Mere Rhetoric reader Barry cracks another PA propaganda myth perpetuated by the MSM:

So when the AP's Ibrahim Barzak describes the murder of five Israelis as "an Islamic Jihad revenge bombing" for the assassination of senior West Bank leader Luay Sa'adi, he's not just lying by omission because he's failing to contextualize that assassination as a response to the drive-by shooting of seven Israeli children. He's simply outright lying.

Charles Johnson's Outrage of the Day involves the New York Times disingenuously quoting a deceased soldier's pro-war last letter home as anti-war regret (Times: "Corporal Starr...was tired of the harsh life and nearness of death in Iraq." Corporal Starr: "I don't regret going, everybody dies but few get to do it for something as important as freedom. It may seem confusing why we are in Iraq, it's not to me.")
But even skilled editors can't catch everything, and sometimes reality slips the New York Times's ideological filters ("Mr. Abbas... refrained from condemning Islamic Jihad... Mr. Abbas had been warned last week that Islamic Jihad was about to fire rockets toward Israel from Gaza "but did nothing about it.") Solution? Go back and erase it:

Muslims at Harper College have successfully shut down an art exhibit title "No veil is required", which depicted liberated Muslim women. Contrast: in 2001 and 2002, Jewish groups were unable to stop campuses across the country from displaying a collection of artwork that, among other things, advocated the "liberation of Palestine" while defining all of Israel - including Haifa and Tel Aviv - as "Palestinian Towns occupied by Israelis". Conclusion: expressing calls for the extermination of the Jewish state is artistic freedom, but celebrating the potential of Muslim women to literally and figuratively remove their veils is too religiously offensive to be considered.

The Palestinian governor of the West Bank town of Nablus thinks that Israel's roadblocks in the West Bank are a political strategy designed to cut off communication between and access across Palestinian cities. We think it might have something more to do with the fact that the only alternative is for Israel to constantly shell the Palestinian Authority into even pretending to crack down on terrorists:

The Palestinian government won't crack down on terrorism on their own, and there's only so long that Israel can militarily prod them into doing so. The governor of Nablus would be well-advised to spend a little less time complaining about the Israeli roadblocks meant to stop terrorists and a little more time working to convince the Palestinian terrorists to stop making it necessary for Israel to install roadblocks.

The Left has always had a problem balancing their devotion to cultural sensitivity with the primitive brutality of many of the cultures they seek to be sensitive about. Now we've reached a point where political correctness means convincing battered women to stay with their abusers:

Respect for Islam apparently includes sensitivity for wife beaters.

As world leaders compete with each other to express totally unjustified surprise at Ahmadinejad's threat to nuke five million Jews, Kofi Annan - the leader of the organization that ostensibly speaks for the entire world - will travel to Iran to make nice:

Faced with a call by one member state of his organization for the destruction of another member state, Annan didn't even consider a symbolic delay. The message is clear: threaten to wipe out Jews on Monday, suffer through a confused din of faux outrage on Wednesday, host the world's leaders as if nothing happened by Friday.

Fresh off his humiliating defeat in the Likud Central Committee and knowing that he can't possibly win an election, right-wing Likud backbencher Benjamin Netanyahu is now looking to bring down his own party's government out of spite for Sharon:

Remember: bringing down the current Sharon government is almost certain to result in a more leftist government after the next election. Sharon, being further left than most of the Likud rebels committed to bringing him down, isn't really bothered by that.

Anti-Semitism continues to sweep through Europe and Asia, as a Holocaust denier is lauded for spreading freedom, a wave of desecrations rock a St. Petersburg Jewish cemetery, and German Muslims march in support of Iran's call to nuke five million Jews.

* Judith at Kesher Talk links to human rights activist Anne Bayefsky's new Eye on the UN watchdog group.
* Ted Belman at IsraPundit posts a crucial article by Strategic Forecast's George Friedman on relationships between Syria and Iran - an article that has only become more important since Ahmadinejad's open call for the extermination of Israel.
* Cori Dauber is disapoined by Fareed Zakaria's glowing review of George Packer's new anti-war, anti-Bush book Assassin's Gate.
* Dan Darling has analysis at Winds of Change on the survivability of Lashkar-e-Taiba's terrorist infrastructure following the recent earthquake, and how that relates to the New Delhi bombings.
* Jim Brown at Menorah Blog links to an extended article on the relationship between the United Nations and Palestinian refugees - he wonders why is it that only Palestinians can pass on "refugee" status to their children and grandchildren?

