I'm now firmly in favor of disengagement:

And just how shameless to you have to be if you're the French Prime Minister and you still have the gall to bring up anything about the UN right now:

Hey Jacques, speaking of the UN, we've got a few questions about that whole Oil for Food thing...

The Palestinians are definitly interested in peace:

No doubt about it. Peace is here is you want it.

You remember that line from his recent press conference? There's still apparently some confusion. A couple days ago there were rumors that the Bush administration was walking back their assurances to Sharon. Yeah, turns out not so much:

Hamas and Islamic Jihad ditched a meeting on cross-Palestinian cooperation that they didn't want to go to anyway:

I'm going to start using the same excuse with my professors. "Sorry I didn't come to class today - the IDF was trying to kill me."

Are Likud voters really stupid enough to throw away the historically unprecedented situation that Sharon has created for withdrawal? Take it as axiomatic that Israel will eventually have to leave Gaza - everybody knows that those settlements are going to be the first to go under any peace deal. Sharon has worked it out so that the withdrawal is about as close to a victory as Israel is going to get - there will never be another White House that will let Israel knock out the entire leadership of Hamas while it withdraws, which means that by definition when Israel finally withdraws it will take more of a deterrence hit. You think when Israel withdraws "in the context of a peace deal" Hamas won't claim it as a victory? You think when Israel withdrawing "in the context of a peace deal" Hamas won't desecrate the synagogues in the settlements? Literally every example we have - Hebron, Jericho, etc - goes the other way, with gunfire and celebrations in the streets and loudspeakers declaring victory as Israeli troops and settlers withdrew in shame. This is a withdrawal of strength - I hope the Likud doesn't blow it.

At first glance, this seems comforting:

Then you realize - double of zero is still zero.

Sharon has two hoops to jump through in the next couple of weeks: the disengagement vote and the Greek Island affair. Looks like he's gonna make it through at least the second hoop. As a reminder - about a year ago, somebody decided to take one of the most significant moments in the history of the Israel to realize that there's (gasp) corruption in Israeli politics. Brilliant. I don't mind the principle behind keeping politics clean, but seriously, timing.

Whatever happened to equal work for equal pay? Where's NOW on this? Is Patricia Ireland going to issue a statement?

(Via: Amygdala, who I found through Meryl)

It's so tough trying to maintain law and order in the West Bank and Gaza Strip these days:

This should go well. And by well I mean "in the most disgusting, shameful, and primitive way possible":

Seriously, the Palestinians are like this close to having a functioning civil society. Just another couple of weeks, build them a courthouse, and they'll be good to go.

Again, I don't mean to tell people how to do their jobs. But if I was in charge of the IAEA I'd be spending more of my time on the country that's openly taunting me with nuclear weapons and even more openly threatening to use them offensively and less time on the country that has done everything possible not to ever have to use their nukes.
Then again, I'm not a lying anti-Israeli hypocrite imposing a double standard on the Jewish state and the country that wants to obliterate the Jewish state, so what do I know?

Hamas is back to making it trying to look like they're forcing Israel out of the Gaza Strip. It's not my place to tell them how to do their job, but I'm skeptical that Sharon is going to let Gaza become Lebanon. And now that the Mossad earned their paychecks for the week... Well, it's not like the newspapers are going to have to spend the money to write new headlines:

I mean, what do you say?

People are usually taught to just cooperate with thieves and give them what they want, because whatever they're taking is always worth less than your own life. But I mean, maybe this guy was just really bitter about being delayed?

Look what word has suddenly entered AP's dictionary:

These terrorists, of course, have actually killed no civilians yet. As opposed to the "militants" who blow up Israeli civilians.

Gaddafi to West: Don't Force Us Back to Bombing
West to Gaddafi: Don't Force Us Back to Making You Into a Pathetic, Sniveling Miscreant

The argument that beauty pageants are bad because they objectify women may or may not be true, but surely this can't be the right solution:

Stoning disobedient women, on the other hand, is perfectly in line with Muslim law and morality. Go figure.

Both Bush and Kerry are leaning heavily on raving anti-Semitic nut-job Lakhdar Brahimi to help with the June 30th handoff. The Bush administration is growing increasingly uncomfortable with the former Algerian diplomat (diplomat? what the hell are they teaching them over there in diplomacy school?). Not so much with the Kerry camp:

The Middle East Peace Forum of Pittsburgh is hosting a refusniks bash next week. I think it's a little tasteless that they would celebrate refusing to serve at the same time that Israelis are mourning those who died serving. But I hardly expect better from the people running this thing:
(1) The Middle East Peace Forum itself lists Pittsburgh Lefty Ken Boas as its contact person. Boas is what you might call an old acquaintance of mine. Suffice to say that literally every smart Leftist academic at the University of Pittsburgh that I ever talked to pretty much thought that this guy is a giant tool. The dropping that he left in the comments section of the above link goes a long way to confirming that assessment.
(2) The website doesn't tell you this, but this event is being helped along by the MEPF's new affiliation with Tikkun. Speaking of Tikkun, Judith has had it up to about here with Rabbi Lerner and his friends' inability to admit that there are people out there who actually want to kill Jews, and it has nothing to do with watching a bad Mel Gibson movie. In their world, it’s OK to go to the line to attack fundamentalist Christians who want to help Jews, but attacking fundamentalist Muslims who want to kill Jews is forbidden.

First, the story:

Then, the response:

Lead. In candy. Doesn't that seem like it should pretty much hover somewhere toward the top of the list of "responsibilities" for the effing Food and Drug people? I mean, what the hell are they spending their time doing? I've seen some of the restaurants in LA - it's not like they're spending their time looking for health code violations. It's lead. In candy! I mean, they usually have to make up stuff like this for bad Democratic fundraising videos.

Parallel to claims that Israel shouldn't defend itself because it will destroy the efforts of Palestinian moderates who are this close to getting everyone in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to start handing out flowers, we get claims that America shouldn't defend itself because it will cause Arab American anger.
First, anger at America is not the result of American self-defense. It's the result of the Arab world and Arab leaders desperately needing an enemy. Israel is an adequate enemy most of the time, but Arab nationalism has a problem with blaming Israel for everything - if the Jews are so weak and corrupt, how is it that they're so powerful? So for the big gun conspiracy theories, you have to bring in the United States. This is an old trick - in the immediate aftermath of the Six Day War Nasser and King Hussein were ready to start a nuclear war by lying that the U.S. had attacked them - a Soviet response would have probably been unavoidable. Israel tapped the phone conversation and played it over the evening news.
Second, since hatred of America has been ingrained into the Arab world over 50 years, it's not a question of creating it or not creating it - it's a question of making it profitable or not. And it is profitable when America looks weak:

And finally, if all else fails, who cares? In business, I believe they call it creative destruction.

In the last month or so, Newsmap has made it pretty obvious (and not just to me) that the media is obsessed with Israel - especially bad news coming from Israel. Now there are reliable numbers on it.

The difference between the blogosphere and old media is that when old media has the headline "Bush alienates moderate Arabs" they're actually serious!

I'm sick of waiting for the mythical "moderate Palestinians" to get their act together. What political power to they have? What control do they have? I think it's pretty clear that they have no influence - and that's on the days when I think that they actually exist.
It's infuriating that people would still try to hold Israelis hostage to this fable of having someone to negotiate with - as if there's a struggle inside the Palestinian camp right now, and even the slightest thing could tip it either way. Is there a time-line in which we can expect the moderates to "convince the radicals of the need to worry about international law"? Because they haven't exactly been doing a great job so far. Or is the expectation that the blood of Jewish children will continue to flow while we wait around for the moderates to have coffee in the cafes and convince the terrorists to at least try to tone it down.

Seriously, this is really dumb:

Oh, but the biometrics data will be enough. Well no, it won't. Here's how this is supposed to work - since Britain is not yet Oceania, citizens aren't required to carry their cards. Rather, they can be ordered to produce the cards at a station within a reasonable period of time.
How would this play out for a Muslim woman who will neither show her face in public (for reasons of religious sensitivity) or have an ID card that identifies her in any meaningful way (for reasons of religious sensitivity)? A police officer would pull a Muslim woman aside for suspicion of something. She'd have no ID card on her. The police officer would send her home to produce her card. Now, what kind of odds would you give me that the woman who ends up producing a card at the police station will match the biometrics on the ID card that she brings with her?
I have a suggestion - why don't we also effectively exempt Muslim men from the national ID card system? That way, we can show that we're extra sensitive and don't think that any Muslim anywhere is dangerous at all!

Palestinian justice:

Also Palestinian justice:

Usually this is the place in a "compare and contrast" piece where I make some snarky comment like "killing is OK, unless you're killing ____". But in the Palestinian legal system, it seems that killing is pretty much always OK.

Superb intelligence and remarkable vigilance have combined to stop 95% of terrorists constantly trying to get into Israel. And how's this for an "uh oh" sensation:

It's probably just nothing - it's not like Sharon is the kind of leader who would risk a regional war if that's what it took to protect Israel's security.

If you're even slightly right-of-center in Israel, accusing someone on the other side of the aisle of endangering Israel's security is guaranteed to send the media into fits of indignation - Ha'aretz will demand that you be tried for incitement, and Yediot Aharonot will bemoan how this never would have happened in the days when Mapai was allowed ot run everything. But let someone from the right openly call for violence against a sitting Likud Prime Minister, and Ma'ariv, with ill-disguised pleasure- reports at as an inter-party battle where things are "getting acrimonious." Ohad Kamin should be drummed out of the Likud, and then he should be thrown in prison for incitement. Calling a sitting Prime Minister a Nazi and then openly calling for violence against him crosses all red lines - we know where that road leads, and we've already lost too much at the end of it.

What the hell is going on at Los Alamos?

Just so I understand - the lead U.S. nuclear facility can be breached by cars going really fast? Nobody's concerned about this?

Some stories spin themselves:

The Israeli papers could care less at this point. The Palestinian papers could care less at this point. But as we go into a full week of coverage on this, Sharon's threat on Arafat's life is still going strong (my favorite new link - NPR, which apparently has been running this story nonstop).
Has anyone considered that Sharon threatens Arafat whenever Arafat isn't getting enough attention? This thing is scripted by now:
(1) Sharon says "when we said we weren't gonna harm Arafat, we actually meant we were going to harm Arafat. Typo. Totally our bad."
(2) The world screams, "the man may be a terrorist, but he's an elected terrorist! You can't do that to elected terrorists! Also, he won the Noble Peace Prize. Very European. You can't do that to people who are very European!"
(3) Arafat drones on about how he's proud to die while doing everything he can to make sure that doesn't happen.
And in the end, .Hamas loses the news cycle and Arafat is strengthened. Isn't that what everyone insists they want anyway? What's the problem here?
Seriously, I think that the newspapers are just recycling their headlines. Here's a tip - no one is going to do anything to Arafat. Calm down and put the Laker game back on.

UPDATE: Speaking of my beloved Pacific Division champion Los Angeles Lakers…

ANOTHER UPDATE: Arieh O'Sullivan disagrees with me. Yeah, but he's just the security journalist for a major Israeli newspaper... what does he know?

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: It's 7PM EST and the Sharon threatens Arafat story is at the top of Google News right now - a week in!

I usually try to avoid schadenfreude - it's an ugly emotion. I'll make an exception for Israel's Anglican Church:

Sleep with dogs.
Get fleas.

Get elected in a democracy. Take an oath of loyalty and service to the state. Refuse to recognize your country anyway:

Hey buddy, your people (and the people who pay your salary, keep your family, and protect you), are Israelis. When did it become OK to be an outright traitor holding elected office in Israel? Would any other country on the planet allow this? And don't even get me started on the Haredi MKs who won't fly the flag because it's too "secular"... I don't know what pisses me off more, treason or stupidity. At least traitors you can drum out of the Knesset with a minimum of regret or fuss. The problem with drumming the Haredi out just for being stupid is that, if stupidity is the standard, pretty soon you're left with like 20 MKs in the Knesset. And most of them are from Labor.

Palestinians to family of slain Arab Christian: When we said we were sorry for killing your son, we actually meant we're not sorry at all and God loved it when we killed him. Sorry for any miscommunication. And seriously, what hte hell?

"Hi Sa’id, this is God. Please go on killing people that are our side. It makes us look great. Really on top of our game."

This is blatantly misleading:

As is well known (and by well-known I mean 5000+ Google hits), Sharon took Bush on a helicopter tour of Israel way back in 1998. I guess you could say Bush was already planning to run for President at the time, but it seems that Kerry's people are implying a little more than that. Other fun things I learned from Kerry's advisers:

I'm not a Kerry adviser, but it seems to me that if I was trying to convey my commitment to Israel's security, I'd shy away from the person responsible for Oslo. Of course, I'd also stay away from the peace process in general:

Don't get me wrong - I sympathize with Kerry's people. They're already starting way behind. But throwing around Carter's name as the guy who'll be running the peace process under a Kerry administration is not the best way to dig Kerry out of the hole he created.

Ann Coulter's views on domestic politics scare me. They're entertaining, but they scare me. Her book on the 1950s years and why McCarthy was a good guy scares me. It's entertaining, but it scares me. That said, I'm beginning to think that she has a point about historians' and media people's refusal to recognize that McCarthy was kind of right about some stuff. First two paragraphs:

Next sentence:

If McCarthy was right about Oppenheimer, wasn't it less of a "hysteria" and more of a "not hysteria"? Same for "witch hunt"? And if the most recent and comprehensive work on the subject overwhelmingly concludes the other way, isn't that enough that you wouldn't want to be using such bold language?
Now, I still think that McCarthy was a bullying, abusive politico - whitewashing him to make a point about why the label of "traitor" should be permissible rhetoric in political discourse is probably a losing tactic. But I also think that there was Communist infiltration at the highest levels of the U.S. government, and I wouldn't mind if the press would admit that once in a while.

I knew that the Palestinians were really pissed off at Bush, but I didn't know that there were numbers on this:

Tripled huh? What is that - like a hatred of 2 means that they'd kidnap and behead Americans if they're either Jewish or involved in the world of finance, but a hatred of 6 means they'd burn their bodies too? How exactly does this work?
And while I'm on the subject of how incoherent this anti-Bush, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian article is, let's not hear anything about how Palestinians "would probably not go back even if they could." One, it's false - the key to their old house, passed on from father to son to grandson and now to great-grandson, isn't hanging next to the front door for decoration. Two, it's just damn confusing - why would the Palestinians be pissed off that Bush announced that they have the right to be compensated for their old land (which he did) if the "right" that they want is to be compensated for their old land? Three - from an aesthetic perspective, it screws up the flow of the article, which ends like this:

By "drive the Israelis out of our lands" they apparently mean "probably not go back even if they could," huh? We've reached a level where the anti-Israel press can't stay on message even for a couple of paragraphs, let alone an entire article. I don't know if they're not trying hard enough, or if they've got different people writing different parts of the articles, but it just doesn't seem to me like they're really even trying any more.

UPDATE: Lynn B of In Context points out that this is an AP story written by one Scheherezade Faramarzi. For more on Ms. Farmarzi Nasiriyah's charming approach to the US's role in the Middle East, Lynn directed me to Susanna Cornett's absolutely brutal post from Cut On The Bias.

I think that Knight Ridder is having trouble with the concept of "reporting" "news":

Huh? This is not an editorial, it's a news story (and from a wire at that). It's supposed to report fact. He isn't quoting anyone there - he's stating that as a factual, reportable matter, "there's no known evidence" that Iraq had ties to Al Qaeda. Why do so many people believe otherwise? Because they're stupid. And live in red states. Which is the same thing, right?

Oh yeah, conservative partisans like Michael Totten and Chris Hitchens, who quotes fellow arch-conservative Richard Clarke. They certainly think (or in Clarke's case, before they got a lucrative book contract, used to think) that there's plenty of "known evidence" connecting pre-war Iraq to Al Qaeda. When did Knight Ridder get the power to assert otherwise? And all this is before we even get to this reporter's egregious journalistic failure of not even trying to get a quote going the other way - how hard would it have been to get someone to go on the record saying "Americans have managed, despite wholly insufficient media attention, to glean that Saddam had ties to terrorists"? What, these people don't have Mickey Kaus's number?

Aww... that's not OK.

I have a high threshold for what counts as offensive - generally, if it gets even a chuckle, it gets a pass. This doesn't pass. "Knock a Jew in the oven... for one dollar" is not funny. It's disgusting. And the fact that it's even within the bounds of legitimate public discourse shows just how far gone American academia is.
"Oh but it's satire." "Oh but it's meant to rupture conventional norms." "Oh but it's meant to unite through laughter." Shut up. Self-important, useless, spoiled, anti-Semitic jackasses. Rutgers should be ashamed. Of course, they're going to whine about how the mere act of criticizing their repulsive Jew-hatred is a violation of their right to free speech - as if all you need to be an "oppressed voice" nowadays is to say or do something really, really offensive. Disgusting.
On the other hand - maybe I'm overreacting. After all, this could just be legitimate criticism of Israel that I'm trying to silence with accusations of anti-Semitism. I hear that happens a lot.

UPDATE: See?

Kofi Annan should resign. I'm not particularly hopeful - Nazi Kurt Waldheim still gets his pension checks from the UN every month. But Annan should resign.

Are you a political junkie? Are you looking to kill about a day and a half? Someone went and created a map of fundraising patterns. I hope you don't have anything due any time soon. (Via: Andrew Sullivan)

Nothing brings the people of a nation-state together like an external enemy. And since the people of Iraq really need some uniting, the UN has one in mind for them:

Usually this is where I would rant a bit about how anti-Semitic the UN is. But I have papers to write, so you can just fill that in for yourself. I just want to point out that this guy said that Israel is the country most responsible for the destabilization of Iraq - which was surprising to me, because (and I just checked to make sure) Iran still exists.

Some time in the mid-1800s, Thomas Carlyle declared that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." Populists everywhere are still recovering (with decreasing success - the most press that Zinn's work has gotten in the last decade came in Good Will Hunting - populism, Hollywood studio style). But they still try. For instance, check out Ari Shavit's (who had his Leftist membership revoked some time ago - he and Hitchens are thinking of starting a club) on why Israel is winning:

So far so good - one of the Last Great Zionists came back to politics to lead his country from the brink of disaster to a period of uncertain hope. As a model for history and society, however, this clearly will not stand. No, it's not that Sharon single-handedly led Israel out of the debilitating cul-de-sac of land-for-promises-of-peace. It's that the Israeli public survived the war:

At first, you might think that this is just sloppy logic - yes, the Israeli public "won" in one sense or surviving (they "were victorious"), but Sharon "won" in the sense of defeating the enemy (by "achieving victory"). You'd be right - it is sloppy logic. But it's sloppy logic in the service of a particular ideology, and it's an ideology that denies the efficacy of Israel's great leaders. And that's a much more dangerous error, because when we stop believing in great leaders we stop looking for great leaders. And when we stop looking for great leaders, we get mediocre leaders who sell out Israel's interests or buckle under pressure. It's important to believe in great leaders because great leaders are important.

Palestinian President: Palestinain Prime Minister's position to be abolished
Israel: Palestinian President to be abolished

Seriously, can I talk to whoever's in charge? Because I think that at this point we can all agree that things are getting a little bit out of hand.

The PLO would like to remind the world that they are, indeed, still dedicated to destroying Israel:

For most of the 90s, successive Israeli governments pretended to believe that the Palestinians were fulfilling their peace process obligations - first under Oslo and then under Wye. One of the most basic, symbolic acts that the Palestinians were supposed to undertake - to show that they had given up their dream of destroying Israel - was to remove the part of the PLO Covenant dedicating themselves to destroying Israel.
For most of the same decade, right of center Israelis were pointing out that the Palestinians had failed to undertake said act. These Israelis made a rather reasonable argument that went something like this: "if the Palestinians have really given up on destroying us, why won't they remove the part of their founding charter that says that they want to destroy us?" Arafat, clever if nothing else, traded the promise of changing the Covenant for land under Oslo I, Oslo II (linked above), and Wye and consistently got away with it. This pattern - of promising to fulfill peace promises made earlier if only a little more Israeli security was given away - is pretty much the history of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
The PLO, we know today, never really intended to make peace with Israel. The tragedy is that they never really implied otherwise to anyone who was actually listening.

CNNHN's Mary Fischer has an article about being addicted to Law & Order:

Let’s see. Arab countries can't agree on making peace with Israel, but they have no problem showing unity in order to condemn Israel for trying to make peace with them. There's a message here... almost like they're trying to tell us something. I wonder what it could be.

You know what I like about Ma'ariv? They're consistent. Very, very consistent. It helps me establish a routine. So for instance, in the morning, I can check whether or not Sharon is still in office. If he is, I know that I can go to Ma'ariv and they'll explain both why he's destroying Israel and why his government is about to fall. They're really very big on the whole Sharon failing / about to fall thing.
So for instance this morning, they're running a Ha'aretz poll and the headline screams:

Sounds pretty bad. But the end of the section on the poll ends with a weird statement:

Gosh, if things are so bad, why aren't Sharon's people moving? Are they apathetic? Are they bad at their jobs? Are they lying? Actually, it's probably just that they actually read the poll:

Throughout history, the greatest of leaders have shared in their followers' fortunes. We're told that after conceding to his men's desire to forgo an escape and instead engage in a final, glorious battle against Crassus - a battle he knew would be hopeless - Spartacus publicly killed his horse so as to bind himself to his men's fate. Spartacus, of course, is a great hero to many today. Yasser Arafat, well, not so much:

Nothing like selling out your men in a desperate attempt to gain a little more time for yourself. Whatever happened to that whole die as a martyr thing?

Last week, CNN got nailed by Charles for out-right lying about Islam's views on wife-beating. Now they've been caught trying to (again) expose Israeli state secrets. The last time they helped Saddam orient his SCUDs on Israeli homes - this time they were trying to help Iran figure out exactly what part of Dimona is worth aiming at. I'm not telling the Israeli security forces how to do their job, but I hear there's a nice cell open at Shima Prison for people who try to reveal information about Israel's nuclear secrets.
Basic cable in downtown LA doesn't have Fox News, so I get stuck watching either CNN or MSNBC. As Cori Dauber asked me when she was down here for the Blogfest, "what, do you live in Berkeley?"

Is this a joke?

How many Mossad agents do you think are trying to figure out the location of this place? That article also discusses other signs of Hamas's glorious victory:

The traitorous tendencies of Israeli Arab Knesset members (elected officials who have taken an oath to defend the country) is getting out of hand:

And check out what Lynn's been following.
That's just this week! I'm not saying Israeli Arabs shouldn't be allowed to vote. Quite the opposite - I'm just saying that they should be encouraged vote better. And till they do, Israel should systematically disqualify all the candidates that are clearly unfit for office. There are people sitting in the seat of the Israeli government who have all but called for the abolition of the state!! No country in the world would tolerate this.

Hamas has finally gained more support than Arafat on the Palestinian street.
Alternative headlines for this post:
"They Sure Know How To Pick A Winner"
"Palestinians and Israelis Agree: We Like Rantisi More Now That He's Dead"
"A Dead Terrorist Really Is Better Than a Live One"
Hamas's boost in support only count s as news if you're committed to obsessing about the different ways that Israel is screwing up. Again, it's not Hamas's support that matters (because they've already got more than enough support to accomplish what they want to accomplish), but their capabilities.

I guess you really can put anything up for sale on eBay. This seller is offering to co-write and publish an academic paper with the winner of the auction. This wont be just any co-authored paper though - the seller claims to have an Erdös number of 4, so the winner will get an Erdös number of 5. For those of you with lives outside the fairly rarified world of academic computer science and mathematics, your Erdös number is the minimum number of co-authors that it takes you to get to mathematician Paul Erdös. It's like a six-degrees-of-separation thing, except for people who like to transform doughnuts into coffee cups. What determines if you can go from one person to the other is if they've co-published a paper together. Having an Erdös number of 5 can make you the life of a party if you're at the right (you sure that's the adjective you want to use? -- ed Reasonably sure) party. The auction appears to be for real.

Is it that the UN thinks that the lives of terrorists are worth less in Jordan than in Israel, or is it just that they think that the lives of Jordanian civilians are worth more than the lives of Israeli civilians? Because they're being awfully silent.

I just saw Vanunu live on CNN giving his "they let my traitorous ass out of prison" interview to the press. I'm against letting him out of prison because, you know, traitor - but even if I wasn't, I'm afraid that he's a danger to himself and others. I mean, this guy just seems really, really unstable. Global conspiracy theory, "voices in my head" crazy. In his mind, he was entrapped by a female CIA agent who colluded with French, Spanish, and Israeli intelligence officials who sent him to prison for so long because he converted to Christianity. Seriously - don't let him near sharp objects. Or, better yet, let him near sharp objects but keep him away from other people.
Let's be clear about this guy: he's not a hero, he's a traitor for profit. Real Benedict Arnold stuff. He ended up selling his story to the Times because the first paper he approached wouldn't meet his price. He did this after being laid off from Dimona for being a tough unstable (shocking, no?). Best part of it - he took his "pictures of conscience" after he was notified that he was about to be laid off. I love the fact that he was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize - he deserves it about as much as a terrorist like Arafat does. Oh, wait…

UPDATE: See?

It's all very well and noble to say that your people will achieve victory even if you won't live to see it. But it doesn't make sense to say that if your death is the definition of a defeat. I'm not sure how Hamas is going to claim victory when there's no more Hamas.

This clearly would not have happened if Howard hadn't supported the Iraq war.

I hate you!

Can I have my allowance now?

Anyone who tuned into Paula Zhan last night got to witness a spectacular demonstration of exactly why Israel is losing the propaganda war. I have three concerns with the interviews she did on the Rantisi assassination:

(1) Asking "does this increase Hamas support" is precisely the wrong question to ask. Hamas already has more than enough support to carry out the murders of Israeli children that it wants to carry out. The question is no longer - and nor has it been for a long time - Hamas support. The question is whether or not the assassination significantly deteriorated Hamas's capabilities. Support for Hamas long ago passed the threshold of "more than adequate." And that support isn't going anywhere - hatred for Jews (not just Israel) has reached endemic proportions in the Muslim world, and the only hope of even tempering that hatred (a hope I believe is futile, but is nonetheless the only one) is through a political solution. Except Israel has no partner with which to create a political solution, so that's not happening any time soon. The question then becomes whether or not kill Rantisi at least slowed Hamas's ability to kill Jewish civilians, since nothing in the next half a decade or so is going to slow their motive for trying to do so. And on that note, even Laura King's otherwise incoherent LA Times write-up ledes with the observation that Hamas's operational capabilities have been damaged, as does Islam Online. This leads to the second point...

(2) Our spokespeople suck. The Israeli government sent Isaac Herzog (Labor's Knesset whip) on the air to show that even the opposition supported the assassination. All good and fine - except for the fact that the man is totally incoherent in English. Just totally incoherent. This isn't a problem of his accent - Bibi has a heavy accent and is an excellent speaker in English, and Barak could also turn it up when he wanted to. This is a problem of sending people on the air who can't formulate their thoughts in English because they just don't have the goods on the language. I watched him for over two minutes try to make the simple distinction between Hamas's support and Hamas's operational capability (the point that I made above).
For some baffling reason, he kept trying to distinguish between long term and short term effects, where short term was equated with a boost in support and long term was equated with a drop in operational capabilities. Those are both true observations - in the short term, Hamas's support will increase and in the long term their operational capabilities will be damaged, but that allows people to conflate Hamas's support with their operational capability, which is, again, the wrong way to frame this discussion. And Herzog knows the difference - you can tell by his frustration in stumbling around the question and by his opaque reference to Hamas's "organizational level." He wants to say "operational capability" but he just doesn't know how.
By phrasing the effects of Rantisi's assassination as "short term = help Hamas, long term = hurt Hamas", it makes it seem like Israel is balancing a short term disadvantage with a long term advantage. But if you reframe the issue solely as Hamas's operational capability because you can't do anything about their public support, then assassinating Rantisi was good both in the long term and in the short term, because it immediately impacted Hamas's infrastructure backbone. Attacking Hamas's operational side is (a) different and (b) more important than addressing their public support. So their boost in support is a short term phenomenon, but that's incidental to the question of whether or not this hit damaged Hamas's ability to kill Israelis.
Herzog is anything but stupid. He's just not a good English speaker. And the Israeli government (which is notorious about putting people in front of the camera who can't communicate) needs to realize that this approach is hurting their cause. Which leads to point 3...

(3) Their spokespeople are much better than ours. When the Palestinians manage to keep Arafat or even Erekat off the camera, they slay the Israelis on the news channels. Just slay them. Last night, they had Diana Buttu on. She's striking, she's soft-spoken, and she's articulate. She did all the work of framing in the first 30 seconds of the interview:

And now, for the rest of the evening, weakening or strengthening Hamas becomes a question of whether it boosted their public support. See above.
Being well-spoken gets you a couple of things. It helps you take control of an interview. It also helps you get away with either making statements that are questionable. Here's some of the rest of the interview in order - I'm going to divide it between statements of questionable veracity and outright lies:

Statement of questionable veracity: as if the Palestinian public, which overwhelmingly supports the murder of Israeli civilians, is concerned about the rule of law.

Outright lie: that there is no assassination of Israeli leaders, which should come as a surprise to the family of assassinated Israeli Cabinet Minister Rehavam Ze'evi.

Statement of questionable veracity: this is an explicit denial of Jews' historic connection to the Land of Israel, which the Palestinian Authority promised to stop doing some time last decade. Of course, they've been systematically destroying the archeological evidence of that connection on the Temple Mount, so I guess denying it on CNN isn't really that severe.

Somewhere between a statement of questionable veracity and an outright lie: Last I checked, there was a healthy majority of Palestinians who still deny the legitimacy of the Jewish State. But that's closer to a whooper than a lie. Also, did I miss the memo where either Arafat or a large majority of the Palestinian public gave up on the Right of Return? Because that doesn't sound to me like telling Israel "you can have it."

Statement of questionable veracity: I'm not sure what international law she's referring to, but UNSC 242 requires Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and their return to the countries who had them at the time - Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. Not that it matters at this point, but those countries weren't exactly in a hurry to establish a Palestinian state when they held them.

Statement of questionable veracity: The only thing that saves this from being an outright lie is that there are settlements being built in the West Bank (illegal or not is an open question). It seems to me (and I'm not a lawyer so take this for what it's worth), that by committing to "withdrawing" from the Gaza Strip, Sharon will no longer be "building settlements" in the Gaza Strip. Again, I'm no lawyer.

Statement of questionable veracity: again, I'm no lawyer, but Alan Baker is, and he says that not only is Ms. Buttu wrong, but that the Palestinians really shouldn't be preaching to other people about adherence to international law.

So all I'm saying is that people who can speak English well seem to do better on English-channel news stations than people who can't. Also, I'm saying that the Palestinian spokesperson last night was a liar, but that's a consequence of us not being able to defend our side.

When Bush calls for a War on Terror, aimed at a "small minority" of Muslims who like to stone women, kill homosexuals, and blow up things they'd never be smart enough to build, it's called "racism." When radical Muslims call for a war between all of Islam and the Judeo-Christian West, it's called "resistance."

So these meddling supporters of a traitor went and got the restrictions on this traitor lifted so that now he's allowed to hang out and tell his story to all his traitor friends. And he still has the nerve to whine and to get his traitor family to whine with him. Hopefully he'll get nailed for shoplifting or something, and get thrown in prison for life.
But because we here at Dejafoo are a forgiving sort (can't you tell?), before Vanunu is released into the country whose defense he tried to destroy we're going to try to satisfy his curiosity. He asked:

Answer 1: Well, traitor, it probably had something to do with a combination of rampant, worldwide anti-Semitism and some of your more nuanced insights:

Answer 2:Well, traitor, it probably has something to do with the fact that you did something that most of the world's anti-Semites only dream of doing - massively undermine Israel's defenses:

And while we're on the subject of traitors, was there a traitor convention in Israel yesterday? At this rate, we'll be able to start an entire colony of them. Like an ant-farm. Except filled with traitors.

Ha'aretz has an article and interview with Dr. Hanan Shai, a high-ranking IDF security studies specialist. He distinguishes between terrorism as asymmetrical warfare, which goes back thousands of years, and terrorism as suicide, which is Islamist terrorism's unique contribution to the history of warfare. Specifically, he argues that the radical disjunct between the West's value on life and Islamist terrorism's value on death creates an intractable conflict, where victory cannot be achieved by getting the other side to surrender. He also predicts that the US military will meet a disastrous end in Iraq unless it adapts - soon.

I