End of the week humor...
Except not really.

This really should've gone in the "things you already could've guessed" post from earlier this morning, but we're not very good at this whole blogging thing. Anyway:

And by "only against the Zionist occupation" he means "only against Jews and their Jew-loving supporters":

Hamas is eager to take back their old "most murderous terrorist organization in Israel" trophy. The only thing we're not sure about is whether all those moderates in Fatah are going to let them have it back:

In other news, Hamas accused the US of dealing a "fatal blow to the road map" by rejecting the new terrorist Hamas cabinet. Because we wouldn't want to do anything to endanger the peace process.

* Benjamin Netanyahu is in big trouble with his Likud party. Something about "totally failing to be good at his job" or something. Remember when we talked about how Sharon's political advisers were going to destroy Netanyahu for abandoning Sharon in the most crass and opportunistic way possible? Yeah.
* Even the United Nations has taken official notice of the fact that Israel did not damage the environment in the Gaza Strip. That obvious truism might have something to do with Israel being an advanced, civilized country that combines humanity and technology to build an advanced society. Money quote: the UN "did not find contamination of water, land or buildings that poses a significant risk to the environment or public health." These conclusions are in stark contrast to ostensibly rigorous academic studies, ostensibly neutral international journalism, and ostensibly accurate Palestinian government information. It's not that accusing Jews of poisoning wells is a particularly resonant fiction buried deep in the Western psyche that can be rhetorically activated while maintaining plausible deniability - it's just that all these people made the exact same mistake.
* Our favorite: "U.S. Ambassador Bolton says Palestinian FM off to bad start". It's cool though - the UN guy in charge of apologizing for the Palestinians says that Hamas has shown "signs of evolution". Maybe in another century or two, they'll even "evolve" to not being "primitive terrorists."
There's your end of the week news. Don't say we never do things for you.

People often ask us "Mere Rhetoric, why are you so angry?" And then when we try to hit them with sticks, they call the cops. Go figure.
Anyway, two days ago, we wrote:

And then today we read this:

That was the lede to the story. The first paragraph. Not the second paragraph - the first paragaph. pparently they didn't want us to miss this great news.
At this point, we're expecting to wake up tomorrow and find out not only that Ehud Olmert has resigned, but that just before he did he made Tzachi Hanegbi the Deputy Prime Minister. Because that would be awesome.

Some jagoff from Canada found us by searching Google on the phrase Israel lack of humanity. Hey buddy, go to hell.

Is Castro dead?

UPDATE: Eh. Probably not.

Liberal activists make much of their brave and defiant stand against the shadow of fascism that the Bush administration is casting over the United States. This idiocy has much to do with their basic misunderstanding of "censorship", which is in turn tied up with their poor upbringing (seriously). You see, liberal activists (especially of the college campus variety) tend to be children of the imbecile 80s - picked on by peers but doted on by parents, they took refuge in the illusion that every little word that tumbled from their rosy, dew-soaked lips was the shiniest and bestest utterance ever.
Then they grew up just a little. Suddenly, nobody really wanted to hear their inane "insights" on socialism, indy music, and their own feelings. But it couldn't be that they had nothing worthwhile to say (remember: shiniest and bestest ever). So it must be... that they were being censored! Whenever anyone told them that they were wrong - or worse, if anyone didn't want to listen to them - then it was suddenly the equivalent of the Soviet gulags.
And so when private organizations refuse to invite odious musicians to perform for them (as in they refuse to help those musicians make statements ) it becomes "censorship" (as in the government actively preventing musicians for making statements). When Ann Coulter accuses liberals of "supporting the goals of Al Qaeda" (as in she criticizes people that she has no formal or informal power over) it becomes literally "indistinguishable from McCarthyism" (as in a government official leveraging the government's monopoly on violence to intimidate government employees). Why? Because liberals have the shiniest and bestest ideas ever - so anything that falls short of actively endorsing their ideas might as well be outright censorship. Seriously - the Google search for DailyKos and blog censorship is above - click through to witness the staggering self-importance of America's self-declared best and brightest.
Usually, these delusions of grandeur wouldn't rate more than a sarcastic passing comment. Under normal circumstances, it's relatively harmless to let this not exactly intimidating netroot army think that Rumsfeld has deployed UAVs to monitor the keystrokes that they so indignantly punch out deep in their parents' basements. Except that there's a cost to calling everyone who disagrees with you a fascist and a censor: it prevents people from being able to identify actual fascism and censorship. And people should care about real fascism and censorship, not least of all because more and more proof is emerging that the Iranian government is beating and arresting bloggers who voice opposition to the totalitarian regime:

We eagerly await news that Leftwing bloggers intend to launch the same kinds of diatribes against Ahmadinejad's actual censorship that they launch against Bush's imaginary kind. Not really, because we're pretty sure that they've lost the ability to identify actual fascism. But it'd be nice if they kind of pretended.

Charming.
Have we mentioned how fantastically awesome we find New York Jewish culture to be? Seriously, Heeb Magazine (the starfucking Jewish hipster mag where anti-Semitic stereotypes are OK as long as they're meant ironically) is just so cool. We can't imagine anything better than having people who don't believe in God, go to shul, or identify with Israel being offensive just so they can prove that "it's cool to be Jewish."

The Gil party? Are you kidding?

