It was just a couple of days ago that the EU was ever so close to a deal with Iran on the nuclear program. The US went so far as to hold off on sanctions so that the EU could get more time:

How'd that work out, you ask? How do you think it worked out:

Here, we'll make this easy: Iran will not give up on their nuclear program no matter what you do. Does that help clear things up?

An Islamic terrorist group has declared a ceasefire, but the country where they bomb and murder civilians remains unimpressed:

The Kurds, of course, are a stateless Middle East peoples that have never been offered a state in any form. This distinguishes them from the Palestinians, who (a) have literal cousins in countries like Jordan and Egypt and (b) have been offered a state several times. And yet when they call for a ceasefire, it seems quite natural for Turkey to say 'actually, no - you're a bunch of terrorists and we know how to deal with terrorists'. Can you imagine the global din of outrage if Israel reacted the same way to a Hamas ceasefire call? There's international outrage when Israel doesn't give enough concessions fast enough to fake Palestinian ceasefire calls - just the hint of Palestinian moderation is enough to get Europe and the State Department clamoring for prisoner releases and 'goodwill gestures'. And here is the PKK - including their jailed leaders - calling for a real dialogue - and outrage is more or less muted as Turkey turns it down.
This is why we think that maybe - just maybe - there's more to this 'anti-Zionism' thing than just pure-hearted humanitarian concern for the oppressed Palestinians. When someone reacts one way in a situation but a different way in a seemingly identical situation, everything from logic to common sense to scientific inquiry screams that there must be some reason for the different reaction. There's at least two ways in which human rights activists treat Israel differently: (a) disproportionate focus on even minor Israeli actions (if you're a human rights group looking to devote your limited resources to combating the world's worst human rights abuses, there is quite simply no rational explanation for focusing on Israel... maybe one group, maybe two groups - but that doesn't account for the anti-Semitism anti-Zionism industry (b) differing reactions to Israeli actions (why does Turkey get to reject ceasefire calls while Israel has to free murderers just because Hamas says that they're moving towards maybe considering a very temporary halt to some of their bombings?) We think that the differences are accounted for by latent and not so latent anti-Semitism. If someone has a better explanation, we'd welcome hearing it.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

... so we said: "sorry Rabbi, it's just because of the hunger and the headache." And he said: "the Yom Kippur fast is a joyous fast - for one day we get to be like angels. Instead of food, drink, and bodily pleasures we get to wrap ourselves in white and spend all our time singing praises to the Divine". And we said: "Hold on. Muslim heaven is 72 virgins and 80,000 servants. Are you saying that when we go to Jewish heaven we'll be like 'who do we have to blow around here to get a steak and vodka' and they'll be like 'there are no blowjobs in heaven' and we'll be like 'it's an expression' and they'll be like 'there are also no steaks or vodka'?" And then the Rabbi said: "Don't kid yourself. You're not going to heaven. Now get ready to stand back up - it's called the Amidah for a reason."

Here's your pre-Yom Kippur (J)Blog Roundup. G'mar Chatima Tova to our Jewish readers, and to our non-Jewish readers: have fun with your "good food" and your "fine wine" on Monday. Sigh.

* Some people might not know this, but before Richard Landes became Richard Landes of anti-fauxtography fame, he was (and continues to be) a leading US scholar on public and theological understandings of religious apocalypticism and violence. Which means that an article-length post by him about the historical and political dynamics of the Papal jihad is that rarest of all things: a qualified blog post.

* Lynn-B from Incontext has a video "for those who need a break from the heavy, flagellatory brand of pre-Yom Kippur sanctimony". Yes please (next up: Lynn-B versus Anne-L catfight. Hot).

* Speaking of Lynn: the Center for Jewish Values is urging Bob Casey, the candidate that she supports and will be voting for, to repudiate the vicious anti-Semitism that's been appearing on MoveOn.org. To our knowledge, he has yet to do so.

* RightWing Nuthouse goes nuts (get it?) about people making light of the fake anthrax letter than he got. Memo to idiots targeting left-wingers with fake terrorist tactics: that's what the other side does. Whoever did this should be found, arrested, and beaten to within an inch of his life. And that's just for making us put up with the DKos and DU avalanche that's going to go on for the next month. After that, the law can have him for milder sentencing.

* This a little out of character for us, but explain to us why it's not OK for Democratic Jews to support a Democratic Muslim Congressional candidate who has repudiated his over-exuberant nationalist past and now seems to be on the right side of the war against political Islam? We're sympathetic to the argument 'a Democratic majority in general is bad for Jews because the Democratic base not accepts virulent anti-Semites into its tent' - but that's not the argument being made. Is there evidence the Keith Ellison is being disingenuous about his positions?

* Let's play this game: If French UNIFIL tanks and Israeli tanks faced off, who do you think would win? Do you think it would be the side that uses its tanks to fight wars? And what the hell is UNIFIL doing confronting Israeli troops? Shouldn't they be busy not disarming Hezbollah or something?

* Israel is giving money to Nigeria to build a mosque. As Ed Lasky points out, that's like what Muslims do for Jews, expcept for the part where Muslims desecrate ancient synagogues.

* It's so cute to watch Israeli right-wingers noticing that Shimon Peres - a Founding Father, hawk who sat at Ben Gurion's knee, and the shepherd of Israel's air and nuclear programs - cares about Israel.

* In a similar vein, it's so cute to watch Israeli right-wingers noticing that Benjamin Netanyahu - the man who gave Hebron to Arafat - sometimes supports negotiating with Fatah.

* Neo-neocon has a troll infestation. Mere Rhetoric? No trolls. Sad.

* Van at KesherTalk introduces us to the story of Anne Murphy, an Irish Catholic impregnated by her Jordanian lover and sent on a suicide mission that she, pregnant with their daughter, was unaware of. He booked her on an El Al flight from London to Israel and gave her a bag with a false bottom - that false bottom was filled with enough Semtex to blow the plane, and its 375 passengers and crew, out of the water. Heathrow security let her walk right up to the terminal, but El Al personnel found her behavior suspicious enough for another search. They discovered the hidden explosives and saved four hundred potential victims from dying in the name of the glorious Palestinian cause.

* JPundit has the results of a survey on High Holiday sermons. Mostly traditional stuff, but 5 percent will be talking about the War in Iraq. Want to bet what strain of Judaism those rabbis are from, and which side of the debate they'll take?

* This Saudi Arabian anti-terrorism wall is going to be a lot of fun.

* Pamela's Global Jihad Roundup provides the usual depressing mix of jihadism and Western apologism.

