Periodic Periodical - News & Commentary - OQB.COMmunications Press & Media

23/02/2025

Berlin Film Festival Roundup
By Oliver Bradley

https://ejpress.org/berlin-international-film-festival-2025-cinema-sowcasing-jewish-and-israeli-experiences-makes-modest-return-amid-changing-atmosphere/

ejpress.org European Film Market - EFM Berlinale - Berlin International Film Festival Berlinale Forum / Forum Expanded Ethan Hawke Tilda Swinton Tilda Swinton Jenny Havemann 𝑻𝒊𝒎𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒆 𝑪𝒉𝒂𝒍𝒂𝒎𝒆𝒕.

  As this year’s 2025 Berlinale roundup has shown, there are ways to foster fairer representation of Jewish and Israeli themes alongside Palestinian narratives, regardless of the tragedies surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, it is crucial that the Berlinale continues to go agai...

11/12/2024

Although first published in 2019, Shani Mor's insight remains as current as ever.

"The Golan Heights and the Depths of Hypocrisy" - a good read for those wanting to delve into the world of diplomatic-double-standards.

The perennial issue of Israel’s borders flared up once again last week when President Trump announced that the U.S. will recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, the volcanic plateau that Israel conquered from Syria in 1967. To say that this decision goes against an almost universal c...

13/11/2024

Amsterdam is only a synonym of a much deeper problem. Thoughts of mine, published in "Minerva", Norway's leading foreign affairs journal.

https://www.minerva.no/antisemittisme/volden-i-amsterdam-folger-et-dystert-monster/460372

, , , ,

DEBATT

Krystallnatten minnes fortsatt, men minnet blir ikke forsvart, skriver Oliver Bradley som er medierådgiver for Europe Israel Press Association (EIPA). Foto: Oliver Bradley

Volden i Amsterdam følger et dystert mønster
Oliver Bradley

Israelske fotballhooligans får nå skylden for den siste ukens voldelige angrep mot jøder og israelere i Amsterdam.

Uavhengig av hooliganenes vulgære oppførsel kan den koordinerte heksejakten og den uhemmede fysiske volden som fulgte mot jøder, ikke bortforklares som typisk gjengjeldelse etter en kamp.

Volden som ble utløst, var ensbetydende med en pogrom, altså en samlet innsats fra grupper av rabiate arabiske migranter for å finne og skille ut jøder, uavhengig om de var israelere eller ikke, for å angripe dem fysisk.

Det var spesielt å merke seg at det hele utspilte seg rundt 9. november. Det er en dato som huskes spesielt for dagen da Berlinmuren falt i 1989. Det var også dagen for novemberprogromene, kjent som Krystallnatten i Tyskland, Østerrike og Böhmen. Dette var startpunktet for det nasjonalsosialistiske Tysklands systematiske jødeforfølgelse – den orkestrerte forløperen til Shoah.

Mantraet har vært slagord som , , , , og lignende.

Likevel, 79 år etter slutten av andre verdenskrig, er det tydelig at det vestlige samfunnet dramatisk har mislyktes i å nedkjempe fortidens trusler. Slike mantraer fremstår nå på mange måter som meningsløs og tom retorikk.

De vestlige samfunnenene avskaffer sine egne, historisk sett ganske unge, men hardt ervervede liberale friheter. Etterkrigs-europeernes tilbakeholdne tilnærming til å bekjempe trusler mot det liberale samfunn – som de vi har sett de siste månedene – truer med å ødelegge Europa slik vi kjenner det.

Mønsteret fra Amsterdam er tydelig: Den typen fysisk vold vi er vitne til i Europas gater i dag, er altfor ofte begått av grupper som stammer fra migrantmiljøer. Det er oppførsel som vi i Europa har sverget oss bort fra – spesielt siden 1968-revolusjonene som begynte å avvikle årtusener-gamle (ofte voldelige) strukturer.

Til tross for all den dårlige oppførselen vi må forholde oss til i samfunnet, er det ingen form for dårlig oppførsel som garanterer fysisk vold.

Men er motvold et alternativ for å forsvare seg mot vold slik vi har sett i Amsterdam?

Slik jeg ser det, har vi to valg: å fikse verden gjennom å følge det jødiske konseptet «Tikkun-Olam» (תיקון עולם) for å forbedre verden, eller å forberede oss på at vi gang på gang vil måtte forsvare oss mot vold.

Publisert 13.11.2024 - 10:59
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Dette er et debattinnlegg. Meningene som fremkommer, er skribentens.

Israelske fotballhooligans får nå skylden for den siste ukens voldelige angrep mot jøder og israeler ...

