We continue our day of how exploring will liberal news outlets and Islamist apologists are trying to obfuscate the act of war committed by the armed wing of the sitting government of the Palestinian Authority. We've already done "the Palestinians are just activists" and "it's a cycle of violence". LGF passes on it's Israels fault. This might have to be our last post on the subject, however, because this Guardian angle seems unbeatable:

Don't you see? The Palestinians are not the hostage takers - they're the ones doing their best to get the hostage back! As opposed to those warlike Israelis, who just want to invade and kill people.
Oh by the way - there were stories going around earlier today that Gilad Shalit was being held by some random splinter group. Turns out he's actually in the custody of senior Hamas officials.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Courtesy of Joshua Mitnick from the CSM, it reads: "Hostilities rise in Gaza". The lede is:

Yes, the hostilities just "rose". They came out of nowhere. And then both Israel and Hamas raised the stakes. Because it's a cycle of violence: one side leaves an area, the other side comes after them and kidnaps their people, and then the first side tries to get their people back.

This is like a a caricature of anti-Israel media bias. A caption from an AFP stringer's photo of two little girls:

Where to begin? First, the bias in framing: why show a picture of two girls (who have, for instance, absolutely zero to do with the story) rather than, say, the picture of the Israeli families who've actually lost children to violence in the last day?
Second, why "torn down building" - did the Israelis tear it down 2 years ago before they left? We don't know - but isn't it nice to imply that the Jews had something to do with the continuing lack of civilization in the Gaza Strip? Maybe some of the money that Palestinian moderates have been using to amass weapons of mass destruction could have been used to rebuild that building, huh?
Third - and this is the point where the caption slips from typical anti-Israel piffle to anti-Israel absurdity - "left... two activists dead"? Yes folks, Hamas members who kidnap and kill are back to being "activists" according to AFP. How awesome is that?

UPDATE: Eh, the photo keeps getting bumped back so the permalink isn't working. Here's a screen cap:

Sometimes, the way that international sophisticates think makes itself very, very plain.
Let's review: Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip a long time ago. That many ISM activists don't know this doesn't make it less true. Until about... oh... 24 hours from now, there hadn't been a significant Israel military presence in the Gaza Strip for years (a single raid notwithstanding). Today's attack occured on Israeli soldiers in an Israeli base on internationally recognized Israeli territory. So you wouldn't think that respectable news outlets would describe it as a "Gaza attack":

They write this way so that they can continue pretending that Palestinians are murdering Israelis because of the Occupation. Rather than, say, because they like to murder Israelis. Over 1,000 articles isn't just carelessness - it's evidence of an unseemly, engrained mentality. A mentality that is the result of conditioning meant to excuse every sort of Palestinian atrocity as an "understandable reaction to the Occupation".
It was not a Gaza attack. It was an attack that happened in Israel.

The first Muslim entity to strike Israel with unconventional weapons might not be the nation-state of Iran after all:

Presumably, they amassed these chemical weapons during the last few months that the international press kept reporting on their impending "moderation" (lots of moderates amass chemical weapons - haven't you heard?) At this point, we'd post links to the LA Times, New York Times, and State Department sophisticates who have been droning endlessly about how Hamas can be talked into not being unrepentant terrorists (or, frankly, to Jimmy Carter's idiocy). But it wouldn't do any good - it's not like the Palestinian public hasn't been more or less steadfast in its rejectionism for the last decade and a half. And it's not like opinion makers in the West haven't been willing to shut their eyes and pretend otherwise.
The endless insistence that Israel is the roadblock to peace in the Middle East has never been grounded in any rational analysis. It's fair to ask what it is grounded in.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

UPDATE: This JPost report says that it's the Al Aksa Brigades (the armed wing of the moderate Abbas's Fatah organization) that issues the CBW threat. These are presumably the moderate terrorists that stayed behind when the really radical members of their group defected to Hamas last month. Good to know that they got rid of the bad apples.

The populations of Jordan and Egypt - the two Arab countries that the US has been pouring money into for decades - don't believe that Arabs had anything to do with 9/11. As a special kind of ironic bonus, they also think that Americans are greedy and selfish - even through the US is their money fount:

Maybe if the West spent another few decades pouring money into the Middle East without demanding any kind of social reform, Arabs might like it more. There's no evidence that this would actually happen (more, the opposite) but that shouldn't dissuade our sophisticates from insisting that it will work.