Some parts of the press are inclined, for motives that need not be speculated about, to wrap themselves up in a warm "the Islamists aren't really crazy" blanket and insist that Iran didn't really mean that thing it said:

And don't get us wrong - we'd be at least a little reassured if Iran's entire political hierarchy was pretending to commit to not destroying Israel. Somewhat less reassuring, however, is the conspicuous fact that the ones doing the pretending aren't even the ones in power:

It is indeed a sign of his amateurism. Nuanced Iranian politicians are far more circumspect about wiping out Israel, conveying their threats through the euphemistic phrase "liberation of Palestine".
But when the mask comes off and the threats become obvious, the MSM has to search for other coping strategies. New tactic: extended and convoluted diatribes arguing that Ahmadinejad is just like George Bush because he's a political outsider who recently had a nominee rejected for a government post (British Leftist 1: "hey, anti-American, anti-Semitic Islamists said something even we can't defend, and ignoring it won't work this time... what should we do?" British Leftist 2: "figure out a way to blame Bush's for it" British Leftist 1: "won't work this time" British Leftist 2: "make it a metaphor"). Yes, Bush and Ahmadinejad have lots of similarities - except for the whole "open threat to nuke another country" thing, which is kind of what the story is about.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Equal parts nutcase archaeology and totally fascinating, an archaeologist is claiming to have uncovered a pyramid in Bosnia built 12,000 years ago by a kind of ancient super-civilization. These finds always smack a little of finding-of-Atlantis sensationalism, and we couldn't find anything credible on the "pre-Illyrians" the archaeologist claims built this thing, but there does seem to be a hill and it does seem to look like a pyramid and they do claim to have uncovered stone steps underneath the soil.

Even relatively moderate pro-Palestinian propaganda tries to sneak in the suggestion that suicide bombers target soldiers. This is rarely the case:

Meryl continues to follow the Main Stream Media's refusal to print the names or discuss the lives of the victims. We've discussed how this seemingly minor point is critical to the broader strategy of dehumanizing Jewish victims of terrorism.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Abbas has decided to start his terrorist disarmament campaign close to home, leading with his "disarm yourself before trying to disarm others" strategy. Sure, it's kind of a self-defeating step (weakening his own presence in the public before trying to weaken the presence of other terrorist groups might perhaps be, according to some schools of thought, backwards) - but at least it's a step.
Except now JPost headlines a story saying that it looks like Abbas might not even be able to accomplish that:

Abbas's inability to stop the suicide bombers from Islamic Jihad had already led Prime Minister Sharon to call off his meetings with the Palestinians. And now Abbas's inability to control even his own people has led Defense Minister Mofaz's to state over the weekend that Israel cannot "reach peace with the current Palestinian leadership" because Abbas "has nothing backing him".

Israel responds to a suicide bombing that killed five people and critically injured six others by attacking the leader of Islamic Jihad, the group that send the suicide bomber. In response, all of the Palestinian terrorist groups have promised massive retaliation:

If Israel promises not to respond to the mass murder that Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the Al-Aksa Brigades are planning to inflict on innocent Israeli civilians, then the terrorists promise that afterwards everything can go back to normal:

In light of Hamas and Islamic Jihad's open calls for genocidal murder, Egypt has called for political talks with Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders, thereby "ranting them equal status with the Palestinian Authority". Egypt's justification?

Well, as long as they're committed to a lull in violence...

