Early Morning Blog Roundup - 2006-08-30
* Dave Bender just uploaded a ton of pics to his Flickr pool. Many were taken in the last few weeks across the north of Israel, during the war. There are some very well-shot photos of local kids playing on the walls of Akko (at least we think that's Akko). And for those of you not into looking at crumbling Crusader fortifications, there are lots of pictures of really big tanks and guns.
* Michael Totten, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, has a link to a film that originally hit to the blogosphere on the site of Israeli blogger Lisa Goldman. The 25 minute film was shot by Israeli video journalist Itai Anghel, who accompanied regiment 931 of the Nahal on a night raid into an Hezbollah-controlled village. The film itself is riveting - the bravery and loyalty of the soldiers is awe-inspiring.
That said, the film also documents a genuine outrage on the part of Hezbollah's - a violation of very, very basic laws of war. Some people who've linked to the film have chosen to let you find out what it is yourself, while others have chosen to spare you the suspense. We're going spoil it for you, because there's a .001% chance that your computer will crash in the next half hour - and this is something you should know about. After the Nahal troops encountered the representatives from Iran's proxy army, they learned that the Hezbollah fighters were wearing IDF uniforms. The IDF troops had to react accordingly to avoid confusion, and they ended up degrading their uniforms and gear. The frustration in watching this scene is at least two-fold: first, you have to watch these 20 year olds remove safety equipment because the other side can't be bothered not to commit war crimes. Then, it slowly dawns on you that the Israeli troops are in no way shocked at their enemy's crimes.
* Rantings of a Sandmonkey has pictures and personal thoughts from last week's massive effort to move the Ramses II statue out of Cairo. The statue had been perhaps the city's most prominent landmark it was brought there by Nasser in the 1950s as a symbol of indigenous Egyptian greatness. It had since become an emotionally charged, cherished part of the city - one of the last remaining visible markers of what had once been a powerful, secular pan-Arab movement. In its time, Arab armies under the pan-Arab banner came very close to destroying Israel - but today that movement is as absent from daily Egyptian life as the Ramses statue now is. When he gets to the part of the post where he discusses the Islamists who feel no connection to the statue or what it represents, Sandmonkey seems to lose something in the way of subtlety.
* In the last few days, there have been so many anti-American andanti-Semitic anti-Zionist slurs thrown around on MoveOn.org that Bill Levinson actually had to start a new blog just so we wouldn't run out of server space over at IsraPundit.
* Michael Totten, guest blogging for Andrew Sullivan, has a link to a film that originally hit to the blogosphere on the site of Israeli blogger Lisa Goldman. The 25 minute film was shot by Israeli video journalist Itai Anghel, who accompanied regiment 931 of the Nahal on a night raid into an Hezbollah-controlled village. The film itself is riveting - the bravery and loyalty of the soldiers is awe-inspiring.
That said, the film also documents a genuine outrage on the part of Hezbollah's - a violation of very, very basic laws of war. Some people who've linked to the film have chosen to let you find out what it is yourself, while others have chosen to spare you the suspense. We're going spoil it for you, because there's a .001% chance that your computer will crash in the next half hour - and this is something you should know about. After the Nahal troops encountered the representatives from Iran's proxy army, they learned that the Hezbollah fighters were wearing IDF uniforms. The IDF troops had to react accordingly to avoid confusion, and they ended up degrading their uniforms and gear. The frustration in watching this scene is at least two-fold: first, you have to watch these 20 year olds remove safety equipment because the other side can't be bothered not to commit war crimes. Then, it slowly dawns on you that the Israeli troops are in no way shocked at their enemy's crimes.
* Rantings of a Sandmonkey has pictures and personal thoughts from last week's massive effort to move the Ramses II statue out of Cairo. The statue had been perhaps the city's most prominent landmark it was brought there by Nasser in the 1950s as a symbol of indigenous Egyptian greatness. It had since become an emotionally charged, cherished part of the city - one of the last remaining visible markers of what had once been a powerful, secular pan-Arab movement. In its time, Arab armies under the pan-Arab banner came very close to destroying Israel - but today that movement is as absent from daily Egyptian life as the Ramses statue now is. When he gets to the part of the post where he discusses the Islamists who feel no connection to the statue or what it represents, Sandmonkey seems to lose something in the way of subtlety.
* In the last few days, there have been so many anti-American and