Say what you will about the deplorable conditions that Israel's elderly live in - and those conditions are indeed deplorable - you have to admit that "voting for the Gil party means freeing Jonathan Pollard" is pretty stupid. But we're glad to see that all the kids who were going to waste their votes on the Green Leaf party found a different way to waste their votes.
The problem with single-issue voting in a parliamentary democracy is that it ignores all those "coalition" consequences of voting. In this case, those consequences mostly involve crashing the Israeli econ... involve empowering Labor:

By "easy time finding common ground" we think he means "making them understand that he'll have them beaten" (since they're union professionals, presumably they're hip to the euphemisms). Seriously, we like the Gil party - it's like the Labor party without all of that "undermining Israeli security" baggage. What we don't like about the Gil party is that the votes they're allowing the Labor party to leverage their relative strength to Kadima:

The only thing that makes us less giddy than the thought of Peretz controlling the Israeli economy is the thought of Peretz controlling Israeli defenses. At least with Peretz in control of the Israeli economy, we'll get a fantastic exchange rate the next time we visit the Herzelia mall. With Peretz in control of Israeli security, there might not be a Herzelia mall.
Question for Israeli university students: seriously, what was wrong with voting for Kadima? Just not hip enough? Too conventional?

New York City employs a certain radical imam who preaches hatred and anti-Semitism, engages in tirades about "Zionists", and gets paid by the city to minister to prisoners (a duty which he discharges by advocating certain stances of questionable patriotism). New York Mayor Bloomberg has recently jumped into action by very publicly not firing the lunatic - and has now explained his decision by linking it to his own Judaism:

In our experience, being Jewish has also helped us approach issues of anti-Semitism with the Muslim community. And by "approach issues" we obviously mean "be targeted by".
You know, we've always been baffled by polls that show gigantic swaths of American Jews who fail to in any way identify their self-interest with the preservation of Israel or Jerusalem. We used to think that it was because of bad polling methodologies. Then we went to New York, and started to think that it's because these New York Jews have this special kind of Judaism (apparently grounded in some version of the Talmud that locates the Temple somewhere in the Lower East Side).
But now we're beginning to think that it might just be because they're total idiots.

One would think that with famine in Africa, bird flu in South East Asia, anarchy in South America, there would be many looming "humanitarian crises" that the international media might concern themselves with. But guess what obvious propaganda they're instead obsessed with repeating:


This is a crisis manufactured by the Palestinians inflicted on the Palestinians, but let's imagine that it wasn't. Let's imagine that Israel had actually closed off the whole Gaza Strip, instead of just one crossing. Why shouldn't Israel close off the Strip? In the last 5 days, two major and well-funded terrorist groups have declared their intentions to launch immediate and long-term terrorist attacks - and they're explicit that they won't stop until they achieve the descruction of the Jewish State:

And while the PFLP and Hamas are busy promising to send terrorists to murder Israelis, Fatah is actually sending murderers into Israel right now. So let's say that Israel actually decided to stop making these people's lives easier - say, if Israel told Egypt that Egypt should send food through the Egypt-Gaza border instead of the Israel-Gaza border. Wouldn't that be, like, justified by the Palestinians' promises to destroy Israel? At some point, it stops being "collective punishment" and becomes "reacting to a large number of people who want to kill you".

Do you remember when human rights organizations weren't literally mouthpieces for terrorists:

Isn't that something they should have to say? At least in theory - like, the presumption should be that you should have to explain why you appear to have close ties to a terrorist before you're considered legitimate. At a minimum, you should have to explain why you shouldn't have to explain that.

Last week we asked: "Would Palestinian Officials Intentionally Starve Palestinian Civilians Just So They Could Demonize Israel?". Israel closed one of three gates to the Gaza Strip because of a highly specific security alert indicating that a terrorist was to cross through that crossing. In response, the Palestinians threw up their hands and declared that Israel had closed off the entire Gaza Strip in an effort to starve Palestinian civilians. Given that two out of the three crossings between Israel and Gaza were still open (because only the crossing that the terrorists were going to slip through had been closed), this statement was very close to being the opposite of true... but still true enough for Reuters to believe:

"But", of course, is a great weasel world - you get to state something reasonable, then state something totally fantastic and call it "balance" ("sure, killing people over cartoons is bad, but...", "sure, Israel says that it's taking measures because of Palestinian suicide bombers, but...") In a sane world, this article by one of the biggest media organizations on the planet would point out either that (a) there were two crossings within a few kilometers that the Palestinians were more than welcome to use for bringing in supplies or that (b) the Karni crossing was being closed in the same way before the Palestinians elected a terrorist government so it's probably not punishment for that election.
Of course, in a sane world Israel wouldn't be criticized for punishing the Palestinians "for electing the Islamic militant group Hamas in January's parliamentary poll." In that world, no one would expect a state to make life easier on a people who had just - through popular election - declared a desire to destroy it. Then again, that world kind of is this world - just not for Israel.

Two specific comments about Juan Cole's predictable reaction to the Mearsheimer and Walt anti-Semitic sounding article (which we'll have a couple more thoughts on in the very near future - not to ruin it for you, but we don't think they're anti-Semitic so much as pathetic):

First, let's all stop pretending that it's somehow brave to talk for academics to talk about how AIPAC controls US policy. For a liberal academic to darkly insinuate that "neoconservative lobbies" control the Bush administration is about as brave as a Hollywood film-maker creating a movie about homosexual love. There is literally less than zero cost to the academy for striking a pose against pro-Israel US policies, and even less to sounding sophisticated by implying that "lobbies" have something to do with it.
Second, has anyone else noticed that while all other ethnic groups are attacked by the Left for acting against their "ethnic self-interest", articles are being published about how evil the "Jewish Lobby" is? More to the point, of all ethnic groups, it seems like Jews - who really are categorized ethnically by many of their enemies - are the first attacked when they appeal to ethnic self-interest. For instance, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh is getting dinged for suggesting that blacks might have political interests - stopping abortion, shrinking the government, etc - that trump their "black identity". The discussion began when some solid (and, we presume, very brave) liberal at the Los Angeles Times suggested that being a black conservative was analogous to being complicit in slavery:.

