noted that Clinton has an international reputation, and recalled the release of two American citizens in North Korea, which was made possible after the former president visited the Communist state."
(Yitzhak Benhorin, Washington)
-link

Tisha Be'Av (2000)

Today is the holiday of "Tisha Be'Av".

Today's Golden Oldie was done ten years ago giving the date of "Tisha Be'Av" that year on the civil calendar ...along with the observation that our ancient holidays are as contemporary as the latest news.

For previous postings about this holiday please click on Tisha Be'Av.

Table Manners

We just had the whole family over. All of the grandchildren were there. I was about to comment on how quiet the teenagers were. Then I noticed the downcast eyes!!

Friendship

According to CBS:

Obama Says Middle Name May Be Source of Israeli Skepticism

"When President Obama was asked a question about Israeli skepticism of him during an interview with an Israeli television station, he suggested that his middle name Hussein may be a culprit.

"I think what this [skepticism] arises from... some of it may just be the fact that my middle name is Hussein, and that creates suspicion," said Mr. Obama." -more

I was so flabbergasted by the President's amazing ignorance of Israel that the only answer I could post was the photo quiz below.

the Web (1995)

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon done in July, 1995. That was 15 years ago this month.

These days everyone (including your local Rabbi) is into email, the Internet. etc.

. . . or so I thought! I just spoke on the phone this morning with an international public figure (you'd know his name). He promised to email something to me. But then he added, almost sheepishly, that his assistant would do the actual emailing since he "didn't know how to use email".

YIKES!!

Exchange Rate

It now seems that in the "10 Russian Spies" caper, Russia made use of British and Irish passports!! According to the Telegraph:

"The case echoes revelations earlier this year in which forged British passports were allegedly used by Israeli agents in the killing of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai." -more

And this report from Israel National News:

British media coverage of the misuse of British and Irish passports by Israel and Russia shows a hypocritical attitude, a British research organization has found.

"Just Journalism, an independent research group focused on how Israel and Middle East issues are reported in British media, examined news coverage of the Russian spy ring recently nabbed in the United States, which allegedly used British and Irish passports. It compared it to the coverage of the misuse of passports by the Israeli hit team that allegedly killed a terrorist in Dubai earlier in the year.

“In the latter case, expressions of political and media outrage were abundant,” it determined. “In the former, not so much on either front.”

An editorial published on March 24 in The Guardian, after London expelled an Israeli diplomat following the Dubai assassination, proclaimed that the faking of British passports was "the mark of an arrogant nation that has overreached itself." On June 30, an editorial on the Russian espionage case in the same newspaper failed to even mention the alleged use of a forged United Kingdom passport.

The BBC, too, has given “negligible” coverage to the UK passport forgery in its items on the Russian spy affair. “Of the eight articles published on its news website on the subject in the last 24 hours, only three even mention the issue,” Just Journalism reported." -more

To read the report click on Just Journalism.

TWA (1985)

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon done back in 1985 about the TWA hijacking.

We knew, even back then, that releasing terrorists was crazy.
Here's a recent blog posting by Debbie Schlussel on the topic

"On June 15, 1985, Hezbollah hijackers seized the TWA flight in Athens. Identifying Robert Dean Stethem as an American serviceman, they brutally beat and tortured the 23-year-old Stethem to death. Then, they threw his body off the plane, like garbage. Stethem was so badly beaten that he could only be identified from fingerprints. He was on his way home after a tour of duty with the US Navy in the Middle East.

But Stethem never made it home. His next and final stop was Arlington National Cemetery.

At the time, the President was Ronald Reagan, a heroic leader who didn’t give in to Islamic terror. Well, almost. In 1983, Hezbollah terrorists (with the help of the PLO and Syria) attacked and killed over 300 U.S. Marines and civilians in Beirut, while they slept. It was the bloodiest attack on the Marine Corps since World War II. But President Reagan didn’t strike back. Instead, he pulled out of Lebanon. He sent a signal to Hezbollah and other Islamic terrorists that their attacks would not be answered, that America was weak. That gave Hezbollah the courage to hijack the plane and brutally kill Stethem, almost two years later." -more

the Name Game

The extent to which the Obama administration is avoiding reality and refusing to recognise the world-wide Islamic Jihad is astounding!
This is beyond "Political Correctness".
This is suicidal "Political Blindness"!

Consider the following by Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post:

"Friday, July 2, 2010

The Fort Hood shooter, the Christmas Day bomber, the Times Square attacker. On May 13, the following exchange occurred at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee:

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.): Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?

Attorney General Eric Holder: There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions. . . .

Smith: Okay, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people --

Smith: But was radical Islam one of them?
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious-based.

Potentially, mind you. This went on until the questioner gave up in exasperation.

A similar question arose last week in U.S. District Court when Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square attacker, pleaded guilty. Explained Shahzad:

"One has to understand where I'm coming from . . . I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier."

Well, that is clarifying. As was the self-printed business card of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, identifying himself as SoA: Soldier of Allah.

Holder's avoidance of the obvious continues the absurd and embarrassing refusal of the Obama administration to acknowledge who out there is trying to kill Americans and why. In fact, it has banned from its official vocabulary the terms jihadist, Islamist and Islamic terrorism.

Instead, President Obama's National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy -- how else do you define those seeking your destruction? -- "a loose network of violent extremists." But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize and kill.

Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don't, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences.

The Pentagon review of the Fort Hood shooting runs 86 pages with not a single mention of Hasan's Islamism. It contains such politically correct inanities as "religious fundamentalism alone is not a risk factor."

Of course it is. Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism is not only a risk factor. It is the risk factor, the common denominator linking all the great terror attacks of this century -- from 9/11 to Mumbai, from Fort Hood to Times Square, from London to Madrid to Bali. The attackers varied in nationality, education, age, social class, native tongue and race. The one thing that united them was the jihadist vision in whose name they acted. " -more

Political Experiment?

Living outside of America gives an American a different perspective on things. Doing a political comic strip for almost 40 years also gives a cartoonist a different perspective on things.

I'm both.

I began drawing Dry Bones back in 1973 when Richard Nixon was in the White House. Nixon was followed by Gerald Ford, then Jimmy Carter, and then Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and now Barack Obama.

Today's cartoon sort of sums up my take on the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Crime Conference (1975)

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon done way back in 1975!!

I'm posting it for a two reasons.

First; a recent criminal court case in England. Suspects in the vandalizing of a factory presented as their defense that they believed that the factory produced military parts for the Jewish State to use to carry out war crimes in Gaza. The Judge, George Bathurst-Norman told the jury: “You may well think that hell on earth would not be an understatement of what the Gazans suffered in that time.” They were acquited -full story

Second; today's news had the story that Charlie Manson gang member, Leslie Van Houten, was denied parole for the 19th time. She's been in jail for 41 years. Van Houten was convicted of murder and conspiracy for her role in the slayings of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca. They were stabbed to death in August 1969, one night after Manson's followers killed actress Sharon Tate and four others. -full story

The conclusion is simply that the legal and moral system in the West is bent out of shape. If only Ms. Van Houten had carried out her murders in Israel as part of a conspiracy to drive Jews out of the Middle East, the West would now be impatiently and eagerly waiting for Bibi to set her free as part of a prisoner release gift to Hamas kidnappers.

Your thoughts?

It's Contagious!

Yes, antisemitism is a "cultural virus", and right now we're in the middle of an out-of-control world-wide pandemic!

Viral antisemitism is spread by mass movements to divert attention from their own diabolical attempts to grab control of society.

Nazism did it. Stalinism did it. Now Islamism is doing it.

Beach Day (1980)

Click on the cartoon below to open a larger, more readable version of this full page Dry Bones Special:This Golden Oldie is a cartoon that I drew 30 years ago this month, in July 1980! It was a full page cartoon and it's another one of those cartoons that I could run today without any changes. Mr. Shuldig at the beach with his dog Doobie.

Click on cartoon for larger version

Local News

The world's ignoring of the Hamas kidnapping of Gilad Schalit is outrageous ...as is the attitude that the whole affair is, somehow, just "local news".

The report from the Financial Times:

Pressure builds on PM over captive Israeli
By Vita Bekker in Tel Aviv
Published: June 28 2010

"Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, faced escalating pressure yesterday to clinch a deal with Hamas on the release of a captured Israeli soldier as thousands of demonstrators pressed the government to step up talks on a prisoner swap.

The family of Gilad Shalit, a conscript captured by militants from the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip in June 2006, set out on a 12-day, 200km march from their community near the Lebanese border to the official Jerusalem residence of Mr Netanyahu along with some 2,500 supporters.

Many marchers donned white T-shirts and baseball caps emblazoned with the slogan "Gilad is still alive", wore yellow ribbons on their wrists or backpacks in the colour of the campaign and waved Israeli flags or banners reading: "It's time to bring Gilad home."

Noam Shalit, the father of the soldier, who has until now conducted a mostly low-key campaign to have his 23-year-old son freed, pledged to camp outside Mr Netanyahu's home until Sgt Shalit was released." -more

Dry Bones Speaking Tour

Announcing Dry Bones Fall Speaking Tour
Book Him Now!
Yaakov Kirschen's combination of comedy and political analysis will be just what's needed for your organization, church, community center, temple, shul, or special event.

The Dry Bones October 2010 Tour

.

Time is short. For info, booking details, topics, and available dates, please contact Ms. Sali Ariel. Email: saliariel@yahoo.com

* * *

Below are banner announcements for this year's selection of topics. Each presentation is a combination of Jewish jokes, cartoon images, political observations and predictions.

Presentation 1:

Presentation 2:

Presentation 3:

Obama's War

The latest news is that the Taliban are refusing to meet with NATO representatives. It looks to me as if they don't want to cut a deal with the weak-willed U.S. President.

What the Taliban want is to win!

According to the BBC:

Taliban Rule Out Negotiations With Nato
Thursday, 1 July 2010
By John Simpson
World affairs editor, BBC News

"The Taliban in Afghanistan have told the BBC that there is no question of their entering into any kind of negotiations with Nato forces.
It comes after US commanders and the British army chief of staff, Gen David Richards, suggested that it might be useful to talk to the Taliban.
The Taliban statement is uncompromising, almost contemptuous.
They believe they are winning the war, and cannot see why they should help Nato by talking to them." -more

Camp David ( 2000 )

Today's Golden Oldie is a Dry Bones cartoon I did 10 years ago this month.

Back then it was a smiling Bill Clinton rather than a snarling Barack Obama who had a "plan" to bring Peace to the Middle East. The succession of self-serving U.S. Presidents who refuse to recognize the simple truth about the Middle East is astounding.

The simple truth: The area between the Persian Gulf on the East, and North Africa on the West is a region which was conquered by Arab Muslims. All other nationalities, peoples, and religious communities have been suppressed, occupied, or crushed. From the Yazidis, Christians, Kakayees,and Mandaeans of Iraq, across to the Berbers of Morocco and the Copts of Egypt in North Africa, the Middle East is one huge oppressed and occupied territory. Oppressed and occupied by Arab Muslims.