Mr Bagel needs your help; and would like to set a few things straight...

The Final Countdown:

Well its five hours to go until the voting for the JIB awards finish.

There's a half a world between me and the rest of most of you.
Living in Australia, in the outback is very hard. I don't have the usual 'Jewish connections', in fact I see my Rabbi and Shule in Sydney, very rarely every time I do a 4ookm journey to Sydney.

We will be moving in 6 months time back to Sydney from this beautiful but very remote place that we live in. Its tough being were we live, unlike most of you, you see the Internet as simply a auxiliary connection to a few Jews speckled around the world.

The fact of the matter is, to us Danielle aka Baleboosteh, and myself Aaron ,aka Bagelblogger you are our world.

It may sound really lame, but every moment we spend on the computer on the Internet is in an effort to try to connect with other fellow Jews. For us there is at the moment no other way.

You are our family, and like families we do argue, we do disagree occasionally.

Now I will not deny that any one voting for Danielle or myself in the next 5 hours would be greatly appreciated, the voting in our class is very very tight.

Danielle: Best Photo/Graphics Blog

Aaron: Best of the Rest

Aaron: Best Designed Blog

But I'd like to talk about something else.

Something more important than winning.

I'd like to talk to all the fellow bloggers out there (like us) who dont have 350 commenters visiting their blogs, the bloggers who sometimes question themselves why they blog, and do they really get the return of the energy and emotion that they put in, back out.

All the smaller bloggers who have tirelessly advocated for Israel, tirelessly spread positive words and wrote advocating on Jewish issues.

There will be a few happy winners to day, they will get their JIB award for best..., whatever.

Some of them will go on and announce to the world 'Winners of 17 blog awards in the Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards', something that they should be ashamed of.

To the organization that pretended to support these awards, but actually used them as a cynical self promotion exercise, you should be ashamed of your selves. You will now have the chutzpah to publicize your 'awards' and announce yourselves as the award winning blogs of....

To these blogs and to their owners, you have done a disservice to yourselves and to the other bloggers which blog with such a passion.

The greatest disservice is the theft, yes strong word, theft of an award which should go to the bloggers who blogged all year round, not just when the awards are coming up.

To the bloggers who slogged it out, and wrote regardless of the lack of acclaim and thanks, who receive very little recognition, you are the real winners of these awards. You are the ones most worthy.

The bloggers who wrote 70 posts a month or more during the Lebanon War, not the bloggers who wrote 19 posts in the whole of 2007.

I would like to address the real winners of this years JIB Awards competition.

The bloggers who refused to compromise, refused to do things they knew weren't right. They refused to vote for themselves more than once. They refused to change they're behaviour despite the presence of Arutz Sheva and other organizations blogs.

This was never a level playing field, It was never a fair test of who has a good blog, it was simply, who was best at ambush marketing themselves, sending the largest number of spams, getting the best media campaign and even to the point of acting unethically.

There's only one winner in these JIB's, and its not the people who won JIB awards, its the people who refused to compromise on what they knew was right and what is wrong.

Your know who I'm talking about, and to those people you are the winners.

Shalom Aaron
Mr Bagel

I live in Australia so 10pm vote closing time is not 10 pm closing time for me.
I've woken up especially early to write this post, its 5 am, and its is absolutely freezing.

I wish all the ethical jbloggers out there the best of luck.

Always FreshBagelblogger
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