Palestinians crossed into Israel and murdered two soldiers, apparently kidnapping a third outside the Gaza Strip. We'll repeat that slowly for any Guardian readers in the crowd (yeah right): Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip so that the Palestinians could have their own land there, and that wasn't good enough for the Palestinians - they had to pursue Israeli soldiers across the border and kill them in order to slake their thirst for Israeli blood. If the Palestinians had ever paused long enough to build up any kind of a civil society, this would obviously be an act of war - a premeditated attack on a military base. Since they don't really have anything fitting that description, it's just your run of the mill vicious act of violence.
Two things:
(1) You can take the diplomatic out of the terrorist but you can't take the terrorist out of the diplomat - this attack was carried out by Hamas. Somehow, being greeted and honored as diplomatic darlings by Malaysia, Sweden, Norway, and Germany failed to give Hamas the impression that their status as a terrorist organization was costing them anything.
(2) The Left-wing European media's ability to pretend that Hamas is peaceful knows no bounds - just yesterday, the Guardian breathlessly announced that Hamas was ready to accept Israel and (this part is crucial) to end any attacks outside the West Bank. Then today, they launch an attack... outside the West Bank. Not exactly the dramatic "climbdown" that Chris McGreal. But we're sure that in a day or two he'll be able to explain how it's all Israel's fault.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

It's been obvious for a long time that there are a lot of people in Irvine who really don't like Jews. But we know that the one or two liberals readers we have won't accept our word for this (let alone the dramatic chronicle that is LGF's extensive archives) - so we went out and got actual numbers on this question.
First, some linguistic pedantries. When people use Google to search on the word "Jew", they're usually either checking the results of Googlebombing or virulently anti-Semitic. Very little in between. Google itself used to carry a disclaimer stating as much:

So let's examine who was doing an unusual amount of searching on the word "Jew" in 2005. And what's that? Right there in slot #6? The lovely city of Irvine, California. It seems that there are a lot of people there who are both very interested in Judaism and who seem to think that the word "Jew" is just the way normal people talk. Not conclusive evidence of entrenched anti-Semitic rhetoric, of course, but suggestive.
Now, someone's going to point out that there are 5 cities ahead of Irvine: New York, Cambridge, Newark, Reston, and Pleasonton. Why aren't we saying that these results are suggestive (only suggestive, mind you) of deep-seated anti-Semitism in any of those places? Two reasons.
First, we can imagine good explanations for why tons of people in those cities are searching on "Jew". It's because there happen to be a lot of very Jewish Jews living in those areas (or, in the case of the greater New York area, some not very Jewish Jews too - nb. hate mail should directed to omri@mererhetoric.com). But there's no large Jewish population in Irvine. Which means that last year there are a lot of non-Jews in Irvine very, very interested in Judaism - interested to a far greater relative extent than non-Jews living anywhere else in the United States.
Second, these people are interested in Jews in a very unusual way. In most of those other places, there's a more nuanced interest in Judaism. Four of the five cities ahead of Irvine for searches on "Jew" were also in the top 5 for searches on "Jewish". In Irvine, however, there are there a lot of people searching on "Jew" but far less people relatively searching on "Jewish" (the other exception is the town Pleasanton, which is a notorious Google Trends false positive because of ATT/SBC station out of there) So: most of the top-6 cities that has a relatively large number of people searching on "Jew" (of all of the top-5 if we exclude Pleasanton) also have a relatively large number of people searching on "Jewish"... except Irvine. In Irvine, it occurs to lots more people to search on "Jew" - a word that anti-Semitic communities are predisposed to using - than on "Jewish". Linguistic habits are formed within communities... one wonders what kinds of communities these Irvine residents are running in.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

UPDATE: People have pointed out that Irvine is in the 2005 top-10 for relative searches on "Judaism". We actually linked to that search in our original post. Our point is not that everyone in Irvine searches for Judaism only by typing in "Jew". It's that when many people in Irvine do go searching for that information, they have an abnormal predisposition to have the word "Jew" occur to them as an overly appropriate search term - and that in most other places where people are searching for information on Judaism, such a predisposition is not found.

Did you know that Israel - far from having withdrawn from a ton of land recently - is actually in a process of expansion:

He's actually talking about Olmert's convergence plan as an expansionist land grab. Which is absurd. If anything, it's a contractionist land grab since Israel - and this isn't really a complicated concept - already has the land. But why let things like facts get in the way of reviving the stalwart liberal tropes of evil Zionists trying to create a Greater Israel?
But before you can even get through another paragraph, it gets better:

This pathetic Walt and Mearsheimer-esque "look how we're willing to stand up to accusations of anti-Semitism" false bravado is as tired as it is self-congratulatory. Read this very slowly: no one is saying that.
Israel should keep some of the land that the Guardian insists is Palestinian (technically, its Jordanian, but really - when it comes to "standing in solidarity with the Palestinian cause", let's not let facts come between good friends)... Anyway, Israel should keep the tiny extra land that Olmert hopefully intends to annex because it was land won in a defensive war and settled for the purposes of continued strategic defense - it would be literal and mass ethnic cleansing to throw all the Jews out just so Palestinians don't have to live next to them.
Sure, the world could be turning against Israel because young kids don't know about the Holocaust (which, incidentally, might be something someone should mention). Or support for the Jewish state could be in freefall because much of the Western media is entering its second and third decades of mischaracterizations and lies regarding the Israeli cause.
PS - could "we may hope that it will never become respectable to be anti-semitic" have been any more disingenuous?

