Iran Is Run By A Bunch Of Unbelievably Wacky People...

The Iranian leader, unpronounceable Ahmandinjad,is advising Israel to pack up and move somewhere else. Maybe there is someone named Moses that can lead them through the desert for 40 years or so. And what a logistical nightmare it would be to move Israel, as Moses [80 years old at the time and probably became very cranky about these headaches] found out...

Moses and the people were in the desert, but how was he going to feed 2 or 3 million people? [Phoenix is about that size today] According to the Quartermaster General of the Army, Moses would have to have had to come up with some 1500 tons of food each day... and that would take about two freight trains, each a mile long, They would also have to have firewood to use in cooking the food- maybe 4000 tons or so per day; and do it every day for forty years {Did they have freight trains then?}.

And oh yes, they would have to have water. If they only had enough to drink and wash a few dishes, it would take 11,000,000 gallons each day. That would take a freight train with a lot of tank cars -- just to bring water!

Before they got to the desert they had to get across the Red Sea --at night. Had they gone on a narrow path, double file, the line would be about 800 miles long and require 35 days and nights to complete. That means that there had to be a space in the Red Sea (provided by God), 3 miles wide enabling them to walk 5000 abreast to get across in a single night.

But the wacky Iranian leader continues to call for wiping Israel off the face of the map or moving them somewhere else like Alaska.

I advise them to pack up and move out of the region before being caught in the fire they have started in Lebanon," said Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly called for the Jewish state to be relocated elsewhere on the planet.

Iran refuses to recognize Israel and opposes any two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ahmadinejad has in the past called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" or relocated as far away as Alaska.

All this angst about the tiny state of Israel...

The Return of Israel
On the campus of the Tel Aviv University in Israel there stands a remarkable museum called Beth Hatuphutsoth, 'House of the Dispersion'. It is a graceful new building packed with the very latest in audio-visual aids. It aims to show young Jews of today how their fathers preserved their beliefs and culture during centuries of wandering, how they kept themselves pure from inter-marriage, and how they returned to the land of their dreams. In a darkened bowl-shaped auditorium, rays of light project on to the curved ceiling above the audience a world map where tiny stars represent the known communities of Jews from the times of Assyria, Babylon and Rome onwards. Practically every country of the world has received Jews at some time. As the centuries pass by, the stars in the display move eerily, as persecution drives the Jews from one country to another. France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Great Britain - each act of terror is catalogued in lights. Sometimes the lights go out, as whole communities pass into oblivion. Then, amazingly, the pinpoints of light begin to move back to the Land of Israel, as the Return gets under way in the twentieth century.

Whole galleries of the Beth Hatuphutsoth museum are devoted to the fortunes of Jewish communities in particular lands - a pagoda-style synagogue modelled on the one in Peking, a reconstruction of a wedding in the Ukraine, a Jewish rabbi pleading for his life before a Jesuit priest in the Inquisition, and most moving of all, in letters of fire, the last words penned by Jews who faced death in the German Holocaust.

The pace and emotion quicken as the exhibition reaches the last joyful stages of the Return. Everything is painstakingly chronicled. First come the thoughts of a national home penned by Weizmann in Russia under the Czars, the publishing of Herzl's The Jewish State in 1896, and the Zionist Congress of 1897. There follows the slow, grinding labour of the early settlements in Palestine under the Turks. The British mandate after the First World War allows more and more Jews to return. Finally, the agony of Hitler's repression creates an irresistible pressure in Europe and precipitates a chain of events leading finally to the formation of the State of Israel in 1948.

Historically, the Persians have always been screwing around in the region. They occupied Egypt for a while and had many conflicts with the Greeks for centuries, before Alexander the great kicked their Aryan asses. So this may just be a continuation of their belligerent pre-Muslim days.