Let's assume that there is something that can be objectively defined as being in "the self-interest of African-Americans". And let's assume furthermore that Republican policies are that opposite of that. It would still be condescension bordering on racism to assume that all blacks should have to support Democrats because of that one issue. It would be predictable - witness the horror with which liberals greet libertarian homosexuals who allow their full political ideology to trump single-issue Republican opposition to gay marriage - but it would still be condescending. And yet Jews aren't afforded the same luxury. Quite the opposite - they're attacked for even the merest suggestion that they have some sort of collective interest in the security of the Jewish State. Or worse, they're paternalistically celebrated when they eschew that interest ("most American Jews deeply disagree with the policies advocated by the American Enterprise Institute).
If Jews - who actually are being attacked worldwide based on their ethnicity - were treated like other groups, the Los Angeles Times would be publishing articles like this:

That would be as stupid as when the same paragraph is written, mutatis mutandis, about African-Americans. But at least it would be genuinely brave to write.

We really love it when international diplomats and academics figure out what Muslim terrorists are "really" trying to tell us. Naive people like us, immersed as we are in our naivete, look at Hamas's declaration from today that they're not going to stop killing Jews...

... and conclude that Hamas is going to keep trying to kill Jews. But apparently that's only because we're unsophisticated. The Swiss, on the other hand, know better:

Of course, we're still unsophisticated enough to believe that Muslim fanatics who say they want to establish the global caliphate actually want to reestablish the caliphate. If we were a little less naive, we'd understand how they're just speaking in code about their "legitimate grievances".

So there's this Amazon Recommends Adoption Over Abortion scandle slowly making its way through the blogosphere (slowly, because it's pretty stupid). Basically, Amazon's search algorithms were recomending "Did you mean adoption?" when people were searching on "abortion". The fact that consumers who search for information on "abortion" also sometimes search for information on "adoption" - plus the similiarities in spelling - was enough to trigger the suggestion. And thus the makings of a pseudo-scandal because some religious official found advocating adoptions instead of abortions "offensive".
Regardless of your views on abortion rights (but not on Roe... no one really thinks that that decision makes sense, right?)... anyway, regardless of your views on abortion rights, if someone is doing research on the abortion debate - is it really "offensive" to point out that adoption is part of that debate? Or even if someone is doing research about acquiring an abortion for themselves or a loved one, is it really offensive to point out the overwhelmingly well-known and obvious fact that adoption is on the spectrum of options that they have?
We only ask because in the last 48-72 hours we've been told that it's "censorship" to point out that accusing a small cabal of Jews of brainwashing Christian evangelicals and undermining US security is potentially offensive.

Steven Spielberg is in trouble because the Native American extras on Into the West are complaining - despite much of the mini-series being devoted to exploring Western expansion from a Native American point of view - that Spielberg's company isn't being sensitive enough:

Why is it that only highly abstract, exotic, and romanticized beliefs count as things that Hollywood filmmakers have to be "culturally sensitive" to? What about our belief that "terrorists who murder Olympic athletes shouldn't get other people's sympathy?" Is that not "cultural" enough to be worthy of "sensitivity"?

In Israel, technology is being used to intensify the power of the sun by a thousand-fold, with the intention of creating new Green technologies:

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia has achieved demographic parity, with "a beggar for each man and woman living in Jeddah" and Iran is determined to ignore silly things like nature when it gets in the way of the Koran:

No Daylight Savings Time because people won't be able to figure out when to pray. Maybe instead of building nukes to destroy a country where everyone has advanced far enough to be able to tell time, Ahmadinejad should hand out digital watches to faithful Iranians.

Gender consciousness reaches Saudi Arabia:

"Do women not have as much of a right to... eating facilities as men?" Truly a question that Western sages have pondered for centuries. We think there might be a discussion of it in Plato somewhere. Do women have a right to eating facilities? Yeah, tough question - we just don't know.
Incidentally, don't email us about how this article is a good sign because it shows that "at least some people in the Muslim world support progress". The question is not whether, over the next two centuries, women in Saudi Arabia would be allowed to have university eating facilities. The question is how we deal - right now - with a violent wave of fanatics coming from a world in which they don't.

So MR knows this guy. 20-25 year old Middle Eastern male. Has a very Middle Eastern (albeit Israeli) name. This becomes important.

This guy spends last weekend in New York. Itinerary: American Airlines - Los Angeles to Newark and back - direct flights both ways. Or, as security officials might refer to it, "transcontinental American Airlines flights to and from a New York airport". Our guy buys and pays for these tickets a week before the first flight, using a crumpled, year-old voucher. As if all this isn't suspicious enough, when he buys the tickets something goes wrong and his name gets misspelled.

So it's the morning to leave, and this 20-25 year old Middle Eastern male needs to get on a transcontinental American Airlines flight to a New York airport with a ticket that's not even on his own name. He's a bit of a tech geek, so his backpack is crammed with, among other things:

* Cell phone, an mp3 player, and a laptop
* Cords and chargers for all those things
* This thing
* A pressurized can of deodorant
* A sharp, metal corkscrew

This is where things get funny. Or really not funny, depending on the humor you find in inconveniences at airports that actually make you less safe. We prefer "funny", but that's largely because of our mp3 player, our pretty decent noise canceling headphones, and our cell phone plan with unlimited text messages. Seriously, these three things are lifesavers in the face of airport delays. Sharper Image should market this combination as a "turn TSA incompetence into instant entertainment" kit.