10/11/2024

The placard reads: "9 NOV. 1938 - REMEMBERING MEANS TAKING ACTION"

November 9th is particularly remembered by the general public as the day that the Berlin wall fell, in 1989. It was also the day, in 1938, of the November pogroms (Kristallnacht or Reichspogromnacht - in Germany, Austria and Bohemia), starting point of National Socialist Germany's systematic persecution of Jews - the orchestrated precursor of the Shoah.

" ", " ", " ", " ", " " and umpteen slogans like the one pictured here have been the mantras cloaking public awareness campaigns against Antisemitism, since 1945.

Yet, 79 years since the end of the Second World War, it is apparent that western society has dramatically failed to sustainably internalize the exhortations of the past and viably repel the dangers of the present.

Such mantras, as well meaning as people try to make them out to be, have become nothing more than meaningless rhetoric chockablock with nothingnesses.

Western society is exponentially abolishing its own rather young (historically) hard-won libertarian freedoms. But particularly post-war Europeans' white gloved approach to combating scourges, such as the ones we have been seeing in recent months, will eventually destroy Europe the way we know it.

The way I see it, we have two choices: either we fix the world (תיקון עולם) now, collectively, or "aux armes!"

(C) 2024 Oliver Q. Bradley - Periodic Periodical - News & Commentary - OQB.COMmunications Press & Media ............................................

11/10/2024

I've been warning people for years to AVOID FREE WiFi - a very common way to get HACKED and most probably the main reason many of you, who have been hacked, will have been hacked.

The article (link below) lists one of the common reasons why people have been getting hacked in droves.

If we must be so desperate to log onto a free wifi network (like when we're in the back of a Supermarket with no connection and briefly need to compare an item, online) then we should first be 100% sure that we're logging onto a legitimate wifi network.

How to know if the network is legitimate?
Depending on where you are, show a store clerk, waiter, hotel receptionist, etc. the Wifi network on your phone's list of available networks and ask them which one they believe to be legitimate - especially when there are multiple wifi networks that contain an establishment's name.

Then, log out as soon as there's no longer an urgent need to be logged in.

Publicly available free WiFis that require no password or no individualized password are utterly unsafe!

Individualized passwords that expire after a few hours or a few days are safer. Hotel passwords that include one's room number + last name are not ideal, but certainly safer than no password at all or those ridiculously-easy-to-figure-out passwords posted in a hotel lobby or hanging behind the bar of a restaurant.

None of us should be to blame for deceitful acts by hackers. But because WE DO KNOW that hackers are out there and ready to prey on us, also through Phishing emails, we can safely assume that we are partially responsible if we will have been hacked...

When hackers hack us, they also get access to our contact lists, contact list details and personal details hidden away in our files. So when we get hacked, information about our friends and family also risks falling into the hands of hackers.

So if we don't want to be safe for our own sake, then let's at least play it safe for everyone who's been saved in our contact list.

Rule of thumb: avoid free wifi, when possible. Even those of you using VPNs should be aware that VPNs can also get hacked - albeit with less frequency.

Oliver Bradley
Periodic periodical

This CNBC article provides some deeper insight.
Copyright ©️2024 CNBC

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/29/its-time-to-take-warnings-about-using-airport-public-wi-fi-seriously.html?utm_campaign=trueanthem&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook%7Cmain&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0BMAABHbaFfMHyPHzcSY3E7rj_KlDGczQuesf3SbmMGSrSPCywRIP6QCMV5NYR3w_aem_2FosktEF3hU8BH7FCunXXg&utm_id=120213053953770033&utm_content=120213053956520033&utm_term=120213053954180033

Copyright ©️2024 CNBC

Internet 'evil twins' are stalking airport Wi-Fi connections and the cybercriminals behind the rising attacks are rarely caught.

15/04/2024

Iran - ARD Kommentar von Oliver Mayer Ruth.

©️2024 ARD Das Erste Deutsche Fernsehen.

25/01/2024

My AP quote about Elon Musk's participation at our Krakow/Auschwitz symposium, on Monday.

Associated Press (AP): https://apnews.com/article/poland-holocaust-musk-auschwitz-64de614f79ab70de0c9f2ac8d509168e

Clearly, Elon Musk's appearance garnered the biggest interest of the journalists. But not only because of his visionary genius.

Unfortunately, his genius has also propelled him into cult figure status - infallibile, omniscient and messianic.

Musk's words and actions are Scripture to millions of his admirers around the world.

This is why Musk's [the demigod's] pollyannish approach to any topic - which includes his no-holds-bar crusade for the right to [even incitefull] free speech and unbridled propagation of [even unsubstantiated] information - remains a problem and our challenge when combating hate-speech, fake news and conspiracy theories.

Our aim was to imbue Musk (even if only by a droplet) with a sense of enlightenment about the potentially dangerous impact and consequences that our words can have and, because of this, about the social responsibilities that every single one of us holds - particularly influencers like him - when exercising our right to free speech.

European Jewish Association EIPA-Europe Israel Press Association

Elon Musk, who has been accused of allowing antisemitic messages on X, visited the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on Monday.

01/12/2023

If anyone wants to find a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, accepting the fact that it’s above all a religious-nationalist conflict – and not some race-based and settler-colonial artificial concept imported from Western campuses – would be an excellent place to start.

Commentary by
Anshel Pfeffer
Published in Haaretz הארץ

Even if you haven’t sat through the entire 47 minutes of the Israel Defense Forces’ compilation of the horrors of that day but have seen a bit of the GoPro footage made by the attackers themselves, you can see that they were constantly invoking God’s name, not the liberation of Palestine. And whenever they mention their victims – such as the video made by the attacker in which he calls his parents from inside one of the kibbutzim to brag about how many people he has just killed – they don’t call them “Israelis” or “colonial-settlers.” They simply call them “Jews.”

Yet there is a blatant refusal to take them at face value. To listen to what they actually say.

Acknowledging that Hamas’ killers claimed to be acting in the name of their religion is not maligning Islam – or to use another fashionable term, “Islamophobic.” It doesn’t mean that they are the sole authentic representatives of a faith that has hundreds of millions of adherents. It is simply sticking to the facts. However, this is somehow inconceivable to almost every Westerner writing or opining on the events.

There are two main reasons for this denial. The first is the total lack of any frame of reference for a war taking place in our lifetimes in which religion is a major motive. A civilization that can come up with a multi-faith area and expect people of any faith to actually pray in it really has no concept of the place faith has in people’s lives. And when clever people who make a living out of speaking in the media don’t understand something, they usually deflect and use terms they do understand, despite their irrelevancy and inadequacy.

The second is that the partisans of the Palestinian cause who do understand the religious aspects – many of them don’t – prefer to use these Western terms as well because they believe, with good cause, that addressing those aspects won’t help endear their cause to Western audiences. So they emphasize the “resistance” in Hamas’ name and ignore the “Islamic.” But they are doing their cause no favors with this approach.

https://us18.campaign-archive.com/?e=d774673aeb&u=d3bceadb340d6af4daf1de00d&id=400aae01b5

European Jewish Association European Friends of Israel Israel in Europe EIPA-Europe Israel Press Association Haaretz.com

22/11/2023

An interesting read (in Italian but possible to read using a translator) about the challenges of optimizing the boarding processes of airlines.

Il sistema più diffuso non è molto efficiente e da tempo se ne sperimentano di alternativi, ma senza grandi progressi per le code al gate e a bordo

20/10/2023

The Legal Aspects of Hamas’s Murderous Attack on Israel
By Pnina Sharvit Baruch

Hamas’s deliberate attack on Israelis and the atrocities it committed fall firmly under the category defined by international law as war crimes and crimes against humanity, and amount to genocide. Significantly, Israel is responding in accordance with the laws of armed conflict.

Read more: https://www.inss.org.il/publication/sword-of-iron-law/?utm_source=activetrail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=INSS%20Insight%20|%20The%20Legal%20Aspects%20of%20Hamas%e2%80%99s%20Murderous%20Attack%20on%20Israel
INSS Insight No. 1769, October 18, 2023

Colonel (res.) Adv. Pnina Sharvit Baruch joined the INSS in 2012 as a senior researcher and heads the program on law and national security. She retired from the Israel Defense Forces in 2009, after serving in the International Law Department of the Military Advocate General (MAG) Unit for twenty years, five of which (2003 - 2009), she was head of the Department. In this capacity, she was a senior legal advisor responsible for advising IDF commanders and decision makers at the governmental level on a wide variety of issues relating to international law and administrative law, among them: the laws of armed conflict and occupation of territory; naval law; counter-terrorism; security liaison; border demarcation; and conflict resolution. She commanded the operational legal advisors at the IDF. Adv. Sharvit Baruch also served as a legal advisor in Israel's delegations to negotiations with the Palestinians, from the early contacts and thereafter. In 2000, she also participated in the negotiations with Syria.

The Murderous Attack In September 2005, Israel completed its disengagement from the Gaza Strip, evacuating 25 settlements and withdrawing its troops. Hamas, a radical Islamic terror organization, forcibly took control of Gaza in June 2007 and has been the de facto government there since. The organiz...

13/07/2023

Since the advent of social media, it has always been harder to find sources for clean and accurate journalism.