There has been a grand total of one Jewish terrorist who's attacked Arabs in the current, five year war between Israel and the Palestinians. After that attack triggered a period of self-flagellation so intense that even Israeli liberals began to think people were going overboard, the Jewish Agency (an organization which, unlike the Government of Israel, exists for the single purpose of helping Jews) has decided to give money to the terrorist's Arab victims. That's how Jews in Israel react when Jewish terrorists murder Arabs.
And this is how Arabs in the West Bank react when Arab terrorists murder Jews:

This mass murder inspired religious-nationalist ecstasy in literally thousands of people, who congratulated what should have been a grieving family for their dead son's crimes (it is a particularly sick society that worships war and death to such an extent that soldiers' deaths are celebrated rather than mourned - what kind of mother is happy to lose a child in any cause?). Not to be overly heavy-handed, but it seems patently absurd to go on pretending that these are people who can be brought down from their sheer insanity either by giving them more land or by releasing a couple more terrorists from prison.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

In all fairness, between the Europeans expressing faux outrage and Israel absurdly pretending that they can get Iran thrown out of the United Nations, the only side being both level-headed and honest about Iran's recent threat to wipe Israel off the map happens to be Iran:

They've got a point: to anyone who's cared to listen, Iran has never been shy about expressing their fervent desire to nuke Israel because it's filled with Jews. For their own reasons, American think-tank fellows and European diplomats have for years chosen not to take Iran's genocidal threats seriously - but it's hardly Iran's fault if no one takes them at their word.
And just to show that they're serious about this whole "they really hate Israel" thing, Iran has unleashed thousands of "protesters" to express their fury against the existence of the Jewish State:

At times like this, it's important to remember what the American Left, the European mainstream, and the Arab world insists: anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism. The fact that the only state targeted by anti-Zionists happens to be the only state on the planet which is Jewish is mere coincidence.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Now that Iran has violated the letter of the United Nations Charter by calling for the destruction of a member state (the charter calls on "all members... to refrain from the threat or use of force" against member states) - to say nothing of how the vicious hatred and vulgar anti-Semitism that the Islamic Republic instigates violates the spirit of peace and understanding - Israel is trying to convince the UN to take notice:

One might think that, given a patent violation of everything the United Nations claims to stand for, such a coalition would be relatively easy to build. One would be unfamiliar with the UN's mandate to be as unabashedly and transparently anti-Israel as possible:

Everyone is issuing all the right condemnations. No one is willing to do anything about it.

The suicide murderer who killed five Israelis in Hadera was let out of Israeli jail last month as a good will gesture:

Kind of puts in perspective the Palestinians' demands on Israel to release more prisoners and the United States' demands on Israel to open up its border crossings.
Palestinians are also calling on Israel not to endanger the ceasefire by doing anything, you know, non-ceasefire-ish:

That they have not always condemn suicide attacks on Israeli civilians seems a little beside the point when they're calling on Israel not to "undermine the cessation of violence" in the wake of a violent suicide attack.

Iran's "new hardline President" has openly called for the destruction of the Jewish state through terrorism and fire (this distinguishes him not at all from Iran's "old moderate President", who only called for the destruction of the Jewish state through fire, albeit nuclear fire):

It's impossible to underestimate the gravity of this situation - this is an open and explicit call for war by a nation actively developing nuclear weapons. And spare us the pedantic Anthony Cordesman "Iran has a rational foreign policy" musings - does anyone doubt that this country under this leader would refrain from using nuclear weapons against Israel? It might sound strange to Western ears, but the leaders of the Islamic Republic genuinely believe that they have a divine mission to wipe Israel off the map:

Last week, the United States Secretary of State called for direct contact and engagement with Iran, while today Russia said that Iran is not a threat. Apparently, threatening to destroy another country because its filled with Jews makes you neither a pariah nor a threat.

Hamas's Gaza leader goes on the record:

Yesterday, the United States State Department ended speculation about its position on the matter and made it clear to Israel that it considers Hamas so legitimate that Israel must let Hamas run in Palestinian elections.

Fences to keep suicide bombers out are legitimate when they're built by Arab countries to protect Arab citizens from Arab suicide bombers:

But a fence built by Israel to protect Jews from Arab suicide bombers is "Apartheid" - even if where its built in Gaza has allowed only one local suicide bomber to get through in five years and even if where its built in the West Bank causes an "absolute halt" in terrorist activities.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

The Fatah party that currently controls the Palestinian National Authority is promising to disarm their terrorist militias:

We'd point that by "disarm them" they mean "arm them with newer European supplied weapons for 'security'", but there's only so much snark we can shove into a single post. So instead, contemplate this irony: the ruling party in the Palestinian Authority is disarming its terrorists while the United States (after a long effort) has forced Israel to allow Hamas (a group that has categorically refused to disarm) to run for and potentially take over the Palestinian government:

That's a huge relief, because for a second there we were afraid that there'd be a Palestinian government not populated by an armed terrorist organization.

