We commented yesterday about the bad habit that Reuters has for reimagining history, where it becomes they want it to be rather than what it actually was. This afternoon they've got a timeline of the NoKo crisis up - and it begins only in 2002:

Now a concerned citizen might comment that - wait - weren't there a lot of things that contributed to the crisis that happened before 2002? Events that are relevant to understanding the current shape of the crisis and to making judgments about future anti-proliferation efforts? Things like this:

Then again, if you don't tell anyone that talks failed in the past, it becomes a lot easier to push the editorial line that talks are the solution to the crisis now. So that's convenient for them.

Javier Solona is one of our favorite people. And today, he's really on a roll:

Forgive us for being skeptical about the world's ability to proffer solutions to the Israeli-Arab conflict:

But no, seriously - obviously Israel is the threat to peace in the region.

Israel can't risk that Hamas's new army (yes Virginia, trained troops armed with cutting edge weaponry working under the command of an elected civilian government is an army). Olmert's worst nightmare right now is allowing Gaza to become South Lebanon and Hamas to become Hezbollah. He's preparing the Israeli public for war:

Tomorrow's journalism today: when the war comes, the center will say that Israel is "complicating peace efforts" and the left will say that Olmert is trying to "mollify the Israeli public" after "what some see" as a "humiliating defeat in Lebanon". Little to no mention will be made of how Hamas is arming itself for an all-out war, preparing to use the same missiles and rockets that killed Israeli workers and schoolchildren during Lebanon II. Little to no mention will be made of how Hamas has been - explicitly, in full and proud view - violating every single peace agreement that the Palestinian ever made with Israel. No - as usual the center will complain and the left will spin pseudo-process stories so that their readers have conventional wisdom to sagely drop at cocktail parties and seminar rooms.

The IAF has taken to making it very clear that Hezbollah's boasts of a crushing military victory may have been premature:

And now we give you France:

Hey, you know what else is "contrary to the spirit" of the ceasefire that called on Hezbollah to stop bringing massive amounts of cluster munitions to target at Israeli children into Lebanon? The fact that Hezbollah is still bringing massive amounts of cluster munitions to target at Israeli children into Lebanon. We'd insert a link here to any of the billion stories on MR about how French peacekeepers have committed - as an official policy - to not doing anything about that. But really, we respect you too much to use something that's (a) blindingly obvious and (b) you already know as an excuse to get more impressions.

Two of our cross-posted posts seem to have attracted a bit of a troll (signs of trollishness: bad argumentation, baiting, using our name as if it knows us). We took a couple minutes to mock it while waiting for the MT upgrade (which we finally got around to downloading) to upload. This should be nowhere near your top thousand priorities this morning, but if you have time and are looking for some cheap entertainment, the relevant links are here and here.

So Peretz has coopted some of the right by letting Avigdor Lieberman into the Coalition. All well and good. Here's how the BBC is helping sophisticated Americans and Brits talk about the event:

Because seriously, if Israel has to go to war with Iran or fails to make peace with the Palestinians, it will be the fault of the Israeli centrist coalition that's currently in control. This is like if you're shooting at us and your buddy is threatening to kill us - and when we turn around to go home, you say "well fine, but let the record show that you're the one who's walking away from this". Why would a newspaper even print an Iranian claim that Israel is being belligerent toward Iran? Like isn't that so far from good sense and logical thinking that you would just kind of dismiss it the same way you would dismiss tin-foil lunatics who claim that Jews were behind 9/11? As a journalist you personally note it, but then think that professionally it's just not something that one prints.

Which brings us to the Egyptians who are concerned that Israel is going to set back the peace process. That would be the peace process that Hamas has said thousands of times does not exist, will not exist, and can not exist. So there's obviously a huge cost in setting it back, right? Isn't this another thing where you'd be obligated to print something like "An Egyptian commentator sees the move as a setback to the peace process with the Palestinians, although Israeli neglected to articulate that possibility in light of Palestinian intransigence toward Israeli peace gestures made in recent months"

As "proof" of their assertion that Israeli commentators are critical of Lieberman, they site one Ha'aretz editorial (not even an editorial - a rant by Lili Galili) and two Yediot Aharonot articles. The first Yediot Aharonot article that proves that there is "concern [regarding] the admitting of the ultra-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu party" begins with:

So in other words, "just the opposite" of concern. The second article reads:

So in other words, a total lack of concern. But since 90percent of readers never get past the lede, they can comfortably go on believing that the BBC has confirmed for them that Israel is a racist state that even its own newspapers are outraged by.

The Guardian's business section title: Act now or the world we know will be lost forever. Big, bold headline: "Simple verdict after a complex inquiry: time is running out". You're thinking maybe... maybe (!!) they've realized that many of the people they're providing welfare to want to destroy their country, burn Parliament to the ground, and make Westminster Abbey into a mosque.

No, it's just about global warming. Not a mention of political Islam.

Which brings up an intriguing point: which will destroy the English way of life first?