Toby Anne Axelrod - the winner of multiple journalism awards - is more than an amazing writer and vibrant storyteller. Her commitment to honest reporting stems from her tireless determination as a resolute fact-finder and fair listener, averse to third-party-hearsay!

It's no wonder that her accomplishments are once again being honored.

Congratulations Toby for winning 1ST PLACE of the American Jewish Press Association’s 2023 Annual Simon Rockower Award in the category "Excellence in Writing about Jewish Heritage and Jewish Peoplehood in Europe", in the division "Web-based Outlets; Digital Only, Website Only and Wire Services."

She received this year’s award for her unabated, in-depth coverage of an abuse-of-power case involving one of Germany’s leading liberal rabbis. Her series of articles on the subject has not only garnered her praise from all spectrums of Jewish life for her fair, unbiased reporting, she also received particular kudos from the jury who, in their award statement wrote, “while some editors and reporters may say that we should not be reporting on “embarrassments” that put the Jewish community in a bad light (either here in the United States or abroad), there is tremendous value in shining a light on injustice and wrongdoing.”

Toby Axelrod is an author, prize-winning journalist, and sought-after translator based in Berlin, Germany. She is Germany correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) wire service. Her articles have appeared or have been reprinted in media around the world, including the Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung, The London Jewish Chronicle and the The New York Times. The former staff writer and editor at the The New York Jewish Week has also won numerous awards from the New York Press Association and the American Jewish Press Association.

LINKS:

https://www.ajpa.org/page-18179

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/greathomesanddestinations/09gh-location.html
The New York Times feature

https://www.amazon.com/Books-Toby-Axelrod/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AToby+Axelrod
Books written or translated by Toby Axelrod
Amazon.com

https://www.ajpa.org/page-18179
American Jewish Press Association's Simon Rockower Award list for 2023

https://www.jta.org/author/toby-axelrod
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

12/07/2023

My Milan Kundera Full Immersion
Memories from 33 Years Ago
By Oliver Bradley

When the cinematic adaptation of Milan Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being" was first released in US cinemas, in February 1988, the possibility of the Berlin Wall suddenly falling or the Soviet Empire unravelling seemed to play an inconceivable role for the foreseeable future, despite it happening a mere 21-months later.

Being a fan of historical fiction, I naturally went to see the film in a movie theater located at the heart of a major US university. And typical for most movie screenings I had ever gone to previously - with the exception of interactive cult films like "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" or "The Blues Brothers" - the audience, including me, watched this emotion-packed and politically-charged film in relative silence and passivity - spawning few visible reactions or emotions during or after the screening.

Fast forward, my first visit to Dresden, East Germany, in September 1990.

Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), was in its last month of existence. I had just embarked on a three-month train journey that would see me traveling through the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria - with the hope of getting some of the feel about what life might have been like behind the infamous "Iron Curtain".

While ending that first visit to Dresden, I looked for a way to kill a few hours while waiting for a night-train to Prague.

Not far from the station, I was drawn towards a huge crowd of people in front of a movie theater engaged in riled-up discussions about East German state oppression - their conversations animated by the plot of the film they were cuing in line to see.

The "Unbearable Lightness of Being" was just making its eastern European premiere, three years after its debut in the west.

Needless to say, the crowd's passionate exchanges of personal experiences during the communist era and my quest to get a feel of what aspects of life might have been like behind the infamous "Iron Curtain" saw me eager to watch the film again.

My second viewing of the film was a sharp contrast to my first, three years earlier. The audience's interaction with the film transformed them into protagonists. Their boiling emotions were manifested by constant, loud commentaries as well as intermittent shouts of protest and yells of disgust.

For two hours, I felt transported back only a few months in time, from before the Berlin Wall had fallen.

Although I had visited East Berlin several times during the communist era - primarily to go visit family graves in the Weissensee district - those day trips and the several East German border checks I had experienced never imbued within me a sense of the desperation which people locked up in a totalitarian environment might have felt.

Despite East Germany's communist monopoly having ended only a few months earlier, I could still feel acute and lingering anger, frustration and even trauma which many people in the former East Block must have experienced.

Through Milan Kundera's work, through that particular visit in Dresden, it was possible for me to be transported for the first time into a full-immersion East Block experience.

And who would have known at that time of that first visit to Dresden that I would actually find myself working in eastern Germany less than a year later - fully immersed, if not a bit overdosed, in a seemingly lifetime of East Block experiences.

Perhaps that second "Unbearable Lightness of Being" experience subconsciously helped pave my way there. Who knows. Maybe...............................................
Milan Kundera 1929-2023

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_Kundera
Milan Kundera 1929-2023