Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the three ring circus also known as the land of bilk and money, aka The Holyland. This is the Weekend Holyland Update, flight 050910, taking off from the Jews-only loony bin, punching through thick steel plates, passing through a burning mosque and destinations further down the drain. Please fasten your seatbelts and refrain from speaking, the captain has turned on the gag order sign.

Our local version of the Stasi, aka the Shin-Bet, or "General Security Service", is continuing its assault on civil rights and arresting people in secret. Within the past two weeks, three individuals have been arrested and a gag order placed on the very fact of their detention: Ameer Makhoul, chairman of the Arab NGO umbrella-organization, Dr. Omar Said, chairman of a Jewish-Arab hi-tech business nursery, and a Turkish humanitarian activist named Izzet Sehin working in the West Bank have all been arrested, with the stupid shadow men refusing to internalize the fact that in the age of the Internet, a gag order isn't worth the paper it's written on. Yours truly was the first to report on the arrest of Mr. Makhoul in Hebrew, my esteemed blogger-colleague Idan Lando flouted the gag order regarding the arrest of Dr. Said, and I am about to blow the lid on the arrest of the Turkish gentleman as soon as I get done with this post. Meanwhile, I was alerted that the great blogger Richard Silverstein noticed my report on Mr. Makhoul and was kind enough to write some nice things about it. I would comment on his blog, but for some reason I get a "your IP was detected as a source of spam", which doesn't make sense, but go argue with a machine. So if any of you care to comment there, tell him I said thanks, and that this is one of those times when what was written definitely outweighs whether they spelled your name right. Richard, if you're reading this by any chance, drop me a line when you have a moment, and just for the record - it's Rechavia. Thanks!

Three days after I reported on Mr. Makhoul, the mainstream media has finally mustered enough testicular fortitude to tiptoe around the issue, reporting "another security case which the whole world and our own blogosphere is talking about but we aren't allowed to report." Dear YNET (to whom we shall return ere this dispatch is over, btw) - please, do grow a pair already. Pick one of these stoopid gag orders and make a test case out of it.

About two weeks ago, a plane landed at Ben Gurion airport, and out of it came Sen'or Ivan Prado, the most famous professional clown in Spain, accompanied by a female Spanish national of Arab descent. The two were on their way to Ramallah, "capital" of the "autonomous" Paltustanian Authority, where Prado was invited to perform and help organize a clown festival. Six hours later, after a lengthy and humiliating interrogation during which his passport was taken from him, he was placed on a plane back to Madrid. The reason: Prado was declared a "security risk" due to unspecified "suspicious contacts". Thus, instead of coming and going with no-one noticing, our men in black deftly created a very motivated spokesman with millions of fans who can't speak up enough against Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians. Israel's embassy in Spain was aghast and demanded a detailed explanation of the reason for this treatment from Jerusalem, so that it could have any chance at all of fielding all the demands for comment from the irate Spanish media. No such detailed explanation was forthcoming. But the next time the Spanish people display an unfriendly opinion of "The Only Democracy in the Middle East [TM]" - we all know why, right? All together now: Because they're antisemites!

After a year-long battle, the Gisha organization, which fights for freedom of movement, and consequently against the filthy Gaza seige, has won a significant court victory after the state was forced to admit that four documents, the existence of which it had stenuously denied until now, are indeed extant and in its possession. These are documents detailing: The list of goods allowed and banned from entry entry into Gaza, a procedure for entering goods into the beseiged territory, a procedure for determining shortages so as to determine whether or not to allow goods to be entered, and a list detailing the minimum caloric needs of Gazan men, women and children. This last item, btw, is not only of legal interest but constitutes a scientific breakthrough as well, establishing as it does that Gazans are a species distinct from regular humans, whose minimal caloric needs can be determined by any family physician and do not require a top-secret government document. I wonder of the offspring of a Gazan and a human will be fertile?

Despite copping to the existence of said docs, the state remains resolute in its refusal to disclose them, citing vital security interest. The Gisha organization has compiled a provisional list of banned and permitted goods, based on past experience of Gazan merchants and subject to change at the whim of any occupation bureaucRAT. From this list it appears that while coriander and vinegar are verbotten, cinnamon and peas are fine. Is there a coriander-weaponizing technology I haven't heard of? I know it's a hotly disputed herb, with lovers and haters and very little middle ground, but...

