Seriously, this is some reasonably good advice. Don’t fly El-Al if you can help it. Why? Pretty simple. Overbooking.

With El-Al, you could find yourself trying to get on your flight only to realize that your flight is full. Yes, full. How does that make sense, I mean, you bought the ticket, right?

Wrong. El-Al sell more tickets than seats. They assume a certain amount of people will cancel their flights, which might not happen at all times. Which was more or less what happened to me.

I had to take an El-Al connection flight from Zürich to Tel-Aviv. The flight to Zürich was smooth, no food or anything, but at least the flight was smooth and the boarding went smoothly and professionally. An SAS flight from Copenhagen.

In contract, El-Al’s flight was absolutely, horrible. I was lucky to even actually get on the stupid flight. Oh, right, and their food absolutely sucked, I just refused it right away, same with their coffee and crap like that.

On the flight there were a whole lot of orthodox Jews. The kind that looks a lot like ZZ Top. Annoying little fellows who screw things up wherever they happen to be at the time.

Seriously, take my advice, avoid El-Al if you can.

I keep a log where I write down all my dreams. I haven’t actually published anything I wrote down in there, but, I saw this entry and thought I should publish it.

The following entry was written in the 1st of August, 2006.

I went to see my old house.

I passed through a bad neighborhood, and saw the burning of communist flags, and thought how bad they’re treated. (Afternote: I was passing through a pretty tough neighborhood.)

Then I got into the building, and told Judy (a person I never knew existed), who apparentaly was the guard who guarded the exit from the elevator and convinced her to let me go past her. I told her my name and she didn’t remember me. I got out of the building and got back, and she wasn’t there. Interesting, so I went to the right door, and listened. I heard my mom talking to some more people. When I opened the door, nothing. They weren’t there.

With all the world’s trouble, it seems to be as if nobody’s actually taking care of a serious breach in many people’s freedom - forced conscription. Being forced to serve in the military by the government with no non-combatant alternative and no regard to one’s beliefs and such.

My main target is of course Israel, who has a record of imprisoning people with conflicting opinions who refused to serve in the army. I will allude to the Social-National (AKA Nazi) party here, who after being elected often was known for imprisoning protesters and such, as well as Stalin’s reign over the Soviet Union, which showed similar behavior.

This is a serious breach of human rights, and apparantly also biased towards Jews, who can much more easily choose not to serve under the definition of being conscience objectors, as shows this Amnesty-issued document. Also, if we look under the section dubbed “Case Histories”, the example of Ali Said Naffa shows that the IDF simply lacks flexibility. Did the imprisonment convince him? No.

“The only democracy in the middle east” my ass. If democracy means “getting minorities sent to prison because they refuse to join an organized mass murder”, I guess democracy it is.