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Israel’s national poet, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, pondered about the first thief in Tel-Aviv as a symbolic sign of Israel joining the League of Nations. Moshe Katsav, the 8th President of Israel, had sexually harassed and even raped numerous women over the years, according to the Israeli Attorney General. Katsav was scheduled today to plead guilty to lesser charges in a plea bargain, effectively closing this disgraceful chapter in Israel’s history, but in a surprising turn of events he appeared before the court and rejected the plea, asking to be tried.

The plea bargain was criticized by many Israelis that felt they did not get their day in court, contesting that the President of Israel is a symbol of the state and as such these kinds of allegations cannot be swept under the rag. As a critic of the plea bargain myself, I thought I would provide the masses with a tool to express their critique in the form of a stencil, which can be put to use with some aerosol spray paint. I had been waiting for the right moment to post this online, but the right moment never seems to arrive. Today, as we are on the brink of a new low in the pages of history, as we have many months, possibly years, before this matter is resolved, today seems like a good day to publish this post.

Here is a low resolution version of my stencil, with Katsav’s face and the Hebrew pun ‘My Rapist - The President’:

For your downloading pleasure, I have provided a link to a high resolution image ready to print:
My Rapist - The President (320.57 KB)
Feel free to link directly to the original post on my blog, but do not link directly to the file.

Here is a tutorial on preparing stencils for use, courtesy of the Stencil Revolution.

What kind of a bizarro world do we live in when International Women’s Day is celebrated by the Israeli parliament by giving female Knesset members self-defense lessons?

I am all for female empowerment but I have to wonder whether the legislative branch became so toothless that the message it wants to convey to the female citizens can be broken down to:

• men are coming to harm you
• the country cannot/would not defend you
• better learn to scream ‘no!’ and prepare for a fight

A month ago, I updated my readers on Hasbro’s worldwide vote to find the 22 greatest cities for the new world edition of the Monopoly board game. On my post titled ‘Up and Answer, Jewish Yeoman - Vote It Joyfully Aloud!‘ I jokingly called upon every right-wing nutter to defend Jerusalem, ‘eternal capital city of the Jewish people’, by voting for it on the Monopoly website.

Well, it turns out the joke was on me and my people:
Hasbro decided that the quickest way to end the Arab-Israeli conflict is to change the status of Jerusalem from the capital of Israel to an undefined territory, belonging to no man or nation. Although I probably should have foreseen that old shtick making a comeback, I did not – and so you will have to believe my word that the first version of the website listed ‘Jerusalem, Israel’ in one of the rankings.
Following are screenshots of the second and third versions:

As you can clearly see, on the second version every world city is naturally located within a country, except for Jerusalem. Smart way to end the conflict, right?
After the Israeli Embassy protested Hasbro’s doing (no, I am not kidding), the company decided to put on their smarty-pants and remove all the countries. Yes folks, just like every fourth Eurovision Song Contest and every second Olympic Games event, someone always wants to show preemptive kindness on the official website, so that the people who tend to get mad - won’t. Even as we speak, Hasbro is removing additional connections between cities of the world and their corresponding countries:
Can you find which words are missing from one of these four Monopoly city guides? (yellow highlight mine)

Instead of discussing the issues that lead to the ongoing decrease in army enrollment, the powers that be have decided to embark on a campaign that aims to shame Israelis that did not enlist, and emphasize the superficial shared experiences that connect Israelis who did serve.
Having served in the IDF myself, I think I earned the right to say I find this campaign to be quasi-fascist on one hand and super-shallow on the other – an all out war on secular middle-class Israelis.
Only in a newborn democracy would the government dare to attack a portion of its citizens without ever opening the subject for real debate: in the commercials you would not find a single governmentally-exempt Orthodox Jew, nor a single sexually-harassed female soldier, nor a single MoD-ignored PTSD veteran.

Here is one of the TV spots of this campaign (mostly in English):

Here is a spoof ad that was recently released by a group of brave Israelis (with less than brave acting skills) in an effort to open the subject for debate (starts in Hebrew, continues in English):

Hat tip to Mizbala.