Moving right along, it's funny how the more things get bad, the clearer they get. The masks sort of come off. Remember the "reality-based community" comment? That told those of us that were paying attention all we needed to know. Similarly, one could read this report in Haaretz about Nick Clegg and learn all that is needed about the character of the current regime in Jerusalem. Scroll down to the section titled "No Joy in Jerusalem" and you will read this gem: ""Clegg is bad news for Israel," one official here said. "His party is running on a human rights platform, and the atmosphere is hostile to Israel. We remind the Liberal Democrats of South Africa during apartheid." The leaders of a state that was granted existence only because most nations of the world felt terribly guilty about how its people's human rights were violated, now openly declares itself as an enemy of "the human rights platform". Heart-warming.

Remember Jehovah-nazi terrorist Jack Teitel? The guy who killed a couple of Palestinians just for the crime of breathing while Arab, then tried to kill a leading left-wing academic and a Jews for Jesus family, whose son, 15 at the time, opened a booby-trapped gift-basket and lost a hand? Anyway, the guy was found to be unfit to stand trial by reason of mental defect. I could say something about how obviously anyone who passes a certain level of vehemence regarding their imaginary friends is insane, but other than that, two things fascinating about this:
1) It's amazing how no Arab who killed a Jew has EVER, to the best of any data I could come up with, been found insane.
2) Funny how he was considered sane enough for the secret security service to try to recruit him as an informant.
Just sayin'

Alert readers may recall how the Egyptians, attempting to help Israel in its seige of Gaza, drove huge, thick steel plates into the ground at the border between them and the Gaza Strip, to prevent the digging of tunnels. Well, unstoppable force 1 - immovable object 0. Somehow those enterprising Ay-rabs managed to punch a 40" square hole in one of these plates and resume smuggling. As long as said tunnels aren't used for munitions, I got little problem with it.

Speaking of Gaza - not that they would have qualified anyway, and not that most of them could afford it, but the people of Gaza decided to do something about not being allowed to go to the World Cup in South Africa, and decided to stage one of their own - 16 national teams, made up of humanitarian aid workers. And in a fine display of "we may hate your government but love y'all as people", the loudest cheers were reserved for... the red-white-and-blue. Go USA!

The settlers cracked me up about a week ago. See, the Paltustanian Authority, in an attempt to mask the extent to which it collaborates with the occupation against its own people, declared a boycott on working in the settlements and buying from settlements. What was hilarious was that these were two separate announcements, and the reaction of the settler scum to the work boycott was a huge feet-stomping tantrum about how this was a hostile act. Because for all their racism, settler scum still need someone to actually build their houses and clean their shit after them...

Speaking of settler scum, they pulled another one of their "price tags" and torched a mosque in the village of Luban a-Sharqia. At first they tried to sow disinformation and plant "reports" that the estimate of investigators was that the fire was caused by a short-circuit. But truth has a way of coming out. Not only did the village Mukhtar (kinda sorta like a tribal chief/mayor) report hearing people running near the mosque at 3am, eventually the arson investigators found out that the judo-nazis indeed torched the place, just more cleverly than their usual m.o. - they used no flammables and started the fire with paper. So after a one week break we have had at least one pogrom-like activity for the second week in a row, for those of you sports fans keeping track at home.

OK, time for some shorties

- Police are investigating whether former PM Ehud Olmert, already indicted for a couple corruption cases and under investigation for possible bribery a big real estate scam, funneled the cash he was allegedly bribed with to his brother, who is living in the US and refusing to return for questioning.

- A large segment of the Druze population in Israel (an Arab population who follow an offshoot of Islam and serve in the IDF, which means they get discriminated against somewhat less than regular ragheads) are up in arms over a plan to pass a gas line through their lands. Since 1948, the Druze citizens of Israel have had some 80% of their privately-owned land seized by eminent domain. And these are the ones we have a "blood covenant" with.

- Ron Huldai, Mayor of Tel-Aviv whose term in office has been characterized by shameless, rapacious selling out to business and real estate interests, is angling for national office, and floated a test-balloon in the form of a harsh attack on the ultra-orthodox religious and their parasitic lifestyle. It's not that what he said was wrong, but I still puke at the thought of him in Knesset or even as minister. Yuck.