So our guy shows up to LAX. Now, you'd expect someone in his position - someone trying to navigate their way through an airport without a ticket on their own name - to be circumspect. Maybe to try to minimize ID checks by going to a self-serve kiosk and checking no luggage. But not our guy. Sure he knows that checking luggage means a potentially unnecessary ID check, but apparently he reasons thusly: "If I try to check my luggage and the guy at the kiosk notices that I don't have my name on the ticket, I won't be allowed on the plane. Which would suck a lot. But if I don't check my luggage I'll have to carry it through the whole airport. Which would suck at least a little. So what are the odds that this joker will notice that the letters have been mixed up on my Middle Eastern looking name? Sure it matters if the guy on the terrorist watch-list is Muhammed, Muhamed, or Mohammed. But seriously - odds that this guy will even bother to notice the difference?"

Total time at kiosk from beginning to getting baggage ticket - less than two minutes.

Oh, and just for fun, our guy uses foreign, Israeli passport as his only ID in the airport. Appparently the goal was to see if there was anything he could do that would make anyone ask anything other than "may I please see your boarding pass (and ID)". Maybe some questions like: "why don't you have a boarding pass with your name on it", "why are you carrying a power strip in your backpack", or "how could you possibly think it was OK to bring a metal corkscrew on an airplane". Not to ruin the ending, but here's a quick summary of the results:

* Number of times boarding pass was checked: 5
* Number of times boarding pass was checked against ID: 2
* Total time spent by airport or TSA employees looking at ID and/or boarding pass: less than 30 seconds
* Number of times any official in any capacity asked any question other than "may I please see your boarding pass (and ID)": 0.

The trip back from Newark to LAX (or, if you wish, "the transcontinental American Airlines flight from an airport in the greater New York area") went about the same way, with a couple of caveats. Instead of 5, there were only 4 separate boarding pass checks this time - the extra one in LAX comes because they have people checking your boarding pass both at the bottom of the escalators and the to. Listen: even a single boarding pass check is idiotic from a security standpoint - who are you going to catch, terrorists who forgot to purchase tickets for the planes they want to hijack? Which makes the standard double boarding pass check - at the beginning and the end of metal detector lines- doubly stupid. The only terrorists they could stop are too clumsy to hold on to their boarding passes when they take off their shoes. We're pretty sure that stewardesses could take those guys. Which makes the LAX triple boarding pass checks (which only stop terrorists coordinated enough to grip their boarding passes during the metal detector line but clumsy enough to lose them in the little escalator steps) are probably not that helpful.

Anyway, the other difference between Newark and LAX is that Newark had the most perfect visual metaphor of all time. Seriously, best metaphor ever. The metal detector line was taking more than half an hour to get through. Probably because they were checking bags carefully - or at least carefully enough to cause massive delays but not carefully enough to notice a corkscrew in a backpack. Which makes us real bitter about that one time that TSA confiscated the tiny Allen wrench that we forgot to take out of our backpack after a biking trip. But back to the best metaphor ever.

So the Newark line is taking forever. And to the side, there's a TSA official who's supposed to be scanning the line looking for suspicious behavior. Real professionals, like the ones in Las Vegas casinos, are real good at this. They watch your body language, notice your breathing, follow your eyes - security type stuff. But not this woman. Oh no, not this woman. No. This woman is talking on her cell phone. Something about car insurance or something, but that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because - even though she doesn't know it - she's about to become the best metaphor of all time.

She's in one of those white TSA uniforms, literally screaming into her cell phone. She's supposed to be watching the crowd, but she's ignoring them while trying to hear and make herself heard over a bad connection. Things are not going well. She still can't hear. So to fix that, she... are you ready?... she bends her head down, plugs her other ear, and turns around. Yes. She puts her finger in her open ear and literally turns her back on the crowd. TSA uniform, screaming into the cell phone pressed against one ear, finger pushed into the other ear - and then to make the whole thing picture perfect she turns her back on the people she's supposed to be watching.

It. Was. Awesome.

But here's the relatively serious side to this gorgeous, gorgeous metaphor: it illustrates why stupid security regulations are positively dangerous. The intuitive position is the opposite - that every little bit of security, no matter how stupid, helps. Three checks, four checks, why not five checks? But the opposite is actually true - useless security checks actively decrease the effectiveness of even well-planned and well-implemented security checks - and we were already pretty skeptical that any of those existed.

Even in the ideal case, multiple checks mean that each individual guard thinks that he or she be just a little more careless because of redundant security. But American airports do not even represent the ideal case. Instead, most airport employees know that most of their jobs are just designed to waste passengers' time or to thin out lines. So like this woman, we imagine that most airport employees quite all but totally ignore their responsibilities because they know it's not really their job to stop a terrorist.

And yet one hopes that there are at least a couple of security officials who have real jobs. And here's where the problem comes in. These are the people who are ones supposed to be, like, checking IDs against boarding passes or finding corkscrews in backpacks. But it's not as if they know which TSA jobs matter and which don't - all they see is a montage of obviously fake security posts. So they - like everyone else - stop paying attention because they can't tell the real jobs from the fake ones. Except their jobs do matter, and so their neglect actually comes at a cost.

So you multiple checks which make employees think that someone else will do their job. You have useless jobs which make employees think that even if no one else did their specific task, it wouldn't matter. Obviously, this is not a situation condusive to careful scrutiny on the part of security officials. To say nothing of how it makes airports a circus of incompetence that only people like us think are funny.

In the past, we've specifically ridiculed the absurd LAX security ritual. And we're not necessarily in favor of an Ann Coulter style "profile Arabs and leave the white women alone" approach to airport security.(we'd advocate a more Israeli "wildly inconvenience everyone within a 10 mile radius, awarding bonus points for rudeness" setup). But there must be a purpose to inconveniences - perhaps maybe making flights safer. At least at LAX and Newark, the inspections are being conducted by bored and careless workers going through the motions of a routine that would be useless even if it was actually being implemented correctly. It's the worst of all possible worlds: incredibly chaotic and objectively less safe.

