Your blogs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-16995239

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falklandislands/9...

On 19th February the Board will be discussing a Constitutional Amendment to allow member organisations to nominate a Deputy of age under 35, with full voting rights.

As the Deputy who successfully brought a Constitutional Amendment to abolish the upper age limit for Board Officers, I strongly oppose this "tokenist" Amendment.

All age-related discrimination is wrong - whether positive or negative. The Board should attract the best people, period - regardless of age. There are a number of Deputies who are under 35 already and they got there on merit - not by means of an artificial age "free pass". If we pass this amendment then the door is wide open to all categories underrepresented to follow suit, eg women or the non-able bodied.

These are extracts from an article by Ha'aretz journalist Meron Rapoport, in this month's LeMonde Diplomatique (www.mondediplo.com):-
"In testimonies collected and published by the NGO Breaking the Silence, we learn what Israeli soldiers did, and were expected to do, in the West Bank and Gaza in the past decade, to impose the occupation.

“I’ll tell you when I flipped. We were in action in Gaza… We were in a trench and children got closer and threw stones. The orders were that the moment [a Palestinian] can hit you with a stone, he can hit you with a grenade... so I shot him. He was 12, or 15, something like that. I don’t think I killed him. I’m saying that … to sleep better at night. I flipped when … I talked about it with my friends [and] family: I was fucking aiming [a weapon] at someone and I shot him in the leg, in the ass. Everyone was happy, they made me a hero, they announced it in the synagogue. I was in shock”

In his book If This Is a Man, Primo Levi recalls a dream he kept having in Auschwitz.... He was back home, telling his family about the horrors of Auschwitz, but nobody was listening ... This was his nightmare: to tell his story and not be heard, or understood.

What's the Commission for Women in Jewish Leadership all about?

A snapshot of the Jewish community last summer revealed that women comprise only a fifth of all trustees (of Jewish Leadership Council member organisations), a quarter of chief executives and a quarter of members of the elected Body, the Board of Deputies. British Jewish women are high educational and professional achievers: the 2001 Census demonstrated that in the top occupational categories, Jewish women matched and in most cases proportionally out-performed men in the general population. However, the Jewish community is failing to benefit from their skills and expertise at a leadership level, where women are significantly under-represented.

The Commission on Women in Jewish Leadership (CWJL) - an initiative of the JLC- was set up to strengthen the community by addressing this gender imbalance in Jewish communal leadership.

http://muchcourageandpeace.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/an-overpowering-sten...

Ok so that is your position....

But why do people adopt a maximalist position and stand by a statement that is so obviously false ? Especially as there are near alternatives that that are as obviously true as aZas is obviously false?

Eg. " anti Zionism is often a manifestation of anti semitism? What is WRONG with that ?

http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishNews/Article.aspx?id=257107