The arrest of two Israeli-Arab traitors who conspired with Hamas to conduct terrorism is raising uncomfortable questions about the many years that the two spent studying dentistry in Romania:

What is it about Romania that makes it such an ideal breeding ground for Islamist terrorism? The article has one explanation...

... but we think it would be an oversight to neglect the ideological predispositions that Romania historically shares with radical Muslims:

There's just something so fundamentally wrong but so overwhelmingly common about Palestinian terrorism that people just don't notice how nakedly absurd its justifications are:

Assume for a second that Israel isn't justified in attacking terrorists like Abu al-Muamen before they can commit mass murder again: so assume that this is Israeli "violence" against Palestinian "militants" and not something more reasonable, like "self defense." So assume the best case for the Palestinians now threatening massive retaliation - that Israel really was unjustified in targeting one of Islamic Jihad's top lieutenants. Even in that case, they would still only be justified in attacking Israeli soldiers and military targets - they would still be nothing more than base murderers and terrorists for threatening to massacre Israeli civilians. But when Israelis attack Palestinian "militants" and the Palestinians attack Israeli civilians, it's a "cycle of violence".

Responding to Israel's historic withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, in which a democracy (that's Israel) took the unprecedented step of unilaterally giving up land won in a defensive war, Palestinian terrorist groups are continuing their war against Israel:

All this started when Israel intercepted one of Islamic Jihad's top murderers:

It's a cycle of violence! The IDF kills terrorists planning to murder Israelis, and other terrorists respond by... threatening to murder Israelis. And in the end, Israel is blamed for inciting terrorists to try to murder Israelis.

The United States is currently spending what little international diplomatic capital it has in a full court press meant to punish Syria for letting people from within their country launch attacks on people in other countries. But this morning, it was revealed that the on going rocket attacks against Israel are being ordered by terrorist leaders under government protection in Damascus...

... and in response to this intolerable situation, in which bombs and missiles are being lobbed over what is effectively an international border, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is demanding that Israel - this is really unbelievable - open up the border crossings between Gaza and Israel:

By any rational definition, the fact that the Palestinians are launching bombs and rockets across the border at Israel puts Israel and the Palestinians in what can only be called a state of war. Take a step back form the day to day insanity of the Middle East situation and just contemplate what Secretary Rice is demanding from Israel - and Rice is pressuring Israel to literally open up its borders to people who are, at this very instant, at war with it:

Sometimes we think we're too cynical about United Nations bureaucracy / incompetence. Sometimes less so:

Can you believe that Kofi Annan would try to bury or white-wash a report implicitly or explicitly critical of Syria?

The oft-quoted definition of an obsession is the inability to change one's mind and the refusal to change the subject:

He doesn't really care about corruption - he's still just really pissed off at the disengagment. And while revenge is one of the oldest pursuits in Israeli politics, there's a point at which it becomes so counter-productive to one's cause as to border on derangement. Then again, we don't know - maybe a right of center leader other than Sharon could get elected... oh wait, no, no - turns out that won't happen.
Also on the topic of disengagement-related debts to be paid, Sharon intends to bring Avi Dichter - the former Shin Bet chief who's assurances in the security arena were critical in mobilizing public support for the disengagement over the objections of former IDF Chief of General Staff Moshe Ya'alon - into the government. Sharon has a long memory for friends and foes and a singular dedication to ensuring that both know that they're being remembered - cf, above, "revenge".

Jeff Jacoby uses Pakistan's demand that Israeli money be funneled through the UN to demonstrate the complete irrationality of Islamist anti-Semitism:

Pakistan was insulting toward Israel's immediate and unconditional offer of humanitarian aid. Waiting almost a week before accepting Israeli aid and then demanding that it be provided quietly is... what the US State Department did after Katrina to avoid offending Muslim countries:

Israeli Arabs enjoy more political, social, and economic rights and privileges than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East. So the obvious response is outright treason:

Over the weekend the Jewish Agency announced that they were giving aid and compensation to the Israeli Arab victims of Jewish terrorist Eden Natan-Zada. Despite the fact that donations and public funds given to the Jewish Agency are generally given for the purpose of improving the lives of Jews, the Agency concluded that it was important to emphasize that Israeli-Arab citizens are full and loyal citizens of Israel.