Why does someone need to check boarding passes at the beginning of the metal detector line if another official is going to do the same check at the end of the line? You know what? We have a better idea. Take the boarding pass inspectors from the beginning of the line (there were three there last week), dress them up as civilians, and have them randomly bump into passengers. Maybe if they push hard enough and get really lucky, a bomb will fall out of a terrorist's pocket! Right now, as near as we can tell, once you have a boarding pass, a laminated high school ID from a Cairo boarding school and a note from your mother will pretty much get you into any LAX terminal. At that point, a ticket purchased with consecutively-numbered twenties should be more than enough to get you on a plane.

We leave you with this story. This very true story. Before the flight out of LAX, someone from the airport Chili's came on the intercom and made the following announcement: "if you just left the Chili's restaurant and you took a black roller, please check to make sure it is your roller. We have a black roller that someone accidentally left here. There is no name in the bag, but there are some clothes inside as well as a laptop. So if this is your bag, please come back to claim it." Let's review. Unidentified bag left unclaimed in a restaurant attached to a gate servicing international flights. So of course the Chili's employees opened it to see what was inside. Because what everyone really, really needed was firm evidence that the staff at the Terminal 4, Gate 42A Chili's is in charge of making security evaluations about abandoned luggage at LAX.

This is kind of like our professors "encouraging" us to get our papers done. Except without the messy misogynist, potential threat of death part:

Also without the slippery-slope to all out Islamic law part.

If we take little delight in passing on the biased international reaction to Israel's capture of the murderers of Rehavam Ze'evi, then it's with admitted frustration that we pass on the reaction of Israel's own Arab government officials:

This is a member of Israel's parliament calling on enemy combatants to take up arms against the army of his nation. Surely, if this isn't treason, it's at least in tension with the pledge of allegiance that members of the Knesset have to take (and which some Arab MKs have been refusing to commit to). Not to be overly pedantic on this point, but as elected officials in Israel's democracy these people make laws every day - including laws related to military affairs and border security. Only in Israel could elected officials come this close to open treason and be celebrated by their constituents.

Israel has closed off the Karni crossing in northern Gaza on the basis of new, specific threats (we do love that the Jerusalem Post has to go out of its way to point out that "the sources stressed that the threats related to new plans, and not those of a tunnel packed with explosives that terrorists intended to blow up on the Israeli side of the crossing, which were received some weeks ago"). Israel - seeking to minimize anything that even approaches collective punishment - has ensured that two other crossings into Gaza remain open so that food can reach Palestinian civilians. One of the crossings is in central Gaza and one is in southern Gaza - and the Karni crossing itself will reopen as soon as Israel finds the terrorists behind this very specific threat.
So of course, the Palestinians are accusing Israel of closing off the Gaza Strip and trying to starve the Palestinians:

This must be a some new use of the word "inconceivable" - one that doesn't take into account the all but official Palestinian policy of hurling children at Israeli soldiers in order to score political points with the international community. Of course Palestinian officials are willing to let their civilians starve if it offers the slightest chance to hit Israel on the international scene. When we say with all seriousness that Israeli officials care more about the wellbeing of Palestinians than the Palestinians themselves do, this is what we're talking about.

We're at a total loss. In the last 24-36 hours, Palestinians have kidnapped and threatened to kill tens of European citizens. They have set fire to European offices across the Gaza Strip and West Bank (including an attack on the British consulate - or as it is more precisely known, "sovereign British land"). The EU reaction is as pathetic as it is predictable:

At this point, the most wide-spread challenge being faced by the Palestinian people is finding European buildings that haven't been torched or European citizens that haven't been molested. And at this point, we're pretty sure that "Palestinian militants" could literally torture and murder European Prime Ministers, in response to which the EU would rush to ensure that the "Palestinian people" suffered no interruption in aid.

Polls show a huge jump for Kadima:

Unless we miss our count, that's 85 potential mandates for a center-right coalition. Obviously, that coalition would never take form - there's no reason to juggle principled opposition to West Bank withdrawals from religious Zionists (read: loud and public interviews) with social allocations for the poor from Shas (read: demands for outright bribery). We also have serious doubts about Olmert allowing Netanyahu to be anything but the head of the Opposition.
The cocktail party conventional buzz is all about the unprecedented number of undecideds still up for grabs. We think that a good number of those are college students deciding between Kadima and the Green Leaf party, but Ha'aretz seems to think those votes are available for Labor (or, they grudgingly admit, for the Likud). Then again, we're still waiting for the "youth revolution" that Ha'aretz promised us Peretz would bring - but if you're a fan of these kinds of articles there's the link.

Labor
At this point, we'd guess that Olmert would be most comfortable throwing money at whatever Labor and Shas want him to throw money at in exchange for their support on his diplomatic plan. The problem with that scenario is that Peretz is staking out a firm position against unilateral withdrawals - he wants Israel to negotiate with the Palestinian partners for peace. Of course, after Labor gets crushed in the election, Peretz might be forced to resign and all his pre-election posturing will be moot anyway:

Here is where we'd usually gloat by contrasting Ha'aretz's euphoria over Peretz with our theory that Labor primary voters drink paint. But this post is already a little longer than we'd like it to be and besides, there'll be plenty of time for that after the election. In the meantime, feel free to sate yourselves on a lede from this morning's YNet:

Of course it's not. It's obviously the fault of the Hebrew language, which has failed to make "prime minister" and "corrupt, backstabbing union thug" into synonyms.

Likud
When Tzachi Hanegbi left the Likud for Kadima, we despaired of finding any more crooks in the Likud ranks. Luckily, MK Naomi Blumenthal came to our rescue:

Current polling indicates that at #18 she won't get into the next Knesset anyway, but we suppose that Netanyahu has a valid symbolic point to make.

