Ayoon Wa Azan (Rabbi Ovadia Yosef has died)

Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is dead. I say: Good riddance. When he was alive, I did not ask for as much as a flu to befall him, and my objection is limited to that: objection (I refuse to talk to them or shake hands with them). Yosef was the spiritual leader of the religious Shas Party and leader of the Haredim, the Sephardic Jews whom the Spaniards wanted to kill or force to convert to Christianity, before they fled with the Arabs to the Maghreb where the Muslim Arabs protected them. So Ovadia Yosef showed his gratitude by insisting that all people must be the servants of the Jews. I believe Yosef is now at the gates of hell, with his followers chasing after him to batter him for misleading them with his extremism and obscenity, and taking them with him to hell. I pause here to say that during my decades-long work as a journalist, there would be days or weeks with nothing news worthy happening and deserving comment. In those days, a journalist would try to invent something, or assign exaggerated importance to something that is not at all important. These days, there are a few dozen stories taking place every day worth reporting, to the extent that the journalist is confused as to what to prioritize and what to ignore. Today, I will try to present important news and other less important news that the reader might have perhaps missed, as we focus on Egypt, Syria, and the U.S. government shutdown. - Israel's Supreme Court rejected a request from two leftist activists to change the Israeli identity to say that the nationality of its bearer is Israeli, rather than Jewish. Israel is the only religious state in the world, which means that non-Jews are not real citizens in it. Even the Vatican does not write on the identity of its cardinals ‘catholic.’ - Israeli extremists and settlers continue to attempt to storm Al-Haram Al-Sharif, writing slogans insulting to Islam and Muslims, and even Christians, on the walls surrounding it. Meanwhile, the Muslims are busy killing one another in their countries and wherever they are able to do so. - There is a fatwa in the West Bank permitting men and women to meet online. Before it, there was a fatwa in Gaza prohibiting it. Each side presented its arguments, but I don’t want to delve into a debate that I would not know how to get myself out of. I just want to say that either way, the Israeli occupation makes it very difficult for Palestinians to meet freely, while women could be harassed and delayed for hours at occupation checkpoints. - In an article about Waterstones, one of the most prominent book selling businesses in Britain, I paused at a phrase that mentioned that hundreds of booksellers had closed down in Britain. I have been visiting the United States since the 1960s. I used to buy books from six different bookshops, all on the same street. But year after year, the number of libraries shrank, and in the end, there was only one left. This year, when I returned to New York, I found that this bookstore, too, had been closed. Curse the Internet and all members of the technology family. I will never read a book in the form of a ‘disk’ even if my life depended on it. - Every day, terrorist attacks kill dozens of Iraqis. A terrorist suicide bomber blew himself up in an Iraqi elementary school, killing 33 people, including 12 young children. This terrorist is an enemy of Islam and Muslims, just like Ovadia Yosef was. - Finally, students at a Hungarian university were banned from wearing miniskirts, so they went on strike. What did they do? They protested while naked. I go hunting in Hungary once a year since the late 1970s, and I have never seen nudes there from any gender. Before that I had graduated from university and went there, and all the students there were fully clothed. I have no comment about the female students in Hungary because I have water in my mouth. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arab Today.