It used to be the case that whenever some cleric blamed mass death on Allah's wrath, we could pass it on with a snarky sense of superiority. But ever since Christian and Jewish groups blamed Katrina on the assorted sins of New Orleans residents, Ariel Sharon, and the United States as a whole, we've had to settle for passing the idiocy on with relative humility:

Earlier this year, German officials proposed celebrating 40 years of German-Israeli diplomatic relations by making Jerusalem and Berlin sister cities. Everyone thought that was a great idea - except the elected representatives of the city of Berlin:

It looks like Jerusalem officials were less then interested in the deal in the first place, but that's not the point - the point is the reason that Berlin gave for rejecting the deal on their end. One might suggest that failing to recognize Israel's capital as Israel's capital is more a problem with Germany than with Israel - and that therefore it's incumbent upon Germans to find a way around the international community's unprecedented refusal to let a nation state choose its own capital city. But then one would be disqualifying oneself from a career as a diplomat.

Regardless of your political commitments, this is objectively funny:

At Winds Of Change, Armed Liberal sees reasons to be optimistic about the chances for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal:

Those numbers are indeed promising. But a deeper look at some of the other answers gives reason to doubt that the low interest in parties who will ensure the continuation of the Intifada actually signals a change in the Palestinian public's pattern of supporting armed struggle even if they were given a state.*:

In other words, even though only 3% of the Palestinian public considers ensuring the continuation of the Intifada "most important", about 60% oppose or strongly oppose taking even the most rudimentary steps necessary to stopping the Intifada.
Furthermore, twice as many Palestinians believe that the Palestinians rather than the Israelis are the winners "in the ongoing armed conflict that has started in September 2000 between Israel and the Palestinians" (34.5% vs. 17.3%), while an even greater percentage believe that the "majority of Palestinians" believe that the Palestinians rather than the Israelis have been "the winner in the armed conflict" (46.8% vs. 18.7%). A total of 66.1% answered "yes" or "definitely yes" to the question "do you believe that armed confrontations so far has helped achieved Palestinian national and political rights in ways that negotiations could not achieve?"
When you couple these convictions of victory with some other results - that 45.6% of respondents think that "a political settlement is not possible ever" and that 72.4% believe that "lasting peace possible between Israelis and Palestinians" is "impossible" or "definitely impossible", the result that only 3% of Palestinians are concerned about "the ability of the list [they're voting for] to insure the continuation of the intifada" becomes a little less comforting. Of course they're not concerned about the ability of a leader to insure continuation of the intifada: they think that the continuation of violence will take care of itself, that no matter who is elected, any Palestinian leader will inevitably have to fight Israel.
And even these numbers are confounded by the Palestinian public's overwhelming focus on internal corruption: 97.8% of respondents say that "integrity and incorruptibilty of candidate" is "important" or "very important", a plurality of respondents ranked "the ability of the list to fight corruption and implement reform measures" as "their most important factor", and a plurality of respondents think that "fighting corruption and implementing reforms" should be the government's "first priority". Now, given that 86.5% of respondents think there is "corruption in Palestinian Authority institutions" and 49.5% think that "the fight against corruption in the PA" has "not changed" since "the elections of Mahmud Abbas", it's unsurprising that when asked to choose the party "most able to fight corruption and implement reforms", 47% responded "Hamas/Islamic Jihad" while only 36.5% answered Fatah (and that's just the people willing to criticize Fatah: 45.5% of people said "no" to "can people in the West Bank and Gaza today criticize the PA without fear?"). So course the Palestinian public is not concerned with "the ability of the list to insure the continuation of the intifada" - many of them are already voting for Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the extreme terrorist parties, for other reasons!
The picture that emerges from these numbers is that: (a) the vast majority of the Palestinian public thinks that they've been winning the war so far, (b) they think the war will continue indefinitely, and (c) they're unwilling to take even the most basic steps to deescalate that war.
But there are answers that look like bright spots:

Of course a majority oppose launching attacks from the Gaza Strip - that's Hamas's position! They tried to launch attacks from the Gaza Strip, they got leveled by the IDF, they promised to behave themselves - but only from the Gaza Strip! The question "...would you under these conditions support or oppose carrying out armed attacks against Israeli targets from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank" wasn't asked.
What about the 76.5% who "definitely support" or "support" "the current mutual cease fire with Israel"? It's easy to support the current mutual ceasefire when the conditions of that ceasefire essentially come down to: the Palestinians get to carry out suicide bombings, rocket attacks, roadside bombings, instigations to riot, and child suicide bombings while Israel is pressured not to retaliate so as not to "threaten the fragile ceasefire."
There might be one big, gaping flaw in this explanation - it relies on the idea that the Palestinian public thinks that the Intifada is inevitable and is therefore unconcerned about its continuation, but when asked "which of the following political parties do you support", 41.2% choose Fatah vs. 30.1% for Hamas and 2.6% for Islamic Jihad (two terrorist organizations irrevocably committed to the destruction of Israel).
First of all, support for Fatah and support for violence are not exactly incompatible. But even more to the point - it's not clear that the fact that a plurality of Palestinians support Fatah means that there is any significant support for negotiating with Israel. If Fatah's support was really being driven by its relative moderation towards Israel, then one would expect the gap between overall Fatah support and overall Hamas support to be much larger, because 64.9% of respondents thought that Fatah is the best party to "push the peace process forward" (compared to 21.7% for Hamas/Islamic Jihad) and 43.5% think that Fatah is the best party for "protecting refugee rights in negotiations" (compared to 36.4% for Hamas/Islamic Jihad). It's far more likely that Fatah's support is being driven by their ability to manage existing civil infrastructure, general satisfaction with Abbas (60.3%), or even apprehension about Islamism from the traditionally secular Palestinian public.
At several points where one would expect the question, this poll fails to ask outright if the Palestinian public is willing to give up armed struggle against Israel. In the weakest sense, it doesn't demonstrate that, once issues of corruption and crime are solved, the Palestinians won't still very strongly seek to continue attacks against Israel; in the strongest sense, it indicates that to the extent that they refuse to disarm and deny the possibility of a peace deal, there is an expectation of returning to attacks against Israel. So in one sense, Armed Liberal is right: the poll demonstrates that this time around, the Palestinians are not voting based on Intifada-related issues - but the implication that they're willing to give up fighting for "the chance to build a better life for themselves" simply does not follow.

* This poll does indicate a change in that specific measure: a very positive 74.6% would support "full reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinian state" if "a peace agreement is reached, and a Palestinian state is established and recognized by Israel." Make no mistake: this is progress. But it's not progress that lends itself well to confidence building measures that risk Israeli security when less than 15% of respondents think that reconciliation is possible some time within the next decade and 42.3% don't think its possible at all - and when they're willing to support not dismantling terrorist infrastructure based on those calculations.

Like the fun-hating lunatic who wants to make a violent video games to show that making violent video games is bad, Egyptian Muslims killed one and injured dozens in protests over art that depicted Muslims as violent:

Nothing like a little violence to put the brakes on art. Hey, at least this kind of thing isn't happening in Western Europe.

In the past, we've argued that the most significant way to gauge whether United States support for Israel was genuine (or just a repeat of implicit Oslo-like pressure) was to evaluate whether the US was willing to condition Israeli concessions on Palestinian fulfillment of Road Map commitments. Usually and unfortunately, the opposite has been true:

So this recent statement by a State Department official is very welcome:

Which makes sense - the central problematic in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has always been that Israel is expected to give up tangible land for intangible promises. Actually forcing the Palestinians to repay tangible concessions (the disengagement) with tangible reciprocation (disarming terrorist groups) doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

Stan Goodenough, a successful evangelical Christian journalist and former editor International Christian Embassy’s Middle East Intelligence Digest, is suggesting that America was founded in 1776 to protect modern-day Israel:

There are two reasons we're skeptical of this claim: (1) it sounds an awful lot like the wildest anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which hold that Israel manipulates United States policy to further its own interest, (2) if He was really intent on consistently using the United States to protect the Jewish people, wouldn't He have prevailed upon President Roosevelt to let Jewish refugees on the S.S. St. Louis enter the US rather than forcing them to return to Hitler's Europe? We're not attempting to disparage the potential role of divine providence in the creation and survival of the Jewish state, nor are we even saying that the United States has played no positive role in said creation and survival - it's merely that we believe that the United States' role has been be little too inconsistent for anyone to confidently claim to have ascertained divine intent.

Missed this story when it first came out. Not that we're judging, but we think it kind of sucks to be a woman in Turkey:

We like how the survey mentions that most of the respondents were men: as if women in the Muslim world haven't bought into the crude misogyny of radical Islam.

We're sure that there's a way to blame Israel for this, we're just not sure what that way is:

Palestinian terrorists will often use civilian infrastructure to hide massive caches of military supplies and to conduct logistical planning for terrorist operations - precisely it makes Israel far more reluctant to conduct operations aimed at preempting terrorism when those operations would have to be conducted in the midst of innocent civilians, turning the entire Palestinian population into de fact human shields. And the most frustrating aspect of this strategy is that it works: does anyone doubt that there would have been intense international outcry, massive Arab riots, and most probably retaliatory suicide bombings if the toddler - having been intentionally put in harm's way by his mother - was in any way hurt?

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

This has apparently been up for a long time, but it's new to us. Steven Weiss maintains a site with scans of rare, pre-WWI Yiddish postcards from Russia, Germany and Poland collected by his grandfather at the turn of the century. Fascinating stuff.

Egypt is among the most secular Arab states in the Middle East. There are no morality police, the legal system is mostly secular, and women are equal citizens. Turns out though, Islamic fundamentalism really does trump Arab secularism:

Two approaches to misogyny in the Arab and Muslim world: the Saudi model, in which women aren't allowed outside without a male relative, no driving, no voting, no job, etc or the Egyptian model, in which women are allowed to do all those things on the condition that they deny that they should be allowed to do them. How clever.

Ha'aretz writes that As expected, Syria dismisses UN probe as U.S. plot. We dunno - we kind of expected they'd blame Israel.
In other Syria-killed-Hariri news, people at the United Nations sure are stupid:

In exasperation, Glenn Reynolds wants to know if there are any tyrants Annan won't cover for? We don't know what everyone's so piss off about about: the UN is designed to give dictators and theocrats the pretense of legitimacy and a place of protection as they launch their Lilliputian attacks against democracy - shielding Assad from the consequences of his actions is just part of Annan's job.

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is considering retiring from politics (or as Israelis call it, pulling a Barak... or as we call it, passive-aggressively threatening to take his toys and go home) because his people think that he might lose a general election:

