Good thing the pants were paid for!

In case anyone wondered why I love Pearls Before Swine...

Never Again

www.shaynezucker.com/neveragain.html

The Olympics are coming in a couple of weeks.

People all over the world will be following their athletes as they try to show everyone that they are better than anyone else. Millions of American viewers will be tuned to NBC to watch our young men and woman compete on the world stage.

Except me.

With the exception of two different times, I have not watched even 30 seconds of any Olympic event in 34 years and I'm not planning to deviate from that anytime soon.

I happened upon a tape delay of the U.S. - Soviet hockey semi-final ("do you believe in miracles? Yes!") game, in 1980 and I was at a department store when I saw Michael Spinks win the gold medal in Boxing.

But that's it.

I'd like to say it's because I'm just not interested in the athletes or the particular games played. I mean, I really don't care to watch speed skating or skiing and bobsleds aren't sport - their suicide. But that's not really the case.

No, unless you already figured it out, I can tell you it isn't anything like that.

The reason I don't watch the Olympics is because of Munich.

I was 10 years old when the 1972 Olympiad took stage in Germany. Until then, I - like a lot of my friends and family - were excited when the games came on. It had been 4 years since the previous one and with the explosion in TV sports, it seemed the whole world was watching little Olga Korbut amaze us with her grace and agility. We even had our own hero. Before the Olympics began, few - if anyone - knew who Mark Spitz was. But he quickly became a legend in every Jewish home.

Then the impossible happened. Before our very eyes, the very athletes we were watching and rooting for became victims of Palestinian terror.

You know what's strange is that until then, know one ever called it "Palestinian" terror before then. But now, we all caught a glimpse of what Israeli's had (and continue to have) been exposed to on a regular basis.

Prior to that day, Israel was looked upon as a shining light that overcame exceptional odds to defeat her enemies in under a week during the Six-Day War, just 5 years earlier. My parents and one of my brothers had just travelled to Israel two months earlier and were impressed by how peaceful it seemed.

But the massacre of the Israeli athletes is not the reason I stay away from the games. After all, it was just a bunch of animals who killed our people, not the games (or other athletes) themselves. Boycotting the games for that would be tantamount to boycotting the Super Bowl because someone was stabbed while watching a Bud Light halftime commercial.

No, the reason I won't watch is because of one comment. One unbelievably morose remark by the IOC President, Avery Brundage. Just a few hours after the dead were sent back to Israel, Brundage proclaimed, "The games must go on".

I don't mean to condemn the continuation of the games. But to announce that, only hours after the murder of 11 innocent participants, showed not only a lack of remorse, but also a lack of decency.

Aside from the fact that Germany, the host country and the nation that needed to show the world (and certainly the Jewish people) that it had competely disassociated itself with it's recent past, should have taken a more empethetic approach, the IOC should have been even more greatly devastated.

Imagine the outcry if just one Arab athlete had been killed by an Israeli (or by anyone else, for that matter). Leaders from all over the world would villify the murderer and the country responsible. Certainly, the bin Ladins of the world would call for a "jihad" and vow immediate revenge, culminating in many innocent deaths.

But, in 1972, the Jews learned a very disturbing truth. When it comes to the Jews, blood is cheap. We saw for the first time that the lives of Jews are worthless in comparison to playing a game. Unfortunately, for me and my people, we learned first-hand what the world thought of us.

It was a real slap in the face.

Maybe it's just me, but I'm not ready to turn the other cheek. In this day and age, with the current world agenda of appeasement towards Arab terror, the other cheek will only get slapped one more time.

No thanks, NBC. Never again, IOC.

I've finally updated my website (although some older files have not been reformatted yet). Stop by and tell me what you think.

Also, due to severe time restraints, I have to discontinue my sports blog. If time permits, I'll start it up again in the future.

From the Los Angeles Times...