- The Kibbutzim movement, which is ostensibly on the left side of political map, belonging to labor which supposedly supports withdrawal from the occupied territories and the two state solution and all that jazz, published a call to soldiers finishing their mandatory service to join new kibbutzim being planned in the west bank. And then they tell you how so many Israelis want peace. Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

- Oh yeah, I promised we'd return to YNET, one of Israel's two leading web portals. They ran a story about Journalists Without Frontiers' 2010 "Top 40 Predators of Journalism" report, listing all the governments and organizations which abuse journalists and impede their work. Now, when they first ran the story, they listed the IDF as among the organizations featured in the report. Less than an hour later, they removed all mention of the IDF. Myself and a fellow blogger (the wonderful Yossi Gurvitz, sorry Yoss) ragged them about how they were carrying the military's water and betraying journalism; within a few hours they contacted him with a furious "how dare you impugn our professional integrity" and said "we removed the IDF because it isn't mentioned in this year's report". My bud pointed out that, um, yes it is mentioned. To YNET's credit, they checked and put the original text back up. So their defense was "we are not pravda-like disinfotainers, we just suck at what we do..."

Yediot, YNET's mother-paper, did however carry the establishment's water, publishing an earth-shaking expose on the past of judge Richard Goldstone as a judge under apartheid South Africa. Now, truth be told, the revelations do not redound to his credit. A truly moral man would not serve such a legal system at all. But what they came up with was a couple of death sentences against some young men who, while belonging to a horribly oppressed population, were convicted of heinous murders, and a couple of cases where he sentenced convicts to lashings. The jerkoff "philosopher" who signed off on what the IDF did in Cast Lead bleated that "the death penalty is never justified", and in general, the specter of apartheid South Africa's biggest ally pointing fingers over apartheid-era actions... risible, what to tell ya.

Nearing landing, someone sprayed some Ethiopian Jewish tombstones in the southern city of Beersheba with the words "death to niggers" in Hebrew and Russian, and signed it "Soldiers of Hitler". This is of course not funny, but the news report was: "Police are checking whether this was motivated by racism".

Getting closer, Lebanon filed a report with the UN, saying that Israel stole 185 goats from its territory. To which I say: 1) those should be our problems. 2) Behhhhhhh!

Finally, it was revealed that the children's book that Hamas-held captive soldier Gilad Shalit ostensibly wrote was not actually written by him. Turns out, "Gilad Shalit's book" When The Shark Met the Fish is based, to a VERY large degree, on the book When the Snake Met the Mouse, written by Shelly Elkayam, Shalit's 5th grade teacher. Apparently it says inside the front cover that the book is "based on" Elkayam's book. Point is, said teacher never gave her permission for this appropriation, and apparently the Shalits assumed that since all proceeds are going to their fund to get him freed, she wouldn't dare pipe up even though she ain't getting a dime. Well, she did, and one has to assume she did so after trying the quiet way the first couple of years. The response was deafening. Ms Elkayam, it was said, broke a deep taboo about "not going against bereaved families" - and never mind that they ain't bereaved quite yet; even though their predicament is no less difficult in many regards, they still have hope of a happy ending. Apparently, loss, if incurred in service of the volk, entitles one to steal another's work.

Now it must be said - Ms. Elkayam probably has many good qualities, but tact ain't one of them, as she went totally over the top in her complaining about the whole affair, even going so far as to insinuate that she cares more about Shalit than his own mother. Um no, you don't, and your book probably wouldn't have sold for shit without the national darling's name on it. And speaking of mothers - happy Mother's Day to Mrs. Shalit despite her terrible position, and the very same to the mothers of the vast majority of the 7,000 Palestinians who are held by Israel and have done very little harm, if any, to anyone beyond, at most, what anyone would do under the circumstances. May all of them be united with their children soon.

And on that apple pie note, the pilot will now bring her in for landing to your original points of departure, where there are also mothers unjustly separated from their mothers from smoking a joint or some such. And still, your own brands of crazy should be looking far preferable in comparison, or you should be seriously considering relocation. WHU airlines is not responsible for any illusions, sympathies or misconceptions that may have been misplaced on our tours. Please collect your luggage and check your comments and thumbs. Thank you for flying the crazy skies.

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