Kadima
Ha'aretz has a take on Olmert's Sharon-esque image strategy, and they drop the bombshell that it might have something to do with the fact that Sharon's advisers are running Olmert's campaign. If you don't want to read it, here's the synopsis: arresting terrorists made Olmert look strong and is likely to reassure voters who were unsettled by his promise to withdraw more settlers from the West Bank. We've just saved you a minute and a half of your life. You're welcome.
Incidentally, the prize for Most Idiotic Political Commentary on the Jericho Raid goes to Ofer Shelah for writing that "Olmert took no particular risk by going to Jericho". When you're more jaded and skeptical of Olmert than an election-frenzied Ha'aretz correspondent ("Olmert did not seek out or initiate this operation, and he would have passed on it had he been given the chance... it was too dangerous"), it's well past time to ask yourself if you're trying a wee bit too hard to play the cynical Israeli.

Iran's Hezbollah proxies in Lebanon and their Islamic Jihad proxies in the West Bank have been given money and orders to launch a major terrorist assault against Israel - a state that, last we checked, was a member in good standing of the United Nations. Members of the United Nations, we're given to understand, are not supposed to initiate violence against one another. Certainly, if they're committed to covertly funding genocidal terrorists, they're not supposed to say out loud, during a speech about acquiring nuclear weapons, that it would be a quite desirable thing for a UN member to stop existing - as Ahmadinejad did this morning.
So of course the United Nations spent today working on condemning Israel for refusing to allow Rehavam Ze'evi's murderers to walk out of the jail that the US, UK, and Palestinians promised they'd rot inside of.

Last Google search for at least a couple of days, we promise. From somewhere in the United Kingdom, a gentleman or lady came to us after searching Google UK for zillionaire jewish international bankers. Our first reaction was embarrassment verging on horror at the thought that we would ever use an imbecilic word like "zillionaire". Then we discovered that the post in question was actually a series of quotes from anti-Semites who invaded IsraPundit after a post of ours:

So either: one anti-Semite searching on "zillionaire jewish international bankers" found our post mocking another anti-Semite who used the phrase "zillionaire international bankers" or the same anti-Semite was searching for sites with his own favorite phrase. Either we have a convergence of idiots or one especially forgetful idiot. Either way, we're charmed.

Remember when Israel brought justice to Hamas terror mastermind Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and the entire world was like "but the guy was in a wheelchair!" We think we've figured out the new sympathy phrase for mass murdering Palestinian terrorists. From Reuters stringer Nidal al-Mughrabi:

"The gray-haired Saadat". We suppose that we'll take it upon ourselves to perform the onerous public service of reminding everyone that old terrorists are still terrorists - and that the older they are, the more likely they are to be terrorist leaders deserving of harsh punishment.
And there's even more weasel, international MSM sympathy in the BBC's Q&A about the raid:

In case you're wondering, they didn't follow this paragraph up with another sentence - something like "and of course, by 'Palestinian judiciary' we mean the worthless kangaroo court that Arafat set up and in which nobody actually testified, a court so worthless that we're not even sure why we're mentioning it". Too bad, because that would've actually cleared things up a little. Instead, they first insinuate a conspiracy theory that as near as we can tell they made up themselves - an impossible theory that ignores that the monitors have been telling the Palestinians for weeks that they're leaving...

... and then they provided extensive paragraphs about the "implications of the anti-Western backlash":

If you're thinking that the part about abductions of foreign citizens always ending peacefully sounds like an open and outright lie that somebody should be fired for publishing, that's because it actually is an open and outright lie that somebody should be fired for publishing.

UPDATE: Our bad on blaming the BBC for the "Israel made the monitors leave" conspiracy theory. Hannan Ashrawi seems to be the original source: "People believe that the British knew of the Israeli assault and they abandoned their post. Clearly the only source of danger was the Israeli army." Yeah, unless you count all the rampaging Palestinian gangs that have been running loose since the Hamas victory - the ones the British and Americans repeatedly complained about through such apparently opaque phrases as "if you don't do something to protect us from the rampaging Palestinian gangs that have been running loose since the Hamas victory, we're leaving".

[Cross-postd at IsraPundit]

We often complain about the Rules of International Law, and have been known now and again to demonstrate the veracity of Rule #2: No one expects Israel's enemies to actually keep their agreements. Sometimes, however, we find ourselves asking what's worse - having the Palestinians openly violate their agreements, or watching the charade that they call "meeting their obligations":

You'll recall that Israel was ready to all but raze Arafat's compound to get to Sa'adat, and that they withdrew only under heavy international pressure and myriad promises that Sa'adat would rot in jail. But instead, the Jericho compound became the ideal place for Sa'adat to continue his terrorist operations - he lived a celebrity lifestyle, met and encouraged recruits, and drew up plans. He did all this in the only place on the planet where he was safe from Israel - even Abbas said that Sa'adat was better off staying in jail because Israel couldn't reach him there. Abbas, of course, is the head of the Palestinian Authority - that organization that had agreed to throw these terrorists in jail in order to save Arafat from the oh so brave position of having offerred his skirts for them to hide behind.

Because those of you you who think we're above increasing our post-count by copying and pasting other people's work are obviously new here...

Shai: Honestly, these guys should have been nabbed in 2002. The whole deal to keep the prisoners in Jericho was cockeyed to begin with, a crappy compromise made under intense pressure from the international community. It’s good to see a wrong righted.

Meryl: I guess that part about loving death only goes for the brainwashed young men who become suicide bombers. Because Ahmed Saadat is alive, kicking, and on his way to an Israeli jail, where he can no longer run his terrorist operations. Buh-bye.

Allison Kaplan Sommer: This raid of a Palestinian jail on the face of it looks like a stupid move. Wouldn't it be better to let them go ahead and release these guys and THEN target them?

