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Tag Archives: Israel/Palestine

Ghanaian Football and Israeli Flags

Several viewers of the Ghana-Czech Republic game in the World Cup seemed confused as to why Ghanaian player John Pantsil was waving an Israeli flag as the Ghanaians beat the Czechs, 2-0. I have heard many explanations, including one suggesting that it was a repudiation of Holocaust denial!
Since a number of people have been directing [...]

Deprecation!

Official RSS feeds from the Harvard Crimson and Haaretz means an end to screen-scraping.

Hardcore Suicide Prevention

The "disengagement" of Israel from its settlements in the Gaza strip is less than two weeks away, and virtually all of the articles in Haaretz are focused on what might be a pivotal event in the history of both Israel and Palestine. While I thought the televised cursing of Prime Minister Sharon so that he [...]

Haaretz RSS is Broken (Again)

The Haaretz RSS feeds give me the most trouble out of all of my RSS feeds. They have not been working for the last few weeks, since Haaretz implemented site registration. While it occurs to me that I suggested such a move (oops), it makes generating RSS feeds much more difficult (the Perl script would [...]

Haaretz' Talkback Experiment

While much of the internet is still talking about the Los Angeles Times' aborted "Wikitorial" experiment, nobody seems to have noticed that the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (which I scrape for RSS feeds, since the official feeds are only accessible in Hebrew) recently added a "Talkback" feature to their website, following the lead of other Israeli [...]

Anti-Arabism in Israeli Soccer

Haaretz reports on two soccer fans "concerned" about the religion of a Ghanaian player named Ismail Ido, who might join Betar Jerusalem, which describes itself as "Israel's most popular soccer team."
Tell me, why behave this way?"
"What do you mean, why? An Arab at Betar? They tried to bring us a Muslim. We've never accepted one [...]

Haaretz RSS is Fixed…Sort Of

Since I was tired of trying to figure out why the screen-scraping code refuses to work properly on this server, I made a semi-elaborate workaround. A shell script on this server calls a number of perl scripts on the FAS server, which does the "hard" work of scraping the Haaretz site. After this is finished, [...]

Dazed & Confused … About RSS

Not willing to wait until Christmas, I decided to look at the Ha'aretz RSS problem. My diagnosis of the problem: something is wrong with the Ha'aretz feeds, but I am not sure what it is.

These are the End Times, or the Week so Far

This week: Ashcroft resigned, Arafat died, Firefox 1.0 came out - with a customized start page, GMail got POP3 access, and the Nader/Camejo people responded to the email I sent them several months ago.
On a hopeful note (at least for those who do not want the world to end anytime soon), Ashcroft's resignation is surely [...]

One State?

While I find Michael Tarazi's rhetoric a bit extreme (i.e. his use of the word "colonies" to describe the settlements, which conflicts with his later claim that Israel and the Palestinian terrorities are already a single de facto state), I think the future of the peace process may be an "one state solution." While I [...]

Ha'aretz RSS

Back before I consumed my news by RSS, I used to read Haaretz regularly. Now, I am lucky if I get to it once a month. In an attempt to change this, I have created four Haaretz RSS feeds.

Haaretz News
Haaretz Editorial & Op-Ed
Haaretz Features
Haaretz Business

$26 String

But this is not just any string. This is special string. What makes this string so amazing?
What makes this particular piece of string so special is, in part [emphasis mine], the fact that it has traveled to Israel, to the ancient tomb of Rachel the Matriarch, and returned, imbued with the essence of protection.
I assume [...]

Sharon Must Die

Haaretz reports that Avi Dichter, head of Israel's domestic security agency Shin Bet, has the names of up to two hundred Israeli citizens who want Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to die, and could be willing to support his assassination.
Responding to Yahad MK Ran Cohen's query as to whether the Shin Bet knows the precise identities [...]

AP 'Mistaken' for Grammatically Correct Journalism

Holden on Eschaton posts about an AP article with an obvious grammatical error in its title. I assume that newspapers are not allowed to change the content of the AP articles that they syndicate; the error appears at both the New York Times and the Guardian.
The overflight by Israeli fighter jets is apparently retaliation for [...]

John Kerry, Friend of Israel

The Globe reports today on a white paper released last week by Kerry's campaign outlining his position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Entitled "John Kerry: Strengthening Israel's Security and Bolstering the US-Israel Special Relationship," it is critical of the Palestinian leadership and affirms several Israeli policies. You can read it at Electronic Initifada or Jews for [...]

Stop Blaming the UN

I was originally going to make this two different posts on two different issues. The first part is from a post on The Volokh Conspiracy entitled "The UN and Anti-Semitism." I respect Eugene Volokh, and I believe that he is an intelligent man. After I read the speech that the post points to, however, I [...]

Mr. Friedman, Please Wake Up

Thomas Friedman's latest New York Times column contains some ridiculous statements. For example, the first paragraph:
I have a confession to make: I am the foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and I didn't listen to one second of the 9/11 hearings and I didn't read one story in the paper about them. [...]

The Wheelchair of Death

Continuing on the topic of assassinations elucidated in my last post, I would not like to go like this:
The Israeli weapons punctured the pavement of the street where Sheik Yassin, a quadriplegic, was being escorted home. Blood spattered the walls of surrounding buildings. "I could not recognize the sheik, only his wheelchair," said one witness, [...]