Why God chose the Jews
By Andrew Klavan, Crime novelist

THERE IS ONE good thing about anti-Semitism: It lets you know who the bad guys are. Right, left, black, white, freak or straight, the minute someone starts rattling on about the evil Jews, you know your train just pulled into Slimeball Station.

All bigotry is wrong, of course, but there's something about this particular form of prejudice that is weirdly reliable as a sign of deeper wickedness. Perhaps it's because the Jews contributed so much to humanity's moral code that to hate them as a race is to despise the restraints of morality itself.

Whatever the reason, true, virulent anti-Semitism is such a good indicator of the presence of evil that I'm tempted to believe that when God made the Jews his chosen people, this is what he chose them for: to be a sort of Villainy Early Detection System for everyone else.

Unfortunately, in his infinite love for his creation, I suspect the Big Guy may have overestimated our intelligence. Maybe he thought that after Hitler we'd just, you know, like, get it. Instead, we still see apparently intelligent people appeasing, making excuses for and even embracing the sorts of stinkers who ought to set off the Big Alarm.

That's why I think the system could use more bells and whistles — a loud honking noise perhaps, or even closed captioning for the morally impaired. Thus, when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says the Holocaust is a "myth" or that Israel "must be wiped off the map," you would hear a loud honk and words would appear in the air below his face: "Hello. I am an evil madman. Please stop negotiating with me now and proceed to cripple my nuclear capability by any means necessary."

Or how about when Venezuelan leader — and anti-American Iran ally — Hugo Chavez warns that "descendants of those who crucified Christ … have grabbed all the world's riches for themselves"? Honk. His subtitle: "Hi. I know you lefties are still enamored of the idea of socialism — fine. But personally, I'm a jerk and a friend of tyranny. Oh, and Mr. Belafonte? Go home before you make an ass of yourself."

Now, I understand the situation in the Middle East is morally and politically complex, as is the situation in South America. I know that honorable people can hold conflicting opinions about the issues in these places. But when the entrenched misery of an area nearly as large as the United States is consistently blamed on 5 million people in a country the size of a shoebox, or when the ills of the world are loaded onto less than 1% of its population, I begin to become suspicious.

If it were only a matter of hating Jews, we could say: "Feel free, hate everyone, knock yourself out." The trouble is the suffering, the slaughter of innocents and indeed the destruction of entire nations that seems inevitably to follow when anti-Semitism is allowed to spread beyond the cesspool of the mind that contains it. History is too full of lowlifes who thought all their problems would be solved if they could just kill enough Jews — or thugs like Pontius Pilate who thought it was a matter of killing the right Jew — for us not to realize that their Final Solutions aren't final and are no solution. They are often the first, and sometimes the last, road sign pointing the way to an earthly hell.

So here's a plan. The next time you express an opinion on what's wrong with the world, take a look around to see who's nodding in agreement. If it's some clown who thinks the Jewish state should be pushed into the sea, or that the Jews killed Christ or are conspiring to subvert the world economy or the government or the media, I beg you to consider that you might be wrong. There is no shame in changing your opinion. Falling into step with wicked fools — that's shameful, and it's dangerous too. God gave you an early detection system. Use it.

Thanks Dr. E!

He loves his team with all his heart (registration required)

Talk about a heart-stopping game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Indianapolis Colts.

Terry O'Neill, 50, of Pittsburgh, was watching the game at a bar and had a heart attack seconds after Jerome Bettis fumbled trying to score from the 2-yard line late in the fourth quarter.

Quarterback Ben Roethlisberger prevented the Colts' Nick Harper from returning the recovered ball for a touchdown and the Steelers hung on for a 21-18 win.

O'Neill said Bettis is his hero.

"I wasn't upset that the Steelers might lose," he told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. "I was upset because I didn't want to see him end his career like that. A guy like that deserves better. I guess it was a little too much for me to handle."

O'Neill, who was recovering at a hospital, credits two firefighters with saving him.

"The Steelers won the game and I'm still alive, so I guess I'm doing pretty good," he said.

He will have a pacemaker implanted to control an irregular heartbeat and he was prescribed medication to deal with the hypertension.

While he would like to go to the bar Sunday for the game against the Denver Broncos to thank the guys who saved him, O'Neill said, "I guess I should probably take it easy and watch the game at home."

Five Pet Peeves of the Day

1. Rebates at Best Buy
If they can lower the cost of an item, why don't they just do it instead of going to all the trouble of filling out the rebate slip, mailing it in and waiting 4-6 weeks for a check. I suppose many people either don't remember or just don't make the effort, saving the manufacture money. But one of the biggest reasons I don't shop there is because of the annoyance. And they do this a lot.

2. Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers
Time to move on folks. I would say that most of the rude drivers I've come across here in Chicago have these stickers on their cars/SUV, but since most Chicagoans voted for them it wouldn't be fair. In truth, I find the drivers of this town to be remarkably bad.

3. Brad and Angelina and baby make 3
OVERKILL, OVERKILL, OVERKILL! I mean, come on - do you really care that she's pregnant with his baby? I'm equally no fan of Jennifer Aniston, but I feel for her for having has this crap constantly thrown in her face. Memo to the Chicago Sun-Times: Normal people don't care that much.

4. Middle East peace sans Sharon
Ok, a stroke is nothing to laugh at. I know, because I had one. But to say that peace in the Middle East is now in jeopardy because the Israeli Prime Minister had one is ridiculous. It matters little to Israel who leads the way. Until the Arabs appoint a true peace partner - one who is less afraid of terrorists and more afraid of failure - there can be no peace.

5. Life sentences that aren't for life
Although I'm not Catholic, I'm still upset that a Turkish court freed Mehmet Ali Agca, the man who tried to kill the Pope back in 1981. He had originally been given a death sentence, but when Turkey abolished capital punishment in 2002, it was commuted to life in prison. Well, he's still alive at age 48 and served just 25 years (and only 5 in Turkey). Maybe the Turkish lifespan is shorter that ours, but Agca was already imprisoned before for murdering a Turkish journalist.

Been having serious problems with my wireless equipment and haven't been able to post anything longer that 2 or 3 lines before it crashes. So, bear with me and when I get it fixed, I'll post again (hopefully before the weekend).

Sick. Just sick. Makes you wish that there was something worse than the death penalty.

Babysitters jailed for baby rape

A story out of Florida got me thinking. A woman was caught on a school bus video camera of physically abusing a six-year old boy. Apparently, Coni Staton was angry that some of the kids were taunting her child.

After watching the video (the link above offers the clip), there appears no doubt that she pushed the boy and forced him on to a seat.

Staton was arrested the next day.

While I certainly agree that she shouldn't have manhandled the boy, what should she have done? According to the story, Staton told investigators that her foster daughter, in the back of the bus, was too afraid to get off. As a victim of constant bullying and a parent as well, I understand the fear and frustration that the woman and the child must feel. Often times, a child can't tell anyone about the abuse because they're terribly afraid of retribution. If the child does tell a parent, then it's just as likely the parents of the bully are either indifferent or incapable of stopping the child (at least in my experience).

Again, I am not condoning what this woman did. However, when it comes to your own child, emotions can easily get the best of you. When one of my children gets bullied (believe me that it happens a lot when you have children with spectrum disorders), my first thought is tremendous anger towards the perpetrator. In certain cases, the parent had the attitude of "boys will be boys" and nothing was done to correct the situation. In other incidences, the parent was either clueless or in denial that their little angel was any trouble (all the while laughing about it in the other room).

The mother of the boy, Trevina Crawford, said she was outraged by the video. "I don't even touch my son like that, so what gives her the God-given right to put her hands on my baby?" Crawford questioned.

Before we attack this woman for her actions, perhaps we should also see the video of the children taunting the poor girl. Perhaps we should see video of his parents parenting their son.

Maybe if Ms. Trevina had touched her son like that, he wouldn't be so quick to bully a little girl.

Hook 'em Horns!!

Very entertaining article from James Lileks in the Jewish World Review...

Another year gone by. Three hundred and sixty-five days — yet it seemed like a scant 52 weeks. Perhaps it was that extra second added on Jan. 1; threw everyone's internal clocks off. But before the year yields to its inevitable successor, let us look back at the notable moments of 2006. Yes, 2006. Tomorrow's news, today!

The spy stories continued to add up, as it became obvious that the administration was boosting employment statistics by hiring hundreds of thousands of people to read every cell phone text-message on the planet. "It's dull, useless, meaningless work," said one official, "but as long as it detracts from the search for terror suspects, great. And if it violates the right of teenagers to send inscrutable, abbreviated rants about their parents without fear of detection by indifferent authorities desperately combing acres of data for terror warnings, we're all for it."

Read the whole article here.

A very powerful, but neccesary read...

Spielberg Phone Home
by Rabbi Benjamin Blech

Time magazine calls it a masterpiece. And that's why Spielberg's Munich, a work of undeniable cinematographic brilliance, is nothing less than a cultural and political tragedy. The irony is incredible: The movie will leave its tens of millions of viewers with a message that is diametrically opposed to the true significance of 20th century Munich, and the events that led up to the tragedy Spielberg so powerfully captured in Schindler's List.

History has forevermore linked the Bavarian capital with the political failure of appeasement. It was in Munich that Hitler founded the Nazi party and it was here that the infamous Munich Pact was signed in September of 1938. England and France, afraid to take on evil, meekly surrendered to Germany's demands and deluded themselves into thinking that their "amiable discussions" had, in the unforgettable words of Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, "secured peace in our time." Appeasement, the world soon learned, was the mistaken belief, as Heywood Broun perceptively put it, that "if you keep on throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian."

Hitler correctly recognized the lack of response to his terror tactics as national weakness, and little more than a year later attacked Poland to begin World War II. Historians trace the birth of the Holocaust to the passive mindset of Munich.

How amazing then to find the very same Munich as the focus of Spielberg's film depicting the anguish of Israel's harsh response to the vicious murder of 11 of its Olympic athletes by Palestinian terrorists.

Spielberg explains why he feels the need for an even-handed approach to the aftermath of the Munich massacre: "Because the biggest enemy is not the Palestinians or the Israelis. The biggest enemy in the region is intransigence." What chutzpah! Does Spielberg mean the intransigence of Israel which has continued to offer land, peace and compromise to its Arab neighbors after every war meant to annihilate it? Or the intransigence of a people which has decided its national policy will not be the cowardice of Chamberlain but rather the determination of "the greatest generation" -- the Allies who fought iniquity head-on to the victory that saved mankind from universal barbarity?

And yet another irony: The Spielberg so conscience-stricken by "Golda's list" of Palestinian murderers designated for execution is the same man who, in Schindler's List, alerted the world to the horrible consequence of passivity in the face of evil.

Perhaps the greatest perversion of truth in Spielberg's Munich is the line he claims is the key to the entire film. In a scene that never actually happened, Golda Meir justifies the mission of the agents she sends to carry out justice with the words, "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." Golda never said it because she understood that holding mass murderers responsible is not a compromise with civilized values, but the only way to insure that civilization survives. It is only a world that abdicates the need for a Golda's list that ends up with a Schindler's list.

PUBLICITY, NOT PUNISHMENT

What Spielberg didn't bother to tell us in his manifesto for moral equivalence -- the film's clear and oft-repeated theme that, as Warren Bell succinctly summarized it, "When good guys kill bad guys, they're as bad as bad guys" -- is how the world responded to the Munich massacre which we now know marked the birth of media-covered terrorism. Avery Brundage, head of the International Olympic Committee, the same "courageous" leader who in 1936 had insisted on sending an American delegation to "Hitler's Games" in Berlin, reacted to the Olympic carnage by stressing that the most important consideration was now that "the games must be saved."

The Olympics, as a microcosm of the world, sent a clear message: Terrorists get publicity, not punishment. Jewish victims may be quietly mourned but their deaths don't require measures that will prevent their reoccurrence.

Golda Meir sent a squad of Israelis to do what for the second time in a generation the world refused to do. And, unlike the lie of Spielberg's Munich, the heroes of this action were not consumed by the kind of guilt that Hollywood liberals believe must accompany every act that lets criminals know evil cannot be countenanced. When Germany actually released some of the terrorists two months later, Golda said she was "literally physically sickened by Germany's capitulation" and by the realization that "that there is not one single terrorist held in prison anywhere in the world. Everyone else gives in."

Israel understood that "crime and punishment" is not only biblically mandated; it is the only alternative to the Munich of Chamberlain that inexorably led to mass murders perpetrated by the Master Reich.


FALLEN HERO

I came away from watching Munich with profound sadness because Steven Spielberg has always been one of my heroes. Spielberg so often made us proud of his identification with his people. Some years ago I met him and shared with him an insight that he admitted he never realized: While filming Schindler's List in Poland, Spielberg did the last editing cut on Jurassic Park. I hoped the remarkable connection between the two films wasn't lost on him. By all logic, the Jews should have disappeared during the centuries of persecution culminating with the Holocaust, just as the dinosaurs did eons earlier. But a remnant survived. That remnant filed by the grave of Oskar Schindler to give thanks. And it is survival that defines the miracle of the Jewish people.

Jewish survival is the priority of our historic mission. But for Spielberg in his Munich incarnation, as scripted by Tony Kushner, political correctness is the new god to be worshipped, even at the cost of national suicide. Kushner has already made clear what he thinks about Israel: "I wish modern Israel hadn't been born." Kushner is the paradigm of one who ardently believes that violence is never justified; only dialogue with our enemies will ever achieve peace.

Yes, Spielberg admits that Munich is "historical fiction," that he has taken license with some of the facts to make a more memorable movie. But what is unforgivable is the "moral message" he leaves with the viewer that distorts reality and affects how millions will judge the current Mideast impasse. Both sides, the film tells us, have an equal claim on our moral sensitivity. Yet it is only one side that seeks not a national homeland, as the script suggests, but the total destruction of the other. As a leading Palestinian cleric declared: "We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again... We will rule America... [and] Britain and the entire world -- except for the Jews. The Jews will not enjoy a life of tranquility under our rule... Listen to the Prophet Mohammed, who tells you about the end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew."

Both sides, the film tells us, are responsible for the collateral death of innocent bystanders. But what it does not make clear is that for Palestinians it is policy; for Israel it is only an unintended and much regretted consequence.

Too bad the movie does not include perhaps the single most relevant dialogue in Jonas' book, Vengeance, that served as the primary source for Munich. In assigning the mission, the agents are given clear instructions: If you get all of the names on the list, your mission is an incredible success. Get six or five, we will feel the message has been sent that Jewish blood is not cheap, that we will not sit idly by as the world did during the Holocaust. Even if you get only one or two, it will not have been in vain. But if you will be faced with a choice between killing any one on the list together with an innocent bystander or aborting your mission, your instructions are to do nothing.

That piece of information is probably the most crucial difference between the Munich terrorists and the Israeli hit-squad, yet it wasn't included in the film.

Munich concludes with a final insult: The disillusioned leader of the mission, who cannot abide the ideology of a country that dares to declare that it will no longer idolize the glorification of the Jew as victim, renounces his country and settles in Brooklyn. And so ends the hope of the Jewish people.

It never happened. And it makes whatever message Spielberg sought to bring to the screen indefensible. I beg Spielberg, one of the most brilliant filmmakers of our generation, to heed the advice to ET: "Phone home" to your people -- the people who will immortalize the courage of Schindler's survivors rather than condemn the heroic executioners of Munich's terrorists.