And Zero, with the culturally astute taste that he has, will present Netanyahu with a stale bagel, sans the shmear.
Posted on 05/18/2009 6:57:48 PM PDT by decimon
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In his travel memoir, Twain describes a 1867 trip to the Land of Israel, which he finds a backward and desolate place devoid of culture or law. "Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village," he states, calling it a country where prosperity had died out, a place of lost splendor and beauty where joy has turned to sorrow, and where silence and death prevail in its holy places.
(Excerpt) Read more at haaretz.com ...
It’s Shania live at the Holy Lands. A 3 cd box set.
Sounds like a book about the future of an 0bama ME.
Obama presents Netanyahu with a CD of The Fat Boys greatest hits.
And Zero, with the culturally astute taste that he has, will present Netanyahu with a stale bagel, sans the shmear.
“The population of Jerusalem is compose of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants...” Twain wrote. “It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently — the eternal ‘bucksheesh.’ To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here.”
A jar of Matzo Balls?
Obama responds with a bag of pork rinds.
No doubt left over from the Administration of George H. W. Bush. They will be stale.
“Innocents Abroad” by Mark Twain. I read it last year after reading a portion of it way back in 1984. It’s a good read. The travelogue consists of letters that Twain sent back to his newspaper in the States of the cruise around the Mediterranean. A trip to Paris; violating the quarantine of the port of Athens under cover of darkness; meeting the Russian Czar and his family; and an overland trip to the Holy Land via Istanbul and Damascus.
One of the reasons why I read it was to verify the fact that the land the Palestinians claim was always theirs was a desolate, sparsely populated, forgotten province of the Ottoman Empire. Damascus was a poverty-stricken dump. Most of the residents of Bethlehem and Jerusalem were Christian.
I hope it’s a used copy with the pricetag half scratched off. Oh wait, that would be appropriate from Gordon Brown.
One of the ironies here is that both Samuel Clemens and Bibi Netanyahu are probably more authentically American than Obama is.
"Comparing many of these slides to the present day shows the relentless and often obtrusive encroachment of modern civilization, roading and buildings. These historic slides portray scenes and a lifestyle which had endured virtually unchanged for hundreds of years. Many areas once populated by poor Arabs and wandering Bedouins are now highly populated and prosperous regions within Israel...
Lepers sitting together on a roadside by the Valley of Gihon, Jerusalem, possibly begging money or food from passers by.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
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It's "Learn some history you idiot."
To compare the area before and after the Israeli state. If this story is so, that is.
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