Remember how people on both the right and the left were a little uneasy about the label "war on terror" because what the West is actually fighting is a group of violent ideologues seeking its elimination and their own domination? It's a good point - the threat of Islamofascism is not limited to, or even primarily from, its inhumane tactics. Rather, its true threat is as an existential danger to Western civilization - its ideologues literally seek to impose Islamic law throughout Europe and the Americas.

Similarly, the Palestinians should not face disapprobation only for their broad support of savage terrorism. What we should actually be shunning them for is the fact that their support for this tactic is part of their broad based support for the violent elimination of the Jewish state. Let's say the Palestinians stopped trying to succeed in their genocidal quest through terrorist - that they built themselves an army and tried to wipe out five million Jews with tanks. Would that make them any less worthy of condemnation? Obviously not.
All of which makes Peretz's statements last week particularly asinine:

Peretz said the exact same thing to Abbas (like literally the exact same thing) over six months ago. Back them he was still just a Histadrut chief running in an election and trying to ruin our life. So he either has a very good memory or absolutely nothing new or interesting to say. You'd think the intervening war thing that Israel fought against the elected Palestinian government would have caused him to modify his standard repertoire. But not so much.

This expression - "we not at war with x people, just with x's terrorists" - is becoming more and more stupid as it becomes more and more clear that large swaths of "people" support "terrorists". Not to put too fine a point on it, but... yes, Israel is at war with the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people have repeatedly demonstrated that there is broad and persistent support for violence against Israel among them. It's blindingly stupid to say that Israel is not at war with the population that supports war with Israel. Think of the logical analog: "we're not at war with you, we're just at war with your army". Do these people even listen to themselves when they talk?

The other annoyingly stupid line of argument that you'll hear is that Palestinian terrorists are also enemies the Palestinian people. Well OK, sure, in a way. But certainly we can agree that Palestinian terrorists are MORE enemies of Israel than of the Palestinian people? Like if we were taking a poll, and the question was "do you think that Palestinian terrorists support Jews or Palestinians more", we'd expect a high percentage of people to correctly identify that, yes indeed, Palestinian terrorists are more in favor of killing Jews than Palestinians. That helps explain why, even after five years, Palestinian suicide bombers have yet to target, say, a Palestinian cafe or diner or school.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Some of you have noticed that we've redesigned the panel on the left side of the screen. A full site redesign is in the offing, but it's still a couple of weeks out. A couple of things to bring to your attention:

(1) The new blogroll. This does not represent all of the blogs that we're subscribed to, nor is it necessarily a list of blogs that we entirely approve of (although we don't strongly disapprove of any of them). They're blogs that are more or less talking about what we talk about and that are more or less recognized as being interesting when they talk about those things. So they're blogs that are updated often and that fall within the interests of MR's core readership: concerned with the spread of political Islam, passionate about pro-Israel advocacy and analysis, and engaged in civil society. Again, we don't agree with everything written on every one of these blogs. A couple are a little too far left for our taste (Jewlicious, TNR, The Note, etc), while several are significantly to our right (Powerline, NRO, just about all of the Israeli blogs, etc). Unfortunately, to the shame of the left, the center-right and beyond are the only places where the alarm is being raised about the spread of the most crude and primitive ideology in at least half a century, and the new blogroll kind of reflects that.

(2) The (J)Blogosphere search engine. This is becoming kind of a pet project of ours, and it revolves around the new Google Coop project that Google just made public. It allows users to create a search engine that searches any list of blogs that you want. We were browsing the site and noticed that a group of prominent climatologists had created a search engine for students and journalists limited to sites that assume that climate change is anthropogenic. Our first impulse was to roll our eyes and think "this is great - now a person can spend their entire existence on the Internet without ever encounter an idea that they disagree with - even over Google". But then we thought "hey, that's a FANTASTIC idea". It's actually not that unreasonable - if you believe that one side just outright makes things up, then there's an obvious imperative to create something like this.

So we created a search engine that we think represents blogs that are more or less in the center – some further left and some further right, but no sites too far on either side. Right now the search engine is more or less limited to sites on our blogroll., minus one or two sites We urge you - we beg you - to kick us over suggestions for other blogs to add. The only caveat is that we'd prefer to keep this as a resource that students can use - something that will produce useful (and true) background for searches like "Chomsky Israel" or "USS Liberty". So if your blog implies that Chomsky is wrong because God gave Israel to the Jews - well, we're sympathetic to your point of view, but that's a different project. But the (J)blogosphere is much bigger than what's on our blogroll (obviously) and so we would greatly appreciate any sites that you can suggest to us. And of course, we would be grateful if anyone wanted to include the search engine on their site for their users to find and use - the code is public and we'll be ecstatic to kick it over to you.

As always, this blog is half vanity project and half public advocacy. Advocacy requires that people tune in and listen, and so your suggestions on the search engine or on any aspect of the site are always welcome.