Laurence Simon: Mahmoud Abbas, who hasn't honored any agreement with regard to Jericho Prison, is now offering to keep the heads of PFLP jailed. What kind of world-class, shit-for-brains cowardly moron would believe him after all of the overwhelming evidence not to? Yossi Bellin, of course.

Power Line: Of special interest is the Post's report on British Foreign Minister Jack Straw and his antagonists on the British home front: "Saadat's London lawyer, Kate Maynard, told the Post that "my fear is that my client will be killed" by the Israelis.... she argued [that] the presence of British monitors at the prison invokes the protections of British Human Rights laws." If Kate Manyard is representative, I guess the British moonbats are fully capable of going toe to toe with our own moonbats any day of the week.

All Things Beautiful: The deal made with the previous government was clear regarding Saadat & Co. He was to be kept in the Palestinian prison only under the condition that international monitors were present. Abbas was repeatedly warned that the situation in the prison was becoming intolerable, and that if he did not reinstate the rule of law, those countries would be forced to pull their monitors out. Abbas' answer was to ignore the warnings, and casually announce that Saddat would be released anyway. This brazenly bandit like behavior, not befitting a president of a country, needs to be shown zero tolerance.

Vital Perspective: During the length of their incarceration in Jericho, Saadat and Ghoulmi continued to conduct and direct the PFLP from within the prison walls. Their location in prison became a site of pilgrimage for members of the PFLP and others identifying with the two. These visits provided an opportunity to recruit individuals to the organization, carry out ideological indoctrination, and give out orders for activity in the field.

From what we assume is the lovely town of Palisades Park, New Jersey we get a visitor doing research with the Google search "israelis are bastards." Can you believe we're losing the propaganda war to these people?
Maybe it has something to do with CNN anchors passing on the phrase "defenseless prisoners" to describe unrepentant terrorists. Maybe.

We just don't have the energy to make this up any more:

Of course he does. And of course they are - terrorists always get angry when Israel captures their terrorist friends.

UPDATE: Obviously, this has already been blogged under LGF's extensive Wildly Inappropriate Hostage Reaction Watch. That post also has extensive links to and information about this idiot former hostage.

To lighten the snark, we give you panda babies playing in a kindergarten yard. (Hat tip: CAP)

When Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip and gave the Palestinians land for their own state (or, as anti-Israel spokespeople described it, "turning the Gaza Strip into a prison" - talk about lose-lose)... anyway, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, there was a significant debate on how to deal with the Egypt-Gaza border. On one hand, Israel wanted nothing to do with the Gaza Strip any more. On the other hand, relying on the Egyptians to stop the Palestinians from smuggling arms into Gaza - international agreements to that effect notwithstanding - is laughable. So Israel made another one of those vaunted "international monitoring agreements", wherein they entrusted to European soldiers the task of monitoring the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza. Don't underestimate the significance of this agreement - weapons fired from the Gaza Strip can easily reach many of Israel's population centers, and an unsecured Rafah could easily become the main conduit for those weapons. But nevertheless, Israel put their security in European hands. Turns out, not a smart move:

That first sentence is an error, by the way - Rafah is on the Gaza-Egypt border, not the Gaza-Israel border. But the rest of it is true - that crossing is not supposed to be open without the presence of EU monitors, and it is undoubtedly the case that there are terrorists taking the opportunity to smuggle weapons into the Gaza Strip - which is exactly what happened last time. This situation obviously can't go on indefinitely, and Israel will eventually have to take some kind of action. Now, Israel would never have left the Rafah crossing if the British hadn't agreed to monitor it. And now the British are refusing to monitor it. But Israel can't go back there and make things the same way that they would have been had the British never falsely promised to monitor the crossing - that would be a "provocation".

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Four years ago, Palestinian terrorists from the PFLP - apparently having concluded that mass murder wasn't sufficient to demonstrate their lack of humanity - decided to cross all red lines and assassinate Israeli Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi. Murdering children was something that the world had kind of come to expect from Palestinian terrorists, but murdering sitting government officials was somehow still shocking. Prime Minister Sharon and the rest of the Israeli establishment predictably went ballistic and promised to bring the Palestinian terrorists to justice, at which point the oh so brave warriors ran and hid behind Yasser Arafat's skirts in his Muquta compound (Jimmy Carter on Arafat's death: "father of the modern Palestinian nationalist movement... powerful human symbol and forceful advocate... instrumental in forging... peace"). At some point Israel realized that it was either going to have to invade Arafat's compound or reach a compromise that stopped short of letting the PFLP terrorists go free. The IDF wasn't so hot on starting a regional war by invading Arafat's compound, so a deal was worked out to keep the terrorists in a Palestinian prison under US and British watch.
Israel promised not to go after the terrorists as long as the Palestinians promised to keep them "locked up" (if sitting around a table laughing and playing board games counts as being "locked up", which apparently it does). Then this happened:

Everyone is quite used to the Palestinian Authority (especially its new "militant wing") abrogating their agreements - there's the always palpable sense that the Palestinians are just playing at being grown-ups - that at any time they might throw a temper tantrum and call the game off.
The Oslo Accords under which Israel gave them land, weapons, and money? No longer binding...
International laws that prohibit the military use of hospitals, ambulances, and churches? What do you expect from terrorists...
Agreements meant to limit the movements of terrorists and weapons? No one expected the Palestinians to even pretend to obey them...
But even in their willful violation of international law and humanitarian standards usually the Palestinians are smart enough to make sure that half of them are hinting at keeping their obligations while the other half are threatening open war (which often actually happens on the same day). In this case, even "moderate" Palestinians like Abbas were saying that this whole "international agreement to keep criminals locked up" thing isn't something they're going to follow. So the American and British monitors packed up and left, and the murderers of Rehavam Ze'evi were about to be let go - again, in direct violation of presumably binding promises that had been made to Israel by British, American, and Palestinian officials:

So Israel, again having given up its right to protect its citizens in exchange for worthless agreements, again sent its own soldiers into harms way to accomplish what had already been accomplished four years ago - the neutralization of Palestinian gunmen and the eminent capture of Ze'evi's killers. The IDF surrounded the prison and battled the prisoners - who had somehow managed to find their way into the prison's well-stocked armory (how'd that happen?) Eventually, the prisoners surrendered.
So of course, the United Nations would blame Israel for triggering a cycle of violence:

We've discussed Rules #1 and #2 of international law (Rule #1: Israel gives up more than it gets, Rule #2: No one expects Israel's enemies to actually keep their agreements). You can now add Rule #3: When Israel's enemies violate their agreements and Israel responds, Israel is the one accused of violating international law. Rule #3 turns out to be true even when Israel is only doing what it would have legally been allowed to do immediately after the initial crime anyway - in this case, go after criminals. And so we have the old cycle:
(1) Palestinian terrorists commit an atrocity
(2) Israel threatens some sort of action that everyone is pretty sure is justified
(3) The Palestinians promise to punish the terrorists
(4) Israel agrees to the promise and backs off
(5) The Palestinians violate their agreement
(6) Israel does the action that they would have done in the first place, had not the Palestinians lied to buy time for the terrorists
(7) The world condemns the Israeli "aggression".

Defamer's hatred for all things Crash extends to Paul Haggis's new project:

Funny, but a little less funny when you realize that (a) that movie has already been done and (b) it was called Paradise Now.

Well that's a relief:

Past Allison Kaplan Sommer mockery of this "sure, they singled out a Jew... but would you really want to call an indirect motive like that anti-Semitism" position here. But who are you going to believe - the Arab News, or your own lying eyes?

We've gotten a couple of emails to the effect that accusing the Bush administration of lying about its commitments to Israel is unfair. Several readers have picked up on the fact that the State Department humanitarian aid that we mocked yesterday is going to the "Palestinian people" and not to Hamas. Or, more precisely, Bush only promised on 1/27 to cut off the terrorist Palestinian "government" and not the people that overwhelmingly elected and continue to support that government.
We hate to mince words, but this argument is mind-bogglingly stupid. It's stupid firstly because it ignores the purpose of providing aid and the consequences of continuing to provide it. Increasing aid to a population right after they elect a warmongering government doesn't exactly signal one's displeasure with their choices, nor does it have a chance of dissuading them from making the same choices in the future. Even if it did either of those things (which it doesn't), the entire point of democracy is that the elected government is the result of popular will - it makes no sense to punish the government but not the people who - in a very real sense - are that government. Certainly the populations of 1940s Germany, Italy, and Japan weren't extended such generosity, and none of those countries were democracies.
But we need not entertain debates about mass psychology or military ethics to understand why the State Department's distinction between "aid ot Hamas" and "aid to the Palestinian people" is just a thinly-veiled excuse to avoid having to punish terrorists. All we have to do is read a Dilbert cartoon:



The analogy isn't perfect, but the point is the same. Money is fungible - not having to use it for one thing frees it up for other things. When the United States builds a hospital, that's a hospital's-worth of money that Hamas will use for suicide belts. When the United States provides a crate of food, that's a crate of food's-worth of money that Hamas will use for anti-Semitic incitement. When the United States purchases an ambulance, that's an ambulance's-worth of money that Hamas will use for infiltrating Israeli defenses (not to mention a shiny new ambulance that their terrorists will use to move weapons). Somebody should teach Secretary Rice what 'fungible' means.

Israel is often accused of hysteria for saying that international law is a rigged game: how can the rule of law (by definition neutral) be biased against a law-abiding state? Turns out, there are at least two ways.
The first, and the topic of what will have to be a much longer post, is the asymmetric way that international law and international agreements plays out even in theory. The fundamental disparity of Oslo is the best example - Israel was expected to give up a tangible (land) and get back an intangible (peace). This disparity had all kinds of cascading consequences in practice: it's much harder to verify whether the Palestinians are giving Israel what they're obligated to give, it's much easier for them to lie about their "efforts", and so on. But even if the Palestinians fulfilled their obligations to the letter, Israel would still have by definition given more than they got - despite the neutrality of the
The real problem with international law, however, is the way that it plays out in practice in the Arab-Israeli conflict. There's an unseemly kind of nudge-nudge wink-wink to the whole sordid affair, in which everybody knows that international law is just a pretense for constraining Israel's actions - but Israel is expected to act as if the situation is otherwise. The examples of this dynamic are legendary, from the ceasefires of the Arab-Israeli wars (which lasted just long enough to save the Arab regimes that had started those wars, until they could try to destroy Israel again) to the charade of the International Court of Justice's anti-Security Fence rulings (as if someone who's a virulently anti-Israel diplomat one month will become a dispassionate judge the next month). No one was surprised when the UN fled in 48 hours from the Sinai Peninsula as soon as Egypt was strong enough to attack Israel in 1967, just as no one doubted what the ICJ's rulings would be in the last few years. There is an open secret that international law is a no-lose proposition for Israel's Arab enemies: they can sanctimoniously demand that Israel adhere to it when it's to their advantage (as Iran does when it demands that Israel assent to the NPT), and they can violate it when they choose because nobody really expects better from them (as Iran does when they threaten to pull out of the NPT). Iran's Manhattan Project is actually a perfect example: nobody really believes that Iran isn't developing a nuclear weapon, but everyone is expected to behave as if they do.
Israeli-Palestinian peace deals are unique, however, in that these two cynical exploitations of international law - in theory, the way that it's stacked against Israel, and in practice, the way that it's routinely violated by Israel's enemies - are dramatically combined: