2003 Tel Aviv Chris Ben Yehuda

Chris was my room mate 2003 he said he was from USA but he was from Toronto Canada, He got sent back to Canada when Foreign Workers were thrown out 2004, He got onto drugs here in Tel-Aviv and I heard from a friend who visited him that he was still on Drugs.
On the Other hand IBM Canada Phoned me Yesterday, Again Lets' Hope for good.
And: I hope my step of going over to Kadima and Tzipi Livni formally is good They are with Obama at Aipac.
Too many Jews and Israelis in Toronto (You know them from NY),
Regards to Irshad.
2009 Mona is going to Toronto Canada.

2009 Jaffa Zehava Ben , Independence Day

28th April 2009 at "last minute" found out Zehava Ben star's in Yaffo Gimmel Gan Davidoff.
Mixed Audience Moslem, Christian Ethiopian and all sorts of jews.
I was alone.
Zehava sang Tipat Mazal, Hayim Sheli, Inta Oumri, Ani Shata, Melech Amiti.
She enjoyed the audience but security did not let us to get close.

2009 Blog War, Omidreza Mirsayafi

_{Last update - 08:18 12/04/2009}

Iranian blogger jailed for criticizing regime dies in prison

_{By The Associated Press, haaretz}

The first line of his first blog from Tehran in September 2006 asks: What is freedom?

Omidreza Mirsayafi answered his own question. I don't know, he wrote, but I know someday I will see its shadow falling on my land.

Two and half years later, from behind the gray walls of Tehran's Evin Prison, he phoned his mother. They talked about his battle with depression behind bars. She asked if he was taking his heart medicine.

A few hours later, on a chilly mid-March evening, the 29-year-old Mirsayafi was dead. He was Iran's first known casualty in the skirmishes between bloggers challenging the Islamic regime and authorities striking back with the tools they know best - imprisonment and intimidation.

This showdown has been building for years in Iran, with bloggers and social network sites becoming the main outlet for everything from hard-edged political dissent to underground videos and music. The role of Iranian bloggers as liberal opinion-shapers could intensify ahead of June 12 elections that will decide whether arch-conservative President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad remains for another four years. The outcome also could set the tone for Washington's overtures for dialogue with Tehran, which has so far resisted Western pressure for greater press and Internet freedoms.

Omidreza is a symbol of many things, said Jillian York, a project coordinator at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, who exchanged e-mails with Mirsayafi in the months before his death. He is a symbol of the free speech battles within Iran and a symbol that it would get worse.

Dozens of activists are now jailed in Iran, including at least two prominent bloggers. One of them, Hussein Derakhshan, helped ignite the Iranian blog boom in 2001 by posting simple instructions to create sites in Farsi.

What makes Mirsayafi stand out, however, was not his notoriety. It's just the opposite. Mirsayafi had a modest - what could even be called irrelevant - presence in the Iranian blogosphere.

Omidreza was just an ordinary blogger, said Farhad Moradian, an Iranian Jewish emigre to Israel who writes a blog from Tel Aviv. This is the big alarm.

A Facebook page in Mirsayafi's memory was formed after his death March 18. It was filled with condolences, rants and shared apprehension.

Said one entry: The next Mirsayafi could be me.

Mirsayafi began his blog - called simply Rouznegar, or Diary Writer - in 2006 as a kind of online salon to concentrate on daily Tehran life, culture and music. Diary included interviews with leading Iranian musicians and artists.

But, as is often the case in Iran, he could not avoid politics.

His first post dabbled in general rhetoric about liberty. It was tame stuff compared with the bromides of other bloggers. Over the months, however, Mirsayafi's writing developed more bite. He was shaken particularly by the muzzling of other bloggers.

A post on June 22, 2007 broke the dam. He lashed at authorities by name, including crossing a red line that few dare to even approach: condemning the memory of the late Islamic Revolution leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Mirsayafi wrote: Living in a country whose leader is Khomeini is nauseating.

Living in a country whose president is Ahmadinejad is a big shame.

He went on to skewer other Iranian officials and closed with the line: Living in a country that calls itself an Islamic Republic is a disgrace.

Mirsayafi knew he entered dangerous territory. But he felt his blog was simply too obscure to draw notice among the hundreds of other Iranian Web writers from inside the country and abroad, say friends and family.

He described what happened next in a letter written earlier this year to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

On April 22, 2008, four officials from Iran's Revolutionary Court came to the small house in eastern Tehran that he shared with his parents. They searched everywhere and confiscated my computer and personal items, he wrote to Ban. And I was arrested.

Mirsayafi was accused of insulting Iran's leaders and its Islamic character - charges that can bring years in prison - and was placed in solitary confinement in Evin. His family, meanwhile, reached out to Mohammed Ali Dadkhah, a lawyer who has built a bulldog reputation while defending bloggers and other political activists.

After 40 days, Mirsayafi was released. As a guarantee he wouldn't flee the country, his family offered the deed to property worth about $50,000, said his brother Amir. Mirsayafi's blog site was shut down.

Authorities had been making cyber-raids for years. Their first salvo was attempts to block specific blogs and Web sites. But hackers bypassed the controls by using proxy sites and other Web shortcuts. Then arrests started after the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005.

The media rights group Reporters Without Borders lists 68 bloggers imprisoned around the world, including two in Iran and nearly 50 in China.

The irony is that many Iranian leaders have adapted well to the wired age. Ahmadinejad's office maintains a Web site. So do the Revolutionary Guards, the military enforcers. Political groups send out text messages to supporters' mobile phones. Some Shi'ite clerics have e-mail addresses.

Mohammed Ali Abtahi, who was a pioneer political blogger as vice president under former President Mohammad Khatami, worries that the assault on Iranian blogs could leave them sanitized of any genuine discourse.

"If the authorities continue with their reprisals, bloggers will start to censor themselves and we'll see only non-political subjects," he said.

But Tehran-based bloggers such as Askan Monfared show no sign of cooling down.

He believes the Islamic regime is panicked by its inability to control the Web as it does the mainstream media.

"They cannot distinguish between what's insulting and what is legitimate critique," he said. "There is no civil society until we reach that point."

On Nov. 2, Mirsayafi was brought before the Revolutionary Court. The charges were serious: insulting the country's leaders and making anti-state propaganda. Some expert witnesses said they didn't believe Mirsayafi's blog violated the statutes, according to various reports.

The court disagreed and sentenced him to 30 months in prison. He was allowed at first to remain free while he appealed, but authorities swooped in Feb. 7.

His lawyer said there was no warning or explanation.

Mirsayafi was placed in Evin's Cell 7, Hall 5 along with his friend, Abbas Khorsandi, a political activist detained since 2007. Evin is Iran's most notorious lockup and the final stop for those who run afoul of the regime.

In 2003, Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was arrested for taking photographs in front of Evin and died several days later in the prison. An
investigative panel concluded Kazemi died of a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage caused by a physical attack, but the findings were rejected by Iran's conservative judiciary. And an Iranian-American journalist, Roxana Saberi, was sent to Evin in February and was charged this week as a spy.

In Evin, Mirsayafi sometimes talked of suicide, said Shiva Nazar Ahari, secretary of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters in Tehran. He also worried about whether he could get more of the prescription drug Inderal, used to control erratic heart rhythms.

Nazar Ahari said she called Mirsayafi every few days.

On one of his last conversations with me, he said, 'I wish I actually did something real to insult the regime since I ended up in prison anyway,' she said.

Mirsayafi's sister, Masoumeh, said they both wrote letters to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in early March asking for forgiveness. They never received a reply, she said.

On March 18, Mirsayafi overdosed on tranquilizers supplied by the prison and was only treated in the prison clinic rather than transferred to a hospital, according to reports attributed to an inmate physician, Dr. Hessam Firoozi. Judicial and prison authorities did not reply to repeated requests for comment by The Associated Press.

Firoozi, who is serving a 15-month sentence, called his lawyer. Quickly, word spread from blog to blog, then on to right groups and the international media.

Reporters Without Borders said Mirsayafi's death was a sad reminder of the fact that the Iranian regime is one of the harshest for journalists and bloggers. Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, a Washington-based pro-democracy group, said it highlighted the dangerously inhospitable climate for bloggers.

Mirsayafi was buried the day after his death. Fellow bloggers joined in a memorial of their own by posting some of his writings. His first blog post was among the most widely cited.

It ended:

I asked: When will we understand the meaning of freedom?

I answered: When our wisdom can be delivered from ignorance, selfishness and foolishness.

2009 Jerusalem Netanyahu's Government

From Al Ahram Weekly: 1st April 2009
I illustrated the racist ultra-nationalist Avigdor Lieberman, head of Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) Party as a hideous monster with menacing eyes that glare in hatred as he spews insults and threats against Arabs and Palestinians. His thick beard marks him out as a fanatic. His protruding lips full of venom. He points his index finger to his head as if to stress that he is determined to carry out the evil thoughts in his mind. It is astounding that he was chosen for the foreign affairs portfolio. His popping eyes see red.

2009 Jaffa And tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life

Shoshan Purim

And tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life...

Link to a Tom Friedman article above.
Not much good news though TASE and Nasdaq are going up after Citibank.

2009 Jaffa Small Business and Small Countries

February 22, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist Thomas L Friedman nytimes
Uncle Sam (me) agrees with tom that Small Business and Small Countries have an advantage.

Start Up the Risk-Takers

Reading the news that General Motors and Chrysler are now lining up for another $20 billion or so in government aid — on top of the billions they’ve already received or requested — leaves me with the sick feeling that we are subsidizing the losers and for only one reason: because they claim that their funerals would cost more than keeping them on life support. Sorry, friends, but this is not the American way. Bailing out the losers is not how we got rich as a country, and it is not how we’ll get out of this crisis.

G.M. has become a giant wealth- destruction machine — possibly the biggest in history — and it is time that it and Chrysler were put into bankruptcy so they can truly start over under new management with new labor agreements and new visions. When it comes to helping companies, precious public money should focus on start-ups, not bailouts.

You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today because their partners — university endowments and pension funds — are tapped out, and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors’ upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.

If we are going to be spending billions of taxpayer dollars, it can’t only be on office-decorating bankers, over-leveraged home speculators and auto executives who year after year spent more energy resisting changes and lobbying Washington than leading change and beating Toyota.

I’ve been traveling all across the country on a book tour, and every evening I return to my hotel with my pockets full of business cards from inventors in clean energy. Our country is still bursting with innovators looking for capital. So, let’s make sure all the losers clamoring for help don’t drown out the potential winners who could lift us out of this. Some of our best companies, such as Intel, were started in recessions, when necessity makes innovators even more inventive and risk-takers even more daring.

Yes, we have to shore up the banking system, which underpins everything; and finding a fair way to prevent hardworking people, who played by the rules, from losing their homes to foreclosure is both right and essential for stability.

But beyond that, let’s think, talk and plan in more aspirational ways. We’re down, but we’re not out. As we invest taxpayer money, let’s do it with an eye to starting a new generation of biotech, info-tech, nanotech and clean-tech companies, with real innovators, real 21st-century jobs and potentially real profits for taxpayers. Our motto should be, “Start-ups, not bailouts: nurture the next Google, don’t nurse the old G.M.’s.”

To be fair, the stimulus package that the Obama team and the Democrats in Congress recently passed — with virtually no Republican help — goes some way toward doing just that. Hat’s off for that. Now let’s do more.

The renewable-energy business — wind, solar and solar thermal — was almost dead in this country. Most new projects stopped last fall because they depended for their financing on selling their renewable energy tax credits to Wall Street firms. As those Wall Street firms went bust or suffered steep losses, they had no need for tax credits because they had no profits to offset. The stimulus package created a mechanism for renewable energy innovators to bypass Wall Street and monetize their tax credits directly through the U.S. Treasury, for any project that starts between now and the end of 2010.

The wind and solar industries in America “were dead in the fourth quarter,” said John Woolard, chief executive of BrightSource Energy, which builds and operates cutting-edge solar-thermal plants in the Mojave Desert. Almost five gigawatts of new solar-thermal projects — the equivalent of five big nuclear plants — at various stages of permitting were being held up because of a lack of financing.

“All of these projects will now go ahead,” said Woolard. “You are talking about thousands of jobs ... We really got something right in this legislation.”

These jobs will be in engineering, constructing and operating huge solar systems and wind farms and manufacturing new photovoltaics. Together they will drive innovation in all these areas — and move wind and solar technology down the cost-volume learning curve so they can compete against fossil fuels and become export industries at the “ChinIndia price,” that is the price at which they can scale in China and India.

That is how taxpayer money should be used to stimulate: limited financing, for a limited time, targeted on an industry bristling with new technology start-ups that, with a little push from Uncle Sam, won’t just survive this crisis but help us thrive when it is over. We need, and the world needs, an America that is thriving not just surviving.

2009 Jaffa Miriam and her 6 children are threatened with eviction out into to streets

Wednesday, March 4

Alert for miriam's home - barricading NOW

Hi,

All of those in Jaffa, please go to Miriam's home at the corner of Jerusalem Boulevard 37, NOW
She has not been able to find a flat and they will evict her and her 6 children out into the streets TODAY.
We can and must prevent it.
We need you all over there

Monday, March 2

Miriam and her 6 children are threatened with eviction out into to streets

Miriam, strong and very bright, has had a tough life. But it taught her how to fight, how to be assertive and how to get what she needs. But now things have taken a worse turn.

Today the police arrived to evict her from the home she squatted about half a year ago, out into the rainy streets.

She has nowhere to go. Quick intervention gave her another two days, in which she must find another flat. Miriam's children all go to school or to a kindergarden except the 2 year old one.
They live on social security. Miriam has a tough time finding employment as her youngest daughter, two years old, has no kinder garden and private childcare is too expensive. The family lives on about 2.400 NIS monthly. But over the last two months Miriam didn't get any money due to a bureaucratic mess. In addition she is entitled to 1200 NIS a month rent subsidy, but given the fact that a small 1 room studio flat in Jaffa costs about 2000 NIS at least per months, the family's chances of finding a rental flat on the public market are close to zero. Of course they are eligible for public housing but the waiting list is taking years, as there are no flats available.
After all, the country has been selling of public housing flats and instead of investing the money obtained from the sales in constructing new public housing (as was the plan), not even one public house has been constructed over the last twenty years inside the green border line. Wages and social security payments have gone down drastically, rent has gone up and rent support has gone down. More and more people are becoming homeless. But no one really seems to care, free market is "great" after all.

If she will be kicked out, the welfare department will take her kids into foster care. Miriam is a good mother. It would make more sense if they would assist her pay the rent. After all putting 6 kids into care would not only be most tramatic for all, but is also very expensive..... Go figure.

And those in Jaffa, we may need you to defend Miriam's home, this week. Stay alert.