Let's imagine for a second that a prosecutor in a foreign country opened a case against an Israeli leader. How much attention do you think it would get? You don't have to come up with an exact number. Just ask yourself whether it would be more or less than the less than 1,000 stories that Google News has about how Argentine prosecutors are seeking the arrest of Iranian ex-President Rafsanjani:

We actually have kind of an answer to that question. Here's a very crude comparison, in the form of a Google search on Sharon Belgium Prosecute. It's obviously not a great comparison, but you can tell that something's up since the second Google search is coming up with almost a quarter of a million hits. The word you're looking for is "obsessed". As in "you can tell that someone is anti-Semitic when they're obsessed with finding the 'Jewish angle' or the 'Jewish influence' to everything".

And you should also consider that a lot of those Iran hits are not about the case at all, but in the context of Iran's nuclear program. Also a couple hits for stories about how Iran wants to indict the Argentine prosecutors for besmirching their genocidal maniac of an ex-President:

What exactly is "spiritual compensation"? Is that like a forced conversion or something?

And how sadly predictable is it that the word "conspiracy" and the phrase "Zionist propaganda" always seem to go together? And how scary is it that Iran just basically "nice country... it'd be a shame if anything happened to it"-style threatened Argentina, and no one seems to care?

Yeah, we're not so sure what we think about this:


On the other hand, maybe Google's takeover of YouTube won't be so bad after all.

UPDATE: This is so embarrassing. The original version of this post had a link to the blog Curiousity by Elliot Temple, which is where we first heard about the search. Then we changed it the link to point directly to the Google search, but didn't add any new links to point to his post. Blush. We have a tiny bit of proof for the claim that we didn't intentionally violate the entire corpus of blog etiquette: we actually emailed him last Thursday to tell him that we were going to shamelessly rip him off and give him credit. Still, very embarrassing. Sigh.

We just can't understand why these people are allowed to publish:

We don't know what Dan Williams is trying to say with "two-fisted" (which we've only heard in the context of drinking, but we're pretty sure in this case is a hackneyed allusion to boxing), but we do know that this is a perfect example of mainstream journalists pretending that history is whatever it is that their ideology would predict that history is. If we're reading this correctly (and, let's be honest, we are), then what Williams is trying to say is that Israel has been making war on the Palestinians for decades and now is trying to project a new image.

Except Israel hasn't been making war on the Palestinians for decades. In fact, there was almost an entire decade - the one that just finished - in which Israel desperately tried to make peace with the Palestinians. During that decade, Israel put 98% of the Palestinian population under Palestinian control and effectively withdrew from almost all of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The Palestinian response was to make war on Israel, which is why Israel had to return to those territories... in 2002!

But hey, wouldn't it be nice if Israel really WAS a warlike country through and through? That would certainly make journalism easier. If only it wasn't for those pesky "fact" things. Oh well - if the Israeli/Arab conflict teaches us anything, it's that if you repeat an anti-Israel lie enough times it will become common, academically and publicly accepted wisdom.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Egypt's President Mubarak is engaging in a little bit of soul searching:

Now it's Reuters, so we wouldn't trust them to tell us anything about what "many Muslims regard" if their journalism was limited to statements like "many Muslims regard the sky as blue". Reuters coverage tends to oscillate between the "Muslims are peaceful and funloving kite fliers" and "Muslims have justifiable grievances that need to be understood and addressed (PS - right now only the New York Times and State Department get it)". But if it's the case that many Muslims regard US support of Israel against a government of genocidal maniacs as a "campaign targeting their faith", then isn't that something that should be at the forefront of calculations describing the US's diplomatic options?

In other words, it appears to us that Reuters has just endorsed the following: in order for the US to dampen Muslim extremism even a little, it would have to side with Palestinian government currently amassing cutting-edge munitions with the intent of using them against densely packed Israeli population centers. Now we're not sure that this is true, but if that's the sophisticated wisdom on the journalistic street them we don't know where they get off calling the Free Republic people right-wing extremists.

We just got done watching the morning Fox News roundup on how the investigation against Olmert is proceeding. We know that we shouldn't feel this way and it's pretty much unjustifiable, but we just don't care.

Newsflash: Israeli politicians are crocked. They're all crocked. OK, now you're caught up.

This isn't what we want the Prime Minister focusing on. He made some extra cash by selling some interest he had in Bank Leumi in some shady way. Shame on him. Can we get back to the nuclear weapons that Iran is building now? Is that something we can do?

A: Maybe. But frankly TSA hasn't demonstrated the kind of initiative that it would take them to sink deeper into a pit of total uselessness.

We make fun of airport security quite consistently. That's because airport security sucks. Everything about it sucks - from the refusal to profile to the insipidness of what passes for security checks. As near as we can tell, TSA personnel can be counted on to do only three things: (1) harass black businessmen traveling through the South (2) feel up white cheerleaders from the Midwest (2) take away our antiperspirant. And of all the things that piss us off, the worst is having to be delayed while these people fumble around with their worse than useless - as in it makes everyone less safe worse than useless - redundant boarding pass screening procedures. Two arguments

(1) Anyone with a a 10 year old's grasp of computers can evade a boarding pass check:

One of the things we've consistently mocked is redundant boarding pass checks (mostly because they don't work and actually make people less careful and less safe). Now it turns out all you need to beat these things is

In other words, you can alter a few lines of code and print anything you want (including, say, someone else's name) on a boarding pass. You don't even have to dip into the code - you can just use a very basic image editing program (say, paint) to cut and paste over a portion of a printed boarding pass. Slate explained why this matters a year ago:

So someone went ahead and automated this process to demonstrate how laughingly easy it is to evade boarding pass checks. Our government's response? They shut him down and threatened to arrest him. Because the problem is that he pointed out the existence of the loophole, and not the loophole itself.

(2) According to airport security officials, this is a big, big problem. But that's why they built in redundancy, you see. Because even if someone bad gets through check-in, they still can't do anything really dramatic because of metal detectors, x-rays, random checks, etc. Right? Yeah, not so much:

So in other words: (1) there are several 100% effective ways to get through security even if you're a terrorist on a watchlist and (2) you have a 10 out of 11 chance of getting through with a concealed bomb or gun. Not to belabor the obvious, but you send eleven terrorists into eleven different major airports in the country, and your odds of blowing up several very large planes and inflicting thousands of deaths on this country approach 100%.

But at least no one on any of the planes will have bottles of water. Dangerous, dangerous water.

UPDATE:While browsing Metroblogger we came across this gorgeous piece of work:

We don't even know where to begin.

We pass this on with no comment:

Actually, one comment: good job Labor primary voters! Destroying the last Sharon coalition and then working hard enough to get 20 mandates and the Defense portfolio has really paid off dividends. Go you!

Lebanon's official government and press - perennially playing the pathetic lapdog to Syria's abusive owner - is making wild and not very credible insinuations about how it behooves Israel to rush to the peace table with Syria:

"Unwise to ignore them"... or else what? Or else Syria will supply weapons to Hezbollah and Hamas? Or else Syria will welcome terrorists to Damascus? Or else Syria will incite anti-Israel sentiment across the Middle East?

Whatever. Assad is not Sadat. Sadat, say what you will about him, actually had some credibility. Assad is a powerless pipsqueak who literally looks longingly at a lunatic taxi driver from Tehran - and it's the lunatic taxi driver that has the real power. Assad has nothing to give Israel, and frankly he's been kind of uppity lately. Don't get us wrong. We're officially on the record as being in favor of an Israeli-Syrian peace deal. We just don't think Assad - given his delusions of relevance - would particularly like the terms.

Did you know that 112 cars per day are being burned by radical Muslims youths in France?

This is the inevitable result of a civilization's best minds turning against their own culture. Of people deciding to attack their own history. Is there anything more absurd or unseemly than the leading lights of the French Left turning against the Enlightenment - against the French Left's greatest gift to progress and civilization? Of course Europe is easy pickings for literal barbarians - France's most powerful minds have been hollowing it out from the inside for the better part of two generations.

Post-Zionist Israelis and leftist American academics take note: your time can be spent more productively than culturally and morally weakening the basis for your countries' existence and legacy.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Last Friday we asked how much longer France would go before empty busses being attacked and burned by violent Muslim extremists became full busses being attacked and burned by violent Muslim extremists. The answer was one day:

They're going to say that they need to throw more money at the Muslim inner cities of Paris and Lyons. Which will make the problem worse. Which will cause another crises. And so on.

After Hezbollah managed to push Israel out of Lebanon again - with not a little bit of international military and diplomatic help - their allies Iran decided that the same tactics will work if Hamas trots them out. To that effect, they paid Hamas not to release Gilad Shalit and began to build an Hezbollah-like army. They fully intend to turn Gaza into South Lebanon, complete with missiles launching cluster munitions into Israeli schools. And they fully expect that they will be able to defeat Israel - to finally initiate the genocidal war that they've been talking about for decades.

We think there's a difference. We think that Gaza is not Lebanon, because Gaza is (a) smaller and (b) urban. We think that blockading Gaza is different than blockading Lebanon, since there's no government recognized by the US or the EU in Gaza. But mostly, we think that there's no Iranian embassy for Hamas leaders to hide in (something that Hezbollah leaders were rumored to have done in the early days of Lebanon II) - and that if they try to emulate their terrorist brothers from the north the Hamas leadership will be dismantled from the top down:

Of course, we could be wrong. International mendacity relating to Israel knows no bounds, and they could easily find a way not to let the IDF win. But we're not sure that Olmert can really afford to cave to international pressure and allow Israel to end another military campaign indecisively. If the IDF has to go into Gaza to root out the cutting-edge military assets that Hamas has stockpiled, the Hamas leadership is probably going to have to pay a steep price.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Chutzpa:

No one's asking, of course, why the EU delegation includes Le Pen? It's apparently the most natural thing in the world that he would come along. After all, since at least as long ago as Ahmednejad was invited to speak to the Council on Foreign Relations, Holocaust denial is on the spectrum of things that foreign leaders can suggest. Some foreign leaders will suggest that Israel has a right to self-defense and some will suggest that the Holocaust never happened. It's all just part of quotidian deliberation on the European Continent.

You know, other than losing the centuries-old churches and the museums, it's really getting harder and harder to tell what's going to change when political Islam finally takes over in Europe.

Of course the US is going to pay to rebuild Lebanon. Why wouldn't they?

Because what Lebanon really needs right now are all of those guns and missiles that Syria can provide. Good on the US for using my tax dollars to rebuild Hezbollah's infrastructure. Good use of revenues. Well done.

Do they just get to make things up now:

Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Israel used a "novel small expermental nuclear fission device" - on the battlefield, no less, where it might not explode. You know why they did it? They did it because they wanted to poison Lebanese wells. Because that's what the Jewish state does. It poisons wells.

At least when Britain is taken over by political Islam, they'll import some newspaper writers from Saudi Arabia and Egypt so that the wild-eyed conspiracy theories will actually make sense.

Unless we're talking about bloggers that we write to and like, we generally try to avoid public ad homs on this blog. But seriously, does this guy have an extra chromosome or something:

OK. So Hamas has a "fake" religious imperative to destroy Israel that they - and several million of their closest friends - seem to think is "real". Can someone please explain to us how that changes things even one iota? What does that even mean? Is Javier Solona now more of an expert on the intricacies of Islam than the Hamas sheiks who've, you know, read the Koran and the hadith? How does a human being of even average intelligence allow himself to say thinks like that? What an idiot.

Yeah, no kidding.

With a story like this, we'd usually subject you to an extended post about how abusing language in UN-sponsored forums (Durban: "Jews are the new Nazis", etc) creates an environment where absurdity seems normal. But you know what? We think that the Taliban are just really stupid:

We'll skip over the whole "why this guy has Reuters on speed-dial" thing and content ourselves with pointing out the sheer gorgeousness of indiscriminate murder as an objection to genocide. "Increase their activities" - whatever. Ramadan is over, they'll run out of steam soon enough.

The UN is doing a hellva a job:

Oh shut up. No one's going to slap sanctions on them. They're going nuclear, and they're going nuclear soon. And short of military action - which the much-vaunted UN won't allow anyone to do - there's nothing that can stop them. But hey, maybe giving them half of Czechoslovakia will slow them down by a year or two. Although probably not.

Oh, Associated Press journalists. Why must you be such caricatures of yourselves:

It's amazing that giving into the demands of violent, ideologically driven fanatics makes them... more violent, ideologically driven, and fanatical. Really, we can't understand how these things keep happening.

If you click through, there's a picture of a bus that will look very familiar. It's charred from top to bottom, windows blown out, etc. The result of violent Muslim rioting. As of now, no Paris bus has been burned and destroyed like that with commuters on it. Anyone want to take bets about whether we'll be able to write the same thing, oh, five years from now?

On Sunday, October 8th at 00:15 someone phoned in a complaint to the Irvine police department that went something like this: "hi, I was walking by the student housing at Vista Del Campo, and it appears that somebody has painted swastikas all over the building". Twenty days or so days later, we finally find out about this - apparently this isn't a big deal around these parts any more. The only reason we found out at all is because LAist linked to two articles in CampusJ about the issue. CampusJ is apparently some sort of Jewish Campus journalism outlet. We can't figure out more than that because the site has been knocked offline (a quick glance at Technorati leads us to blame Steven Weiss for this, but there could be others). We do know that CampusJ is not the official UCI campus outlet. For one thing, the UCI paper is called the New University. For another, the author of these articles - Reut Cohen - probably couldn't have written something like this for the New University. Some time last year the New University specifically asked Cohen to tone down her pro-Israel coverage because it was causing too much controversy (allegedly... that's what we heard at least). So they probably wouldn't let her publish something like this.

So this incident: the University really wants you to believe that someone was really pissed off about a student housing policy, and that they decided the way to express that was through anti-Semitic hate speech. Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Manuel Gomez even put out a statement on this question, making it one of his foremost talking points: (Google cache):

The last time we talked about Vice Chancellor Gomez, he was giving an interview to a hate group about anti-discrimination efforts targeting the UCI campus (can't imagine what they had to be concerned about). The hate group sympathized deeply with his plight, and then went on to use the situation to launch thinly veiled threats against the Jewish students and campus leaders that Gomez supposedly speaks for. On the basis of their interview with Gomez, they threatened that "the large majority of citizens" are about to "lose patience" with "the Jews".

Let's not mince words: the UC Irvine administration is currently on the wrong end of a ZOA lawsuit because they've let their campus degenerate into an anti-American, anti-Semitic cesspool. They teach explicitly anti-American classes. They allow student funds to be used for the most disgusting kinds of anti-Semitic incitement. And so their students end up dressing and talking like terrorists. Except it's not just make-believe: the FBI has begun to investigate UCI students for terrorism. Because apparently some students were incited by all of the incitement that their student funds funded.

And how is the University dealing with this hate speech? With these preachers brought in by the Muslim Student Union who scream about "Zionists" and then nudge-nudge wink-wink the crowd? How is the University dealing with Nazi-link statements that may or may not have led to Nazi-link vandalism? We couldn't make this up: (Google cache):

That. Is. Awesome.

Here's a hint to Chancellor Drake and Vice Chancellor Gomez: it's no longer about you prohibiting hate speech. Sure, it'd be nice if you took some step like saying "the University does not endorse it when Muslim clerics link Jews to conspiracy theories". But let's not get crazy. At this point, we're asking for no more fodder to hate groups, no more paying for hate speech, and no more pretending that you don't have a gigantic problem on your campus.

For instance, let's say that this vandal really was just angry with the management of the Vista Del Campo housing complex. Wouldn't that make it worse for the UCI administration? Wouldn't it mean that their students now, as a matter of course, find deploying anti-Semitic hate speech to be the most natural thing in the world? Because after all, as Vice Chancellor Gomez says, "one person’s hate speech is another person’s education". Seriously, this is disgusting. That man should resign or be fired. But of course he won't be, because "protecting academic freedom" means never having to say you're sorry because your students have become violent anti-Semites under investigation by the FBI for terrorism.

UPDATE: Remember, according to Vice Chancellor Gomez, this is "another person's education" (and this is from a man helping to run an educational institution, so he's an expert):


"Every time we fought in the name of Allah, we always won... we are not afraid of THEM". Psst - when he says "Zionists", he means "Jews".

UPDATE 2: CampusJ is back online, so we've modified the links to Cohen's articles from the Google cache to the original articles. Google cache links have been left in parenthesis in case the site goes down again.

Apparently the good folks at One Jerusalem wanted to make up for missing a week by giving the blogosphere an interview with a big name. So - Allen Roth and David Goder being who they are, they went out and got one of the biggest: author and columnist Mark Steyn. The call was so crowded that it went over the usual hour cutoff - and Mark Steyn being the gentleman that he is, he stayed on to make sure that everybody got a chance to ask a question. On the call: Allen Roth (One Jerusalem), Rick Richman (Jewish Current Issues), Pamela Geller (Atlas Shrugs), Jerry Gordon (IsraPundit), Avi Green (Tel-Chai Nation), Judith Weiss (Kesher Talk), Banagor (Broadsword), Kim Priestap (Wizbang), Barak Moore (IRIS Blog), Tigerhawk (Tigerhawk), Chad (Granddaddy Long Legs), Anne Lieberman (Boker Tov, Boulder), and bloggers from The American Thinker and (Infidel Bloggers Network). As always, audio will be up soon on the One Jerusalem frontpage and their blog post will be updated throughout the day with participants' blog posts. We think that we missed at least one caller, so make sure you check in on OJ's site throughout the day.

Mark Steyn. Holy hell. Mark Steyn. Women want him. Men want to be him. As a matter of fact, there are not a few men who certainly want him as well. If we were gay, we'd certainly want Mark Steyn. Hell, we're not gay and... well, nevermind (in fairness to us, it was Allen Roth said that Steyn is "giving it to us" - don't ask, it'll just make things awkward).

Mark Steyn has a colorable claim to being the most important conservative journalist alive. Now he's got his first major book out, titled America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. As it turns out, the title is actually one of the more cheerful parts. We'll going to paste the Amazon book description below, but you really should click through to read the description on the inside flap. And while you're there, you should obviously purchase the book:

Cliff notes version of the book: Europe is finished. Lots of reasons why, but the conclusion is the same. They're done.

Will the pendulum of multiculturalism, which renders Europeans literally impotent in the face of radicalism and intolerance, swing back? No.

Will non-Muslims in Europe, driven either by primal instinct of political calculation, personally intervene to stop its demographic decline? No.

Will anything, even a renewed fascist movement, arise as an objection to Europe's increasingly steep slide into outright primitivism? No.

In one way, Steyn's got this kind of a VDH Nietzschean thing going, where multiculturalism has combined with civilizational weariness to effectively make Europeans no longer care about being European. He's got a deep appreciation for the broad sweep of history and this poignancy when talking about the heyday of Europe: he was noticably saddened when talking about the loss of Shakespeare and Nelson's England to political Islam. There's also more than a little bit of West Is Best in his attitude: the inside flap of the book includes the line "America should proclaim the obvious: we do have a better government, religion, and culture than our enemies".

Several bloggers asked him various questions about multiculturalism, which he sees as a defense mechanism that allowed Europeans to come to grips with more basic structural deficiencies. His read of the emergence of European multiculturalism is causal: "we need more plumbers, but we're certainly not going to do that work... we'll bring in kind of violent unassimilated immigrants, and to make ourselves feel better about their violent unassimilated we'll celebrate our tolerance for it". The causality between demographics, cultural exhaustion, and the welfare state is probably impossible to untangle, but his description is certainly how it happened on the ground. And it's certainly why European journalists and authors find it so hard to criticize the "youths" that are rioting now.

On the other hand, he's not trading on any simplistic nostalgia for a Europe that never existed. We're not dealing here with a simple Huns-at-the-gate scenario: political Islam is not just barbaric primitivism. Instead, it is the intersection of the East and West, the Muslim world and the Christian world. In several places he alluded to the standard academic trope for this, which is that fundamentalist Islam is the intersection between the developing world and modernity. People driven by an ancient ideology now have access to planes. It seems like Steyn is still marked by the shock of traveling to Europe and the Middle East after 9/11 and discovering that France's Muslims were far more hostile and alienated than any of the people that he met in the Arab world. Osama Bin Laden might have lived in a cave, but the Hamburg 9/11 terrorists and the French gangbanging rioters live in apartments, have televisions, and drink Coke.

Steyn is also quite skeptical about the potential for secular values or secular movements to form a bulwark against political Islam as it spreads across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. He explicitly and extensively criticized the anti-theism of Chris Hitchens and the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins as empirical failures. He didn't use either of those labels, although that's what he was alluding to - Hitchens's anti-theism is well-known, and Wired just posted an essential article on New Atheism if you're getting caught up on the high-tide of broad Leftist anti-jihadism. A secular society might be sound in theory, but it's simply not appealing enough to form the basis for an ideology. What's needed is something that can provide a backbone to the people who'll be fighting the good fight for the next two or three generations - if anything can. As Steyn said, "history is on the march very quickly in Europe"

There's a ton of other good stuff in this interview: comments on blogging, skepticism about just how much European goodwill there was after 9/11, and the single best response to NYT-reading self-styled cocktail party sophistication that we've ever heard. The call lasted over an hour, and it'll be an hour of your time well-spent to listen to the whole thing.

If a prolonged, all out clash of civilizations is averted, it'll be because of efforts like those of Aslam Abdullah, director of the Islamic Society of Nevada:

Signs of hope.

Sorry for two videos in a single day. We know we're abusing your patience. But via Allahpundit via Blackfive, you have to see this:


It's like the Dixie Chicks. Except not aggressively stupid.
This is one side of Australian culture. There are others. For instance, 300,000 Australian Muslims have this guy as one of their most important spokesmen and representatives:

Well, first of all, we still blame the cat when she jumps on the counter and sniffs at the meat. But that might be missing the point of the controversy. Our favorite part is the more or less non-apology apology:

Well that's nice of him, don't you think? "Sure, I think you're asking for rape - but if that's the look you're going for, by all means don't let little old Mr. Mufti stop you". This is like the time when he said that 9/11 was "God's work against the oppressors", and had to clarify later that he didn't support terrorism. So theoretically, if 9/11 had been perpetuated by a state actor, he would have been totally copasetic with it.

Here's the thing about the whole radical Islam view on women thing kids: they're not really "on the same page" as we are. They "hate women". To quote a show that juts about none of you will admit to watching but that we will gladly endorse through the fourth season, "They beat women, Nancy. They hate women. The only reason they keep... women alive is to make more... men."

People who say that modern day Islamists are just like the Nazis are obviously mistaken...


... the Nazis didn't have nukes.

So the TV for our new studio came in, and of course we plugged it in and turned on CNN. That's about when the train started heading south. Has anyone else noticed that these people are more or less just making it up as they go along? Like really.

Within the first 5 minutes, they have some over-emoting, big-eyed pony-tailed douchebag on to talk about the genocide n Darfur. And we've got Ms. Overemotional McHandwringer throwing him the following softball: "well, why isn't anyone doing anything about this". We were kind of half-listening, but we just figured that he would say something like "well, it's kind of complicated. On one hand, China sells arms to the janjaweed and so doesn't want the UN to clamp down, while on the other hand the Bush Administration's maneuvering room for going it alone has been damaged by Iraq. Everyone's to blame for this mess." And the reason we expected him to say that is because it's, you know, true.

Except that's not what he says. Nope. Instead he chooses to say something that's not that.

He says: the Bush administration isn't intervening in the Sudanese genocide because it has deep connections to the Sudanese government. And how could the Bush administration possibly have ties to the Sudanese government, especially since the Administration labeled it a government complicit in genocide? Oh, no reason... just the War on Terror! Yeah, that was the claim - the Bush administration is super-cozy with the Sudanese government (hint: no they're not) because of the War on Terror. Wouldn't you know it, it's the War on Terror's fault that the Bush administration isn't stopping Arab militias from massacring non-Muslim African animists in Africa. That's obviously what it is. The genocide would be solved if only we could all get together and pretend that today is Sept 10, 2001 and that it's really sunny outside.

And of course this woman doing the interview, whoever she was, nods credulously and tsks her tongue at imaginary evil Republicans. And all this happened an hour before Lou Dobbs even went on the air - at which point we had to listen to how the government hasn't fixed everything in the country yet. Isn't Lou Dobbs supposed to be a fiscal conservative? What the hell is he doing complaining that the government isn't doing enough? Fiscal conservatives like gridlock, remember? It's when people in Congress actually get the gumption to do something that things start going horribly awry.

If you're a terrorist who knows that most of the world will be mostly on your side no matter what you do, obviously this is exactly what you do:

Incidentally, "urban parts" means "under houses". Or, more descriptively, "under houses where if Israel tries to get to them the world will scream about human rights atrocities" And say what you will about the Gazan terrorists - one thing that they certainly do seem to understand is how the world would react.

The message MEMRI wants you to get from this video: "Islamic Clerics Authorizing Sexual Abuse of Children". By "children" they mean "infants" and, yeah, that's pretty bad. But you knew that already. The message that we want you to get from this video: apparently there is no place in the world that is immune from the stupid, stupid argumentative trope "they say they are right, and you say you are right [who's to judge]".


Real blogging to resume shortly.

Joking aside, we need to stay in school. The (J)Blog Roundup won't be up until at least this evening, and actually will probably be rolled into the Tuesday morning roundup. Sorry about that. In the meantime, here's some red meat for our core demo. It's the kind of heavy-handed and uncomplicated portrait of Israel that helps make the pro-Israel echo chamber the beautiful thing it is.


Of course, the difference between our echo-chamber and the other side's echo-chamber is that most of the stuff we constantly say to each other happens to be reasonable and true.

We know that we blogged this yesterday, but it is absolutely mind-boggling that this week Ahmadinejad literally threatened to attack Israel and any European nation that supports Israel and no one seems particularly put out:

HELLO? IS ANYBODY HOME?

Lunatic. Nukes. Genocide. Do we have to draw you a goddamned picture?

The LAT is in hyperventilating hysteria about a shadowy purge of gay Republicans ostensibly being planned by "powerful evangelical coservatives":

We'll take this as a reason to switch political allegiances when we see prominent Democrats coming out against the 1970 purge of lesbians conducted by the progressives who run NOW. What's that you say? That was over three decades ago and it's unfair to comapre the progressives of today with the GOP of today? Hey, if it's good enough for comparing rampaging Muslim mobs to the Catholic Crusades of a thousand years ago...

By now of course you know that Human Rights Watch has called out Hezbollah for firing cluster munitions at Israeli civilian targets (which is redundant, because those are the only targets that Hezbollah fired at). The way you know this is because Reuters published it in a screaming headline: HRW: Hezbollah hit Israel with cluster munitions. And now we're going to reproduce the LA Times wire on this in full, just so that you can get a feel for the levels of weasly bias:

Three short paragraphs about the report that Hezbollah fired cluster bombs into Israeli schools. The first one is about how Israel used cluster bombs and the third one is about how Israel used cluster bombs - because that's apparently what the LAT finds relevant in a wire that's about how "Hezbollah Used Cluster Bombs". It's almost like they knew they had to say something about it, so they put it in a headline (attributing the whole thing to an apparently anonymous "group" that "asserts" things) and then didn't bother to actually write anything about it at all.

Hey, do you think that this story will get more or less play on lefty blogs than Ahmadinejad saying this morning that God is destroying Israel? Or Ahmadinejad saying earlier this week thatGod will guarantee an Iranian military victory? We think more, not less. Nice to know where they see a theocratic threat coming from:

And for the record, the official MR position is that this is obviously wrong and silly. Anyone who's anyone knows that it's God who gets his inspiration from Rummy.

This man will soon have nukes:

France on Iran: stabilizing force in the region.

UPDATE: When people on the right insist that Israel is the front line in the West's battle against political Islam, they're called shrill and hysterical. But when Ahmadinejad announces the exact same thing while threatening to attack Europe - well, then it's a stabilizing force:

Is anyone in any official capacity even pretending to be outraged any more? Or have we pretty much given up on that game?

It's no secret that the MR frontend is not exactly "stable". In fact, if you're reading this, you're probably not using IE since... er... we don't look too good in IE. So now let's see how many ways embedding a YouTube video can break the site. This is the clip of John Ashcroft's Daily Show appearance that got DovBear's panties in a bunch. The audience laughs at Ashcroft's joke, incidentally. Because it's funny.


If this works, goodbye "MR the not very controversial Middle East politics blog" and hello "fifteen clips a day of talking animals".

Shabbat Shalom. It's Friday, so don't expect go expecting The Republic out of the morning (j)blog roundup . Not like you ever do, but you know...

* This chick needs to read this guy so we never have to lose another two minutes of our life figuring this out. PS - yes.

* :-(

* When we saw Pamela call Clinton a POS because of his