Me, Myself and My Qassam

Remember the "Tzevah Adom" I experienced last week while passing out Suphganiyot? Well I caught the Qassam!

The Sderot municipality stores the most recent Qassams landing in the city at the police station. There I saw all different types of rockets - some small, and some very large and in charage.

They really look like water pipes!

Also, the color of a Qassam signifies which terrorist group fired it.

Yellow Qassams with writing on the tail are fired by the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigades, the military wing of Palestinian President Abbas's Fatah Party, which the U.S State Department identifies as a terrorist organization.
So Abbas goes to the Annapolis Peace Summit last week - sponsored by American President Bush - and is head of an organization the U.S deems as terrorist - hmmmm, that's odd.

Back to the Qassams, the red and yellow ones are fired by terrorists from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the red and green ones are fired by our friends in charge of Gaza, those boys (maybe even a few girls) from Hamas.

Speaking of Hamas, they want to establish a hudna (truce) Israel. Why? Because they heard Israel is preparing a large scale invasion of Gaza to stop them from firing rockets on us here in Sderot and the western Negev.
So what exactly is a hudna?

It's not a ceasefire, which many western journalists have made it out to be, but according to the authoritative Islamic Encyclopedia (London, 1922):

A hudna is a "temporary treaty" which can be approved or abrogated by Islamic religious leaders, depending on whether or not it serves the interests of Islam.

A hudna cannot last for more than 10 years .

The Prophet Muhammad set the precedent for using hudnas for military advancements in 628, when he established the Hudaybia treaty, where he made a hudna with a tribe of Jews.

After three years, when his band of Muslim warriors were readily prepared to destroy The Jew (as Borat says it), they subsequently wiped the Jewish tribe out.

So Hamas wants a Hudna... too bad! You're not going to wipe The Jew out, we're here to stay baby.

Today, I visited Kibbutz Nir-Am, located two minutes outside Sderot. Ami Rabin, the head of security, showed us the state of the bomb shelters on the kibbutz.

This shelter is the one located in the area for the elderly. He told us when the "Tzevah Adom" sounds, they are supposed to run to this shelter in 15 seconds.

Besides the fact most old people can't run, this shelter is disgusting! You can't go in it.

Ami said there was a little water down there. Me being me, I wanted to see for my self. Oops! I stepped in a huge pool of water - it had to have been a few feet deep.

Of the 13 shelters on the kibbutz, only 6-7 are inhabitable. The rest need close to $20,000 worth of repairs.

Supposedly, the government had the money to fix up the 78 shelters needing repairs in the western Negev and Sderot. But no one down here saw the money - it supposedly went to build shelters in Arab villages in the north of Israel.

You hear so much about how the Israeli government does not support the Israeli-Arab community, but you never hear when the Israeli government, which supposedly is the savior of Jews all over the world, neglects Jews living in Israel!

Why was that money lost? Why doesn't the government do anything to support it's citizens?

For example, Ami's father fought in the western Negev against the Egyptians in the 1948 Independence War to defend Kibbutz Nir-Am. Here's a picture from the kibbutz of a captured Egyptian machine gun during the 1948 Independence War.

So Ami's father helped establish the State of Israel, and what does the state do for him? Nothing.

The Israeli government expects him, in his old age, to keep defending his country. How? By sitting in his house and praying that a rocket doesn't land on him? What chutzpa!

We really need to help protect the people living in Sderot and the western Negev. Well, if I had the money (I actually live in 90211), I'd drop a few bucks to keep the 180,000 residents living under the threat of constant rocket fire safe. Wouldn't you?