* IRIS has a subscription to a news service we don't, and passes on this stat: "As a result of a religious dispute, nearly 5,000 Christians were displaced and six were injured on September 20th, when Muslim rioters destroyed and torched at least 18 churches, 20 Christian homes, and 40 Christian shops in Dutse, the capital of Jigawa state in Northern Nigeria." It's the Occupation's fault.

* Sol calls our attention to liberals who can't understand why there are all these anti-Semites in the anti-War movement. We think it has something to do with carrying signs that say Nazi Kikes Out of Lebanon during anti-war marches. But what do we know?

* AK Sommer is having a birthday. This makes her, what, 29?

After dealing with our inbox this morning (now: afternoon), we offer the following corrections and/or clarifications about this week's blog posts:

(1) Contrary to the implication that we may have made in this post, we do not think that Orthodox Jews will refuse to vote if a poll worker is menstruating. If a poll worker is menstruating on Shabbat, of course, we still maintain that Orthodox Jews will refuse to vote. But that's for a totally different reason, and we were inappropriate to imply that the blog title "How Orthodox Jews should vote" indicates otherwise. The writer, on the other hand, support Casey. So now there are two Jbloggers who you can blame when a 2007 Democratic Senate passes a nonbinding resolution that says "we don't know what you're talking about - we think the State Department is doing a great job!"

(2) Contrary to the implication in this follow-up post, AnnieGetYour from Jewbiquitous probably does not - in our words - think that "Jewish bloggers aren't allowed to have fun like everyone else on the blogosphere". If she does, she probably has better reasons than - again our words - "some transliterated Hebrew". Nonetheless, we will defend the part where we implied that Anne from Boker Tov, Boulder! linked a video so bad that it makes people want to go out and club baby seals. Sorry, it's true - we've seen studies on this.

(3) We certainly did not say that liberals who think that Evangelical Christians support Israel for apocalyptic reasons are "dumber than a sack of wet hair". We do think that they're quite wrong though.

(4) Contrary to the implication in yesterday's (J)Blog Roundup, workers at the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles do not kill their pets. At least not until they've made their pets sit for 3 hours in the waiting room, called them up to the only open window, given them several totally unnecessary forms to fill out, forced them to wait twenty more minutes after finishing the forms, and then finally told them that nothing can be done right now because it's a Thursday in Israel and - since Wednesday was a holiday - no one will be at work till Sunday. So given the time zone change and the fact the Consulate isn't open on weekends, the forms won't get faxed to Tel Aviv until Tuesday.

(5) Contrary to the implication in this post, the good people at Vital Perspective do not blog just to one-up other (J)Bloggers. We don't even know how someone could fail to notice that we were joking, given the description of their posts as "clearer, more detailed, more accurate, and more nuanced". Sometimes we wonder about some of our readers.

(6) For about a month we have been getting progressively angrier about a woman that we've been calling "Karen Anderson", first when she made some of the worst arguments ever in excuse of jihadism and then when got dismantled by Daled Amos. We've been calling this woman "Karen Anderson" because we are very, very stupid. The woman we've been calling "the most insipid journalism in the world" is actually named Karen Armstrong (h/t to SoccerDad for this). Karen Anderson is the animal telepath who helped Demi Moore contact her lost dog, and we don't know anything about her positions re the war against political Islam.

What's that you ask? How many emails did we field this morning? A couple.

UPDATE: We give up. Email from How Orthodox Jews should Vote:

Looks like Lynn is back on her own. Unless we're misreading the email. Which is likely, given that we've been having trouble lately with things like, oh, the names of authors.

Of all the ignorant yet conveniently-stereotype-affirming arguments favored by the academic and cultural left, among our least favorite is the conceit whereby Salon and Nation journalists go deep into Christianity to uncover the deep, dark, apocalyptic motives that evangelicals have for their support of Israel. Everyone's heard this canard – supposedly, the only reason that fundamentalist Christians support Israel is because they want to get all the Jews back to Israel in preparation for a final war and the return of Christ. This argument is quite simply slanderous: evangelical Christians who support Israel are inspired by literal interpretations of the Bible, yes, but of a far more benign kind.

But the problem with this argument is that it's always teetering on conspiracy theory ground: demonstrate an alternative, non-Revelation-based motive, and leftists can claim that Christian leaders are just hiding their true motives. So the only real way to get at the debate is to just highlight obvious, undeniable good will and dare the left to spin it as all one pre-planned conspiracy:

Yes, they're obviously donating their time, money, and passion because they want to see all of the Jews wiped out. That makes perfect sense, and is totally compatible with everything we know about human nature and these people's behavior.

Two dolphins were born off the Israeli coast during Lebanon II. Awwww:

This may seem frivolous to you, but to us it screams "finally, something living in Israeli territory that Europe really wants to protect". Hezbollah, on the other hand, could care less:


Nasrallah probably thinks that it's Allah's sea anyway - the dolphins are just infidel occupiers.

This is a good illustration of how low our expectations of traitorous Israeli-Arab lawmakers have become. When we first clicked on the headline MK Taleb A-Sanaa calls for Marwan Barghouti's release we actually said to ourselves: "you know, he probably said that Barghouti is a strongman who will enforce a peace deal by any means necessary... obviously that's not really why he wants the terrorist Barghouti released, but at least the excuse is not a risible lie on its face... good for him!" And then it turns out that actually the excuse he used was just another stream of shameless demonstrable lies, and we were faced with the challenge of actually lowering our expectations to new depths:

(a) Actually, Hamas has made no significant progress toward recognizing Israel. We gleaned this obscure fact by reading the Hamas statements that went something like "some people are saying that we've come a long way toward recognizing Israel - but those people are wrong, since we are committed to never recognizing Israel"
(b) In fact, the very premise of the claim is as false as the claim itself - acceptance of the Prisoner's Agreement would under no circumstance imply that Hamas was accepting the existence of Israel. The Prisoner's Agreement, after all, demands that four million of the most radicalized anti-Israel Arabs in the world (aka fourth and fifth generation UN-fed and watered refugees) be allowed to flood into Israel. Which would mean the end of Israel. Which is the opposite of continuing to exist.
(c) We were going to sub-subpoint out and address all the dumb potential reasons that someone might make for why a Palestinian government uniting Al Aksa terrorists and the Hamas terrorists would be motivated to stop terrorism, but screw it. He didn't believe it when he said it, so proving that it's not true is kind of beside the point.

In other Barghouti news, he's now saying that not freeing Palestinian prisoners will cause more kidnappings and attacks on Israeli soldiers. This is to be contrasted with the rest of the known universe, which points out that freeing Palestinian prisoners also seems to inspire more Palestinian kidnappings and attacks. We strongly suspect that both of the those causes are true.