When Arafat committed horrendous acts of indescriminate, mass slaughter, it increased European sympathy for the Palestinians.
When Israel accidentally kills civilians in the act of trying to precisely target mass murderers, it... increases European sympathy for the Palestinians.
See also, pretext.

We're sure that this point was made in many places when Abbas's referendum was initially announced, but recent news articles indicate that many journalists have yet to understand what ought to be a very basic point. There are currently over 1,000 news articles cataloged on Google News which seem to in some way or another state that the prisoners' platform embraces a "two state solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
When you read tripe like this, you should think "wow, that's a really stupid way to describe the referendum"
Not to be overly pedantic, but the phrase "two-state solution" is usually taken to mean that there would be actually be two different kinds of states after a peace deal: one (generally referred to as "Israel") is supposed to be a majority Jewish state while the other (generally referred to as "Palestine") is to become the national homeland for largely Muslim Arabs. This referendum, in contrast, explicitly demands an Arab right of return into Israel. It would grant the Palestinians a state in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and while also throwing open Israel's borders open to millions and millions of these Palestinians' closest friends and relatives.
Now, if we were Palestinians bent on the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel, we would definitely vote for this referendum. Why? Because it would be a really good way to destroy the Jewish state of Israel.
First, there are the sheer demographics of the situation - there are currently about 5 million Jews and about 1 million non-Jewish Arabs living in Israel. There are between 5 and 8 million Arabs usually designated as Palestinian refugees scattered among various Arab states and UN camps. Second, these populations tend to be more radical than the Palestinians who have had to live side by side with Jews in the West Bank (hmm... maybe it's not really the "daily presence and humiliation of the Occupation" that radicalized Arabs against Israel) At the risk of being pedantic again, but the best case scenario would be that Israel would remain a democratic state rather than a Muslim theocracy. With 5 million Jews would be outvoted by the 6-9 million Arabs, however, anything Jewish about the state of Israel would instantly be abolished. The second state in the "two-state solution" - the Jewish one - would cease to exist.
Abbas's referendum asks Palestinians to choose between Fatah's usual advocacy of destroying Israel demographically and Hamas's usual advocacy of destroying Israel militarily. "Two-state solution" indeed.

The EU has announced that it will not recognize any border drawn unilaterally by Israel. Funny - we don't imagine that they'd be half as loathe to accept a border drawn unilaterally by the Palestinians.
In the meanwhile, the Europeans are set to resume funding the world's first terrorist people. Because why should a population that votes for war and violence actually have to suffer the consequences for their decision? It's not like the Palestinians are being held hostage by a fascist government they would like to be rid of. We're beginning to think that there's something pathological about the global rush to give aid "directly to the Palestinian people" - almost as if not doing so would require recognizing that, yes, the Palestinians really do support Hamas and so really do not deserve the world's sympathy.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

One of the pro-Israel Right's favorite reports ever is finally being published as an academic monograph:

A few of things are worth noting:
(1) These figures don't take into account the Gaza Strip, which for reasons genuinely passing understanding was excluded by the Zimmerman team (despite their work being done pre-disengagement). In other words, those who used this study to conclude that disengagement was unnecessary to defuse the demographic time bomb were... er... misguided.
(2) A lot of the debate that has been had thus far has focused on the current Palestinian population. But the Jewish and Muslim populations are close to each other no matter what figure is being used. The critical statistic in dispute is the Palestinian birthrate - a figure which the Zimmerman team seems very sure that they're right on. In other words: there might not be a demographic time-bomb in the West Bank.
(3) None of this makes Quartet pressure any less real - even without a demographic time bomb, there is still a diplomatic time bomb with a constantly shortening fuse.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

As we attend the International Communications Association in Dresden, we're reminded that journalists have broad discretion in how they frame their stories. Framing goes well beyond simple spin. It's not so much about what facts you present as about how you present them - order, tone, etc all determine the meaning of news. Not even MSM apologists go so far as to deny that they frame stories - they usually just claim that they try to be "objective."
So when Muslim armies take over the capital of a country in a kind of modern-day Islamist Domino Effect, of course there are many different ways to view the situation. Perhaps the Los Angeles Times thinks that headlining the story with "Islamists Sow Calm, and Concern, in Southern Somalia", is the most objective way to describe the situation. Or maybe they're just terrorist apologists who excuse their moral incoherence with self-satisfied and comforting slogans about their own sophistication. Anything's possible.
Next up: "Islamists Sow Calm, and Concern, in Paris".

Best talkbacks so far from the YNet about this idiot:

* This guys Katz is an amateur. "Pray for us"??? Katz should call up the experts - the guys at Shas and hire them as consultants on different ways to leverage Torah to win support. They could provide a whole menu of services: Amulets, promises of heaven, putting a curse on the enemy (sons of pigs and monkeys etc.)
* Boruch ata Hashem alukeyni melech h'olem borey pre hashaq!

CNN is passing on the reports of Iraqi officials that Al-Zarqawi is dead. We'll believe it when we see a body.
We'd like to take this opportunity to brag about how early we're reporting this. The time-zone advantages of being in Israel...

This guy is not smart: