Tag Archives: Martial Arts

Krav Maga is martial art of war crime

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Commando Krav MagaI recently overheard a karate instructor mention an Israeli hand-to-hand fighting technique called Krav Maga being adopted by paramilitary forces worldwide, which of course excites the youngsters. So I looked it up. Speaking for social justice bloggers everywhere, I have to admit, Israel is just a gift that keeps on giving!

Exhibit 1: online images of Krav Maga fighters are color coded to show which is the attacker.

Perhaps because this fighting style is a reality based training method.

Exhibit 2: Krav Maga teaches discipline like the Asian martial art traditions, but does not assume a pretense of honorable conduct. Its rules are: no rules and no restraint. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

From descriptions of its ethics, I found it hard to distinguish Krav Maga from bar brawling. To judge by some online disclaimers appended to the principles of Krav Maga, of few webmasters may have become uncomfortable with the similarity they bore with the IDF’s code of conduct in Gaza.

Here, for example, are its basic principles:

        * You’re not going to care how much damage you’re going to cause.
* Cause as much damage as possible and run.
* Do not try to prolong a fight. Do what needs to be done and escape.

Expressed in more formal terms:

        * Do not get hurt
* Neutralize your attacker as fast as possible
* Go from defending to attacking as quickly as possible
* Use the body’s natural reflexes
* Strike at any vulnerable point
* Use any tool or object available to you

Of course applied to military strategy, this could mean the disproportionate application of force, and using weapons that might have been banned by international treaty.

A survey of Krav Maga training websites reveal it’s based on Israel’s history of fighting for its survival in the Middle East, and by the way, it is not a sport.

Krav Maga is an evolving art that adapts to an ever changing world, both locally and globally.

As a result, Krav Maga is the ideal self-defense system for use on the street — a place where no rules exist.

Militant Fratricide, Say Shiboleth?

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So I got onto this because of a comment posted supposedly proving that All Palestinians are evil because of one Arab-on-Jew act of violence which sounds a lot like it was instigated by the Jewish kids.

And I’ve pondered for the past day or so, Why doesn’t the commentator get upset about Jew-on-Jew violence?

I would say, you know, that the closer one is in kinship to ones attacker or victim, the more upsetting it is.
And I thought about “Say Shiboleth” which is from the Book of Judges. Fairly near the end. Chapter 12.

The Israelites in the Gilead were at war with the Israelites of Ephraim. When they had slaughtered so many in Ephraim, they were picking off the stragglers at a ford of the River Jordan.

The guards would challenge anybody to say “Shiboleth” which the Ephraimite accent would render as “sibolet”
Once identified as Ephraimites, the fugitives would be taken out and slaughtered.

There was a similar Kin-slaying between the tribe of Benjamin and the Rest of Israel. again in the book of Judges and in which the Benjaminites were almost exterminated.

This sort of thing happened all the Damn Time.

As Solomon lay dying, two of his sons divided the kingdom..

The Tribes of Judah and Levi formed the Kingdom of Judah and the other tribes formed the Kingdom of Israel.

At the time of the Assyrian Conquest, the time of the prophets Jonah and Isaiah, and several of the other prophets, All Of Whom are quoted extensively in the “Right of Return” rhetoric, when they said “Israel” these are the people who were meant.

That Israel would be restored. Neither Israel nor Judah had yet been subjugated.

Also, the Assyrians and their successors on the Imperial Scene Babylon and Persia…

DID NOT take the entire people out of the land. They took the aristocracy, the priests and the artisan class.

And the military.

They didn’t need MORE peasants in Babylon, they already had plenty of Poor Folk.

Sad thing about the Economic Crimes of Conquest and Slavery is people are sorted according to how much money they can bring to their new masters.

Dehumanization on the grandest of scales.

In between the division of the Kingdom and the Assyrian Conquest, there were fratricidal wars between Israelites and Judeans.

All… The… Damn… Time…

When the Persians allowed the Priesthood to go back to Judah and Israel, two of the most violent Hate Freaks in Jewish history were the leaders of the “return”.

Their names were Ezra and Nehemiah.

They basically re-conquered the people who had been left behind. The poor who had tended the land all the time the rich were in Babylon.

It was like, “Yeah, you guys took care of OUR land for US, thanks for your service, now get your stinkin’ arses off OUR land.. and by the way, we no longer considere you to be Pure Israelites because while the priesthood was away you intermarried with Other Tribes of Israel and with Gentiles”

True Racism at its finest. Hating your Own Cousins for not being “pure”.

But back to the axe-wielding “militant”. An axe isn’t a weapon of choice. You would have to be well trained in the Martial Arts to use it effectively as a weapon. A real “militant” out to do some terrorism would have some kind of weapon that’s EFFECTIVE.

But he was Palestinian, therefore he must be a Terrorist.

If a Jewish Israeli shoots or stabs or gets into a fistfight with another Jewish Israeli, why isn’t one or both of them called “Militant” or “Terrorist”?

Because it’s fratricidal, brother against brother?

The Palestinians are the closest relatives the Jews have in the entire world, more so than any other Arab group.
And proven through DNA.

More than that, so is everybody else, sprung from one source…

Anybody rising up and smiting his neighbor, friend, enemy, foreigner from the farthest reaches of the world, is smiting his Brother.
Those who don’t believe the Bible on that can believe the DNA.

Either we speak out against fratricide, matricide, parricide, whatever the feminine-specific term is for killing your sister, infanticide…

Or we join hands in common guilt with those who actually do the killing.

We take the Mark of Cain upon ourselves.

It’s one or the other, and can’t be both, and can’t be “neither”.

We can’t sit on that fence.
That fence won’t even support ONE person, far less the whole world.

R68 training sessions, Saturday Aug 23

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There will be a series of trainings to prepare demonstrators for the events of the DNC week. Trainings are as scheduled Saturday, August 23, starting at noon, in two sessions, 12-3pm and 3-6pm, at Lincoln Park in front of the State Capitol in Denver.

SESSION ONE: 12-3pm

12pm – 1pm
Training Area 1
Health & Safety for Activists (Colorado Street Medics)

Training Area 2
Non-Technical Blockades (Re-create 68 Alliance)

1pm – 2pm
Training Area 1
Logistics Training (Unconventional Denver)

Training Area 2
Self-Defense for Protesters (Gumm Mixed Martial Arts)

2pm – 3pm
Training Area 1
Know Your Rights (People’s Law Project)

Training Area 2
Drumming for Demos (The Back Bone Campaign)

SESSION TWO: 3-6pm
The above lessons, repeated in the 3, 4 & 5 time slots:

Activism home grown

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My siblings and I frequently talk about our “activist” upbringing. We grew up with parents who walked their talk. Our mom hung out with the radical nuns protesting around Rocky Flats. And I can’t remember a single Thanksgiving where we didn’t have a couple of homeless men sitting at our dinner table. Our parents introduced them by name and we were expected to be gracious and make interesting conversation.

Then there was Robin, a retarded young man who was obsessed with a pair of moccasins that we had in our front closet. My mom made a rule that the front door be always open so that Robin could come in for his moccasins any time he wanted. As a mother, I question the wisdom of this now but, at the time, we just accepted that at any time Robin might walk in and open our front closet. It wasn’t anything we worried about….just another one of mom’s people.

At the 1975 fall of Saigon, Divine Redeemer, our home church with hundreds of families, decided to sponsor a family fleeing Communist oppression. They asked that someone step forward to host a family of 8 people for several months. Guess who stepped forward? Much to our horror, my mom and dad did. We had 6 of our own children, aged 6 to 15, living in a small house and suddenly we had 16 people living under the same roof. They didn’t speak a word of English. We certainly didn’t speak Vietnamese. Our mom and their dad were able to communicate in broken French.

We reminisce about how our mom used to read little kid books to them, VERY LOUDLY, as though she could make them understand English if only she shouted. They used to stare at us and we back at them while she did this…all of us trying hard not to laugh.

Because my dad had been a part of the war in Viet Nam and a number of families we knew had been widowed during that war, we lost friends because of the choice we made to support this family. I didn’t understand this at all at the time. It’s taken many years for me to understand that to stand for something, anything, is to risk the wrath of those who don’t agree.

As kids, we remember it as crazy fun. We made Chef Boyardee pizzas and they chopped off the heads of weird little fish and made carrots look like flowers. We were all about the same age, they dressed weird, we dressed weird….we laughed and figured out how to communicate even without words. They showed us martial arts. We taught them to hula hoop. We laughed our asses off day after day.

Once, the 10-year-old girl, incredibly beautiful, her name was Ngoc (pronounced Nop), and I sat on the swing in the front yard. She placed her hand in front of my face, put up her index finger and said “Mot.” “Mo,” I said, knowing that she was counting. “Hai.” “Hi.” “Bah. Bon. Nam. Sau.” After she taught me to count to ten she grabbed my hand and rushed me into the living room where 15-20 people sat, always at the ready, listening to the Vietnamese singing American anthems, which was both lovely and hilarious since they didn’t really understand the words. “Ma cunry tis a vee. Swe lan a liverty.” Ngoc got everyone’s attention and suddenly 20 people were staring at me, a 14-year-old, not exactly at the age where I wanted a lot of scrutiny, and she said, encouragingly, “Mot.” I felt like throwing up but I understood that the stakes were high so with red cheeks I recited what I just learned. When I finished a loud roar went up….I swear there were even a few tears from the Vietnamese parents.

This family went on to become a success story. Ultimately, the boys, Phat, Dat and Loi, became Tony and Billy and Joey. They went to DU, studied engineering. Mom and Dad opened a successful restaurant on Federal Boulevard in Denver. The girls married Vietnamese men and carried on Vietnamese tradition on their new soil. Oddly, my two brothers married Asian women, one Vietnamese, one Thai.

This family had another baby after they came to the United States. They wanted to choose an American name to honor the country that had given them a second chance. They chose Helen. My mother’s name.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two decades “wasting” my time doing things that may or may not ever register on anyone’s radar. One of my inspirations has been Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” That’s what my family taught me….what I’d like to teach my own.