The Blog is Back – Thoughts from the Square

View from the Square

16-years since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the public square next to where he was killed is filled with only ten-thousand. 15-years ago I stood in the same spot with more than one-hundred thousand mourners.

I was 18-years-old, 3-months in Israel and living on Kibbutz Maagan Michael. I did not understand most of what was being said, my Hebrew was not yet very good. But with the songs whose music I did not yet know, and the speeches whose words I could not yet decifer, I made a fateful decision that would change my life forever.

As the national anthem was sung and the lump in my throat gave way to tears, I decided that I would become a citizen of this country. I wanted to be part of it all. I felt that through tragedy there could be hope. I was idealistic, and admitedly so, incredibly naive.

The lady has spoken and the election battle has begun

The lady has spoken

A glamorous Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has called a August 21 election, announced at a press conference outside the Governor General Quentin Bryce’s Canberra residence Government House. With a pearl necklace and a glass-slipper encrusted foot, Gillard reiterated that she ‘made a pledge to the Australian people’ to become a fully elected Prime Minister who plans to move Australia forward with changes to immigration, environmental and economic policy.

Though the exact policy changes the Labor Party will make, such as a so-far unannounced environmental plan, and those that differ her from the Rudd government of which she was a part of, were a little harder to pin down.

Whilst promising to make the country ‘a better Australia, not a bigger one’, Gillard also warned that opposition Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott threatened to take Australia backwards with poor leadership and unsustainable policy choices.

Hear, hear Roman – You got away with it

Smug

What a fantastic step forward in justice. Roman Polanski, famed art-house film director and creative genius will not be extradited to the United States from Switzerland to face the 30-year old sex offense charges that he skipped out on all that time ago never to return.

How wonderful, he will go back to making films that will be shown in film festivals throughout the world. He will shake hands with dignitaries, celebrities and the common folk who line red carpets hoping for a glimpse of fame. He will be acclaimed as a ground-breaking and visionary director who changed the face of cinema.

How truly great it is that Roman Polanksi will never have to serve his sentence for the rape and sodomy of a 13-year-old girl whom he plied with alcohol and forced his pedophile self onto, violating a child against her will in the worst possible way.