In Lebanon... For the better part of half a decade, oh-so-brave Lebanese citizens who wanted to throw rocks at Jews (or really any anti-Israel tourist who wanted to throw rocks at Jews) could have a little fun by tossing stones across the border at armed Israeli soldiers. The idea has been that, unlike soldiers from some countries we could name, the Israelis won't actually open fire at unarmed civilians. It's the best kind of liberal academic resistance - anti-Israel, vaguely thuggish, and totally safe (hey kids, you can be like Che!) Columbia professor Edward Said (aka the intellectual father of the New Anti-Semitism) was himself once photographed throwing rocks and Israeli teenagers who he knew wouldn't respond.

Well, that game ends now:

You'd think that this will put a stop to this once and for all. But the problem is that the stone throwers are very stupid, and so they might not get the memo. How do we know they're very stupid? Well... we don't have any really specific proof, but the throwing rocks at armed soldiers thing is kind of a giveaway, no?

In Gaza... As almost no one in the West knows, the Palestinians have been firing rockets into Israeli schools and hospitals for the last month or so. This distinguishes last month in no way from the month before, or the month before that. But now Defense Minister Peretz is saying that at some point something will have to be done to express the idea that randomly bombing Israelis just because they happen to be Jewish is not OK:

Frustratingly, Peretz is a liar. But it sounds nice.

At first, watching Lebanon grow up into a precarious teenage Arab country - full of newly found confidence and braggadocio - was kind of cute:

But now this whole 'we can send our army to almost anywhere in our country' thing is starting to go to their head. To extend the metaphor, they're like 14 year olds trying to act like adults. And so what's at least normal coming from uncouth Syria or Iran is just kind pathetic and annoying coming from Siniora:

Blaming Israel for endangering a ceasefire that he's already explicitly broken... check.
Issuing not-very-veiled but nonetheless-very-vague threats about what will happen if Israel breaks the ceasefire that he's already explicitly broken... check.
Dragging in 'the Palestinian issue' even though every single other thing that he's committed to was done on the pretext that he was acting as a Lebanese Prime Minister and not a grand Arab defender... check.
Ignoring the fact that it's the Palestinian government that refuses to make peace - and therefore de facto justifying endless war against Israel but blaming it on the refusal of Israel to make peace... check.
Calling on the US to become "more constructive" by accepting that all of these totally loony ideas are actually true or reasonable... check
Making said call as a plea to the EU... check
Pretending that if pressuring Israel to make itself vulnerable to attack will yield some sort of peace dividend from an Arab and Muslim public that shows absolutely no inclination to provide said dividend (and that is killing nuns and burning churches for reasons that have nothing to do with Israel)... check

And to think, just two months ago he didn't really have anything that he could call "Lebanese sovereign territory" without someone in the audience smirking. Just look how fast he's grown up.

Yeah, we could pass these on with extended and explicit commentary. But sometimes, you just have to place your faith in the readers' abilities:

Percent of Palestinians who support Hezbollah, an organization dedicated to the physical eradication of the Jewish presence in the Middle East: 63 percent.

Percent of Israelis who support negotiating with a Palestinian government, even one like Hamas that is dedicated to the physical eradication of the Jews presence in the Middle East: 67 percent.

No way this can go badly.

Obviously, in a historical conflict that revolves over who has a "right" to land, the historical presence or absence of Jews or Arabs in Jerusalem will matter more than an outsider might think it would. And so leaders and opinion makes in the Arab world occasionally try to run the argument that Jerusalem was not really sacred to ancient Jews and that the Temple was in some other city or country entirely. We're not hopeful that new "rational evidence" will slow down this obvious lunacy even a little, but for what it's worth:

There's simply no other way to account for the disproportionate presence of valuable metals except by admitting that Jerusalem was a political, cultural, and spiritual center for many, many decades. Again, this discovery obviously won't stop the conspiracy nuts (at worst, they'll just say that this scientist is a lying Zionist agent), but it's a nice little talking point.

Slow morning.

* Israellycool notices that there are a lot of Israelis in Los Angeles. We can confirm that this is indeed the case, and we even have a little fable to explain how it happened. In the mid-1980s, the Israeli state was in total crisis. A unique blend of bureaucratic imbecility, laziness, and self-righteousness had pretty much brought the country to a halt. Something had to be done, and quick. So in one fell swoop, Israel physically shipped off to LA 15% of its meanest, least helpful civil service professionals. And that, boys and girls, is how the Los Angeles Consulate was born. The End.

* Daled Amos fisks the new book by World's Most Insipid Journalist Karen Anderson. Holy hell, do we hate that woman.

* Some of the members of the Lost Tribe that's been hanging out in India for a couple thousand years are coming home. There are 7,000 Bnei Menashe still in India. We think instead of absorbing them, Israel should declare that they're 80th generation refugees. Then they should demand UN special treatment and open up negotiations with Italy and Iraq (cause whatever, you know). Israel should demand an unconditional right of return in principle and massive compensation in practice.

* Via MEMRI, we find out that Pirates of the Caribbean is a Zionist plot. Which is obviously not true, because if Jews were in charge we never would've let Disneyland change the ride just to market the new movie. There's a special circle in hell reserved for people who change Disneyland rides. It's right outside the betrayers.

* Meryl catches the Saudis being a touch hypocritical about building fences. Very unneighborly.

It seems like everyone in the world suddenly thinks that Israel should be handing out more land on the 1 in a billion chance that it will distract a single Palestinian terrorist or Hezbollah proxy-soldier. Everyone, that is, except many Israelis - who kind of like what little amount of land they've still managed to keep.

With the Palestinians... So you're Spain. Other than being the WWII bad guy that everyone always forgets, your biggest claim to recent fame is being the boss on the Iberian Peninsula (not that Andorra was putting up much of a fight). So rather than being satisfied and resting on their laurels, the Spanish are suggesting that Israel should revive the utter failure that was the 1990s Israeli-Palestinian land-for-peace. How dumb is this argument? Not even Labor chief Amir Peretz thinks that's a bad idea - and he's so committed to his commitment to insane peace deals that he was talking about them during an election where Labor needed to go right. Shilo Musings is genuinely impressed. Why is it that whenever any decadent European wannabee wants to do something "relevant", pressuring Israel to endanger Israelis always seems to be near the top of the list? And incidentally, the fact that Labor is still expressing some semblance of normalcy makes the Meretz proposal for a Meretz-Labor merger that much funnier. Because nothing screams "we're trying to reestablish our credibility after our idiot primary voters elected an idiot teamster and then he lost a war" more than merging with a party to the left of you.

With the Syrians... People who think that Israel should negotiate with Syria: YNet's Sever Plocker, who's brain will allow him to publicly argue that the Golan Heights is different from the West Bank because, unlike the West Bank, the world is opposed to Israel's occupation of the Golan Heights (?!?!) People who think that Papa Assad blew Syria's golden opportunity and that if Baby Assad wants to come to the Golan he can damn well apply for an Israeli tourist visa like everyone else: Israeli Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres (or as the IHT describes it: "Israel vice premier says Israel open to peace talks if Syrians offer realistic proposals"... because that's the perfect way to sum up the main point of a speech dedicated to explaining that Assad will never, ever, ever make a realisic proposal).

It's beyond hackneyed to point out that technology is a precarious and unpredictable thing. Coulter constantly talks about Lexis-Nexis, but it's the availability of Google and Google Cache - free to tens of millions of energized individuals - that has dramatically increased the risk of any kind of dishonesty. And if you're a controversial ex-President talking about the single most important issue of our age, it's a very bad idea to throw around accusations of conspiracy when someone implies that you may spent eight years kicking the can of Islamofascism down the road. First, the blogosphere will fact check your ass [insert too-predictable-to-be-funny punch line about Clinton and ass-groping]. Then the blogosphere will follow up their fact-checking of your ass by gleefully posting video of really smart judges fact checking same. And then a major blog will arrange for your former adviser Dick Morris to describe to a bunch of other bloggers qua megaphones that (a) you probably were being a little intellectually dishonest and (b) even the maybe-excusing-your-behavior-possibility that you were overwhelmed by your emotions is just a cynical and calculated ploy (apparently Stephanopoulos has worked out an entire taxonomy of how Clinton pretends to lose control in different ways for different situations).

And so, yesterday was the latest OneJerusalem.org conference call - it put political uber-guru Dick Morris in the center of a gaggle of enthusiastic bloggers ("enthusiastic" is a serious understatement - given how people on this call were and are talking about him, the conference should have been a meltdown of people excitedly trying to ask questions all on top of each other... that it was actually probably the best behaved OJ.org conference call in the last two months suggests that there is something deeply flawed about our current understanding of the human psyche). And for once, we can actually give you a complete list of participants (which we only have because we sandbagged finishing this post and stole the list of the One Jerusalem writeup). Participants: Allen Roth (OneJerusalem.org), Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit), Pamela (Atlas Shrugs - a blog that Dick Morris can recognize by name, for those of you considering whether it's worth your time to RSS it), Don (Liberally Conservative), Anne Lieberman (Boker Tov, Boulder - aka "the woman who will never talk to us ever again"), Jerry Gordon (Israpundit), Michael Illions and Hank Butehorn (Conservatives With Attitude), Banagor (Broadsword - make sure you read his mid-month concise and brutal dismantling of Papal Jihad apologists), Kim Priestap (Wizbang), and Chad (GDLL).

Many of these people have written summaries of the call, and some of them are actually quite extensive (One Jersualem on background, Pamela on Dick Morris and blogging, Kim Priestap on Hillary vs. Gore and Bill vs. Hillary, Jim Hoft on just about everything). We want to focus on a few things that we think are still being somewhat underemphasized, and we'll do it over the next several posts to keep things from getting unwieldy.

One of the most successful political minds on the planet stated unequivocally that he believes that electoral trends will see Democrats taking control of both chambers of the US Congress in November. He built up to that conclusion after we asked him to offer midterms predictions, but he began by talking the more fundamental underlying dynamic: "the country wants to vote Democrat". This is a structural reality that can be maybe mitigated if Bush emphasizes terrorism, but it's significantly more complicated than being 'just another issue'. Rather than Bush limiting the general sense of anti-GOP dissatisfaction, that dissatisfaction also limits how much he can do: "every single day" Bush has to emphasize terrorism just to keep the Republicans from losing ground. Jim Hoft is the only person we noticed even passing these phrases along, but that was a later part of his post so he never really explored the full magnitude of what's at play. It's not just that the political dynamics present Republicans with an uphill climb: it's so powerful that it means that they can only go in one direction - down. The Republicans can't climb up the electoral hill - the very, very best they can do is not slip and tumble. Even accomplishing that much requires enormous will and luck - for them to hold their ground at all the Democrats will have to continue they current practice of almost willfully fumbling the terrorism issue - and Morris thinks they'll get their act together. But even if he's wrong on what the Democrats will do, notice what his very compelling description does to the hopes-against-hope of many conservatives: it means that Democratic misplays don't really matter because the national mood will sweep everything along anyway. Just about everyone has pointed by now that it's folly to underestimate the Democratic aptitude for wresting defeat from the jaws of victory. What Morris explains is that even if Democrats do everything in their power to lose, even they can't screw this up. The fundamentals are just too overwhelming - the frustrations of voters at GOP Congressional scandals (and subsequent near-total failures to reform) have pretty much hardened into a weight that will sink the GOP.

One of the most astute political observers on the planet declared with crystal clarity that, next to Bill, President George W. Bush will be the man most at fault if Hillary Clinton is elected President. Not because Bush's blunders have hurt the GOP, not because Bush isn't fighting the Clintons hard enough, and not because Bush is helping them in minor ways - Morris was explicit that this Republican President has single-handedly put the Democratic Clintons back within striking distance of the White House. The way that his term ended made Bill was an albatross around Hillary's neck (the White House china, the pardons, etc). But President Bush rehabilitated Bill Clinton and therefore the Clintons: he saved Bill's image by linking it to Bush I after the tsunamis, he prevented the Justice Department from giving Sandy Berger anything but a wrist slap, and he was presumably involved in the decision to have stratospherically-popular Laura Bush speaking at Clinton's summit. The scariest part of Morris's description? His surreal admission that he just outright doesn't understand what Bush could possibly be thinking - of tens of hundreds of political scenarios that Morris can game play, he can't see a single way that President Bush's actions make sense. And that's enough to transform Bush's inexplicable helping hand from frustrating to scary - it suggests something in the way irrational myopia or sentimentalism , something that in turn bodes poorly for the prospect of the President doing what needs to be done in the next six months.

The man who helped sustain the political fortunes of a President who was eventually impeached (and so is no stranger to the dynamics of political scandals) announced that a suspicious business arrangement involving a former President, an oil sheik, and a creepy billionaire will be the "dominant scandal" in the candidacy of the presumptive Democratic nominee. Untangling all of the tangled players in all of their opaque roles is way too much to write about when you can just go and listen to his description. There's two parts to this scandal, each alone really bad for the Clintons - together they combine in all of the wrong ways for the Democrats.

The first scandal is about Bill's close relationship with the Emir of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum. We're not going to say that the UAE is a theocracy, because self-declared sophisticates get very huffy when that happens - so how about we all agree that for the purposes of a Presidential campaign, any distinctions between "radical Muslim theocracy" and "complicated multi-layered state where a fully-functioning and state-supported sharia court system just happens to control several layers" are totally irrelevant? It is easy to all but prove that Bill Clinton seems to exercise a strong influence on how the Emir tries to financially influence US policy-making. It is also undeniable that the Emir has given Clinton and Clinton's organizations significant financial disbursements. It would significantly help Hillary if anyone would ever believe that these two things are unrelated.

The most immediately suspicious evidence involves the attempt by the UAE firm to take over day to day operations for a number of US ports - the US firm that Dubai hired to guide them through the process just happened to be the one that provides Clinton with the only thing that can be reasonably called regular employment (and below we'll get to how Morris transforms this potential awkwardness into the makings of a career-ending scandal - but right now, just focus on Clinton and the Emir's connections). It was noted by not a few people at the time that while Hillary was threatening to take legislative action to shut down the UAE takeover on national security grounds, her husband was advising the Emir on how to navigate the scandal (and Hillary's initial claim of ignorance on that point became all the more untenable when someone pointed out that she had just finished disclosing that her husband was paid almost half a million dollars to give speeches in Dubai).

And after the ports deal fell through, the Emir didn't give up on acquiring US assets. He then targeted two US defense firms. This time, he hired a new firm to steer him through the deal. So instead of the company that Clinton de facto works for, he choose... another company that Clinton has incredibly deep ties to. The Glover Park Group is a consulting firm of / club-house for Clinton administration ex-pats. It's headed by Joe Lockhart, it has lots of late Clinton staffers throughout the ranks, etc). So some eyebrows were raised when the Emir choose this firm to help him acquire the US defense firms. We imagine that said eyebrows will arch a little bit higher if/when connections are established - as Morris implies they will be - between this second deal and Clinton familial relations. At the very least, this is an obvious public relations disaster and a genuine public policy problem - as Morris said, Hillary would be running under the shadow of a foreign head of state paying enormous sums of money to husband of then-sitting Senator, and the husband then directing that foreign head of state's excess largess toward financial and professional friends.

Now the other distinct scandal that may not be distinct much longer: the connections between the Clintons and disgraced supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle. Burkle's Yucaipa firm provides Clinton with the only thing that he has that can really count as employment, and he's supposed to get them donors. We'll talk about what kinds of donors in a second, but by now you see where this could end up. But the Clinton/Burkle connections are damaging even without the media folding in dealing a foreign billionaire easily caricatured as a de facto representative of militant Islam. As Mickey Kaus and almost no one else repeatedly pointed out, the Burkle/Clinton relationship stinks plenty on its own. We never really read a comprehensive investigative roundup (we don't really think one was ever produced), but there were plenty of hints of Democratic cronyism - a trend that seems to be developing across these scandals which will not make them harder to fold into each other.

But the real nightmare scenario for Hillary occurs if it turns out that there is a real and demonstrable connection between these two already very shady financial / personal / political relationships. Bill Clinton gets paid a lot to get the very creepy Burkle financers and in return Burkle distributes money to Clinton's friends - damaging but spinnable as right-wing conspiracy mongering. Bill Clinton gets paid a lot to handle the UAE Emir's domestic political palm greasing and in return the Emir distributes money to Clinton's friends - damaging but spinnable as reactionary Arab-baiting.

But if you combine the two scandals, then Hillary is facing the prospect of a politically disastrous scandal that has the relatively singular virtue of being more or less grounded in fact. The connection isn't even particularly convoluted: at some point after Clinton became employed by Burkle's Yucaipa company, it so worked out that Clinton's good friend the Emir ("good friend" being "pays him $450,000 for a couple speeches good") hired Yucaipa to run his financial investments... including, obviously, the port buyout deal. You could argue that these two events were unconnected, but you'd have a tough time actually convincing anyone (Morris: they're "not coincidental"). This would be the same port buyout deal that Hillary opposed as a major terrorist risk.

The perfect storm: Bill Clinton was willing to put a company that his wife more or less called a terrorist risk in charge of US ports because he was being paid to do so by Ron Burkle on one hand and the Emir of the UAE on the other. The ways this impacts campaign strategies are staggering: it super-charges Republican attempts to paint the Democrats as a War on Terror disaster, it super-charges claims that the Clintons are corrupt, it super-charges claims that Hillary can't be relied on to tell the truth / reveal her genuine personal beliefs. Even Hillary's increasingly strong anti-terrorism credentials now become the frightened overcompensation of a candidate for her spouse's politically damaging connections to people she brands potential terrorists. Above all else, it's so ugly and tangled that Hillary couldn't talk her way out of it - the public sense that some kind of massive impropriety that's been covered up has occurred is the definition of a scandal that a politician can't disprove.

Rick Richman unloads on the Council on Foreign Relations about their inexplicable decision to grant elite legitimacy to this decade's (and perhaps this century's) wannabe Hitler:

We used to think that there was more or less a precise answer to this:

... but that was before the CFR invited Ahmadinejad. This is just irresponsible - ideology and myopia and investment in sophistication is one thing. But it must have occured to them, as they were mulling this decision over, to ask themselves: "what would we say if we were asked 'would you give Hitler a podium?'" But this is a confirmed trend among foreign policy sophisticates: the CFR tin ear is after all just a more severe version of the WaPo giving Hamas arch-terrorist Ismail Haniyeh column inches to make his case. We understand that there's value in hearing radical advocates of genocide pretend to not be radical advocates of genocide - but that doesn't outweigh the effects of treating these people as reasonable points on a spectrum of how Arabs react to Israel. Jeanne Kirkpatrick knew that almost twenty years ago - giving terrorists legitimacy makes them more, not less, radical and intransigent. And if you're still in doubt, ask yourself how every single person on the right could be so overwhelmingly sure that bringing Arafat to the White House would make him more likely to jerk Clinton's chain. Or how every single person on the right could be so overwhelmingly sure that giving Haniyeh a column in one of America's great newspapers would at best fail to moderate Hamas. What, they just keep getting lucky? (hat-tip to David Gerstman on the Kirkpatrick article).

First, people start declaring that Jewish bloggers aren't allowed to have fun like everyone else on the blogosphere (apparently because of some transliterated Hebrew... honestly, we kind of lost track pretty early in the post). Then we make fun of those people and click "upload" - an action almost immediately greeted by an email dinging us because our post was kind of wildly unfair (a defensible characterization, but one that is totally beside the point). So we upload an acknowledgment about our imputed over enthusiasm, and hop on this afternoon's One Jerusalem conference call with Dick Morris.

Which was awesome. And somewhere around the middle of said awesomeness, Boker Tov Boulder's Anne Lieberman pretty much started a feeding frenzy about a former Clinton official who may or may not have violated several federal laws by destroying documents with handwritten margin notes attesting to Clinton-era anti-terrorism negligence. Total feeding frenzy - follow-up questions from different bloggers, leading to electoral considerations, Dick Morris handing out his email address, general pandemonium (we might be exaggerating a little - but the general description is apt). Anne did what she did because (a) Rick Richman asked her to and (b) she's a badass. Except now we - and you - have to live with the knowledge that Anne's a badass who nonetheless couldn't resist joining the rising chorus of people who are trying to use Yom Kippur to ruin our week. Or as we like to call it: people catching the anti-blogger, anti-fun train to "and in other news, the NYT is still biased"-bloggingville. If you don't believe us, click on the link and see for yourself. It goes to a video... a video that literally spins out of the screen and forms a vortex of slow-talking, illustrated, patronizing sanctimony that physically pulls your will to live out of your body. Luckily, we had just finished reading this morning's LA Times Max Boot article, where he criticizes groups who don't oppose violent jihadists (this would be Max Boot of the Council of Foreign Relations... yes, that Council of Foreign Relations). So we really didn't have much that the vortex could take. But if you're thinking about puppies or something, be careful.

Listen, obviously yes - Yom Kippur. Obviously and definitionally of impossible-to-exaggerate importance. And we're not even denying that reconciliation with the Other is a necessary prerequisite for reconciliation with the divine. But none of that changes a very basic fact: if Juan Cole was slightly less confused by his own confused claims to intellectual grandeur, he would be no more than your very basic, garden variety, cheap fraud. And that's as true this week as it is any other week.

Adloyada has discovered the existence of John Dugard, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian territories (aka a UN-employed de jure spokesman for Palestinian terrorists). Adloyada seems to be somewhat less happy with reality than she was before she discovered existence of said UN employee. Welcome to the club Adloyada:

Meetings once every two months. And as soon as CafePress stops censoring our designs, we'll have t-shirts too.

On a just slightly more serious (but no less surreal) note: it can't be pointed out enough that the United Nations has a job where someone is literally paid - year to year and decade to decade - to be an international advocate for civilians and armed groups that are explicitly trying to destroy a UN member state. But look for the silver lining: before you knew who John Dugard is supposed to protect / work for, you were confused about how he could possibly come out for the de facto destruction of the Jewish State. Now that confusion - and any resulting anxiety - has presumably been settled. And now everyong can walk away from this post reassured - as is always the case - that United Nations employees are humanitarians of the highest caliber.

Assad can go eff himself:

And of course, he'd know about how to treat tumors, being a skilled doctor and all. But seriously, he can go eff himself. There is not a single incentive - not a single one - for Israel to trade the Golan Heights for a peace deal with Syria. It's already giving them too much credit to go over the reasons why not, but it'll have to be done at some point:

(1) Economic normalization - the country is a third world backwater
(2) Cultural normalization - hasn't worked with Egypt, which is far more modern than Syria has ever been
(3) Political normalization - it's a joke. Not even Jordan hesitates to pull their ambassador whenever the mood strikes them, to obviously say nothing of the cold peace Egyptians
(4) Military normalization - please. Last time Israel decided to roll up a newspaper and smack Syria on the nose by bombing Syrian radar stations, Syria didn't even bother scrambling their jets. Because they like their jets, and didn't want to lose them.
(5) Hezbollah - the only good argument that's ever existed for giving the Golan to Syria. Syria held Hezbollah over Israel's throat for years and years. The single best justification for leaving Lebanon in 2000 was to remove this card from Assad's deck - and Israel had to put up with Nasrallah's insufferable crowing as the least of the costs. The other cost, of course, was the deterrence hit that Israel took and the deployment of Hezbollah and its rockets to South Lebanon. But - and there's no nice way to say this - giving up the Golan is not worth the slim possibility that Hezbollah will stop trying/managing to kidnap five soldiers every five years. Additionally, we frankly don't think that Hezbollah can get away with dragging Lebanon into another war. The next Prime Minister will either be a general from Kadima or a Likudnik (or a Laborite that can't afford to look like she's getting pushed around) - the invasion will come much sooner. Plus, Damascus can't call Nasrallah off - he answers to his masters in Tehran now.

So Syria has absolutely nothing to offer Israel in exchange for the incalculable strategic and cultural value of the Golan. Obviously, given that fact, peacenik Yossi Beilin supports land for peace negotiations with Syria. Because he's a total clown.

In grade school, there are the kids who always raise their hand to answer the teacher's question. Everybody hates those kids. But there's another group of know-it-alls that's even more annoying: the kids who wait until the first kids have finished answering, and who then one-up the first kids by giving better answers. Clearer, more detailed, more accurate, and more nuanced answers. Obviously, everybody hates those kids too. Are you listening, Vital Perspective?

Because apparently the posts from Yourish.com, MR,, BtB, and Smooth we're good enough - just because they didn't "provide all that information" or "help readers understand the situation as well".

"The rockets also damaged a water tower, a greenhouse, an elementary school, and a college." Oh did they? Showoffs.

Not a single mention of Juan Cole yesterday - MR's brand recognition is on the line. We've got something special to make up for it though. People often criticize Cole for the close proximity with which the following three things appear in his posts: (a) absolutist statements about what Islam and the Koran really mean (b) implicit or explicit mockery of people who disagree with him for not being experts like he is and (c) having said interpretations of Islam and the Koran be the opposite of what hundreds of millions of Muslims seem to believe and what influential Muslim scholars explicitly say. So for instance, Cole sniggers at unsophisticated 'neocons' and warlike 'Likudniks' because they don't know - as he's patiently explained over and over again - that the Koran is case-closed, full-stop peaceful. Yet millions of Muslims and not a few clerics say that the Koran actually compels them to riot, burn, and murder. Well, if you dig deep in one of his posts (smugly titled "Quran Quote of the Day on Peace), you get the explanation:
You see - the Koran is inherently peaceful. It's the people who lived in "militaristic, feudal societies" that screwed the whole thing up. And they screwed it up (this is really beautiful - he can't avoid being a pretentious academic even to ancient Muslims)... they screwed it up because they "lack[ed] the techniques... typical of contemporary academic writing". You see, the readings of the Koran that are used for "much Muslim law and practice" - those readings are just too unsophisticated to be taken seriously. Because they "lack[ed]... contextual and causal thinking".

This absurd "technique of the hermeneutical circle" excuse is presumably his preempt against people who point out that what he says the Koran means is sometimes exactly the opposite of what the hadith says the Koran means. This is a problem for Cole, since Muslim theology holds that the hadith is a recording of divinely inspired interpretations (which is why it serves as the basis for sharia for the vast majority of Muslims).

So it's not that he's "wrong" or "lying" or "desperately looking for any possible reason why the West should lower its defenses against radical Islam". No, it's that he's "deploying the technique of the hermeneutical circle" (and have you ever heard anything more insufferably pretentious). But that begs a very fundamental question: if his interpretation of the Koran has nothing to do with how the Koran is actually interpreted by anybody but him, why should we care about his interpretations?

He's outright and explicitly admitting that the interpretations that guide Muslim law and practice (practice (!!(!!))) are unrelated to the interpretations that he's passing off as sophisticated insights. He's got a "contextual and causal" interpretation of the Koran: good for him, but there are hundreds and millions of Muslims all over the planet who (a) have a different interpretation and (b) have an interpretation that tells them that they should violently protest when public figures deny that the Koran is revealed and literal truth (i.e. when public figures insist on "contextual and causal" interpretations). So it's not only that the 'understanding' he presents about the Muslim world is the understanding of a world that would be nice but is not this world - it's also that if certain people (like, say, the Pope) were to pop off that Muslims should embrace this new interpretation, they would very likely take it as an insult.

But let's ignore all the ways that Cole's interpretation of Islam is contrary to the basic tenets of Islam (after all, who are we to criticize him for being "academic"). Just focus on the one overwhelmingly important implication of this post: everywhere else on his site, Cole is inexplicably insisting that contrary to appearances, there is no unique link between political Islam and violence. Here he admits that what he really means is that there's no unique link between his ideal version of political Islam and violence. Which is very nice, but not useful for dealing with really existing Islam - and he ought to stop implying otherwise.

We know, we know. Late for the second day in a row. We're sorry, but we're out of ideas for getting more productivity out of the interns. We've started just randomly hitting them on the head with yardsticks (only on the head, of course, so you can't actually see the bruises - thank you 4th grade teacher). But even that's not helping. Stupid interns.

* Spare us benevolent Arab peace plans. Israellycool takes apart the newly-minted Pakistani initiative

* Kesher Talk uses the phrase Kinky Jews. Obviously, that's enough to get a link.

* Jihadists are now threatening to riot over operas. Next up: the immodesty of Mona Lisa's uncovered hair. To our two liberal readers: wanna bet?

* Israel Matsav thinks it's important to note that only 32 percent of Israelis think that Dorit Beinish is qualified to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. We're totally under whelmed. All that this poll proves is that 68 percent of Israelis firmly believe that they themselves are the most qualified to be appointed Chief Justice. Not exactly news. You can play this game all day: percent of Israelis who think that urban planners are qualified... percent of Israelis who think that their bosses are qualified... percept of Israelis who think that any public figure in any sector in any part of the country is qualified... percent of Israelis who think that people in charge of Israeli beach environments are qualified... and so on. And actually, that last group in all honesty pretty much is comatose-level useless - but you get the point.

* For some context about yesterday's Tony Blankey interview, you'd be well-served to go read his article about Kissinger and the Pope.

* Pamela - and we're quoting her now - breaks the taboo. Not a direct vlog reference, but close enough for the obligatory link to Phish Bowl bikini vlog remix. Which is taboo, making the link context-appropriate.

* Also from Pamela, Paul Belian is a personal hero of mine. He might not be a personal hero to you, but he's reporting on the third straight night of Ramadan-related rioting in Brussels. Which seems like something that people should be talking about a little more. Anne does more digging on the subject.

* Anne is also posting kiddie porn on her site. Question: is the joke itself super creepy? Answer: obviously and overwhelmingly, yes. Also, there's something about how Ivy League schools have been inviting Jew-hating anti-Semitic lunatics for the better part of a century now. If you're interested in that sort of thing.

* Shlemazl has a depressing-in-its detail post about upper-curst British anti-Semitism.

* Mainline Truths has a headline that reads Presbyterian leaders meet with Ahmadinejad - and you won't be pissed off after you read it. Unless, like us, reading anything about Ahmadinejad pisses you off. In which case you'll be more pissed off - but less than you'd think from hearing about the headline.

* Get off of Allah's land, Britain. This bulletpoint brought to you by Citizens for the Preservation of Pre-HA Allahpundit Slogans.

* Thomas Lifson suggests that Pope Benedict XVI is a YouTuber. Sure we've just stolen neurons from you by suggesting that Pope Benedict is a Lonelygirl15 groupie. But look on the bright side: Lifson comes down firmly on the MR side of the "of course the Pope knew exactly what he was doing" debate.

* George Allen might not be a racist. Don't care. As far as campaigning, the Senator still makes John Kerry look like Alexander the Great. Total disaster. A pox on all their houses.

* New post at Augean Stables about Le Monde and how much they suck. More or less. And so MR continues our transformation into a very badly coded RSS reader for anything Richard Landes publishes.

AnnieGetYour at Jewbiquitous is doing some pre-chatima tikkun-ha-blogosphere by going all preachy on the Jewish side of the blogosphere. She says that JBloggers should try to be less mean, and she furthermore ropes in a not particularly short quote from Jewschool's even more preachy Jewish Bloggers Campaign for Responsible Speech Online:

That seemed reasonable to us for about 10 seconds, during which all we could think about was how happy our professors are going to be and how much we're going to miss blogging. Then we realized that this is totally backwards. There's nothing wrong with us pointing out, sometimes at length, that Jewish hipsters in New York are douchebags and that Jewish Hasidim in Jerusalem are insane. Why should we change? They're the ones who suck.

But just to show that we're in the sprit of the season, we're willing to make this one-time concession to fellow tribespeople: we're not going to write a post discussing the various answers that come to mind in response to the title of newly-minted Blogger blog How Orthodox Jews should Vote. How's that for avoiding lashon ha-ra? And we're going to go even further: we're going to partially agree with these self-appointed schoolyard monitors (don't say we never did anything for you).
They're not only more or less right about the potential harms of incivility - if anything, they're underestimating how rhetorical ugliness seems to consistently accompany genuine analytical and social pathologies. It's not coincidental that disgusting sexist, heterosexist, and bigoted insults appear in direct proportion to the degree to which the netroots are incensed by some real or imagined slight. And it was inevitable that excusing or celebrating those insults as 'telling it like it is' would mainstream the kind of vulgar sexism that Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter are now being subjected to - literally on a daily basis.

Luckily, we have two ways to distinguish our charming wit from nutroots vulgarity: (1) we are fighting the good fight, while they are smug, condescending, shrill, and often not very bright terrorist apologists (hint: if you're a leftist inclined to indignantly point out that this begs the question, you should know that your unreflexive indignation is actually proof of our point... it'll take you a while to figure out why, but we're confident you'll get there if you apply yourself) (2) they're heavy-handed and not at all funny, while we are objectively sparkling (hint: ditto).

Besides, Jewbiquitous and Jewschool don't have MR blogrolled. So screw em, ya know (kidding, kidding... we 100 percent take that back. Until after Yom Kippur).

UPDATE: Yeah, yeah, we know. There was no way we were going to get away with that "How Orthodox Jews should Vote" crack. It took SoccerDad David Gertsman like fifteen seconds to ding us:

Fair. But come on - like fairness would have stopped us from writing a post that goes something like: "... sure, some people will point out that 'How Orthodox Jews presents both sides'. But whatever, we've got some ideas about how they should vote..." But we're not going to write that post - because we're thinking about chilul Hashem. Obviously.

How is this not a damning indict of the very possibility of Muslim moderation:

Follow the logic here for a little bit (not too far - general warning about aneurysms apply): according to Musharraf, Pakistan can serve as a useful advocate in the task of bridging the Muslim world and the West. But Pakistan can only be useful if it rejects the right of Israel - which is, last we checked, a Western state - to exist. Which seems, when you think about it, like a poor way to start off bridging the Muslim world and the West. One of two things is true:

(1) Musharraf is just lying, which we actually don't really think is what's going on.
(2) What he meant was "the rest of the West" - mostly Europe - which seems willing to (a) accept Pakistani mediation under these terms and (b) embrace a virulently anti-Semitic and in many cases openly genocidal Muslim world.

Say what you will about him, Musharraf is not stupid. He's not exactly on the side of civilization all of the time, but he's not stupid. And we don't even think he was being intentionally vague or duplicitous here - he just assumed that everybody knows that when diplomats and statespeople say "the West", Israel doesn't count.

Papal rage death count in Iraq is up to two.

The Pope met with Muslim leaders to try to calm the rage. Here's the information you're looking for:

And you know what that means:

Good old Al-Jazeera. So no apology, and "protests may continue" (and of course we know what "protests" mean. Still, their "protesting" sure doesn't have the flourish that their early non-violent church bombings and nun murderings did. Some Gaza preacher said that the flag of Allah will be raised over the Vatican. Sure, it sounds threatening - but maybe this guy should focus on getting out of the Gaza Strip before he makes threats to people in countries that he can't find on a map. Although actually, now that we think about it, he's more than welcome to leave Gaza. And then there are the Pakistanis:

This is the parliamentary opposition? Shouldn't they be busy making sure that rape victims get executed for adultry? If the Palestinians had half of their energy, they'd have a state by now. Instead, the Palestinians spent the last few days drawing imbelic cartoons implying that the Pope is an American and Danish Nazi. Don't try to figure out the logic - your brain will start bleeding.

From Google Canada: "Pope said cross is Jewish tool of execution".
First reaction: wtf?
Second reaction: no way the Pope says that - crosses are 100 percent Roman.
Third reaction: Canada really needs to crack down on Islamist extremists.
Fourth reaction: oooohhhh... this is a Christ-klling reference... got it.
Fifth reaction: Wow, Canada really needs to crack down on Islamist extremists.

Two rockets out of Gaza. And then (maybe) a third one. And of course, terrorists were so eager to take credit that two different groups each claimed that they fired two rockets. All this has caused Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal to complain - quite rightly - that the government is neglecting his town, which is the main victim of the rocket attacks. He should take the AP's implicit advice and just calm down - it's not anyone's getting hurt... all that often.

It's OK though - Defense Minister Peretz is all over the situation of Palestinian terrorism. He doesn't know whether his navy is still blockading Lebanon (they're not, obviously), but he does know that there have been 10 attempted terrorist attacks stopped in September. Memo to the Labor primary voters who picked him over Peres and brought down the Sharon government: you people are idiots. Memo to the Gil general election voters who decided to spite "the Establishment" and not vote for Kadima, thereby putting him in the Defense Ministry: you people are also idiots.

Israel Matsav has another Palestinian civil war watch post up:

Our views on this are well-documented. Every couple of months, the Palestinians tease us with a civil war - and just like the parts of Oslo where they promised to stop publishing textbooks calling Jews pigs and apes, they inevitably fail to deliver. Now it is true that Abbas is saying that the unity government is off the table because of the whole "Hamas won't pretend that they don't want to destroy Israel" thing. But it's not like Abbas is confronting Hamas or anything - quite the opposite, he's settling for being huffy and passive aggressive:

The irony of Fatah getting pissed off because Palestinian terrorists keep reneging on agreements is something we leave as an exercise for the reader. But it's gotta be frustrating for a relatively smart guy like Abbas to watch Hamas be too stupid to go through the motions of even pretending to consider recognizing Israel. We are honestly shocked he hasn't just snapped at them.

But we've just been burned too many times on these civil war watches to fall for this trick again (it's like Iran moving toward suspending uranium enrichment - come on). In the final analysis, we just don't think that the Palestinians have the drive or commitment to go through with a real civil war. If they had that kind of attention span, they'd have a state by now. But Hamas is expressing hope for reconciliation:

Dialogue, huh? How's that working out for the Pope? Oh, Hamas called the Pope a Nazi and called him "ignorant and stupid"? And they published cartoons implying he's the stooge of conspiratorial Danes and Americans? That's awful strong for people who are counting on dialogue to help them get a not-openly-terrorist fig leaf. And yet hope springs eternal:

The "problem" with the initiative is that it only calls for a de facto destruction of Israel. While that's happening, Hamas would have to pretend that they're not out to destroy the Jewish State. And they are so pathological that they can't stomach even faking not wanting to wipe out all the Jews between the river and the sea.

This morning's OneJerusalem.org conference call brought together a large group of bloggers to talk to Tony Blankley, Washington Times editorial page editor and author of The West's Last Chance. A very large group of bloggers: Allen Roth (One Jerusalem), Jerry Gordon (IsraPundit), Jim Hoft (Gateway Pundit), Lynn-B (In Context), Rick Richman (Jewish Curr