Oh you think so? As if the part sabout Netanyahu losing in the general or the part about him being blamed for bringing down the Likud weren't brutally obvious before he pulled his little stunt in the Central Committee. But Netanyahu's confidants still don't get the point: he wouldn't have lost the general because people would be angry that he brought down Sharon - he would have lost the general because he and his positions are, in sum, wildly unpopular.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Last night, we were privileged to attend a screening of Paradise Now, sponsored by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. The movie, by Dutch-Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad, relates the final few days of two childhood friends recruited to be suicide bombers. We expected to hate the movie: it has won awards and accolades from all the wrong people and Abu-Assad has refused to condemn suicide bombings, describing them as "a very human reaction to an extreme situation." But the film turned out to be not only well-made but surprisingly subtle. It is unfair in some places, and there is one overarching anti-Israel theme which is difficult to justify, but it is a smart movie unworthy of the condemnation it's received from some reviewers and bloggers.
The film opens in Nablus (where it was in fact shot), as two childhood friends, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) are told that they have been chosen for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv "together, as [they] wanted". The boys accept, but this review, translated at Davids Medienkritik is unfair when it states that they "don't hesitate a moment when" they're told they have been selected for the operation. Quite the opposite - Nashef and Suliman do a superb job conveying precisely how torn they are through long, sad looks and faltering steps - hesitations that the terrorist leaders steadfastly pretend not to notice. The clear implication - that there are doubts which neither friend feels comfortable or safe expressing - is confirmed the first time that their caretakers allow them to be alone, when the two air their doubts aloud.
It's not an accident that, from the second that Said and Khaled are told that they're going to be suicide bombers until that moment (at the fence to Israel), the terrorist leaders never leave the friends alone. Jamal (Amer Hlehel), an Islamist terrorist leader, announces to Said that Said has been selected. He then insists on not leaving Said's side for the entire night or the next day - and we later find out that the same is true with Khaled and his handler. The terrorist leaders are clearly unwilling to give the young men which they "honor" with the "duty" of suicide bombing the time or room to reconsider. The humanization of Palestinian terrorists and the abstraction of their Israeli victims - something we've criticized when it's done by the media - is here used to explore the very real dynamic by which Palestinians are trapped between the genuine hardships of Israeli military occupation and the cynical terrorist leaders who manipulate young Arab men's senses of honor to murder Jews by proxy. At times the movie is very subtle on this point: there is a scene in which Hiam Abbass, who plays Said's mother - a fairly modern, secular Palestinian widow - is sitting outside with Said in the morning. Jamal comes out of the house to meet them - at which point Said's mother quietly but hurriedly wraps her hair out of deference to the encroaching fundamentalism seeping into daily life in the West Bank.
Nonetheless, the movie is about what drives Palestinian men and women to become suicide bombers and it's by a pro-Palestinian filmmaker - so the blunt theme is that Israel's Occupation is broadly evil, while a more muted theme, which is still thoroughly anti-Israel, is that military occupation coupled with poverty turns Palestinians against one another. There's some intellectual dishonesty in the film: repeatedly the suicide bombing is described as an attack on soldiers, and the last scene indeed shows a bus filled with armed and uniformed soldiers. But the vast majority of suicide bombings - in restaurants, in front of nightclubs, and yes, on buses - have been against civilians, many of them teenagers. In another scene, Jamal states that Said and Khaled's suicide bombing will be the first one conducted by the group in two years, the implication being that Israel created the motive for the attack (and the loss of Said and Khaled's tragic lives) by assassinating a leader of the group at the very beginning of the film. However, the terrorist group is clearly Hamas (it's an Islamist group powerful in Nablus, there's a reference to the schools they run, etc) - and of course, since the Intifada began, there has never been a two-year gap in Hamas's mass murders. But since Abu-Assad never comes out and says that the group is Hamas, he can create a fictional universe in which Israel is solely responsible for instigating Palestinian violence.
Which is the one, overarching theme with which we have concerns: the insistence that the Israelis have forced the Palestinians to wage war. There is a moment during Khaled's recorded martyr's speech when he states outright that the reason he has to become a suicide bomber is because the Israelis will never offer that the Palestinians their own, viable state. This claim is demonstrably false:

And on this issue the entire film turns: even an impassioned debate on the ethics and utility of suicide bombings between Khaled and Said's love interest Suha (played beautifully by Lubna Azabal) is only about the right tactic with which to fight Israel - Suha states that the Palestinians must wage a "moral war" while Khaled ridicules her as naive. The idea that the Palestinians don't have to wage war at all - that the only reason the two sides are still fighting is because Yasser Arafat turned down a historic peace offer in order to launch a premediated war largely supported by the Palestinian public - is never considered. Nor is it pointed out that before the Palestinians launched that war and Israel had to reinvade the West Bank, previous Israeli withdrawals had ensured that 97% of Palestinians lived under the control of an elected Palestinian government. And here the movie fails its audience, because the point could and should have been made - there are plenty of Palestinians in plenty of cafes who are more than willing to dismissively blame their leadership for failing them or angrily ask why Hamas leaders don't send their own children to die as suicide bombers.
But even with its anti-Israel leanings, this movie is not propaganda and it's not hateful. It conveys the banality and heartbreak of a crumbling society soaked in machismo and terrorism - from wild conspiracy theories traded in taxis to the cost of renting video tapes of collaborator lynchings, from grandiose claims of honor to the best place to buy water filters. It unfairly blames Israel for the entirety of that situation, but it poignantly demonstrates how the most touching of childhood friendships is shattered by two young men's belief that they only way they can truly live is to die.

My new HateWatch post is now online at Winds Of Change.NET.

As the Bush Administration hands Palestinian Authority Chairman Abbas the international recognition and legitimacy that comes from having a summit with the President of the United States, Hamas is really afraid that Abbas will return and try to stop them from killing people:

Of course, Hamas isn't really worried that Abbas will move against them: (1) Bush very explicitly choose not to link demilitarization to Hamas's participation in Palestinian elections - mostly because the United States has come out in support of letting Hamas run no matter what. (2) Ab