Ummm... WHAT?

Let's go over that middle part again: "something pulled the two divers down - but what it was exactly could not be explained". We didn't think they wrote sentences like that about the Arctic, except in movies where ALIENS INVADE EARTH and EVERYBODY DIES.

Previously: Dumb Ideas In Robotics I, Dumb Ideas In Robotics II, Talking Animals - Not Just For Really Funny Movies Any More

Because you've clocked out of work, so it's effectively already Friday.

* Report: Syrian network planned to kill Lebanese officials: Surprise!

* Iranian Weapons Arm Iraqi Militia - Hezbollah Training Also Linked to Iraq Violence: Surprise!

* Sharia law is spreading as authority wanes: During times like this, we like to revisit the words of one Prof. Juan Cole: "PS As for Friedman's main point, that Muslims haven't done a good job of fighting jihadi ideology and terrorism, it is bizarre." Totally bizarre! Douchebag.

* Pro-Peace Symbol Forces Win Battle in Colorado Town : Oh, that's too bad. Oh well, you can't win em all.

* Pope Backs Turkey’s Bid to Join European Union : Suddenly, he's on the NYT's good side. How'd that happen?

* America, Not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on: America actually says the opposite, thank you very much.

* Baker Commission to recommend withdrawal: We think we might have a heart attack from not surprise. What's next? Desmond Tutu concluding that Israel really is evil?

* UN troops face child abuse claims: Again.

Previously: OneJerusalem.org Conference Call: Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute, Hezbollah To Lebanon: Nice Country You Got Here... Be a Real Shame If Anything Happened To It, Quick Comparison of Recent Discourse In Gay Rights (Israel vs. Political Islam Edition)

We could not hate these people more

Too bad the feminist left is obsessed with "overthrowing" Bush and the Zionists. Because they're the real threats to women in the world. Good choice of scarce resources!

Previously: Winds of Change.NET HateWatch, Hey Gals, Check This Out - Saudi Companies Block Cell Phone Voting for Arab Reality Show, Feminism in the Muslim World

Paris is about to get its first architecturally significant tall building in a decade and a half:

This is to be a mark of French chic, culture, progress. A beacon of the French culture. And what's the architectural inspiration for the building? What is the aesthetic that has been chosen to embody France in steel and glass? Over again to Josh Stein at Gridskipper:

But hey, probably nothing to worry about. It's not like Josh knows anything about architecture. Or like he's the editor of Gawker Media's Travel and Architecture blog of anything.

Previously: French Delusions of Grandeur May Yet Cause International Incident, France - How Did It Come To This?, France Identifies the Real Threat To the Lebanon Ceasefire: Israel.

There's a headline you don't read every day. Josh Stein, our boss over at Gridskipper, just posted about a bit of a mini-controversy that's bubbbling up in Germany:

There's a picture attached. It really is a couple lines of Santas all hieling an imaginary North Pole fuhrer. It's a furor about a fuhrer.

Previously: Unholy Alliances - European Style, Hezbollah Admits: Appeasing Violent Hatred Doesn't Decrease Violence or Hatred, Israel Not So Racist After All

We got our form-letter announcing the launch of isRaelli, the new Israel blog being run by a bunch of folks out of the New York consulate, so we dutifully went to check it out. Initial reactions:

(1) It's an Israeli life blog, not a politics blog, seemingly closest in content to Israelity. So on one side, you've got an Israeli life blog being written by people in Israeli and edited by AK Sommer, PJM Middle East editor. On the other side, you've got an Israeli life blog written by New Yorkers and edited by someone who is not AK Sommer. Hmmm...

(2) As far as we can tell, there's only minimum snark. For instance, in 23 Questions To An Israeli in NY, nowhere does the query "how the hell do you put up with all these NY Jews thinking that the Wailing Wall is somewhere in the LES" ever come up? That's going to be a problem.

(3) 2001 called. Something about a web design...

(4) Too many gratuitous movies and jpegs inserted just to generate content. That's our trick, and we're kind of bitter that they're pulling it off with so little subltly. Because that too is our trick.

(5) Typos everywhere. Lynn is going to have an aunerism.

This is really just bitterness because Israel started an officially blog, and instead of going after media bias they're posting YouTube videos in posts like Virtual Aquarium and Israel Gone Wild. In fact, they call themselves "the new and improved Israel Video Blog". Memo to the New York consulate: we already have something like that. This just seems like an effort to "make people like Israelis", which is so far past where the issues are today that it seems like of frivolous.

Still, we dutifully RSS'd it like we're supposed to. But we're skeptical that we're going to be posting much about it.

Previously: Vulgar Palestinian Propaganda Succeeds with International Media - Again!, Palestinian President Hates Reality, Blames Israel, Do They Just Get To Make Things Up Now? - How Israel Is Losing The Propaganda War

At least don't smoke crack while sitting naked in the middle of a alligator-infested swamp:

Those are excellent questions.

Could the rank bias be any more obvious?

ONCE. Once in a decade long genocidal battle that the UN insists on calling a "liberation struggle", even though itt began when 98percent of Palestinians were already liberated. Once despite facing conditions that no other army on the planet faces and acting with ethics that no other army on the planet displays. ONE EFFING ARTILLERY goes off target, and instead of hitting the apartment building that the terrorists have turned into a missile launching pad, it hits the apartment building next to it. ONCE. And it's instantly "systemic" human rights violation that the entire UN gets to talk about for a month and investigate for a year.

Thousands of attempted suicide bombings, each seeking to murders dozens of Israeli civilians and maim hundreds more. Nothing. Dozens of successful suicide bombings that did exactly that. Nothing. A decade of terror and horror woven into the fabric of one of the most willfully joyful nations on the planet. Not a single UN investigation. Not one.

But 19 Palestinians die because terrorists decided to use them as human shields, and Desmond Tutu gets to show up and "investigate the Zionist entity":

Gee - wonder what he'll find. Consider this: the nudge-nudge wink-wink of anti-Israel international diplomacy has now reached such an absurd level that the genocidal maniacs out to delegitimize the Jewish state don't even have to pretend to be unbiased any more.

You know, why not just get it over with and appoint Ahmednejad to dig through the dirt and see if he can come up with evidence of Israeli war crimes? At least it'll give him a chance to visit the Holy Land before he tries to nuke it. Which is also something, incidentally, that the UN has roundly failed to condemn.

Disgusting.

Previously: Under UN Protection, Hezbollah Prepares For Next Missile Barrage At Dangerous Israeli Schools and Hospitals, Things Not Discussed By Emergency UN Sessions This Month: The Continuing Genocide In Sudan, Beit Hanun Meme Watch - (2) "The Palestinians Are Really Pissed Off" - And The NYT Will Publish Death Porn To Prove It, Beit Hanun Meme Watch - (6) "Israelis Demoralized and Blaming Themselves" - Actually, No They're Not

It's the perfect Slate headline: it's contrary, it's incindeary, and it even ends with a question mark. Also, it's brutally stupid:

Because he hasn't built gas chambers or tried to exterminate an entire race.

If we were teaching class, we would now say: good question though, let's move on.

Since we're not teaching class, we can point out that "Hitler wore pants, Bush wears pants, so Bush is Hitler" is a very, very dumb argument. Substituting "took away civil rights" for "wore pants" doesn't make the argument any better, incidentally.

It's good to see who the left is willing to call Hitler-esque though. Last week a CFR lackey published an editorial in the LA Times insisting that Ahmadinejad is not comparable to Hitler. This week Slate puts out an article saying that Bush is comparable to Hitler.

These people really have just totally lost it.

Previously: It's Amazing How Speaking and Thinking Like an Anti-Semite Makes You Into an Anti-Semite, Jews Now Being Blamed by Media for Harassing Nonexistent, Modern-Day Joseph and Mary, Palestinian Government Publishes Holocaust Denial On Web As Part Of ''We?re Not Even Trying To Hide It Any More'' Campaign (Also: The Rhetoric of Anti-Semitism - Introduction)

Who says you can't blog a week's worth of news in a single post? Wait until we do a month worth of jblog posts...

* Bush Pledges Continued U.S. Presence in Iraq: Donald Rumsfeld was unavailable for comment.

* Carter blames Israel for failure of roadmap, denies he’s anti-Israel: OK, seriously. The man lies. He tells obvious, easily demonstrated lies. Things that are not true. And be publishes them as fact, in an effort to undermine Israeli security. Why do we have to pay attention to him again?

* Quebec recognised as a nation within Canada: It's becoming increasingly obvious that Canada is not a real country. Can we take the conservatives and the ski-slopes in the Western half yet?

* AMERICAblog: In face of concerns about their safety, Bush twins snub US embassy officials in Argentina: John in DC is pissed off because the Bush twins are making it hard on the Secret Service and the State Department by... refusing to leave the territory of a US ally because people there don't like them. Screw that. Quadruple their security, and have them prance up and down the streets to their hearts' content. Civis romanus sum - things haven't gotten that bad where the First Daughters can't walk around in public. If they have, there's some serious recalculating that policy makers better be doing, and it better involve the phrase "saturation bombing". Seriously, we understand that the left's instinct is to cut and run whenever ANYBODY is angry with Americans - but this is effing absurd.

* We're just kidding about that saturation bombing stuff. Mostly.

* Hezbollah Said to Help Shiite Army in Iraq: They're doing it out of the goodness of their heart. It has nothing to do with Iran, because as the French have told us that Iran is a stabilizing force in the Middle East.

* Woman faces fines for wreath peace sign: Nope, we don't care if the homeowners association is fining her for being vaguely anti-American. And you know why? Because it's hysterical. If Borat gets to be anti-Semitic because it's objectively funny, then the Loma Linda Homeowners Association in Pagosa Springs gets to fine stupid moral exhibitionists.

* Is the L.A. Times Repeating Enemy Propaganda? Yes.

* Waxman has Bush administration in sights: Because this is a family blog, we rarely use the word "fellatio". But come on:

See, Erica Werner isn't being biased by accusing the Administration of blundering badly. She's just reporting on what many Democrats feel. It's news! And they're not just investigations, they're searing investigations.

* MyDD: Democrats Won. We Won. Get It? MR: Your base is a bunch of resentful liberals obsessed with anti-Establishment posing. Get It?

* Iran and Syria Helping Hizballah Rearm: If this is news to you, then you are an idiot.

Previously: At the LA Times, Even the Obits Pitch In To Apologize For Terrorists, Even 40 Years Ago, Anti-Zionism was Already Anti-Semitism, LA Times Can Give You Anti-Israel Cycle-Of-Violence Framing. Full And Accurate Reporting, However, Is Not Their Forte.

About a week ago we commented on Amnesty International's weird fascination with everything Israeli. During that post we commented that their casualty figures were... er... drawn from a testimonial community regulated by epistemic norms that were not exactly trustworthy. We linked to a CAMERA video on YouTube demonstrating said lack of veracity, but embedding on the video was disabled at the time. Through various people in CAMERA who are good enough to return our emails and IMs, that's now been fixed. Human rights organizations lie:

Of course, this is wasted on all of you since we're sure that each and every one of you clicked through on the original post. And by "each and every one" we mean "approximately ten percent".

Previously: NJ Leftists vs. NY Leftists vs. Castro (how's a poor conservative to choose?), Roadblocks that Stop Terrorism Bad, Roadblocks that Help Terrorism So-So, Amnesty International: Hezbollah's Real Bad - Someone Should Really Do Something about Israel.

We have absolutely no idea what this is about, but we got a wildly inappropriate giggle out of it: 10:49am, someone from Haifa got to MR by searching Google for Meryl Yourish video. For the record, the only other hits we ever get for video are for "Jewish Girls Gone Wild". Anything you'd like to share, Ms. Yourish?

Previously: Meryl, Cats, Division of Labor,
Now They're Just Being Unoriginal, Simon Wiesenthal Dies at 96

Via Hot Air, we just found out about Nabil, an Iraqi blogger who has been putting his life on the line for years to provide testimony about Iraqi life - for good or ill. Now his life has become literally unlivable, and he's asking for help:

The Paypal button is indeed on the top-right. In just three clicks you can - and you should - send him some cash.

Previously: Egyptian Persecution of Bloggers Must Be Uncompromisingly Fought - What Happens Right After That, However, Is Not So Simple, Egyptian Sandmonkey Takes Exception To TIME's Embrace Of Tariq Ramadan, Truncated Catalog Of Syria's Human Rights Atrocities In Lebanon

We've recently taken to describing ourselves as "militant progressives", which elicits laughs from our liberal friends right up until we declare that it's because "sometimes, you have to bomb countries out of the Stone Age" - and that we're serious. This morning's OneJerusalem Conference Call was with Will Marshall, who describes himself as a "progressive internationalist" - close enough to be both suggestive and interesting. And since the Republicans have become the Party of James Baker, new voices are both welcome and needed. Allen Roth (One Jerusalem) was as always running the call, and Rick Richman (Jewish Current Issues) was also on the line. The audio will be on the One Jerusalem frontpage later today or tomorrow.

Will Marshall is the President of the Progressive Policy Institute, and he's the Editor at Large of the new Democratic magazine Blueprint. Blueprint seems to be a kind of center-left The New Republic, focusing specifically on foreign policy security initiatives. The PPI just published With All Of Our Might, a collection of essays by some of the leading intellectual lights of the center-left. The goal is to articulate a positive vision for a reinvigoration of what used to be called Truman Democrats.

We'll give away the ending: we're sympathetic but quite unhopeful about the prospects of a robust, American liberal opposition to political Islam. At stake, we submit to you, are two fundamental questions. But before we get to them, we do want to emphasize again how overwhelmingly critical it is to foreground our sympathy and support - more than our disagreement - with what the PPI is trying to accomplish. Most importantly, there is the fundamental issue that everyone's on the same side in the fundamental battle of the next hundred years. Perhaps just as significantly, however, we really do seem to be approaching a political situation in which there will be no mainstream support for Israel keeping up its fight against the genocidal opponents that threaten it - there's more than a little reason to hope that making a compelling case to the center-left could serve as the foundation for new tactical alliances.

(1) As a domestic political matter, are there any prospects for a broad revival of liberal internationalism?

We've made no secret that we view the Congressional flip as more or less a classic, mouth-frothing plebian revolt: an explosion of destructive resentment in the form of a revolution that will very quickly consume its children.

Every party and ideology has its populists and ideologues. Certainly the Republican party is not immune from crazy. The difference is - and we don't understand why this isn't an obvious, argument-ending observation - that the Republican base is quite content to confine its policy demands to a limited set of domestic policies. As long as national Republicans are willing to toe the line on abortion, immigration, gay rights, and judges, the Republican base remains more or less content.

That's not the case with the Democratic base, which literally brags about having bought the Democratic party (there's a separate essay to be written, incidentally, about liberals' projection of their own worst traits - deliberative ugliness, secret machinations, buying candidates, etc). Furthermore, the liberal base not only thinks it's in control - it actually is in control - Harry Reid made an election-day video for the DKos Denizens all but acknowledging their control of the party. We've seen nothing since then that contradicts the idea that top party leaders feel indebted to the netroots.

And that's a problem, because the netroots are totally batshit crazy:

Will Marshall's solution to delineate between the Congressional and the Presidential wings of the Democratic party, observing that Congress always ends up being more ideological than the President. Fair enough, but Rick Richman put the problem bluntly: can a Truman-style Democrat (assuming that this is a meaningful phrase) get out of the Democratic primaries? Marshall seemed pretty confident that one could, but we remain unsure as to exactly why he thinks that (although that could be - and we're not being sarcastic here - because our stupid cell phone 2-in-1 handsfree went out for 10 seconds - we'll have to review the transcript). It seems that he thinks that Pelosi losing the Murtha thing means that it's not all about the Iraq War.

Which is fair - but precisely not the issue. The issue has to do with liberal fascination with and feting of the most ruthless, genocidal maniacs on the planet. The liberal fascination with Ahmadinejad is just one example - it's not just the netroots who love this guy. The CFR - not unrepresented in PPI publications and in the book - is also enamoured with the idea of this powerful, anti-Western populist. Forget the whole "genocide" thing. And that's the intellectuals at CFR - that's before we even get to the "Ahmadinejad has a pretty sweet hipster style" bloggers.

The contemporary control of the Democratic Party by netroots activists is not, however, terminal. The netroots will fizzle out just like every populist surge fizzles out - no matter how well organized it is. If nothing else, their parents will eventually shut off the electricty and force them to get a job. We're more concerned about what a reinvigorated liberal internationalist would look like. More than whether one is possible...

(2) Intellectually and institutionally, is broad revival of liberal internationalism desirable?

When the neocons started crafting their positive vision of their own ideology, they referenced old Wilsonian internationalism minus a single crucial element: the belief in multinational institutions and treaties. The idea is that you can have as many good intentions as you want, but none of that matters if you provide a forum that levels the playing field between the US and despots, dictators, and tyrants. Bilateral treaties and alliances among friends of similar ideology are all to the better - but having to go to the United Nations to win over cynical thugs - whether through coercion or bribes - makes progressive internationalism impossible.

You could look at this as a broader issue of commitments and sensibilities: it's grounded in the left's refusal to give up on the pretenses of negotiating with people who don't respect negotiations, from the United Nations down to the Palestinians. It's diplomatic fetishism, where the appearance of negotiations substitutes for what negotiations ought to represent - a willingness to come to the table (rather than a footdragging maneuver to buy time to rearm or go nuclear). So in With All Our Might, there are chapters devoted to reinvigorating democracy promotion by Larry Diamond (awesome idea - let's try it in Egypt!) and to restoring the UN by Anne-Marie Slaughter (super - how about giving Venezuela an expanded role!). In Will Marshall's terms:

Same old same old. But Larry Diamond or Anne-Marie Slaughter are not nobody bloggers: these are some very, very big brains. So it's not enough (and it's frankly inaccurate) to say that they're not "just wrong". Quite the opposite - they're wrong in all kinds of complicated, tangled ways, produced by an interplay of institutional inertia, disciplinary assumptions, and personal sensibilities. But fundamentally wrong they are, and you can tell that this is true because on the whole they embrace silly notions like the idea that if we explain our lifestyle more to an Arab world that hates it, that Arab world will like us more.

The reason that the neocons wanted to give up on these pretenses is because - practically, materially, as a matter of effects - they end up in the same place as realism does. You end up having to balance the lesser of some pretty significant evils just to get a little peace and quiet. Stability becomes the default, desperately talking and pretending nothing's wrong becomes the method.

There is no tangible, material difference between James Baker pressuring Israel from the Right and State Department-DLC sophisticates pressuring Israel from the left. Will Marshall was stunningly revelatory - almost to the point of Clinton-era caricature - on this question: "there's no partner with the Israelis to negotiate with but... we need to be actively engaged in other sorts of diplomacy". Which is exactly how you end up with John Kerry - who Will Marshall proudly held up as a supporter of the broader War on Terror - suggesting that the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was to send Jimmy "Israel Is An Apartheid State" Carter to Israel. Because who's better at getting Muslim and Arab radicals to uselessly talk than Jimmy Carter?

Underneath this new liberal internationalism is a cluster of mistaken assumptions, entrenched by page after page and article after article in leading foreign policy journals: the idea that the Bush administration has been hands off in Israel ()not really), the idea that the Bush administration has been unilateral (insulting), and the idea that there are allies out there just waiting to join us in the global war against Muslim extremism (demographically problematic for them, to say the least). It's an ideologically and institutionally myopic.

But - and here's the crucial point - Will Marshall thinks there's tons of daylight between liberal internationalism and neo-Realism ala James Baker. He thinks that organizing a coalition is significantly different from Bush style unilateralism. But the point is that he's wrong, and he's wrong because the starting assumptions are wrong - there is no difference between failing to get the Palestinians to genuinely make peace and never starting in the first place. Or actually, there is a difference - but it doesn't end up positively for the people who brought Arafat to the White House.

But Allen Roth and David Goder are quite right in bringing center-right pro-Western bloggers into dialogue with people like Will Marshall. The stakes in the war against political Islam are too high to let partisanship get in the way either of fruitful intellectual dialogue or of contingent political alliances. But, again, more importantly: Will Marshall and his allies on the center-left are fighting the good fight against isolationists and neo-Realists of all stripes. They're frighteningly wrong in some respects, but they remain critical to constructing a centrist coalition dedicated to protecting the West against the threat of jihadism.

When there's a real interest in moving forward through dialogue - not the fake, foot-dragging style of international diplomacy – then there's a chance for genuine sharpening of argument. There are not many conservatives who could go more than a couple rounds with the folks that the PPI has mobilized in their publications, and that's reason enough to encourage conservatives to engage those authors and publications. And if the center-left arguments can't be addressed and answered (and we want to be very clear on this - we think they can be) - then they should be adopted. Because that's how useful strategies and political visions are formed.

Previously: In Just Seven Short Paragraphs, Jimmy Carter Tells 2 Lies, Makes 2 Incoherent Arguments, Takes an Anti-Israel Stance that the State Department Mocks, and Just Generally Annoys the Hell Out of Us, OneJerusalem.org Conference Call: Mark Steyn, OneJerusalem.org Conference Call: Yehudit Barsky on Salah Choudhury

Three reasons we get to blog this video of Buddy Rich, the world's greatest drummer, in a drum battle with Animal on the Muppets in 1981:

(1) He was Jewish. This blog's core demo is Jewish and interested in Judaism. Ergo...
(2) It was posted on Hot Air yesterday morning. The blogosphere is an incestuous swamp. Ergo...
(3) It is totally awesome. We know you love awesome. Ergo...

Make sure you watch till the very end. Seriously:

Umm... wow?

Previously: UCLA Student Gets Tasered By Campus Police. Only 33,000 More UCLA Students To Go., Hot Israeli Chicks On YouTube, Political Discourse - Parrots

We kind of liked the movie when we downloaded it. People who didn't:

Debbie Schlussel: Ouch.
Chris Hitchens: Double ouch.
Charles Krauthammer: Triple ouch.

Eh, yeah - the implication that America is crawling with racists and anti-Semites is obviously false and misleading, especially compared to the countries that the people who sniff at this film consider to be beacons of tolerance. But it was still kind of funny. And as long-time readers know, if it passes the laugh test it's in. No exceptions. We've gotta have some consistency around here, and after we start talking about Olmert's new peace plan that's going to be few and far between.

Previously: Christopher Hitchens Has Been Kidnapped. This Is An Obvious and Undeniable Fact., Hitchens and Sullivan On CNN, Israel's Chris Hitchens

We're supposed to be impressed that the company that employees Keith Olbermann - the liberal success story, now with almost one-fifth of O'Rielley's viewers - has chosen to declare Iraq a civil war. We'll start calling Iraq a civil war when they start calling France a civil war - given that it's actually a case of French citizens fighting French citizens rather than a foreign-bred and funded insurgency, we think that at least the claim makes sense in the French context.

We do have a question though: if a Muslim sectarian conflict has now risen to the level of a civil war in Iraq, does that mean that NBC is saying that there are ways to interpret Islam in ways other than as a Religion of Peace? Because if so, we expect to see CAIR call for anti-NBC boycotts any minute now - because CAIR is nothing if not consistent, and would never pass up criticizing a news story just because that news story made the Bush administration look bad. Right?

UPDATE (4:00AM PST): We didn't catch this the first time, but the FishBowl LA blurb points out that Oblbermann said in an interview that he doesn't want to become a left-wing version of O'Rielly or Limbaugh. With due respect, his ratings would need to increase by entire orders of magnitude before that would even begin to become a potential worry that he should consider entertaining.

Previously: What? No Snark About Imams Calling For Muslims To Boycott Airlines?, Politically Active Filmmakers Find a Religion-Based Summer Camp They Feel Safe Criticizing, CAIR Protest In So Cal

Major press outlets and major center-right blogs have begun to form into what might end up being a critical mass against James Baker and his Realist friends selling out the Cedar Revolution. But if Lebanon will be shielded from their machinations, whatever will the US give Syria in exchange for taking a six month break from raising hell in Iraq? Not to spoil the ending:

At least John Mearsheimer will be happy that real people are talking to him again. Unless you count David Duke as a real person. Which we don't.

Previously: John Mearsheimer - Not Anti-Semitic. Just Anti-Semiticish,
Academics Who Attack Israel are Brave if Brave Means "Doing Things All Your Collegues Who Agree With You Will Tell You That You Were Brave for Doing", Mathematical Proof That Negotiating With Iran Is Stupid. Not Wrong. Stupid.

As far as we know, Rantings of a Sandmonkey is the only site on our blogroll with an editor who actually believes that there's an Israeli-Palestinian "cycle of violence". Posts like his commentary on TIME giving Tariq Ramadan an editorial are more than enough to recommend him despite this (albeit significant) ideological misstep:

In fairness to TIME, it's still not as bad as when the Washington Post allowed Hamas arch-terrorist Ismail Haniyeh to obfuscate / justify his genocidal ideology in their pages. Close though.

Previously: Rantings of a Sandmonkey On Moving the Ramses II Statue Out of Cairo, Egyptian Women's Magazines Are Ironic, Tariq Ramadan Makes His Contribution To Benedict Controversy

Folks, we can't take it any more. We just. Can't Take. It. Any. More:

NO. That's JUST NOT TRUE. It is FALSE. The AP is NOT BEING HONEST. Reuters reported that there was plenty (almost a dozens' worth of) "Palestinian rocket fire into Israel". Hell, the AP themselves reported on the tons of Palestinian rockets that have been fired on Israeli schools and hospitals since the ceasefire went into effect:

And all of this in an effort to make it seem like Israel is the one that's endangering the ceasefire by killing the people who are trying to ruin the ceasefire. Brilliant! If we keep this up, we can blame Israel for everything. See how neat and tidy that is?

Previously: Israel Can't Go After Terrorists, But Hamas Is Allowed To Call For Genocide, Damascus Embassy Attack Update Thread (Bumped) - The AP Is Amusing, Associated Press: "We are all Hezbollah" is Not Anti-Israel

Of the many disagreements between MR and the left, one of the most fundamental involves the sources for global instability. We tend to say that Palestinians who endanger Palestinian civilians and murder Israeli civilians are responsible for the deaths of civilians, while the left prefers to blame Israel because they can't be bothered to remember what happened yesterday (seriously, dealing with these people is like arguing with Memento).

Another difference is that the left always demonizes Israel as the greatest source of regional instability, arguing that Israel's arms imports cause arms races across the Middle East. We, on the other hand, insist that Egypt is one disgruntled general away from being the most dangerous country on Earth. Now without peeking, whose side do you think is supported by the data in Richard F. Grimmett's CRS Report for Congress, "Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1998-2005":

The only interesting thing about this is that the 1997-2004 report still had Israel slightly ahead of Saudi Arabia in arms purchases from the US. Good to see that two Middle Eastern countries with large populations that would like to see Israel destroyed are firmly ahead of the Jewish State in arms acquisitions. Now at least neither of those countries are about to go nuclear. Except of course, we've been literally screeching that Egypt and Saudi Arabia are going nuclear for the better part of a year:

* Saudi Arabia has concluded a deal with Pakistan to help them go nuclear and has worked it out so that the the IAEA isn't even allowed to inspect their nuclear facilities.

* Egypt has been totally open about it.

What's the difference between our conspiracy theories and the left's conspiracy theories? Ours sometimes turn out to be true:

It's enough to actually kind of scare you.

But anyway, yeah - the liberal canard that the US disproportionately funds the Israeli military is as factually incorrect as it is suspiciously pervasive.

Previously: Israeli-Egyptian Peace Not Really Working Out "Peacefully", Mid-East Nuclearization Watch, IAEA Plays Charlie Brown To Iran's Lucy

This would be fun if it wasn't so totally depressing:

Allahpundit sums it up quite depressingly: "Not a single seat went to a secular liberal". Awesome.

And now let's check back in with Professor Cole, the most quotable of the myriad public intellectuals that we're honored to have in our intellectual public sphere:

Totally bizarre! They've been doing a GREAT job of fighting jihadi ideology. Totally awesome job!

Sigh. What a crank.

Previously: Juan Cole - Fraud, The Left's Pathetic Ignorance and Hatred of PM Sharon, Academics Who Attack Israel are Brave if Brave Means "Doing Things All Your Colleagues Who Agree With You Will Tell You That You Were Brave for Doing"

Yesterday evening, we posted on a CTV story (the "C" is for "Canada", ya'll) that seemed to make the word "ceasefire" a synonym for "Palestinians firing a ton of rockets at Israeli schools and hospitals - and Israelis not responding". But a quick check on Tammy Bruce shows that (a) we should've pointed out that this was an edited AP wire and (b) that Reuters was running the exact same absurdly biased and stupid equivocation. But check out who's responsible for the inexcusable and unjustifiable bias in the Reuters story. Could it be our old friend Nidal al-Mughrabi. Why yes, yes it could be:

Seriously, could we please do some sort of review of basic effing material existence here? A ceasefire does not "take hold" if there are multiple "Palestinian rocket attacks". That's not what ceasefire means, for crying. Out. Loud. That's the opposite of a ceasefire. That's "Israel not responding to Palestinian provocation"... maybe! But it's not a ceasefire, because - you see - fire hasn't ceased. It's just not what that word means.

Previously: Reuters Gives Advice: Want To Dampen Muslim Extremism? Support People Who Want To Commit Genocide, IDF Hits Reuters Vehicle - Countdown to Lunacy Begins, Reuters: Problems With North Korea Began In 2002 Under Bush

Yoko Ono has published a full-page ad in the New York Times begging for the world's forgiveness for the suffering inflicted by blah blah blah. All you need to know: at no point did she apologize for breaking up the greatest band in the history of the universe, ergo she is still doomed to burn in hell for eternity.

Sorry, but those are the rules. You can look it up.

Previously: Yoko Sues EMI, Yet We Remain Unmoved, This Is So Embarrassing - Our Book Collection, Could They Be More Evil?

When is a broken ceasefire not a broken ceasefire? When it's the Palestinians doing the breaking:

Firing eleven rockets at Israeli schools and hospitals is NOT A CEASEFIRE. We're sorry. It's not. It's the opposite of a ceasefire. Really. You can look it up.

Previously: Palestinians Commit Several War Crimes in Just a Few Hours. Instead of Reporting That, Reuters Publishes Gripping Tale of Glorious Palestinian Martyrdom (and We're Not Even Exaggerating About That...), BBC Needs Help With "Words" And "Definitions", Syrian Official Has Problem With "Words" And "Definitions"

Yowsers:

And thus are turning points in public discourse made.

Previously: What An Idiot, Idiots, Things That Don't Meaningfully Exist: Divisions Among Arab Terrorists, Divisions Within the Arab Public, and Unicorns

Another Arab blog that is wildly wrong on many issues, but provides an emphatically useful perspective on others. This one from the Lebanese blog The Beirut Spring:

Thankfully, the United Nations passed hundreds of resolutions condemning these Syrian abuses. Otherwise, it would have no moral authority to criticize Israel for mistakes made in the heat of battle. Ditto for the human rights organizations that make their business demonizing Israel. Oh, the UN never passed a single resolution against Syrian human rights atrocities in all those years? Well that's weird...

Previously: We Are Unimpressed by Amnesty International's Condemnation Of Israel. In Fact, We Think It's Kind of Ugly, Hezbollah: We're Going to Attack Israelis; US Liberal Churches: That's Very Educational, Hezbollah Admits: Appeasing Violent Hatred Doesn't Decrease Violence or Hatred

The man that the Democrats won't let be our voice to the UN:

They prefer someone who will be more conciliatory - in that "listen to all sides, even the ones who want to protect Syria and Iran" kind of conciliatory.

We were originally going to title this "Somewhere, Right Now, Pamela Geller Oshry Is Getting Hot", because she's got a little bit of a crush on Ambassador Bolton... then we noticed that she apparently had this video blogged like two minutes after it was posted... then we noticed that she's actually the one who posted it. So there you go.

Previously: Two Debaters Debate Bolton, Lebanon and Hezbollah Already Not Implementing UNSC 1701. Countdown to Israel Scapegoating Begins... Now..., Iran To Protest Israeli "Military Threats" In UN

Lebanon has just taken a historic step to remove the shackles of Syrian influence in their country. They have approved a UN tribunal to investigate the Hariri murder - this despite a campaign designed to destroy the cabinet by literally murdering so many members that it would have to dissolve itself. What's the Associated Press headline and lede?

Yeah, because that's the significant and salient part of the story. That the "US-backed government" is pushing the country "toward a new danger point". That's the take-away that you want the 90-plus percent of people who never get past the first paragraph to get.

Soviet papers were more subtle.

Previously: Associated Press: "We are all Hezbollah" is Not Anti-Israel, Stark Contrasts Watch - Israel Can't Go After Terrorists, But Hamas Is Allowed To Call For Genocide, AP Headline and Lede: Syrian War Against Israel Would Be "Resistance"

Fourteen of the best blogs on the planet comment on the imam airline boycott call...

... and not a single one of them asks why he couldn't have made the request on September 10, 2001? For shame:

Of course, Allahpundit - snark be upon him - gets close with his best boycott evuh comment. But other than that, nada.

Just LGF pointing out that the imam spokesman for the other imams has been linked to a frozen Hamas charity and JihadWatch reporting that he had open pre-9/11 ties to Bin Laden. Boring.

Lileks clocking in with a "not only do they probably have terrorist ties, but they're also very rude" report from the imam's conference? Still boring. Soon to be US Representative Keith Ellison was at that meeting, and it was being run by sharia-law-imposing CAIR darlings? Yawn.

Sorry. It just takes more to get any outrage these days. Imams linked to Hamas charities are not going to crowd pardoning turkeys out of the news cycle. Just not unique or newsworthy enough. There has to be something more. Example: this loony spokesman had expressed skepticism that Muslims were involved in 9/11. Now that's getting close, but it's still not enough. Did he actually go on an explicit rant about Jewish involvement? No, no he did not. So he's not even crazy enough for the DKos comments section. "Mildly crazy" is just not enough to stand out of the crowd. Sorry.

Previously: Juan Cole Is So Incoherent That We Have To Believe He's Doing It On Purpose - Global Wave Of Moderate Islam Edition, It Must Be Tough Having a Bunch Of Lunatics As Your Party Base, Mayor Bloomberg Says His Jewishness Is the Reason He Protects Anti-Semitic Imams - Not Smart

Our new liberal foil blog, the LAist, demonstrates one of the left's more annoying habits: sanctimonious preaching that is not just wrong, but wrong because of something they did. To wit, this complaint about the sentence for Iraqi civilian abuser Cpl. Jerry E. Shumate Jr:

First of all, any liberal who uses the phrase "we support our troops, BUT" has obviously not talked to anyone to the right of Chris Hitchens in at least a year. That is what we refer to as a "self-caricaturing phrase" - because merely using it makes you a caricature of yourself, you see .Second: that last part would be true, but for the fact that when Iraqis ruthlessly and knowingly murdered American contractors and hung their desecrated bodies from a bridge, the heart, conscience, and trendsetter of the left declared "screw them".

The acts Shumate has been convicted of are reprehensible. But the side that has the moral authority to pass judgment on him is the military fighting for justice from its soldiers and for the Iraqis. Not the American left, which seems to reserve its humanitarian outrage only for acts committed by Americans.

Previously: Dialogue On the Left - Yes, We're Being Sarcastic, The Ugly Left - Sarcastically Praying For the Vice President's Health Edition, Juan Cole Is So Incoherent That We Have To Believe He's Doing It On Purpose - Global Wave Of Moderate Islam Edition

Selling out Israel during Iraq I is one thing - people have a short memory. Selling out Israel during Iraq II is also not exactly a base-eviscerating move either - you're unlikely to see Tucker Carlson shedding any tears if the State Department succeeds in destroying Israeli strategic depth. But destroying the Cedar Revolution for peace in our time a relatively quiet American retreat is going to piss off a lot of people:

At least John Mearsheimer will be happy that real people are talking to him again. Kind of.

Previously: Why John Kerry Would Still Have Been A Disaster For Israel - James Baker Is Not Not Anti-Semitic Edition, What We Know About the New SecDef So Far, Walt and Mearsheimer Week 3 - Enough With the "Oh But They're So Qualified" Thing

MR reader Merav, sending us this Reuters story from YNet , comments: "I can't believe they did it. If this doesn't start a revolution, I don't know what will":

No national soccer is enough to make us almost feel bad for the average Iranian. Unfortunately, polls show that the average Iranian supports Ahmadinejad, so they can spend the next few years watching reruns of Saturday morning cartoons for all we care. Except their cartoons are also viciously anti-Semitic, so that might not help:

Sure it's not soccer - but it's still Jew-demonizing fun for the whole Iranian family! And that's at least something for the Ahmadinejad supporters to hold on to in these dark, soccer-less times.

Previously: Rome the Night Italy Won the World Cup - Oh Yeah, We Were There, Palestinian Soccer Players to be Punished for Playing With Israelis, EU Population Races to Be More Anti-Semitic than Leaders - Soccer Edition

Yeah, but if you think about it, Vice President Cheney probably had it coming:

It goes on for several more smirking and insufferable paragraphs. Don't try to figure out if more disrespect is being shown to the Vice President or to religious people in general. And you know what the real frustration is? These people actually think they're funny - and it's the pathetic and parochial echo chamber of DKos and the HuffPost that makes them think that.

On this Thanksgiving Eve, we're thankful for the blogosphere - which has replaced academia as a place where the petty ugliness of people like Tony Hendra can be bloviated more or less harmlessly.

Previously: The Ugly Left On Steele, Fetishistic Defenses of Artistic Freedom and Racism, Some JBloggers Call For Other JBloggers To Be Less Mean. Isn't That Just So Spunky Of Them?

The safest bet in the world...

... pays off within a couple of hours:

And yet, there are still plenty of people who think it's true. Usually we'd go to the DKos comments section to find them, but as near as we can tell there's no post up yet about the one of the most significant geopolitical events to happen in the last half year. Can that be true (that's an honest question - we think that we might just be missing it - it has to be there?)

Previously: Muslims Bomb London? Blame the Jews., Iraqi Muslims Murder Jordanian Muslims? Blame Jews., Crazy Terrorist With AIDS Dies? Blame Jews!

Oh, the poor dear:

Hey, you know what matriarchs who lost grandsons haven't turned into murderous lunatics? Every. Single. Israeli. Grandmother. who's lost a grandson to Palestinian viciousness.

Ah - not only was she a suicide bomber this week, but last week she was a voluntary human shield. What a charming woman. Definitely a worthy target for journalistic fawning.

Previously: Moderate Fatah Party Announces Moderate All-Women Suicide Bombers Unit, Palestinian Tech Innovation: New And Better Suicide Belts So Women Can Blow Up Hospitals, Palestinian Mother Becomes Terrorist

A black mark on every two-bit politician and human rights activist who has ever sworn Never Again:

In the last couple of years, Sudan has been a member in good standing on the UN's human rights watchdog. This is despite the Sudanese government's - and let's not be coy and pretend otherwise - undeniable complicity in the Darfur genocide. Their willful complicity qua footdragging in the Darfur genocide certainly has nothing to do with:

(1) Chinese arms interests
(2) Russian concern about access to oil
(3) The way that many theocracies in the UN are theocratic in more or less the same way that the Sudanese government is

The UN spent the last two weeks looking for new ways to condemn Israel. But they're not obsessed about the Jewish State or anything like that. Their focus is best explained as a rational calculation on where the world's worst human rights atrocities are taking place.

Previously: If Anti-Zionism Isn't Supposed to Be Anti-Semitism, Someone Should Probably Tell the Anti-Zionists, OneJerusalem.org Conference Call: Yehudit Barsky on Salah Choudhury, Hey UN, Shove It

Mediabistro catches LA Times writer Jocelyn Stewart going all terrorist-apologist about Black Panther hijacker William Lee Brent:

Most people would mention the part about shooting police officers in the cause of fomenting a race war before the part about free breakfast programs for children. Because, you see, lots of people seek to feed hungry kids - but not many people go around shooting police officers in the cause of fomenting race wars. So in a very crude, explaining-this-to-second-graders kind of way, the part about the police and race wars and stuff is more significant. So it should be mentioned first, because it's the part that matters.

But we only get to true weasle art in the next paragraph, with the "acts that many also considered criminal". Well yes, in a very technical way, that's true: many people do consider shooting police officers criminal. But the phrasing leaves open the possibility that there are also reasonable people who don't consider those acts criminal. Hell, it implies that those people exist. Which is kind of dishonest, because they don't.

The rest of the obit is all about how he didn't kill that many other people, and about how his sister suffered while he was in Cuba because "Brent was her only sibling". Don't bother reading it - it's saccharine, sentimentalized tripe that could only get published in a world where journalists have allowed romanticized, thuggish anti-Americanism replace ethics. It's like we're being punished because thousands of hand-wringing, soppy, liberal arts chicks never fulfilled their dream of banging Che Guevara.

Previously:
Israeli Flag Is Offensive, Bush=Hitler Poster Not So Much, Then There Was the Time Che Spoke At the UN, They Still Want Every Revolutionary To Be Che

You gotta ask yourself: when Western progressives demonize an Israeli state under siege by genocidal Islamic states, do they justify it by ignoring the real world or by totally shutting down anything that approaches reason or logic.

Israel, 11/21/06:

Qatar, 11/18/06:

Let's go over all that one more time:

(a) "prominent Islamic scholar"
(b) "bestial pleasures" = "gay marriage" = "nudity" = bad
(c) "gay marriage" is "part of the Western civilization"
(d) The Islamic world "will never be part of the Western civilization"

Now, you can continue to parrot Juan Cole and insist that vast swathes of the Muslim world are teetering on the brink of progressivism. Or you can listen to prominent Islamic scholars who think that gays are evil and swear never to accept them.

Oh, plus: they drop houses on gay people. That's a huge counter-example to the "warmonger make up violent versions of Islam" theory, in our humble opinion.

Previously: For The Last Time. Israel Did Not Cancel The Gay Pride Parade Because of Religious Jews, Saudi Men Like Islamic Fundamentalism, Positions of Privilege, European Leftists Unite With Arab Knesset Members, Criticize Israel For Not Being Democratic Enough

It's apparently faux Leftist erudition week on digg. Juan Cole gets dugg yesterday, and now we found Chomsky has been on a two-day roll. What the hell is Noam Chomsky doing on Google Video anyway? We thought that they didn't allow pornography on their service - is it suddenly OK to post as long as it's something that only terrorist apologists can mindlessly masturbate to?

Previously: Boston Globe, Trying to Whitewash Hamas, Contradicts Itself. In Same Sentence., Then There Was the Time Chomsky Said There Is No Anti-Semitism In the West, Funny or Not Funny (Qaddafi Coca Cola Version)

How dumb do you have to be to think that Israel should actually have to reassure these idiots:

You want to know how silly the Israeli government is? This is the clarification that they provided:

Now we ask you folks: how the hell is that supposed to work? OF COURSE the French can't understand the difference between an unarmed plane and a fighter jet - they're THE FRENCH. They can't tell the difference between a sniper rifle and a miniature chocolate revolver. Those things involve MILITARY KNOWLEDGE and we're talking about THE FRENCH.

Always eager to help, here is a complimentary MR clarification that we are more than glad to provide the Israeli Foreign Ministry:

Maybe diplomats would want to take those last two sentences, we don't know. Whatever - it's still more likely to work asking the French to understand how weapons work.

Previously: Under UN Protection, Hezbollah Prepares For Next Missile Barrage At Dangerous Israeli Schools and Hospitals, Only Failed French Politicians Can Talk To Jews, Hezbollah To Lebanon: Nice Country You Got Here... Be a Real Shame If Anything Happened To It

This guy gives us a headache.

Juan Cole's got an insufferably smug roundup purporting to demonstrate that moderate Muslims are rushing to the front lines in the battle against Islamic extremism. It's very typical Cole stuff on all three typical Cole levels: cherry-picked examples in the service of flawed analysis, with the purpose of providing liberal terrorist apologists ammunition in the form of ostensible erudition. As of this post going into the MT backend, the post is nearing 400 diggs, which reflects tens of thousands of hits for that one post. This is what he's good at - allowing DKos Denizens to talk about how learned scholars are on their side against the ignorant warmongers supporting Bush and Israel.

We're inclined to go through the typically Cole-ish examples - ever-so-tangled examples, contextualized in ever-so-off ways, making use of ever-so-subtle omissions. So his lead example is Ayatollah Muhammad Husain Fadlallah of Lebanon. Fadlallah did indeed condemn Bin Laden - very important point. Do you think that it's also important to note that Fadlallah was the spiritual leader of Hezbollah, and was concerned about whether or not Shiites or Sunnis would lead the global jihad against the West? We think it's important to note. Cole didn't.

The rest of his examples proceed apace, but you know what - screw it. Grant all of his examples. Accept that every scholar he pointed out is against terrorism (even though not a single one of his statements goes that far). Even if all of that was true, his conclusion would still be stunningly incoherent:

Listen, we were going to insert a rant here. It had a lot of capital letters and words. But again, it's just not worth it. Cole's claim is that "it is bizarre" to claim that "Muslims haven't done a good job of fighting jihadi ideology and terrorism". Given that today there is more support in the Muslim world for jihadi ideology and terrorism than there was a decade ago, this is a stupid claim that not even the densest ideologue could justify in a public forum. This isn't even close. Is there a single Muslim country where political Islam is in significant retreat in a way the offsets palpable gains in Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and Bangladesh? Do polls show greater or lesser sympathy for secular values in Muslim countries? We can even be specific: is opposition to Israel in the Muslim world more or less inflected as religious obligation? If Muslims have done a good job fighting jihadi ideology and terrorism, we'd really hate to say what would constitute apathy.

If you read Juan Cole and you think "wow, that's a really good point - I just knew that my fellow Leftists and I were right to suspect that Bush administration Likudniks were demeaning Islam's peaceful nature" then you are an idiot.

Previously: Juan Cole - Fraud, Juan Cole - Anti-Semite?, Academics Who Attack Israel are Brave if Brave Means "Doing Things All Your Collegues Who Agree With You Will Tell You That You Were Brave for Doing"

What's dumber than the American legal system? The Russian legal system making a halting gesture toward Western jurisprudence. We're going to copy this Ananova article in full, since we assume that there's no real sense of property rights in Russia:

And yet somehow, they still find a way to get nukes into Iranian hands. Priorities.

Previously: Putin Is A Thug, Then There Was The Time Putin Was Convinced That Iran Wasn't Going Nuclear, The Cold War Is Back

The giant sucking sound you hear is whatever was left of Amnesty International's credibility:

As you might expect, we have some reasons why we think that this report is biased:

(1) We don't think that Hezbollah is necessarily blameless for Lebanese civilians being in the line of Israeli fire. This is because Hezbollah is almost single-handedly responsible for putting Lebanese civilians in the line of Israeli fire, which is the opposite of "blameless". Some Hezbollah militia put up roadblocks to keep civilians inside densely-packed cities, while other Hezbollah militia used those civilians as human shields to fire missiles at Israeli schools and hospitals:

(2) We also think that, in addition to using civilians as human shields, Hezbollah committed the related but distinct war crime of transforming civilian infrastructure into military infrastucture. This makes AI's charge that Israel targeted civilian infrastucture especially dense and tenuous. In this video, it's the stroller in the background of the guy's living room / weapons depot that's particularly charming:

(3) We further think that the report draws an unjustifiable equivocation between Israel desperately trying to pick out Hezbollah infrastructure in civilian areas and Hezbollah indiscrimately shelling Israeli civilians:

It's not that there aren't ways that Israel could have been more careful. It's just that we're highly suspicious of a human rights organizations that pick out those things as the most important aspects of the conflict. We just don't understand how you can compare Israeli attempts to spare Lebanese civilians with Hezbollah attempts to murder Israeli civilians - or how you can compare Israeli attempts to spare Lebanese civilians with Hezbollah attempts to endanger Lebanese civilians - and conclude that the side that really bears responsibility is Israel. It makes no logical sense to us - the definitions of the word "blame" don't really seem to hold up. So we remain unimpressed by the nuance of this report, and suspicious that there might be calculations and impulses driving AI's report beyond strict neutral analysis.

Oh, and as to the casualty figures: distorted at best, fabricated at worst.

Previously: If the UN Doesn't Want to Get Bombed Like Hezbollah Allies, Maybe They Should Stop Being Hezbollah Allies, UN: Sure Hezbollah is Bad, But Have You Considered How Much Israel Sucks?, Hezbollah Probably Lost the War, But They May Never Have Been In It To Win

Convergence of liberal foreign policy sophistication!

How awesome is this article? This awesome:

(1) Let's assume that Ray Takeyh from the Council on Foreign Relations is right. You'd think that newspapers would still be loathe to publish him, since the CFR feted and strengthed Ahmadinejad, the modern-day wannabe Hitler, last month. But the LA Times never misses a chance to tell Americans that radical Islam is nothing to worry about. Which leads directly to...

(2) The LA Times knows its constituency. It's like USA Today for liberal sophisticates: with the exception of what the Bush administration is doing, their readers want to know that EVERYTHING IS OK. Nothing to worry about folks: everyone can go back to their cocktail party, name-and-country-dropping lifestyles. And bagging a real-life sophisticate from a real-life thinktank? Bonus!

(3) Please explain why the following two paragraphs are reasons for optimism. Actually, here's an even easier task: explain in what world they could ever make sense. Because our reading of it is "liberal sophisticates like the writer have consistently hoped that engagement with Iranian leaders would moderate the regime, but instead it's gotten worse and now the lunatics are running the asylum - and these same liberal sophisticates want to continue with another decade of the same":

(4) The fundamental assumption of this article is insanely and transparently flawed:

Do we really have to point out that the difference between past Iranian regimes and the current one is that THIS ONE IS MORE TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED. Germans nationalists were blustering military adventurists when they were being thrown in jail for failed coups during Weimar - that didn't make them less dangerous ONCE THEY DEVELOPED NEW MILITARY TECHNOLOGY. That's the entire point of the "Ahmadinejad = Hitler" comparison: Hitler said the exact same things when he was in jail writing Mein Kampf as he said when he was the leader of Germany. The difference between the two situations is that letting him cultivate power meant the deaths of millions - because, having declared his intentions, he then followed through on them. How mind-bendingly obvious is this? How could anyone arrange words into the form of an argument on the basis of any other assumption? Like, did he think that nobody would notice that this is a relevant difference?

We're sorry that the CFR is feeling bad about having buoyed Ahmadinejad's genocidal spirits - but we don't think that it's appropriate for them to try to fool the American public into appeasing Iran just so nobody will notice their mistake.

Previously: AbbaGav's Inspired Description of Ahmadinejad, Even 40 Years Ago, Anti-Zionism was Already Anti-Semitism,
Uhh, That's Treason

UPDATE: Incidentally, re:

See our extensive The Denial of the Obvious By Reference to the Irrelevant: Center-Left Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics:

This is what we're talking about

UPDATE 2: Enough with the Goodwin's Law emails. The only thing dumber than comparing someone to Hitler when it doesn't make any sense is denying a comparison to Hitler when it makes frightening sense.

UPDATE 3: The original headline for this post implied (err... "said") that the article was from this morning. It is not.

Instapundit has posted on a BBC story about the Egyptian government's persecution of bloggers that as near as we can tell got its start yesterday evening on Slashdot:

This follows Tom Palmer's call from a couple days ago to help free another jailed Egyptian blogger, Abdelkareem Nabil Soliman.

The controversy, however, goes far deeper than just government repression - and it has been going on longer than a couple of weeks. The first thing people should know is that the stakes involve freedom of speech and the right of women to basic physical security - two issues that we must be absolutely unwilling to compromise on. The second thing that people should know is that it's nowhere close to clear what side to choose in the medium-term to achieve those goals.

Political and religious repression in Egypt is nothing new: last month they very quietly arrested a former Sheikh for converting to Christianty. Political intimidation of bloggers is also nothing new - last summer they arrested and tortured Alaa Abdel-Fatah for his political blogging. We posted on that incident in a Winds of Change.NET HateWatch post:

Given that last time the police bought themselves a lot of trouble and not much intimidation, it might seem surprising to see them try persecuting bloggers again. But that's because the current controversy is a unique and dangerous combination for them: Egyptian bloggers have been mounting sustained protests against the disgusting sexism rotting Egyptian society, but they've been mounting them against the backdrop of more general and unspoken criticisms on the government. So these are protests that have the effect of political protests, but they're wrapped in something so undeniably true that the Egyptian government really can't oppose them. It's the same kind of perfect storm that has consistently brought down former Soviet clients (which, it bears remembering, Egypt is among) in the last half-century. A movement is not openly against the government - so no defense can be mounted and no opponent can be demonized - but it is nonetheless obviously targeted at the ruling regime. The regime is being attacked, but it has no justifiable reason or grounds for counterattack - and so the only available recourse is to arrest the protest leaders.

But it looks like these protests might not be containable. The specific controversy began in late October, when news started leaking about riots that had happened over a couple of nights in downtown Cairo. On the first two days of Eid, Muslim men - hopped up on religious fervor - had apparently gone on massive rampages, literally assaulting and raping scores of women as police looked on:

Obligatory theoretical psycho-social background: Phyllis Chesler's 2004 Psychoanalytic Roots of Islamic Terrorism, on how a culture that fetishizes submission ends with outbursts of repressed frustration aimed at debasing Muslim women and murdering non-Muslim enemies (the book she was reviewing, by Dr. Nancy Kobrin, was later pulled by the publisher because of post-Muhammad Cartoons fear of violence). You should also see this intimidatingly extensive analysis on links between violence against women and Islamic communities in the hearts of Old Europe.

Soon after Eid this year, the Egyptian blogosphere erupted. Early eyewitness reports quickly turned into a flood of outrage. At least as early as mid-November, Lynn-B of In Context had introduced the issue into the J-Blogosphere. But here's the thing - the main focus of the protesters' anger was not religion in general, Islam in particular, or even cultural dynamics. Rather - and this is the source of the perfect storm facing Egyptian authorities - protesters picked out the police for specific blame:

And so anti-sexism protests, so obviously justified and necessary, have taken this anti-government edge. And as the protests have been growing - first getting domestic coverage and then hitting the international wires by mid-November - the government had no choice but to begin cracking down.

But Mubarak is between two opposing forces, both of which are taking aim at him. On one side, he's being undermined by growing Islamist power - movements that are destroying whatever thin secular tradition the virulently anti-Israel pan-Arab movement built up during the Cold War. On the other side, Mubarak's being attacked by secularists because he can't control the cultural pathologies being introduced by this growing fundamentalist movement. So the government will do what they always do - arrest as many people as they can, and look for a way to get everyone to agree that social unrest is being caused by the West or by Jews.

This time, however, that tactic might not work. There are no Jews in those YouTube videos - and the Egyptian government is facing a mobilized blogging community that is quite pissed off about the arrest of fellow bloggers. And it was already pissed off about the Egyptian government's role in the original outrages - which is what got them arrested in the first place. The essence of political repression is control over information - which is literally impossible in a society that is simultaneously as advanced and as decentralized as Egypt is. These bloggers will eventually be freed, if only because Western bloggers - and then activists - and then government officials - will bring pressure to bear on Egyptian officials. And every day that they're in jail is another day that this issue spreads - and with it spreads awareness of the Egyptian government's incompetence.

Nonetheless, choosing a political side in this disgusting debacle is not trivial. The situation places advocates in almost the worst of all worlds. It's undeniable that our sympathies lie first and foremost, at least in the abstract, with the forces of political liberation. Even more so, in this concrete situation we should - as the Left used to say - demonstrate solidarity in every way with the Egyptian women being raped and the Egyptian bloggers being tortured. But the political considerations are difficult to weigh. If Mubarak is overthrown because of his regime's insipid inability to protect the physical well-being of women, what will replace him will be worse for those women. We honestly have no idea what concrete outcome we prefer to see after the short-term goals of liberating these bloggers are met. We just kind of wish there wasn't this massive fundamentalist movement of extremists who think that women exist to be domestic and sexual slaves to men, and that it wasn't sweeping large parts of the globe. Everywhere political Islam takes over, women become interpersonal and cultural punching bags for increasingly repressed fundamentalist societies. On the other hand, short-term political calculations that end by propping up strongmen are what got us into this situation in the first place.

It's almost like views on women might be particularly salient examples of more fundamental differences in civilizational sensibilities.

UPDATE: Via Tom:

It looks like there are videos on the incident are here and here, but they're Arabic language news reports and not eyewitness videos.

Previously: Egyptian Women's Magazines Are Ironic, Israeli-Egyptian Peace Not Really Working Out "Peacefully", WaPo Discovers Egyptian Anti-Israel Movements, Gets Story Wrong Anyway

There are times when the analysis of social dynamics calls for nuance. This is not one of them:

If you think that President Bush is a bigger threat to civilization than Osama Bin Laden, you are one of the following:

(1) idiotic
(2) pathological
(3) a pathological idiot

There is no fourth option.

Previously: The Essential Stupidity of Leftist Displays of Solidarity, What Liberal Academic Bias?, The Left's Pathetic Ignorance and Hatred of PM Sharon

Under MR's official "if it's true it's new" policy, we feel justified in pointing this out even though it's a couple of weeks old. The idea of conclusively proving something is inherently problematic - different people will have different standards and burdens of proof for different kinds of claims. So we understand that not everyone will agree that NewsBusters unmasked MSM Afghanistan coverage as liberal propaganda:

After all, it's not dispositive proof. But we'd be very interested to hear any evidence going the other way on the claim of deep-seated bias in coverage, tone, and sensibility.

Previously: Beit Hanoun Meme Watch, Memo To Diplomatic Sophisticates: Ahmadinejad Did Not Get The Part Where You Meeting With Him and Being Nice To Him Was A 'Criticism', Here's the Thing About the Anti-Israel Media: They Lie - Hezbollah Hides Among Civilians Edition

The Google News count on the UN condemnation of Israel is inching toward 1K. You'll remember that Israel is being condemned for accidentally hitting Palestinian civilians in a densely packed neighborhood, after Palestinian terrorists affiliated with the Palestinian government fired rockets and missiles from that neighborhood. Here's a video of where some of those missiles ended up, in the Israeli city of Sderot:

The UN has yet to condemn the Palestinian government or its affiliated gunmen for endangering either Israeli or Palestinian civilians. This silence comes despite the fact that the Palestinians' crimes were done quite deliberately, while Israel's accidents were a direct result of those crimes.

The reason that the UN has yet to issue any such condemnation is because it is a cesspool of viciously anti-Semitic tyrants, despots, and kleptocrats. FYI. (via: GIYUS)

Previously: UN: Murder of Jews Not Really Our Problem, Under UN Protection, Hezbollah Prepares For Next Missile Barrage At Dangerous Israeli Schools and Hospitals, France Identifies the Real Threat To the Lebanon Ceasefire: Israel.

In theory, the spectacle of a UCLA student getting tasered by campus police should upset us:

But lots of things are true "in theory". "In theory", we shouldn't suggest that this video would be even better if the UCLA student fell out of a window and landed on top of West Virginia QB Pat White. And "in theory" Communism works, too.

Previously: UPenn Suicide Bomber Partier Posed With Smiling UPenn President, University of Michigan Campuses Both Charming and Not Charming., John Mearsheimer - Not Anti-Semitic. Just Anti-Semiticish

UPDATE: Blah, blah, blah:

Maybe it's the time of the morning. Maybe it's the faux outrage. Maybe it's that the phrase "returned to their activist roots" is very stupid. But we're really trying to care about this story and just utterly failing. Can someone explain to us why it's newsworthy when fake liberals ditch class to indulge in their moral exhibitionism? Don't these people have a ticket to get punched on their way to dental school or something?

UPDATE 2: Oh hey - we just remembered why we could care less about these massive power-to-the-people protests. It's because the campus was nowhere near this shaken by the swastikas that someone drew on their campus. So spare us the moral outrage, yeah? Obviously, the cops were overzealous and a few people need to get fired. But this is not Kent State, and so we're kind of ready to move on.

Second-rate Reuters propaganda mouthpiece Nidal al-Mughrabi is starting to just get silly:

"Several hundred Palestinians barricad[ing] themselves inside" the house of a terrorist as voluntary civilian human shields = "protest". Everyone got that? Good.

Past al-Mughrabi hits include delebrating the killing of six Israeli soldiers and whipping up sympathy for Palestinian mass-murderer Saadat. We think that he's completing with Shams Odeh for how absurd Reuters can make it's anti-Israel journalism.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Previously: Reuters Gives Advice: Want To Dampen Muslim Extremism? Support People Who Want To Commit Genocide., MSM: It's Israel's Fault We Made Things Up, Beit Hanoun Meme Watch

In 1967, Israel took the Gaza Strip from Egypt after Egypt committed an act of war by closing Red Sea shipping lanes to Israeli shipping. Israel stayed in the Gaza Strip until 2005. Throughout that time, Palestinian terrorists justified their murder of Israeli civilians and soldiers on the basis of that military presence. After Israel left, the Palestinians continued launching attacks out of the Gaza Strip - turns out, their terrorism didn't really have much to do with the much-derided Occupation after all. Within the last year, Hamas gunmen - that would be gunmen associated with the ruling Palestinian party - have crossed the border and attacked Israeli soldiers. Hamas militants have also launched hundreds of rockets and missiles into Israeli cities - literal day to day shelling of civilians, as real as any war can be. Trying to put a stop to this, the Israeli army has occasionally gone back into the Gaza Strip - or, as a fair observer would say, been pulled back into the area they've repeatedly tried to leave. They have sought to root out the cells launching rockets and missiles at Israeli schools and hospitals, all of whom are launching their weapons from urban apartment complexes and back yards. In one incident a shell aimed at one apartment building - housing terrorists - hit a different apartment building - where there were no terrorists. This incident happens in the midst of months and years of such near-impossible anti-terrorism operations, conducted as Palestinians become more and more comfortable using human shields.

So of course, the UN has launched an investigation into the incident. They won't say a word about the thousands of times that Palestinians have used human shields, or about the thousands of times they've intentionally shelled Israeli civilian centers. But the Palestinians finally succeed in getting their human shields killed - the exquisite care that Israel takes to avoid civilian casualties falters just once - and it's anti-Israel UN Emergency Meeting Time:

The hypocrisy is so entrenched that they're not even ashamed of it any more.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Previously: The French Will Fire On WHO? They're Going To Do WHAT?, Sudan Is The UN Human Rights Watchdog, Hey UN, Shove It - UN-declared Palestinian Ownership of Jerusalem Edition

It's amazing how Google News can sometimes clarify things:

They don't hate Jews because they oppose Israel. They oppose Israel because they hate Jews.

Previously: By ''Anti-Semitism Is Dead'' We Meant ''Anti-Semitism Is Not Dead'', They're Not Even Good At Anti-Semitism, They Did It Because They Hate Jews

Because Israel warns them to get out:

So Israel warns Palestinian residents to get away from Hamas terrorists, and instead the Palestinians flood into those buildings. When pro-Israel advocates point out that the Palestinians use Israel's humanitarian impulses against the Jewish State, this is kind of what they're talking about. And by "kind of" we mean "exactly."

Previously:
Palestinians Commit Several War Crimes in Just a Few Hours. Instead of Reporting That, Reuters Publishes Gripping Tale of Glorious Palestinian Martyrdom (and We're Not Even Exaggerating About That...), Like Hezbollah, Hamas Uses Children As Human Shields, Video of Palestinian Gunmen and Women Committing War Crimes

Courtesy of MEMRI:

They're probably just cherry-picking. Sure, they've got programs from just about every Arab and Muslim country on the planet, but if the sophisticates from academia and government say they're cherry-picking - well, who are you going to believe? Professional Arabists who have been wrong about every event involving the Middle East in the last five or six decades, or your own eyes?

Plus, it's totally unfair of MEMRI to make videos like this, while neglecting the extensive Arab and Muslim opposition to these kinds of TV programs.

Look for the theological justification for the annihilation of all Jews starting around 5:50 - a nice little go-to the next time you have to listen to someone tell you that there is absolutely no way that Islam could ever be interpreted to endorse mass violence.

Previously: Academics Who Attack Israel are Brave if Brave Means "Doing Things All Your Colleagues Who Agree With You Will Tell You That You Were Brave for Doing", Either You Believe 'The Pope Made Them Attack Churches' Or You Know History, Walt and Mearsheimer Week 3 - Enough With the "Oh But They're So Qualified" Thing

Two days ago, Israeli authorities uncovered a terrorist cell designing almost undetectable suicide belts filled with liquid explosives.

Here's the fantastic thing about Palestinian terrorists. They don't make suicide belts for "martyrs" who are going to attack Israeli soldiers or anything silly like that. The suicide belts they make are designed to kill the most vulnerable members of Israeli society, whether they be children or hospital patients.

A little while back, they caught a female suicide bomber who was going to blow up a hospital - the same hospital that had brought her back from the edge of death months earlier, after she was the victim of a fire (our post on it here). In this scenario, Israeli doctors and nurses would have literally nursed back to life the woman who would return to violently murder them:

Not content with their mere "evil" status, the Palestinians are doing their best to achieve "super evil" and "nearly unprecedented levels of evil" levels.

Previously:
Moderate Fatah Party Announces Moderate All-Women Suicide Bombers Unit, Palestinian Mother Becomes Terrorist, Stabs Israeli Teenage Girl, Hamas Women Suicide Bombers: Suicide Belts For Love

The Los Angeles Times continues to demonstrate why it is suffering one of the worst sustained circulation drops in the history of US media. Ken Ellingwood reporting on the deadly rocket barrage that is falling on Israeli schools and hospitals in Sderot:

That's some fine reporting right there. The very first paragraph sets up the "Israel is overreacting" meme, telling you that this death is an anomaly (as if that makes it OK). Then the second sentence tells you - again - that the rockets have rarely killed anybody (in case you forgot that "Israel is overreacting").

Then a little lower, you get told that Israel said that the shells went off course. That's true - an investigation did yield that as the explanation for the shell that struck the apartment building. But Israel ALSO said that the Palestinian terrorists who were launching the missiles were at fault, because they were the ones hiding in civilian areas. So an accurate reporter would leave the reader with the information that:

(1) The Palestinians were firing rockets at Israeli towns from densely packed Palestinian neighborhoods
(2) When Israel tried to stop the Palestinians from firing rockets at Israeli towns, they accidentally hit a different apartment building than the one that the Palestinians were hiding in
(3) The Palestinians retaliated for this by... firing rockets at Israeli towns from densely packed Palestinian neighborhoods

Instead, Ken Ellingwood and the LA Times give readers all of that information, except the part about how the accident was caused by Palestinians firing rockets from densely packed Palestinian neighborhoods and how they're returning to firing rockets from densely packed Palestinian neighborhoods. So in other words, all the information except the relevant background and the information that would allow the reader to predict where the story is going in the next few days.

But the anti-Israel overreaction meme? That part got through loud and clear.

And the both-sides-at-fault cycle of violence meme? That part gets implied too.

Full and accurate information, though, seems a little beyond what can be expected.

Previously:
They Really Do Just Make Things Up, Beit Hanun Meme Watch - (2) "The Palestinians Are Really Pissed Off" - And The NYT Will Publish Death Porn To Prove It, Beit Hanun Meme Watch - (Interlude) Convergence of Bias - With This Simple Formula, You Too Can Produce Solid Anti-Israel Journalism

Yet another report has shown that global anti-Semitism is skyrocketing. New links between European and Muslim countries -and among Europeans, Muslims, and European Muslims - are adding strength to increasingly genocidal hatred and bigotry. Some people are suggesting that this new wave is the result of Israel or of Israeli policies. Those people are either delusion, ignorant, or idiotic.

Anti-Semites don't hate Jews because they oppose Israel.

They oppose Israel because they hate Jews.

Previously: Even 40 Years Ago, Anti-Zionism was Already Anti-Semitism, They Did It Because They Hate Jews, USC Muslim Student Union Slips Into Open Anti-Semitism

In exchange for Israel stopping their military campaign and leaving South Lebanon, the following organizations committed to preventing Hezbollah from rearming: the US State Department, the European Union, the United Nations, and Lebanon. In recent weeks, France has gone so far as to threaten to open fire on IAF jets trying to monitor Hezbollah activity, because it's soooo unnecessary. Yeah right:

The great thing is that this time, the IDF can't even go in and get them this time because there are 5,000 new human shields with UN uniforms in their way.

Previously: France Identifies the Real Threat To the Lebanon Ceasefire: Israel., Hezbollah To Lebanon: Nice Country You Got Here... Be a Real Shame If Anything Happened To It, Lebanon and Hezbollah Already Not Implementing UNSC 1701. Countdown to Israel Scapegoating Begins... Now...

Don't get us wrong. It's definitely progress that rape is not always and in every case a woman's fault now:

We're just unimpressed by this being called anything but what it is: a centuries-overdue correction to a pathologically sexist theo-juridical practice. We've been known to say that there are parts of the Islamic world that are mired in the 9th century. That's actually inaccurate when it comes to the way that fundamentalist Muslim countries treat women: the Judeo-Christian West was NEVER this bad. There were never laws grounded in the Bible that presumed women to be more at fault for rape then men. The Gospels were never mobilized as an excuse for rape the way that the Koran de facto is in places like Pakistan. So yeah, this is progress in the most literal sense. But it's difficult to call it progressive - no matter how hard Western feminist groups try to argue that the European Enlightenment is the real threat to women.

The sad thing is that women in Pakistan would be mired in their third-class existence even if Musharraf managed to strongarm the parliament to repeal all the sick, anti-women laws that they have on their books. Egypt, for instance, has more or less formal legal equality - and women still hide behind their veils. You'll even hear Egyptians saying that behind those veils, women are just as well-groomed and carefully made up as their Western counterparts. In other words, in everything but day to day public behavior, women in the West and women in Egypt are presumably equal. But it's precisely that public, quotidian existence that reflects and makes all the difference: it's the sense of life that matters. Gut-check: how many decades or centuries away are we from women in most (all?) of the Muslim and Arab world being able to make something like this, produced by two Israeli girls and posted to YouTube on Tuesday:

It's meaningless and silly and fun. And that's the point. Here's the original video that Tasha and Dishka put together, which is one of the most popular videos on YouTube ever:

Our original, pre-YouTube-on-MR post about this video is here. The title is "Joyful Israeli Girls A Stark Contrast To Girls In Arab And Muslim World", which is, well, true.

Previously: Bahraini Women's Rights Activist Dismantles Religious Zealots, Saudi Arabia Discovers Women Need To Eat Food, West: Female Fighter Pilots, Islam: Women's Private Parts Are Dirty

As we said, last tonight / this morning is the last time until Monday that we're going to be able to do significant blogging. But luckily, you don't need us here to get our commentary. Here's what's going to happen in the next week or so:

Israel is going to invade the Gaza Strip to root out the rockets and missiles that have been falling on Israeli schools. People will die. The world will blame Israel.

Some time in between all of this, Iran will issue a statement calling for Israel's destruction. Not "calling" for it, though. Just "observing" that it's inevitable in the very shortterm. The Bush Administration, led by James Baker and his team of realists, will studiously ignore this "observation". Instead, they will commit themselves to trying to get Iran to cooperate on stabilizing Iraq in preparation for a humiliating American withdrawal, to be broadcast on Al-Jazeera.

UPDATE: That disclaimer at the beginning should read "significant, real-time-ish blogging". We've got three posts set to go up on Friday and another two on Saturday - but they're going to be current only as of this morning. Still, if we can't blog detached and abstract meta-commentary only loosely related to the news story we're ostensibly posting about, then the terrorists have already won.

Previously: Ahmadinejad Just Threatened To Wipe Out Israel, Attack the EU and the US, Israel Not Amused By Attempts To Turn Gaza Into Lebanon, Terrorists Building Tunnels, Storerooms For War

Just a little FYI to our friends in the international journalism community:

Meanwhile, we've read that Palestinian officials are suggesting that Israel should withdraw from militarily-occupied territories to make the rocket barrage stop. Yeah, if only Israel would withdraw from the Gaza Strip, it would fix all of this.

Here's a hint: they want to kill Jews. They consider it a religious obligation of sorts.

And by "of sorts" we mean "in the strictest sense".

Previously: IDF Increasingly Uninclined To Treat Attacks With Famous Sense of Good Humor, War Is Coming To Gaza, And It Will Be Hamas's Fault. But That Won't Be What You'll Read., Hamas Has A Trained and Armed Military of 7,500 Troops

Some have opined that modern social sciences - especially political science, economics, and communication - have been rendered manifestly silly by the urge to reduce human interactions to numerical methods. Those opinions are quite sound. But all but the most churlish humanities scholars would agree that there is something to be learned from the discipline imposed by very basic numerical methods. For instance, game theory can often describe in very broad terms what negotiations are or are not likely to yield satisfactory results. Now that Rumsfeld is gone and the State Department realists are back in control of the Defense Department, there's talk of dropping piles of gold on Iran. We have a very fundamental question:

Q: Assuming that there is nothing that Iran wants more than the bomb, what can the US give them to get them to give up the bomb?
A: Nothing. There is nothing that the US can offer Iran that they will take instead of building nukes, because there is nothing they prefer more than nukes.

There. Now you have mathematical proof that negotiating with Iran is doomed to foot-dragging, nuke-developing failure. Although of course, we could be wrong about our assumptions. Maybe there's a secret code that only nuanced and sophisticated anti-Semiticish thinkers like Walt and Mearsheimer can crack, wherein Arab and Muslim states that commit themselves to successful civilizational conflict mean something else.

We've heard something like that before. For a decade, Arafat said that he was committed to destroying Israel no matter what. The State Department, the Clinton Administration, and political science academics said that he was just saying those things to shore up public support, and that secretly he was ready to make tough concessions. People opposed to Oslo (unsophisticated, uneducated rightwing lunatics, according to many press outlets) made the opposite claim - hey, maybe Arafat actually means what he says. Bibi was among those totally unreasonable rejectionists that the Clinton administration had to bulldoze out of the way so that Clinton could try to achieve his Nobel Peace Prize. Here's what Bibi is saying today about Iran:

What Netanyahu doesn't realize is that he's just not smart enough to understand that Ahmadinejad is just kidding about all that. He should go have a talk with New York Times staffers and State Department Arabists. They'll explain to him that Arab and Muslim leaders never mean what they say. And that military-modernizing lunatics who threaten to wipe out millions of Jews never mean what they say either (h/t for Bibi article: MR reader Joel)

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Previously: Iran Baffles World By Refusing To Give Up Nuclear Ambitions, Iran, Much of the World Kind of Anti-Semitic, Reuters: Problems With North Korea Began In 2002 Under Bush

We don't have time this week to really do anything approaching "analysis", but by the time we get back it'll be too late to post this article from early this week. Mark Steyn on the stakes in Iraq:

Also read the Belmont Club's more extensive roundup of how losing in Iraq is going to be understood by the rest of the world.

Previously: AP Headline and Lede: Syrian War Against Israel Would Be "Resistance", Democrats Partying Like It's 2004, Insulting the Sacrifice Of Coalition of the Willing, Iraq Recognizing Israel - Not So Much

It's the week of the National Communication Association convention. It's the one week of the year where all of the scholars in the field get together to drink in the same place.

Previously: MR Exclusive! Leaked Northeast Exit Polls! Must Credit MR!, Red Meat On Election Day, Political Discourse

This is getting annoying:

Those sentences is from ABC News, but it's typical of how weasels are covering this is. Can you guess what kind of weasel tactic we're dealing with here? We'll give you a minute.

Ready?

It's the weekend, so we made this one kind of easy. It's just your standard, garden variety "technically true but totally irrelevant statements". Nothing special. Let's look at the second, critical sentence again:

Well yes, there was pressure from fundamentalist religious leaders to cancel the parade. But the plausibly-deniable implication - that they had anything to do with getting the parade canceled - is flat out false. In fact, that sentence is exactly as true (and exactly as true), as the following one would have been:

Gay leaders on Thursday canceled the public parade in Jerusalem amid security concerns, pressure from fundamentalist religious leaders, the Democratic sweep of the US Congress, the statements by Democratic leaders that they were going to seek redeployment from Iraq, a new South Park episode attacking anti-theist douchebag Richard Dawkins, and the publication of several damning reviews of George Lakoff's conservative-bashing "this is why academics who gain fame in one field need to stay the hell out of rhetoric and political new book.

Again, our rewritten sentence is technically true - all of those things were happening when planners and security officials moved the gay pride parade to Hebrew University. But the point is that they're totally irrelevant to the move. The same thing is true about the religious pressure - yes, we ourselves complained about lack of civility, bigotry, and outbursts of violence from ultra-religious Jews in Israel.

We know why this weasel tactic is being busted out. There are a lot of journalists who seem to believe a lot of stupid catchphrases like "the problem isn't fundamentalist Islam - the problem is fundamentalism in any religion". Now the problem for them is that anyone with a brain responds "well yeah, but it seems that Islam is unique in that any version except fundamentalism seems to have been destroyed - the moderates let the extremists set the agenda for their cultures and countries". So for those journalists, it'd be really nice for them if there was some other religion or country where moderates were staying silent in the face of extremist bigotry.

Unfortunately for them, this isn't that example. Let's be very precise about this: fundamentalist pressure did not cause the parade to get canceled. It was neither sufficient nor necessary for the cancellation. The parade was originally going to go on despite it, and police had made plans to bring out over 10,000 officers to make sure that it went on. And the parade would have been called off because of the security alert without it. Implying that Israeli leaders caved to fundamentalist religious pressure is very nice for people whose ideology tells them that "the problem is not Islam, it's religious fundamentalism in general". But it's false.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Previously: "Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism" Is The Dumbest Slogan Ever,
Evangelical Support of Israel - Now With Even More Good Will!, The Problem Isn't Any Particular Religion...

Tell us again about how international law is not a joke. Let's hear that story:

Earlier today we refused to insult you by linking to all of the reasons that Israel might distrust UNIFIL. If that's the standard, there is no way we're going to give you the links to why Iran complaining about threats from Israel is the most brazen and shameless act in the history of thought. But do consider: they think that this is something that will be productive for them. They have looked at the situation at the UN and said "you know what, we're not going to get laughed out of here - they're actually going to pretend to agree with us".

Previously:
Three Videos of Trunk Monkeys, One-Fourth Of Americans Are Retarded. At Least One-Fourth, Coulter on Canada

We talked about this yesterday morning, where the French are congratulating themselves for not losing their nerve and firing on Israeli jets during IAF flyovers. And this morning, they're making the same stupid argument:

OK, let's go over this very slowly: it is not "restraint" when you don't do something that you aren't supposed to do. France has no mandate to fire on IAF planes - that's why they keep talking about how they need the Secretary General to change their rules of engagement to fire on IAF planes.

Listen, it's not like this is debatable or something. UNIFIL's rules of engagement do not allow the French to fire on the IAF. If the French fired on the IAF this would be a violation of their rules of engagement. That would be a breakdown of military discipline more or less equivalent to a soldier failing to obey a lawful order. So the French are congratulating themselves for their military being able to not actively break military discipline. For the French, we suppose, this counts as progress.

This part is awesome:

Now whyever wouldn't Israel trust a French-led UNIFIL? Why could that ever be?

You know what, we're not even going to go through the motions of cutting and pasting in the UNIFIL-conspires-with-Hezbollah-to-murder-and-kidnap-Israelis links. We have more respect for you than that.

Previously: Election Loss Means Chirac Has Nothing To Lose By Talking To Jews Again, AP Identifies Root of Muslim Violence in France: Non-Muslims!, Iran Might Not be a Stabilizing Force in the Middle East After All

Ralph Nader is starting a campaign to fix the New York Times. With any luck, he'll be able to break them out of that conservative rut that they've fallen into.

Very firmly liberal public intellectual Steven Pinker recently upbraided Richard Dawkins for letting "the way Richard wishes conservatives were" make its way into analysis relying on "the way conservatives are" (hackneyed phrases ours, not his). The idea is that if you don't have at least a vague idea for the breadth of the mainstream political spectrum, then you end up thinking that centrists are extremists - and you therefore lose the center. Trust Bill Maher to demonstrate why Pinker is right - and how the left is still trying to snatch cultural defeat from the jaws of political victory.

If you spend any amount of time listening to some of the more self-important and dishonest critics of Israel dotting the intellectual landscape, you'll soon pick up on a common and dumb trick that a lot of them use. It goes something like this: they'll say something that's obviously untrue and sounds startlingly like an anti-Semitic slur - "Israelis are poisoning Palestinian ground water" is a decent example. Then they'll kind of step back and bravely assert "now, I just know that I'm going to be labeled an anti-Semite for saying that". And they love nothing better for you reasonably say "yeah, actually, that is kind of anti-Semitic - it's not true, so I wonder why you'd say that" - it will send them into fits of triumphant, self-declared martyrdom about how they're "being censored" and how you're "using accusations of anti-Semitism to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel".

Now the proper answer to this is: "of course you knew I was going to accuse you of anti-Semitism - you were being anti-Semitic!" Just because doing X predictably solicits response Y doesn't mean that response Y is somehow inappropriate. It may mean that X is so obvious that anyone can tell in advance what anyone else's reaction will be.

But. But...

If we can tell you in advance what you're going to say about us no matter what we do, then there's a problem. Because then it means that your reaction isn't coming as a result of our actions, but is based on something else - maybe predispositions, ideology, prejudices, etc.

So you can tell when accusations of anti-Semitism really are being used to stifle criticism of Israel (and this does happen, although pretty rarely), because the accusation will be the same no matter how reasonable the criticism. If the effect seems to happen no matter what the cause, then the real cause has to be something else entirely. In this way, being able to predict people's reactions to certain events - especially if these predictions happen before the events have even taken shape - is one way to suggest that something is amiss.

On October 6, we wrote about the Hezbollah-like army that Hamas was assembling in the Gaza Strip:

Then on October 31 we were even more convinced that something like this was inevitable, that few if any outlets would mention how Hamas made it inevitable, and that Israel would be blamed. We even added a little wrinkle about how Israel's legitimate campaign to root out rocket platforms in Gaza would be denied - we guessed that sophisticates would spin stories about how Olmert was attacking Palestinian civilians to shore up his political power in the wake of Lebanon II.

Sigh:

It's not necessarily bad to react the same way to the same situation. But when you're reacting the same way to every situation but passing it off as careful, contextual analysis - well, then you just might be biased.

And if this post isn't sufficient to demonstrate that the media is using weasel tactics to demonize Israel, tactics ranging from somewhat subtle to brutally obvious, then you would be well-considered to check out any of the 8 posts below. And if they're not enough to strongly suggest ingrained bias bordering on institutional discrimination, you might want to ask yourself if maybe you're working just a little too hard to deny the obvious. And if so, why.

Previously: Telegraph Publishes Demonstrably False, Vicious Anti-Israel Libel As Fact - USS Liberty Edition,
Anti-Semites: Israel Had Prior Knowledge of the Jordan Bombings, Arab Paranoia Watch II: Crazy Terrorist With AIDS Dies? Blame Jews!

This story could have gone under the Stupid Headline Tricks post. But the bias in both form and content is just so mindbending that it deserves its own post. Here's Reuter's headline so you can get a taste of where this is going:

You'll recall that there was a scandal a while back, where Reuters asked subscribers to remove the Reuters byline from stories that they altered to include the word "terrorist", because "we don't use emotive words when labeling".

Anyway, after the headline the rest is predictable. And by predictable, we mean that the next two paragraphs use the word terrorism to describe Israel three times:

Oh, but there's the Reuters editorial policy has an exception for not labeling terrorists if you're using a quote. Of course it has an exception for that! How else could they use their It's Not Bias If You Quote Someone Else trick if they didn't have an exception allowing them to use any kind of quote they want?

So it's not bias to call Israelis terrorists four times before the second paragraph is done - because it's a quote? Who choose to use the quote for the headline? Who choose to use a gigantic extended quote for the first two paragraphs?

Oh, and we're sure that if we checked, we'd find plenty of headlines where Reuters used quotes from Israeli sources in their headlines to identify Palestinians as terrorists. We're sure that happens ALL THE TIME.

All. The. Time.

Previously: Chinese Support for Hamas - Not So Much Blindingly Hypocritical as Confidently Unworried, Actually, Israel IS At War With the Palestinian People, Reuters and AP Won't Use "Terrorist" Label Even As Quote From Syrian Official

Unapologetic, shameless liars. They really just making it up as they go along.

Financial Times headline and meme:

AP headline and lede:

Not even a single shred of shame. Check out the dates:

To quote Ms. Coulter, talking to liberals is much more fun now that we have Lexis-Nexis. Ditto for Google News.

But don't let that distract you. Because, you see, the story is kind of true in a very meta-sense. The Palestinians have found a renewed sense of unity and purpose. They're now all back to agreeing that mass murder is totally awesome:

So everywhere, the news is that the accident has ushered in a new age of Palestinian unity. The problem is that the only place where it's true is about Palestinian unity regarding suicide bombings - and there's really only so many times (two or three weeks, max) where you can remind people that the Palestinians solve their problems with suicide bombings. So how do you emphasize that Israel's mis-targeting caused Palestinian unity without mentioning that it's "unity" over genocide? Easy: find something else that Beit Hanoun caused unity about.

These stories choose to transmit the new-found sense of Israeli-caused unity in the context of government negotiations. Now you might think that this would be a problem for them, since that's "actually true" or "how history worked" or "something that makes sense". In the real world, the tragedy caused Hamas to suspend unity talks, not resume tem. Implying the otherwise is "a lie".

But if you look very carefully, you'll notice that the writers don't ACTUALLY write that the attack led to the unity talks. They just make a headline that says "Palestinians show renewed consensus after Gaza killings" - two definitely true things. They didn't force you to think that one thing was the cause of the other. It's just that you let the universal structure of grammar and language trick you into assuming cause and effect between two events that are described as being one right after the other. It's not the headline writer's fault you were sloppy, so don't go talking about bias or anything. If you've got complaints, address them with whatever deity, teleological force, or evolutionary dynamic you think created language and grammar.

Previously:
Why Everyone Knows That "Contacts Aimed at Moderating Hamas" Are a Joke and How Russia Doesn't Care,
The Less Than Compelling "Hamas Wasn't Elected Because of the Whole Palestinians Hate Jews Thing" Argument, Tell Us, President Abbas, How Can We Help You Today?

In the least subtle version, the meme is getting spread this way:

It's rare to actually find the entire argument all brought together in one story. More often, you can watch it getting spread around in more disjointed, fill-in-the-blanks-for-yourself form:

Israelis offering peace talks (because they know the Palestinians are going to justifiably attack them)

Israelis apologize (because it was their fault)

Israelis admit mistake (see? told you it was their fault)

Israelis will reevaluate shelling rocket-launching terrorists in Gaza (because they now know that it's wrong)

Each flavor has numerous examples.

Incidentally, it's kind of weird that it's news that Israel apologized for accidentally killing civilians who got caught in a cross-fire. Of course Israel apologized - you'd have to think that they were totally barbarians to think that they might not (rather than, say, one of the most progressive and technologically advanced countries on the planet). This helps explain why their characterizations of Israel sound like "lies". It's not that they hate Israel - it's that they're totally effing clueless about Israel. Now, they're totally clueless because they hate Israel, assume the worst, and don't bother to ever read anything that might challenge that - but that's a subtly different dynamic, now isn't it?

Anyway, the implication is that the Israelis are in a downward spiral of demoralization and self-blame, agreeing with the world's moral condemnation and getting ready to give up their fight. Except that's the opposite of true:

But hey, wouldn't it be nice if Israelis were as stupid as the rest of the world, and couldn't understand that when human shields die the moral blame should go to the people who used them as human shields?

The only Israelis actually blaming Israel MORALLY for this accident are the Arab members of Israeli's parliament (that the evil apartheid regime allows to make laws, vote on budgets, and generally be lawmakers - because all apartheid regimes are like that). Anyway, yeah - the Arab MKs. They're the only ones who are really blaming Israel, since everyone else is pretty certain that this is why they beg the Palestinians not to commit war crimes by using human shields. Why don't the Israeli-Arab MKs see things the same, relatively obvious, way? Could it be because they're traitors looking for a justification for their treason? Or maybe because they're traitors and want to undermine Israel in this time of controversy? Or perhaps because they're traitors and don't care about lying? Who knows. There could be a lot of reasons. At a minimum, they're traitors and should not count as "Israelis joining the rest of the world in condemning the attack" or whatever the most popular phrase is on Google News right now.

Previously: Vulgar Palestinian Propaganda Succeeds with International Media - Again!, International Media: "But Saadat is a Grandfather!" Also, BBC Tells Demonstrable Lie About Past Kidnappings, Makes Up Conspiracy Theory, and Says "Foreigners mostly live harmoniously among the Palestinian population", Even the Funny Liberals (Implicitly) Lie About Israel

You know, we'd be more sympathetic to these pathos-soaked declarations of how the world is ignoring the Palestinians...

... if we didn't first find it in the effing BBC. World indifference to Palestinian suffering? It took like 20 minutes for the UN to pass a resolution condemning the Israeli action (answering our question: what does it take to get condemned in the UN General Assembly for killing civilians? Apparently, the answer is "it has to be unintentional". Also "the victims have to not be Jewish", but that's a seperate post).

Of all the memes, indifference may not be the most frustrating one. But it is probably the most obviously stupid:

As a comparison, the total number of stories on Rumsfeld's resignation is clocking in at below 2,500. Probably because it wasn't as significant as the news that launching rockets at Israeli schools from the middle of densely-packed urban areas puts those areas' residents in the line of fire.

Previously: Palestinians Commit Several War Crimes in Just a Few Hours. Instead of Reporting That, Reuters Publishes Gripping Tale of Glorious Palestinian Martyrdom (and We're Not Even Exaggerating About That...), Like Hezbollah, Hamas Uses Children As Human Shields, Video of Palestinian Gunmen and Women Committing War Crimes

We're almost half-way done with today's posts on the tricks of the anti-Israeli journalistic trade. Here's the thing about most of these dishonest weasel tactics - they're neither subtle nor sophisticated. It's just pathos-soaked propaganda. In some ways, it's just formulaic, cookie-cutter stuff: a biased opinion-as-quote here, a personal detail about the victim there. So far this morning, we've talked about the following memes and tactics:

(1) Rage and Tears - The Palestinians are sad, but they're also genocidal. The Israelis made them that way.

(2) No Seriously, The Palestinians Are Really Pissed Off - Pictures of dead babies in the interests of showing just how much rage and how many tears there are.

(3) Stupid Headline Tricks - Got an opinion you want to express as news? Do it in a quote!

(4) The al-Athamnah Family - If you personalize one side and keep the other anonymous, it doesn't matter who's really at fault. The personalized side gets sympathy, and everything else follows.

For the rest of the day, we've got stuff about double standards, faux-sophistication with a purpose, and demonstrably false descriptions of Israeli reactions. All of these posts deal with how journalists generate plausible deniability and cling to "neutrality", all the while deliberately framing their stories in anti-Israel ways. But there's a reason why the examples are in the context of memes - of the phrases and ideas that are getting circulated.

The tricks aren't the things that are doing the damage. We can point out how and when a quote smuggles in a journalist's real opinion - but it's the content of the quote that's doing the anti-Israel propaganda work. And - more importantly - the way that memes spread means that it's the content that goes out and digs into the public consciousness. The weasel tactics are just how the meme gets off the ground - they're the tools and evidence of bias, but it's the bias itself that's the real concern. It's the spread of the disgusting omissions and implicit suggestions that is of concern - that the Palestinian thirst for genocide is somehow as natural as mourning for a dead wife, that barbaric mistreatment of dead babies is just something that people will do when they're angry, or that there was a tragedy and people should focus on that instead of thinking about how it happened. They spread and then they condence into little clusters of anti-Israel incitement and propaganda, where shockingly barbaric image meets shamelessly biased text:

"Weeping in anguish and screaming for revenge". Don't pay attention to how those two things are actually kind of different from each other, and that in your personal experience people who weep in anguish don't usually scream for revenge. Just focus on all the crying people. And the dead baby in the center.

Previously: Ignoring Inconvenient Facts, Palestinian Civil Society Watch - Just Wait Till They Try to Open a DMV!, Israeli Arab Girl Victim of Honor Killing

Not much analysis or substance about this meme - relatively straightforward bias expressed and transmitted in double standards. But it's such a standard media go-to that we can't justify leaving it out of a catalog on the different ways that the media is whipping up hysteria today. Critics have long commented that journalistic accounts of Arab-Israeli violence try to make the deaths of Palestinians personal by providing names and details, while keeping the identity of Israeli victims anonymous. It's Writing 101, but that doesn't make it ineffective. So of course it's all over accounts of what happened in Biet Hanun:

WaPo lede:

UPI:

The AP even managed to sneak the family's name into a photo caption.

Again, old trick - it's even been troted out for MSM Lebanon coverage. But as with some of the other tried and true tactics that the media is pulling out of the shed, there seems to be a certain lack of concern and shame this time around.

Now the great thing about being an anti-Israel hack is that you can mix and match your tricks. The job never gets boring. So for instance, you can take this "generate sympathy only for one side" tactic and combine it with the death porn fetish that we discussed earlier this morning. Mix them together and what do you get?

AP propaganda gold:

Not to worry - the AP archives are filled with TONS of equivalent pictures from the aftermaths of cafe and bus bombings. We can't track any down just this minute, but we're sure that they're there...

Previously: MR - Ahead Of The Curve on the Muslim Hypocrisy Beat, Think That This Will Be How It's Framed?,
Israel's Chris Hitchens

Ah yes. The clever trick where a journalist publishes their own opinion as objective news by quoting "what people are saying about the news" (that is, by finding a quote they agree with or just making up an "anonymous" one). It's not opinion journalism and it's certainly not bias - it's just good reporting.

Now, of course there are usually some imbalances. One might point out that it's a little unfair to quote both sides equally, because the Israelis are often trying to be self-critical and the Palestinians are nearly always out of their minds batshit crazy. Also, the ordering seems consistently imbalanced - Palestinian quotes are often in the headlines while the Israeli quotes are stuck in the middle with something like "... but, under attack, Israeli officials said...". But since both sides have quotes, there's supposedly no bias.

OK, so obviously those excuses are stupid and obviously the journalists are trying to demonize Israel. These techniques are used day in and day out in articles about Israel - this is nothing new? Well, yes and no. Obviously, the techniques are routine. So routine that we cracked a joke about them offhandedly in an earlier post - they've become tropes rather than fodder for fisking, because they're just so obvious that you can't believe that journalists still think that they're being subtle.

But there is something a little unique about the kinds of Palestinian quotes that are being thrown into headlines right now. We wrote at the beginning of the morning about the unusual degrees of freedom that journalists are allowing themselves this morning. Given a story that's "closer to truth than usual", journalists are going the extra mile in their headlines:

Syria condemns Israeli "massacre" in Gaza (Reuters)

Abbas, Haniya condemn Israeli 'massacre' (AFP)

FM Gul Condemns Israel over 'Massacre' of 18 Palestinians (Zaman)

FWIW, there are hundreds of Arab and Muslim newspapers with those headlines. But if the world doesn't expect them not to demand genocide as the price for Israel accidentally killing Hamas human shields, then us pointing out that they're biased seems a little beside the point.

To some extent, these obvious violations of neutrality - and, for what it's worth, fairness or reasonability - are the only option that journalists really have. Every other day of the year, they're demonizing Israel in ways either disproportionate to what they're reporting on or on account of wild-eyed Palestinian make-believe Jenin massacres. So now that there really are a lot of dead civilians involved, they have to take an extra step to somehow distinguish this story of an Israeli "massacre" from all the other stories of Israeli "massacres" - not that accidental deaths from cross-fires usually count as "massacres", but the fact that the number of dead civilians isn't totally made up calls for an escalation in anti-Israel story writing.

Previously: BBC On Pope Benedict - Weasel Quote Someone Else Trick, Weasel Words Mean Never Having To Observe That Hezbollah Commits War Crimes, "Everyone Knows" (Something Totally False About Israel) Weasel Quote Someone Else Trick

This one kind of goes along with the "why are Palestinian threats of genocide OK just because they're really pissed off" post that''s just below. Except it's more like "why are Palestinians actions that are totally evil and inspired by 9th century barbarism OK just because they're really pissed off". Death porn:

Evil, yes. But worth taking notice of as anything but evidence for how really hurt and battered the Palestinians are by these ostensible Zionist atrocities? Not so much. And if you can throw in an insinuation that the Israelis agree that this is all their fault - rather than, say, the result of Palestinian terrorists using Palestinian civilians as human shields - then that's even better:

We've got a much longer post going up later about this "Israelis admit that the whole thing is their fault" thing - one of ten posts today about the different tools and tricks that are making this accidental tragedy the story of the week (and we seem to recall this being a big news week already...) But for now, we want to hammer in one of the themes that runs through almost all posts: no matter what specific, dishonest meme or trick we're addressing, journalists are using it more shamelessly on this story than almost ever before.

For so long, they've had to settle for passing on made up massacres with made up body counts: the Jenin massacre of maybe thousands of civilians (turned out to be a battle against a couple dozen Palestinian gunmen) or the Lebanon atrocity where forty people were killed in a collapsed apartment building (turned out to be one person killed in a very-uncollapsed apartment building). Now, instead of made up massacres with made up body counts, they get to report on a made up massacre with a real body count. Sure, it's still not a massacre - because of the whole "you generally don't call accidents massacres" part of the plain meaning of "massacre". But it's CLOSER.

And so journalists are giving themselves a TON of leeway. They're inserting bias into headlines in ways they usually wouldn't try to slip past. They're blaming Israel for things that are demonstrably untrue. They're letting the Palestinians get away with making explicit genocidal threats without the bat of an eye. The entire impression one gets is that they're just outright giddy. finally, Israel screwed up, and they're going to do everything they can to spread global outrage by writing "objective" stories about how "outrage is sweeping the globe". And they're going to do it for the next couple of weeks, minimum.

We're not surprised at the attempts. Though we'll admit, the shamelessness and enthusiasm were a little startling.

Previously: Siniora Asks International Media to Transmit Pictures of Israeli Atrocities. Which Is Kind of Like Asking Us to Keep Making Fun of Carter, IDF Hits Reuters Vehicle - Countdown to Lunacy Begins, Will the Press Finally Find a Scandal They Can Pin On Israel?

We'll be commenting all morning that international journalists seem almost giddy about Beit Hanun: "look at all of the rage that the Israeli atrocity caused!" Finally, decades of having to make up Israeli atrocities against Palestinian civilians have ended. The most extreme Palestinians and their international media sympathizers can get to threaten to blow up Israeli schoolhouses because of an Israeli action, and for the first time in a long time that that Israeli action actually happened. The last time, Hamas has that Israel was responsible for an explosion actually caused by weapons being paraded through town by macho Hamas terrorists. And even though everyone pointed out that they were lying (including Palestinian President Abbas), they went on shamelessly using that excuse as a justification for violence.

Now at the time, we imagined that journalists might have been feeling a little guilt about passing on Hamas's lies. Oh, it's not that the journalists openly agreed with those lies of course - that would be bias, after all. No, all they did is use phrases like "Palestinian officials accused" and "but Israeli officials denied'. But still, there must may have been a little guilt. Because implicitly justifying future Palestinian atrocities based on demonstrable lies is guilt-inducing. Maybe.

Problem solved.

Now they can pass on the most lurid details of Palestinian viciousness, because obviously Israel makes them that way. And so, with the burden of guilt lifted from their shoulders, they are reveling in the opportunity. Both major wires. Many major newspapers. All the same headline and first paragraph: the Palestinians are just devastated over this senseless lose of human life, and they are going to blow up a ton of Israelis to get over their sadness:

Reuters lede:

AP lede:

Guardian headline:

New York Times lede:

Now here's the interesting thing. That's the NYT lede - "anger and mourning". But the headline is just "Palestinians Mourn Civilians Killed By Israel". And that gets at exactly why this gleeful coverage of Palestinians anger (glee only thinly disguised as moral outrage) is so outrageous -

When did it become OK for vicious mobs to declare that they're going to take out their sadness on Israeli children? Like, let's assume that this was entirely Israel's fault - that the Palestinian terrorists who choose to use these people as de-facto human shields bear zero moral culpability for their deaths. Obviously, it's untrue, but since everyone else seems to be assuming it let's bracket it for the sake of argument -

In what moral universe does that make it totally natural for the Palestinian government - not some mob, not some random guy, but the government - to threaten to eradicate the Jewish state? Because the Israeli government never threatened to eradicate the Palestinians in response to any of the hundreds of mass murders that the Palestinians have committed - and we're very sure that if they had, they wouldn't be getting this kind of "well, of course they're angry" coverage.

WHERE IS OUR CYCLE OF VIOLENCE COVERAGE?

Why aren't we reading ledes in British and French newspapers about how "the cycle of violence in the region threatened to spiral out of control as the Palestinians threaten retaliation"? Because that was the lede of just about every single post-suicide bombing story when Sharon was in power - even when Sharon clearly had zero intention of retaliating. The press preemptively wrung their hands about it anyway. Why isn't that happening now.

Is it because they just don't expect any better from the Palestinians?

Is it because they actually think that this accident is so outrageous that it justifies threatening genocide as retaliation?

Is it because they just don't care about the cycle of violence when Israel is on the immediately next rung?

Because those are the only three explanations for why the Palestinians are getting this "justifiable anger" coverage. Either journalists don't think threats of genocide are newsworthy, or they think they're justified, or they support them. Maybe there's a third option, but we're not sure what it could possibly be.

Previously: Reuters Gives Advice: Want To Dampen Muslim Extremism? Support People Who Want To Commit Genocide., We Continue To Be Frustrated and Baffled By The World's Reaction To Iran, If Anti-Zionism Isn't Supposed to Be Anti-Semitism, Someone Should Probably Tell the Anti-Zionists

The journalistic feeding frenzy around the Beit Hanoun tragedy shows no signs of slowing down. And don't get us wrong - this is a really newsworthy, earth-shattering event. It won't revolutionize our understanding of the world (let's not exaggerate), but just think of what we know now that we didn't know before this horrible accident:

It turns out that when terrorists fire missiles at Israeli schoolhouses from the middle of densely-packed neighborhoods, they are putting the residents of those neighborhoods at risk of being hit in the crossfire of Israeli counter-terrorism efforts.

Again, this isn't a revolutionary discovery. No one is claiming that (we don't want to put words into the mouths of international journalists, obviously). But to witness the sheer volume and diversity of coverage, you have to conclude that there's at least billions of people who didn't know it before. And journalists themselves are tripping over themselves trying to come up with new and insightful angles to explain this discovery to the rest of the world. Some are falling back on old favorites, demonizing Israel and excusing the most insane kinds of Palestinian statements and threats. But there are definitely a few innovators out there, mining this tragedy for new ways to approach the Israeli-Arab conflict (or, more precisely, for new ways to blame Israel for the Israeli-Arab conflict).

So over the course of the day, we're going to try to track down and comment on a few of the more prominent ways that this story is being spread around the world. We already kind of started yesterday, with the Xinhua's breathless "raid on civilians" headline (although that wasn't so much "framing" as "lying" - but as you'll see, it counts). We're going to avoid dipping into the blogosphere, because we're out of the state and we just didn't bring enough painkillers with us to deal with that. Besides, what's the point - once you've advocated destroying Israel, there's really no reason to look for new reasons to advocate destroying Israel.

Previously:
MSM: It's Israel's Fault We Made Things Up, NYT: Just Because You Were Forced at Gunpoint to Convert To Islam Doesn't Mean You Were Harmed In Any Way, Kidnapping of Reporters by Palestinians Proves that Palestinians Love Peace! Brilliant!

The French are congratulating themselves about not letting their bad training and pathological animosity toward Israel start a war:

We're going to go out on a limb and say that maybe French troops don't have the best "battlefield judgment". How could they possibly perceive a threat from an Israeli flyover? Just like from an everyday, common-sense standpoint – Israel has never threatened French troops and those flyovers routinely happen without any threat to French troops. What, exactly, caused them to perceive a threat? Are they clairvoyant? Are they just lucky guessers? There has never been anything - not a shred of experience or evidence - to indicate that those flyovers are threats. And yet, the French perceived them as a threat. There must be something about French feelings toward Israel that causes them to be totally irrational and illogical. Wonder what it is.

But let's break this "judiciousness" statement down for a second: France's nervous and poorly trained troops, driven by righteous indignation at the injustice of Jewish self-determination Zionism and giddy their opportunity to play at being real-life soldiers, did not have a nervous breakdown and violate their orders to hold their fire? And their Foreign Minister is bragging about this? Those are some really high standards they have for their fighting mean and women. No wonder those people are getting shit-kicked by illiterate Muslim teenagers in the middle of their capital.

"Our soldiers are wonderful, because they just barely avoided being so undisciplined that they would have let their hatred of Israel cause an international crises between two nuclear-armed states".

We will admit though - we kind of like the way that the French are phrasing this. We think we're going to adopt it in everyday life. From now on, we're going to congratulate people for not being violent in response to events that under no circumstances warrant violence.

"Billy's neighbor cut him off on the freeway, and so Billy was going to shoot him. But Billy managed to restrain himself, and thanks only to Billy's judiciousness a catastrophe was averted"

"Robbie's wife let the dinner get cold, and so Robbie was going to beat her. But Robbie managed to restrain himself, and thanks only to Robbie's judiciousness a catastrophe was averted"

"Jon's friend bragged about how he had a better jumpshot than Johnny, and so Jon was going to brain his friend with a brick. But Jon managed to restrain himself, and thanks only to Jon's judiciousness a catastrophe was averted"

"Amir and Yossi were guarding a checkpoint in Hebron, and a mob of Palestinians rushed out of Sunday prayers and charged at them. But they managed to shut down the checkpoint and hunker down until help arrived, and thanks only to their judiciousness a catastrophe was averted"

Except that last one actually makes sense. And is true. And happens every few weeks. And is never talked about.

Previously:
France Identifies the Real Threat To the Lebanon Ceasefire: Israel., France - How Did It Come To This?, French Intifada Begins Claiming Victims

It's really amazing to see the global feeding frenzy that this Gaza story has triggered. The media finally has a story of fifteen-plus civilian casualties that they don't even have to make up (what will their Photoshop people do for fun now?) There are a lot of just outright shameless headlines floating around, but the one at the very top of the list right now was this Xinhua headline:

From the headline "Bush urges probe into Israel's raid on civilians", you'd almost think that Israel had conducted a raid on civilians. Instead of a raid on terrorists who were hiding out in the apartment building that Israel was aiming at, before they missed and accidentally hit the apartment building right next to it.

Previously: AP Headline and Lede: Syrian War Against Israel Would Be "Resistance",
Telegraph Publishes Demonstrably False, Vicious Anti-Israel Libel As Fact - USS Liberty Edition,
Return of the Cycle of Violence

(1) He is a Cold Warrior and a technocrat. This probably gives him little incentive or ability to move the Pentagon away from a Cold War, technocratic mindset.

(2) He is a close personal friend of James Baker. The two men are drawn together by similar personal sensibilities and international connections. That would be James Baker the anti-Semitic intitutional Arabist James Baker,.

(3) He favors dialogue with Iran, presumably assuming that if we offer then something that they want less than nuclear weapons they'll give up their nuclear weapons to get it. No, it doesn't exactly "make sense". But why would you even point that out? What are you, a war monger?

Anyway, yeah. It's now this guy's job to defend the US.

For the last couple of years, you've been seeing anti-Israel journalists awkwardly inserting "blitz" both as a verb and a noun) into stories about Israel. It's kind of cute - anyone who complains about it seems like they're overreacting, but the implication is quite clear. The essence of plausible deniability:

Here's the beauty of it. Right after the attack, Hamas explicitly and officially issued a statement calling for the eradication of Israel. But the Israelis are the ones who deserve to be compared to Nazis.

It's probably just very strong anti-Zionism. The seeming obsession for Nazism and Jews probably has nothing in any way to do with Nazism. Or Jews.

Once upon a time, a somewhat spinier President Bush gave SecDef Rumsfeld two assignments:

(1) Run a war
(2) Shake up the Pentagon's entrenched bureaucracy and Cold War thinking - replace it with a revolution in military affairs that would prepare the US military for an era of fighting either inferior armies from the air or shadowy militants in urban areas

The mistakes and faults that revolved around Rumsfeld's first assignment have been criticized incessently by unemployed DKos Kidz and Air American windbags - none of whom could tell an M-10 from their gas-guzzling SUV (or in the case of the DKos Kidz, the gas-guzzling SUV that their parents own and that they borrow).

What really got Rumsfeld into trouble was the second task that President Bush gave him. Shaking up the Pentagon, taking away generals' fiefdoms, cutting pet arms procurements - that's what bought him the resentment of generals. Many of those generals, in turn, started out slowly and petulantly - but soon found that they liked their new-found WaPo darling status. The drip drip drip of former generals kept Rumsfeld's name constantly in the press, until he was the visual representation of failure in Iraq.

So Rumsfeld retires after earning the animosity of the Pentagon because he tried to take it out of the Cold War. He spent his last six years trying to do that because that's what the President asked him to do, even though it earned him no gratitude and much resentment - creating a series of dynamics that ended up making him the fall guy for public disenchantment with the war. Presumably, the President wouldn't have put Rumsfeld in that position unless he firmly believed in the necessity of RMA.

So after Rumsfeld retires, who does the President appoint? Robert Gates, a former CIA director. And when did Gates work his way through the CIA? During the Cold War.

CNN tonight even went so far as to call him a Cold Warrior.

So one of three things is true:
(1) The President never believed that RMA was critical to US national security, and he had Rumsfeld earn the animosity of the entire military chain of command just because
(2) The President does believe that RMA is critical to US national security, and is serving the Democrat's Rumsfeld's head on a platter because... well, we actually don't know why
(3) The President did believe that RMA was critical to US national security, but Rumsfeld completed or nearly completed the shakeup. In which case the President is betraying a man who lost public and military support by doing what the President thought needed to be done

We don't really see a third alternative. Maybe if Gates wasn't a Cold Warrior of precisely the opposite sensibilities of Cheney and Rumsfeld the conclusions wouldn't be as inescabable. But Rumsfeld is hated in the Pentagon far more for RMA than Iraq, and now it looks like the President is giving up on RMA.

We're watching Jesse Jackson on CNN right now. These people have no idea what they're doing. It's tough to articulate a program the morning after you win by criticizing all possible plans that have been offered by right and center-right intellectuals and politicians.

What are they going to do about Iraq? They're apparently going to get some sort of coalition - probably the same one that Kerry was going to raise as soon as Bush was forced out of office. We had really thought that this idea died when UNSCAM was exposed - when people found out that France, Russia and China weren't pitching in because they had helped Saddam build palaces instead of feed his people. But apparently, there's still this idea out there on the left - or at least this assertion - that there are these armies out there just sitting to go to war with the Democrats. But those armies are apparently all hiding, because George Bush squandered the good will created by 9/11.

On top of everything else, Jackson repeated the election-era slander that the US went into Iraq "alone" (quote-unquote). He apparently doesn't think that the bravery and sacrifice of troops from our allies is worthy of notice – troops from the UK, Korea, Poland, Australia, Italy, Ukraine, Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Japan, Denmark, Georgia, Bulgaria, Thailand, El Salvador, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Nicaragua, Singapore, Azerbaijan, Norway, Latvia, Mongolia, Portugal, Albania, Slovakia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Lithuania, Armenia, Tonga, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Macedonia, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Iceland, and Canada. Many of those troops paid the ultimate price for the bravery that Jesse Jackson denies exists.

Is Jesse Jackson an idiot or a liar? Is he unable to count?

And if he does know that there were troops from several dozen countries involved in the liberation of Iraq, what exactly does he think will be gained by insulting their bravery and denigrating their sacrifice? We know that he's got some kind of magic wand that he's going to use to create a coalition of French, Russian, and Chinese troops. But in the meantime, do the Democrats really think that the best way to promote multilateralism is to insult literally - literally - every single country that has been willing to fight shoulder to shoulder with the US thus far.

Previously:
How many Poles does it take to save democracy?, Report Proves UN Is Pervasively Corrupt, France Interferes With Progress on Iraq - Again

There are two flavors of Israel stories going around major papers this morning. The first is about this tragic accident and about the Israeli offensive in Gaza. The second is about the Hamas government's call to eradicate the state of Israel. Which do you think the press has chosen to insert the word "genocide" into? Hint: it's not the AP story about the Hamas statement:

You know what's really infuriating about this statement? The small, nagging thing that really just eats at you?

It's not the obvious shameless of Hamas using "barbaric operations" as a standard for whether a state has the right to exist ("operations" in the context of killing civilians, no less!) Nor is it that right after that statement, the AP reporter calls him a moderate (OK, OK - it's not the AP reporter calling him a moderate... it's just the AP reporter writing that some other, nameless people consider him a moderate and that you should know that). Both of those are frustrating, but they're also kind of routine.

In this case, what's really just blood pressure-inducing is the way those two things combine in this specific context of civilian deaths.

Imagine what would happen if Israel responded a suicide attack claiming eighteen Israelis by declaring their intention to wipe out all the Palestinians. The din would be deafening. Every major and minor world leader would condemn the Jewish State. Every two-bit leftist would crow about the evils of the Zionist regime. Every journalist would hasten to provide ever-so-slightly-inaccurate descriptions of ostensible Israeli atrocities. There would literally be riots in the streets throughout the Arab and Muslim world, some stretching for weeks.

But when the official spokesman for the Palestinian government explicitly declares the Palestinian intention to commit mass genocide? Suffice to say that world leaders aren't exactly tripping over each other to grab microphones and condemn him. At best - at best - we'll hear some tsk tsks about how it's unfortunate but understandable after 18 Palestinians died. Nothing approaching this kind of generosity ever seems to get extended to Israel after Palestinian suicide bombings. Instead, even the most precise and targeted Israeli retaliation is met with howls of "disproportionate force" and "the day after". So we're pretty sure that Israel would be under a virtual boycott right now if it was gearing up for attacks (like the Palestinians are doing) and promising to make the other side "cease to exist" (like the Palestinians are doing).

Israelis targeting terrorists - disproportionate force. Muslim leaders calling for the destruction of Israel - just something that happens every couple of days. Honestly, you can't expect world leaders to address every single Arab or Muslims call for the elimination of the "Jewish cancer," can you? Nobody has the kind of time or energy.

Ahmadinejad has succeeded: calls for Jewish genocide have become a normal part of public discourse in the Arab world, in international diplomatic circles, and in the global media. It's on the spectrum of things people suggest. "Moderates" are Palestinians who suggest that Jews should be allowed to live in the territory that's Israel, but that it should be flooded with refugees and lose its Jewish majority (because of all the groups in the world, only Jews apparently have no rights to self-determination). "Extremists" are people who believe the same thing, except without the Jews being allowed to live part.

At least that's how it used to be. Now according to the AP you can call for genocide against Jews and still be a "moderate". Makes you wonder what one would have to do to earn an "extremist" label from the Associated Press? Probably live in a red state and ask for a Christmas display on public land or something.

Previously: Slate Seems a Little Confused about the Israeli-EU Relationship, Looks Like Sometimes It's OK To Kill Terrorist Leaders, If You're Not Israel, VDH On International Diplomacy and Israel

Palestinians fire artillery directly at children who are in a school and celebrate whatever limited success they have.

Israelis fire artillery at gunmen shooting at their troops from a residential building, missing it but accidentally hits a different apartment building. Eighteen civilians are killed. As opposed to celebrating the loss of innocent lives, however, Israelis are shocked and order an immediate halt to all artillery fire until a full investigation is completed.

Previously: The Stark Contrasts, Palestinian Terrorist Division of Labor - It's Not About Who's Moderate, It's About Who's In Power, AP Worried About "Extremists on Both Sides", Even Though Only One Side Is Doing the "Killing People" Stuff

As you read through this list of House Democratic leaders, we want you to keep in mind one thing: Nancy Pelosi is objectively the most reasonable person in this group.

Speaker of the House: Nancy Pelosi. Aka the shrill extreme liberal who will convince Democratic primary voters that the country has turned against women in leadership positions. This will cause them to choose someone who is not Hillary to run in 2008. The Republican machine will then handily produce the 17 votes needed to win a pluarlity of people who show up to vote.

John Murtha, Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Aka the guy who really is dumb enough to try to stop the Iraq War by just cutting funding to the army and telling Bush that either the soldiers come home or they die. No way this can go poorly.

Charlie Rangel, Chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee. Aka one of the last great masters of identity politics, mixing a sense of entitlement, an ethos of victimhood, and uninformed but righteous indignation - all to create a stew of insufferable superiority. People who believe that the public is literally entitled by right to government largess are exactly who you want drafting tax laws. Also, commercial fodder.

John Conyers, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Aka "the man who's actually written up articles of Impeachment and will now be running House Judiciary"

Alcee Hastings, member of the four-member Select Intelligence Committee. Aka "the federal judge who was impeached for bribery, and to whom will not be entrusted the most sensitive secrets of the United States"

When Pelosi is sworn in, will it be Kos who's holding the Bible? Or do you think they'll get Sheehan, because she's so holy and pure and has Absolute Moral Authority (tm)? Or do you think they'll finally decide not to use a Bible in the public ceremony, after the first three Bibles they practice on spontaneously erupt into flames?

Previously: Some De-Facto Republican Acceptance of Gays: Not Ideal, But We'll Take It,
Brave (Albeit Genocidal) DKos Anti-Zionism From the Summer, The Democratic Party and American Jews: The Divorce Is Going To Be Ugly

In the last post, we alluded to how the Democratic election strategy might set up structural problems for their 2008 campaign. The DKos denizens that Harry Ried admits are the essence of the Democratic victory expect legislative and partisan blood. This will bring the Democratic leadership into conflict with any group that opposes socially liberal legislations or Democratic partisanship.

That second group includes Americans who found things like the Starr investigation distasteful. Which was everybody.

The first group is potentially even more problematic for the Democrats. Among those who are opposed to many of the Left's social policies are... many of the new Southern Democrats that make up the the new Democratic majority. These Democrats ran against incumbants this time around, so they didn't have a record that Republicans could stick them to. That trick works exactly once.

Now, the Democratic leadership has a choice. They could fail to pass social reforms, alienating the not-exactly-emotionally-stable DKos Denizens. Or they could whip the Southern Democrats into line and force them to vote for pro-abortion, pro-stem-cell, pro-euthanasia, etc policies - all but guaranteeing that those seats will revert GOP in 2008.

And they still have the problem of how exactly they're going to demonstrate to the nutroots that they're making progress on Iraq. By actually doing something and cutting troop funding? By not doing anything, but by holding hearings and subpoenaing generals to make it look like they're doing something? That'll play well.

Previously: Does Kos Just Get to Make Things Up Now?, Dialogue On the Left, Three Out Of Every Four American Jews Will Vote To Empower These People Today

As Arthur says in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show, we're not panicking yet. This is still just the culture shock.

We don't see what liberals have to be so damn happy about. We can understand that the nutroots are marching through the streets and figuratively dragging nobles to the guillotine. That's the natural course for explosions of vulgar plebian resentment, and it's going to be a couple more weeks before "storming the Bastille" time becomes "revolution eating its children" time. Plus, it would be churlish to the Democratic base at least some celebration - they kind of earned it. Plus, they do need something to distract them from how they made Joe Lieberman, their most hated enemy, the one-man swing vote of the United States.

But what do real progressives - people who have thought out the relationship between their ideologies and their actions - have to be happy about? The Democrats rode to victory on a wave of isolationist, socially conservative, economically liberal Southern Democrats - or as we used to call them, coarse populists. So they get their incredibly unpopular immigration amnesty package passed and signed. Two things happen: (1) they lock in a black underclass for another few generations and (2) they help fill in the blank for the 2008 GOP talking point, "George Bush was a great President, but he made certain mistakes like __________ that the Democrats approved of and that you have to send us up there to fix". What happens after that? A minimum wage hike? Wow - that's really the stuff that revolutions are made of!

But - the smirking LA Times reader might say - now the Democrats are going to reign in Bush's war. To which we say: don't be an idiot. The US Congress doesn't get to set foreign policy. That's the executive's job. The Constitution is vague on many things, but upon that division of labor it is more or less clear - maybe in liberal Constitutions, the space where Article II usually goes has been cut out and replaced by the part that allows the government to grab private land for fun and profit. The Congress has oversight and control over the conduct of foreign policy, but no formal ability to set its course.

And what kind of control do they have? This is a great one. At their disposal is a single mechanism - the power of the purse strings. Oh, the House can indeed force the President to heed their demands - but to do that, they have to leverage their control over the defense budget. Or, as the GOP will describe it during the 2008 election, by "cutting money to our troops".

So that's what genuine, thinking liberals got. On the domestic side, their newly minted saviors are a mix of anti-abortion, anti-gay, social conservatives. On the foreign policy side, their leadership's vague talk about changing course in Iraq forces them to take a legislative stand against American soldiers while those soldiers are still in the field. The only thing worse in American politics than "cutting money to our troops" might be "killing babies", and they're not exactly on the right side of that rhetorical trope either (well, they are for us... but that's only because we support 5th trimester abortions). So maybe we haven't seen the last of Democratic Presidential candidates trying to talk their way out of voting for money to US troops stationed in Iraq - and that went so well last time.

We'd usually talk about how progressives shouldn't want to abandon the fight against political Islam anyway, what with Muslim courts now lashing rape victims for getting raped. But there's only so many times that one can go to that well before it just becomes repetitive. And depressing.

Previously: Anti-Semitism on the American Progressive Left, DKos Crazies Sure Are Crazy, Hezbollah Admits: Appeasing Violent Hatred Doesn't Decrease Violence or Hatred

Because today is "politics day" on the blogosphere. Unlike every other day.

Are you talking to me during The Jackal? Never talk to me during The Jackal.

Warning sign #18 you may need to take a break from the blogosphere: you don't find this awesome because West Wing is "too liberal".

Yeah, we've referred to them as "fly-over states". We're not proud.

Listen, obviously we're happy that there are more people in red states than blue states. But Josh has a point about that civilization thing.

UPDATE: You know the video below pretty much demonstrates that the grassroots Left has some pretty deep Jew hating issues? You know how liberal Jews who vote Democrats claim that those people don't define or control their party? That is a lie:

But hey, at least those people aren't evangelical Christians! Because that'd be evil.

ORIGINAL: So while we were posting jumping karate monkeys, Dave uploaded a video that more or less tells you everything you need to know about the base of the party that 80percent of American Jews vote for:

No seriously, Mr. Liberal American Jew - tell us again about how it's disgusting that we make common cause with evangelical Christians. Let's here that story. Could you include the part where you think it's particularly disgusting because they support Jesus coming back and wiping out all the Jews? It's not a particularly credible description of evangelicals, but it's kind of funny to hear you make that the basis for your criticism.

We had to post at least something substantive. It was either this one of the Lileks five-year 9/11 anniversary video, and you just don't need that kind of buzzkill.

Before you ask: yeah, obviously, the Jewish Conspirators who were supposed to be in charge of Reuters that week got fired. Don't blame us - our assignment that week was to do the USA Today pie charts, and we pwned. Used different colors, stayed within the lines, everything.

Because we will literally never have a good excuse to post this ever again.

Pssst... it's election day. She's a little what you might call "on edge".

Parrots.

Oh don't be like that. Like you had anything better to do.

Watching this video might be the most significant thing you do today...

... and yeah, we're including those of you who voted.

Not to get all political on a day like today, but we can't recall a time - at least not in recent memory - when there has been such an incredible gap between a significant subgroup's self-image and what one might call "reality".

PSA: parents take note. We know that your child doesn't do very well in school. It must be tough on you to watch them try so hard just to pass. But you can't keep telling them that it's "the school's fault" or that "they're smart in other ways" or how "it doesn't matter how well they do as long as they try". We don't care what the books say. There are more important things in life than "self-esteem".

Conservative: "They better hope the United States doesn't roll over one night and crush them"
Liberal: "We have to live in a global community"

Yeah, but we're the humorless ones.

"All I want is the Western portions. The ski areas, the cowboys, and the rightwingers... we like the English-speaking Canadians"

Retards.

At least they're not in control of the US House of Representatives.

Not always. Maybe not even usually. But occasionally.

We would've liked to see the guy get a little more roughed up, but mama didn't promise us a rose garden ya know?

Yeah right.

Here are three videos of monkeys.

Try to stay sane today.

It's apparently Surreal Anti-Israel media day here at MR. Next up: the Associated Press.

Let's assume that Israel should give back the Golan. We think that's an awfully unjustifiable and kind of mendacious idea, but let's assume it. Let's even assume that Syria would be justified in attacking Israel to get the Golan back.

That still wouldn't be "resistance". It would be a "war" conducted by one state to get back territory - rightfully or not - from another state. The reason that people label certain violence "resistance" is to make it seem like something positive or legitimate. In the past, it's usually been applied almost exclusively to Palestinian atrocities against Israel.

But now we have an official evolution in the term: it seems that any attack against Israel by an Arab state, provided that it can be justified under some theory of territorial division (no matter how one-sided) can be labeled "resistance":

Now of course, the AP would claim that they were just quoting the Information Minister. Not that there's any indication in the headline that it's a quote. And not like there are any quote marks in the lede that would tell you what the quote was. But that's what they'd claim.

We're not sure what they'd claim if they were pushed on this to explain why they'll drop the biased and slanted word "resistance" into a headline but not the word "terrorist". They'd probably make something up about how you're a Fox-News-watching fascist who ought not ask such questions.

Previously: AP Identifies Root of Muslim Violence in France: Non-Muslims!, Associated Press: "We are all Hezbollah" is Not Anti-Israel, With the AP, It's the Little Things That Scream Anti-Semitism

At the end of an article describing how Hezbollah is rearming and refortifying itself (good job, UN!), the Telegraph's John Keegan drops this:

That last line is a reference to the Israeli attack on the US spy ship USS Liberty. The attack happened during the confusion of the Six Day War, two days after the US had publicly assured the world that it had no naval assets within hundreds of miles of the area. Israel has always claimed that they thought they were hitting the Egyptian ship El Quseir, which was known to be in the area at the time. Conspiracy theory nutjobs say that Israel deliberately tried to sink a US ship. How can anyone know who's right?

Well. Ten out of ten official US investigations have concluded that it was an accident. Recently declassified documents reveal that covert US investigations also concluded that it was an accident. And the most extensive and comprehensive non-governmental work ever undertaken concluded that it was an accident.

And of course, if you don't want to believe other people, you can always trust your own ears. The IDF released the tapes of the conversation between the pilot and his base. They conclusively prove - the word is prove - that the Israelis thought they were hitting an Egyptian vessel.

Now of course people are free to be as crazy as they want to be, even when they're humiliatingly wrong. They're free to excuse how little evidence they can find for their claims as proof of a massive cover-up - rather than, say, a lack of evidence. Once somebody takes disproof as proof, they are definitionally beyond the reach of evidence or reasoned analysis.

But it is inexcusable to see this demonstrable lie in print. It means that at least one journalist, at least one fact-checker, and at least one editor approved a demonstrable lie. That puts this well, well beyond normal bias or spin, where quotes are manipulated or facts are lined up in an intellectually dishonest way.

This is the publication of perhaps the most popular and vicious anti-Israel myth in existence as a statement of fact.

Previously:
The Telegraph Celebrates, Excuses Palestinian Atrocities, When They Say "Cycle of Violence" This is What They Mean, Conspiracy Theories in the Arab World

It's not that LA Times journalism failed to accurately report or significantly influence California politics. It's that they were so successful that they forced Schwarzenegger to retreat and apologize. Obviously.

Somewhere in Los Angeles right now, Mickey Kaus might be dreaming. But even the sweetest of sweet dreams must pale in comparison to how he'll feel when he reads the LA Times pre-mortem ofGov. Schwarzenegger's impending face-crush of Angelides:

Now, a more objective political analyst employed by a more successful newspaper might at least entertain the possibility that declarations of Schwarzenegger's political death were premature the whole time. For instance, isn't it at least something suspicious that the people reporting Schwarzenegger's demise were writing above the fold for the LAT, while the people trying to bring about Schwarzenegger's demise were writing below the fold... for the LAT? It's just that when you're running a campaign you're not almost the most objective judge of its relative strength or weakness (cf. the Democratic base).

But instead, the LA Times is concluding that they forced Schwarzenegger to concede and apologize. Let's read that again: Gov. Schwarzenegger was forced to "I'm sorry". How good an explanation is that? Let's examine the very next paragraph:

In other words, the LA Times knows that it wasn't at all wrong or biased in declaring that the rest of California agreed with them, because their examination of Gov. Schwarzenegger's body language told them so.

Seriously, does Ron Brownstein even come into the office any more? Or does he just write from home, because he's afraid that the intellectual vacuum of LAT HQ will literally suck the smart out of him?

Previously: Shameless, Textbook Example of anti-Israel bias: The LA Times Reports on Hezbollah Cluster Bombs Fired At Israel, The LA Times Tells Us About Jews, I Wish I Had An LA Times Subscription, So I Could Cancel It

You'd think that the liberal base of the Democratic party would make an excellent basis for a textbook about how social pathologies play out in creating beliefs. They are, after all, pathological. And their pathologies do, after all, cause them to be consistently wrong. Our concern is that there's not much to say. The things they write and the ways they think aren't so much case studies or examples - they're near-ideal illustrations. Take the way that conspiracy theory corrupts ones ability to evaluate evidence. From someone called "DarkSyde", who posted last night:

So you put this in the textbook and write: "See? When disproof becomes proof, reasoned analysis has been replaced by paranoid fantasy." But where do you go after that? There's nothing left to say. The example, as it were, speaks for itself.

Previously: DKos Conspiracy Theories Literally Crazier Than Anything We Can Imagine, What Liberal Academic Bias?, Chafee, Bolton, and MoveOn Anti-Semitism

On the basis of nothing more than a coin flipping through thin air, here are a series of totally unnecessary predictions that can only come back to make us look bad Tuesday night.

Senate: 52 (R) / 48 (D). AZ and TN will go Republican. Rasmusen has already taken Kyl out of Lean GOP, and Ford is not going to beat the GOP's ground game in a state as red as TN. The GOP will also put up its usual GOTV numbers and win Missouri and Montana. Obviously, Burns is the question mark among those two, but the $300K that Liddy Dole just got done dumping in Big Sky Country should make the difference. Steele and Kean will both fall short - MD and NJ are just too blue for the GOP to make up a 3 point election-night gap. In a totally a dick move, God will deprive the GOP of Santorum but force them to keep Allen. And we don't care what Mason-Dixon said this weekend, Chafee will lose. This is not Nam, and there have to be some rules.

House: 210 (R) / 225 (D) plus-minus who cares. We are mere months away the official launch of Pelosi's campaign to create a permanent Republican majority that will last generations.

FWIW.

Previously: The Democratic Party and American Jews: The Divorce Is Going To Be Ugly, Hitchens and Sullivan On CNN, Some De-Facto Republican Acceptance of Gays: Not Ideal, But We'll Take It

UPDATE: Why wait till tomorrow when being wrong is so easy today? NRO's boxscore puts Allen down by 8 and Burns down by 9. They've also got Talent down by 4 to make the Senate +6 Dems, but we're still pretty confident that that's going to be erased come election day. It's MO - if you put together any kind of Democratic GOTV network, doesn't that pretty much exhaust the state's entire supply of registered Dems? Like, who's left for them to call after that?

Listen, we're firmly in the Dean Barnett "liberals are bigmouths who can’t wait to share their opinions with strangers and conservatives have lives" school of polling sucks, but those gaps are way, way outside the margin. But if you're a Republican looking for some solace that doesn't involve shooting vodka and sniffing glue (what? how do you people relax), here's this morning's proof that polling really does suck.

But it probably doesn't suck that much. Let's hope that the lunatics are right and Karl Rove really has conspired with the judge in Saddam Hussein's trial to rig all the Diebold machines.

Oh, and yeah, that link actually does go to a DKos post "questioning the timing" of the Saddam death sentence. Seriously.

There was a time when people who claimed the mantle of resistance fighters did not use unarmed women as human shields. It didn't really seem like the kind of thing that one did - if for no other reason then because it'sa war crime. Palestinian resistance fighters, on the other hand, seem to have graduated from putting children in the line of fire to hiding behind the skirts of women. How brave:

Previously:
Like Hezbollah, Hamas Uses Children As Human Shields,
IDF Videos Show Hezbollah Shelling Israel From Civilian Areas,
Palestinians Use Children As Human Shields, Nobody Notices. Seriously

Good.

Previously:
Broad Palestinian Support for Saddam, Hitch Justifies Liberation of Iraq. Again, Knight Ridder Has Trouble "Reporting" "News" on Iraqi WMDs

UPDATE 1: Hey, we don't know much about much. But this is a quote from the JPost edit of the AP article:

In general, when a country is actually liberated, there's a decade or so where the old regime is condemned simple on the basis of good manners. This ["Saddam shouldn't be killed" thing] is actually really, really bad. Obviously, it's bad because it shows that there are a lot of pepole in Iraq who really love the idea of a brutal dictator. But it's also bad in another way: now we're going to have to stop saying that Israel is the only country in the world where there are people sitting in parliament who want to destroy the country.

Live and learn, we suppose.

UPDATE 2: Added phrase in brackets to UPDATE 1 - "[Saddam shouldn't...]" - based on email.

Arrest them all:

In a civic democracy, you don't get to use violence to enforce a heckler's veto. We don't care if you're really, really, really offended - if you don't like living in a civil society, then go found a theocracy somewhere else.

Previously: Mere Rhetoric is Mean to Religious Jews, MR To Ultra-Religious Jerusalem Jews: Seriously, Get a Hobby, Chasids Rioting In New York Completes List of New York Jewish Subgroups That Piss Us Off

We're not really sure what to make of this post by Stan. He covers the MR site redesign in relatively complimentary terms, and he certainly alludes to some very nice compliments. On the other hand, he very clearly implies: (a) that there might be a bit of egotistical self-reference in our new banner of famous Greek minds and (b) that we play ball like a girl.

The second charge is too hurtful to discuss in public. That will be resolved over drinks in Pittsburgh. With the help of Stanley's credit card.

The first accusation is a little more manageable. It turns out that we settled on this Raphael painting for exactly the opposite reason: exactly because it doesn't focus on any one philosopher or philosophy. We actually chose it over another Renaissance work of another event in Ancient Greece precisely so that it didn't seem like we were saying "that guy" (painting) is like "this guy" (MR). We figured that the School of Athens is a safer choice because it's about a bunch of philosophers and not just one.

And it's not as if one can go wrong with the School of Athens.

The painting is a near-perfect expression of perhaps the only essentially human moment in all of history: the emergence of the life of the mind - a link across time in the small space of the city. The Athenian polis saw vastly different systems of thought emerge into the light, one right after the other. But instead of creating a chaotic din, these systems were harnessed, disciplined by, and expressed through arguments. Deliberation becomes a bootstrap - the product of people building walls and the mediating force that allowed those walls to be planned, justified, and built.

French architect and philosopher Paul Virilio says many, many silly things. But his elaboration of human history as the history of the city is both formidable and suggestive. Any healthy society has to make a fundamental gamble: disagreements can be worked out if brought into tension, but any tension risks exploding into open force. The gamble is that the destruction wrought by the clash of ideas can be kept more or less within the realm of ideas.

Notice that we're already far, far a field of the vulgar multiculturalists who claim that they want dialogue and human expression just like we want. They want expression, sure. Even expression of different ideas. But that doesn't mean that they want a clash of ideas. They want the opposite. Their ideal "debate" is a series of public monologues. You get up, narrate your unique experience, and sit down. Then the next person gets up, narrates their experience, and sits down. And even if those two experiences imply totally opposite things about the world, the multiculturalist doesn't think that's a problem - after all, you have your experience, they have their experience, who's to judge? This isn't an introduction of ideas, and it's even less of an argument. It sounds a little bit like those things, but the purpose isn't to test the validity or strength of ideas. It's a public performance meant to create a kind of bubble around each individual, where their own special and unique identity gets to stay and never be challenged because "that's just how they feel".

This is the farthest imaginable thing from the distilled essence of learning and disputation that is the School of Athens. Arguments conducted honestly must have winners and losers. Without a challenge - without a "what have you got to go on" - there can be no argument. Once a challenge is introduced, however, it must be either succeed or fail (or be deferred, but repressed arguments have a nasty habit of insisting that they get attention). So it must either succeed or fail - there must be a winner and a lost. But so what? As Plato is no doubt pointing out to Aristotle in the center of the painting, so much the better for the loser who has been disabused of his nonsense.

Students of human thought and historical tension are absolutely justified in mentioning Raphael in the same breath as Plato or Nietzsche. If we knew nothing else about him, his patent recognition and expression of the School's sublime centrality would justify this company.

But Raphael is not Raphael because he squinted through the fog of the Dark Ages and perceived the outlines of ancient Greece and Rome. There were not a few great thinkers who were doing the same at the same time, and most of then are not on his level. It's not just the ability to grasp how overwhelmingly central and critical this impulse is, or even to locate it in the birth of the polis. Raphael is Raphel not because he saw what was so important in human society, but because he was able to do justice to it.

Previously: Changes at MR (1), Resentment and Hatred On the Anti-Israel Left, This Will Not Be Our Last Bow

Coming back for yet another extended showing, it's our old friend and crowd favorite, the cycle of violence:

So the Palestinians spend the better part of three months constantly firing rockets into Israeli population centers: (two most recent MR posts: here and here; Technorati link here).

Israel goes in to root out the rocket cells firing at their civilians.

The Palestinians respond by intentionally getting civilians on both sides of the conflict killed: using their own civilians as human shields and now threatening to commit suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

It must be a cycle of violence!

Except for the messy part where one side is targeting civilians and the other side isn't. But don't let that part get in the way of unthinking, unblinking, and frankly very, very stupid moral equivocation.

Previously:
Egregiously Stupid "Cycle of Violence" Headline of the Day, Words Are Funny Things, In Just Seven Short Paragraphs, Jimmy Carter Tells 2 Lies, Makes 2 Incoherent Arguments, Takes an Anti-Israel Stance that the State Department Mocks, and Just Generally Annoys the Hell Out of Us

UPDATE: Score:

Let's review: innocent Israeli civilians "pay the price" when Palestinian terrorists blow themselves up in cafes. Innocent Palestinian civilians "pay the price" when Palestinian gunmen use them as human shields while they fire at Israeli soldiers from mosques. Maybe we're not good at semantic analysis, but it appears to us that it's not exactly the "cycle of violence" that's putting civilians in the line of fire and shrapnel.

If you only get your news from main stream media sources, it might seem strange to you that Muslims are still threatening to kill the Pope. You'd think they would get over this kind of thing:

But consider: Al Qaeda has been quite clear that the mass murder of 3/11 was triggered in part because they were still pissed off over the expulsion of the Moors in 1492. So these fanatics seem to have what some might call "anger issues". More precisely, it's resentment that has oozed and hardened in every crack of their identity. Nietzsche was very clear - and very right - about the kind of rot that resentment inspires. And this is a resentment that they have been nurturing in one form or another for centuries.

So yeah, people still being pissed off at the Pope isn't really all that surprising.

Previously: Pope Kind of Apologizes. Radical Muslims Reciprocate With More Riots, Another Murder, Uh Oh - Looks Like Someone Didn't Get the "Koran Bans Forced Conversions" Memo, The Pope Is A Tactical Genius (Jew-Baiting With a Purpose Edition), Shut Up, The Pope Understands Islam Better Than You Do

In the past, we've bragged in a kind of unseemly way about the 10-point IQ differential that Ashkenazi Jews over the mean. We were obviously wrong and we take it back:

That means that there is a sizable majority of Jews who support military action that would likely not work over military action that has a greater chance of working. Because remember - Iran has committed to attacking Israel in response to an attack by Israel OR by the US. So the resulting war would be identical - the only question is who should start it. And about one-fifth of American Jews have concluded that they'd rather have it started in a way that minimizes the chances of success.

Previously: Gawker Cracks Holocaust Joke, ADL Thinks Real Hard, Identifies Religious Threat to American Jews - Christians!, Two-thirds of American Jews Don't Know Anything About the Holocaust

In our last post, we wrote that we were done for the week "assuming nothing major happens". From the Times Online via Drudge, this qualifies:

Reaction 1: all of those countries have been just plain awesome in insulating their military and scientific echelons from terrorist infiltration.

Reaction 2: we hate the UN.

Reaction 3: it's so nice that the Sunday Times did that little drop-in about how these theocratic and barbaric kleptocracies have a right to pursue nuclear technology.

Reaction 4: no really, it's nice - because these familiar journalistic ticks of deeply ingrained, institutionalized liberal biases are about all that's left to hold on to in a world spinning off its axis.

Reaction 5: remember to note for readers that reactions 3 and 4 were sarcastic... try to avoid dwelling on how we're sarcastic even when we talk to ourselves.

Reaction 6: wow, we really could not hate the UN more. Not so much because it's an un-drainable swamp of thugs, terrorist sympathizers, and fascists. We can deal with political mendacity in the context of argument and opposition. Dishonesty in the service of self-interest is basic to human nature - that Adam and Eve disguised their nakedness is as much an empirical statement as a normative warming. The UN, though, brings us to the brink of sputtering incoherence. It's the way that they - and much of the Left - combine consistent failure with almost unseemly self-satisfaction. To hear Turtle Bay's proponents tell it, you'd think that the General Assembly has consistently been a think tank and launching pad for action against genocide. The opposite, of course, is true. So you've got a version of the idiot's paradox: they're too far gone that you can't even make them perceive how far gone they are.

Reaction 7: now we have to suffer another two weeks of the press asking insipid rhetorical questions like "if Israel has nuclear technology, how is it fair to deny the same technology to Arab states?"

Reaction 8: of course, those questions are going to be in the context of very-informative-and-newsworthy-quotes from learned commentators and global leaders. Because journalists don't inject their own opinions into their stories.

Reaction 9: wonder if this'll effect the election. October surpr-

Reaction 10: oh God. The DKos Denizens are going to blame Rove for this.

Reaction 11: how pathetic is it that we can't even have a serious debate in this country any more? One side can only go so far in opposing their own party's President. So that puts some very basic positions off-limits. E.g: "the State Department is sending the world to hell in a hand-basket... and they're basing the design of the hand basket on a series of very professional-looking 3-tone, 7-slide PowerPoint presentations about the Muslim world's 'legitimate grievances', the destination still sucks". And then, the other side is even worse. Its leaders are South Park fodder because they're spineless and pathetic, while their base is South Park material because it's totally retarded .

Reaction 12: excuse me... yeah, another one please... yeah, only ice again... what? No - the well vodka is fine thanks.

Anyway, we're well past metaphors like "the world stands at the doorway of the worst-case post-Cold War scenario: multiple failed states with decentralized military structures, massive corruption, and loose nukes". Because we've been at that door for a while. The problem is that instead of turning around and trying to walk away, we've kind of hovered around the doorstep and hoped that no one opened the door. But the UN has been so egregiously bad at controlling Iran and North Korea lately that this metaphor doesn't really suffice. If the door is a world of nuclear terrorism and the world is on the doorstep, the best analogy would be that the UN - after ringing the doorbell and knocking a few times - has now taken to frantically trying to kick the door down.

But at least the Democratic party is committed to restoring our image with those people. So that they'll like us a little more when they sell their nuke technology, their enriched uranium, and their scientific knowledge to people who are literally - literally – the enemies of Western civilization. (h/t for ruining our evening: Stan Shivell)

Previously: Iran Baffles World By Refusing To Give Up Nuclear Ambitions, IAEA Plays Charlie Brown To Iran's Lucy,
The IAEA - What A Bunch Of Idiots

UPDATE: Apparently LGF had this hours ago. Which means that to avoid the news you had to be someone who read neither Drudge nor LGF tonight - making you either (a) an overloaded student (b) an observant Jew or (c) a tech-hating luddite. Which means that there was no reason to blog it. Which means that we're going to murder Stan.

It's a little early for quittin' time, but this will be the eighth substantive post of the day. More than enough for a Friday. Assuming nothing major happens, this is it for the day. Shabbat Shalom to our Jewish readers. And to the other three of you: as you enter the weekend, remember that if you take care of your body, your body will take care of you. So take note of scientific evidence attesting to the health benefits of catechins, and prefer red wine over white wine. Yes, even if you're having fish.

And actually, that little bit of wisdom goes for everyone else too.

Anyway, the Israeli Air Force has been doing flyovers in Lebanese airspace. This has a little bit to do with flexing some muscle and a lot to do with keeping an eye on the massive shipments of weapons that have been arriving for Hezbollah from Syria and Iran. UNIFIL and the Lebanese government are obviously ignorant of these transfers, since if they knew about them they'd be rushing to meet their 1701 obligations by intercepting them.

So Israel has continued to do manned flights over Lebanon. First thing that happened: Lebanon threatened to open fire on the IAF. This is such a mind-bogglingly stupid idea that people just figured that Siniora had failed to take his meds or something. Everyone pretty much went on with their lives.

But then the UN made some noises about how the IAF shouldn't cross into Lebanese airspace. Everyone kind of blew them off too - because, you know, they're the UN. But then - and this part is totally awesome - France threatened to open fire on IAF jets. The subsequent dialogue went exactly like you'd imagine, and the French withdrew from their position.

In the last couple of days, EU uber-diplomat Javier Solona has chimed in and demanded that Israel stop. But his statements didn't really have much credibility, since they came right after the part where he said that- in his expert diplomatic opinion - Hamas really wants peace.

So naturally, now the Bush administration has hopped on the band-wagon:

This is yet another aspect of President Bush's willingness to disadvantage Israel in order to help out Saniora. Now we've been consistently skeptical that Saniora either intends or wants to reign in Hezbollah. But let's pretend that he does - it still doesn't matter, because Hezbollah is now actively consolidating its political power. But at least Israeli jets won't there to see it happen.

All of this has just been a really roundabout way of saying that this is a really cool video:

How about instead of not letting the IAF do its job, the Bush administration lets the IAF do its job?

Previously:
US Will Rebuild Hezbollah Infrastructure - Your Tax Dollars (and State Department) At Work, Hezbollah Probably Lost the War, But They May Never Have Been In It To Win, Syria is Hiding Weapons in Civilian Aid Convoys. Of Course They Are.

You know why the Palestinians are attacking Israel from the Gaza Strip? It's because Israel is in military and civilian occupation of the Gaza Strip and the Palestinians are resisting. What's that? Israel is not in military or civilization occupation of the Gaza Strip? And Hamas is just trying to become Hezbollah - who in turn is busy resisting Israel's nonexistent occupation of Lebanese land? Whatever:

Firing Kassams at Israeli schoolchildren. These are some really noble freedom fighters that we're talking about here.

Previously: Israel Not Amused By Attempts To Turn Gaza Into Lebanon, Hamas Has A Trained and Armed Military of 7,500 Troops, War Is Coming To Gaza, And It Will Be Hamas's Fault. But That Won't Be What You'll Read.,

In the last 36 hours, Palestinian gunmen have committed the following war crimes (here and here):

(1) Occupied a place of worship and used it for military purposes
(2) Occupied a hospital and used it for military purposes
(3) Used civilian women as human shields in order to protect themselves and facilitate offensive and defensive military maneuvers
(4) Gotten one of their civilian human shields killed as they continued to trade fire with the IDF from within the mosque and from behind the women

Let's take a gander at how this is being reported by Reuters. Instead of writing what might be called "journalism", Shams Odeh chooses instead a less conventional, more literary approach. So instead of doing something boring like "reporting", Odeh transforms this tragic end to a Palestinian war crime into a kind of universal archetype. In his hands, this woman is not someone who walked in between Israeli soldiers on a battlefield and Palestinian gunmen hiding in a mosque. Rather, she becomes an exemplar of the eternal wanderer - someone traveling the tragic - but eternal - journey from trepid uncertainty to willing martyrdom.

Strictly on aesthetic grounds, we're going to reprint this whole thing. Chopping it up and inserting ellipses would be the equivalent of hacking off a limb from The David or removing a motion from The Fifth.

See what we mean? It's pure art.

At least it had better be art. Because if it's supposed to be informing readers about what happened then it's a miserable failure. Parts of it are typical weasel journalism. For instance: "the Israeli army said the women were being used as human shields": technically true, of course, since the Israeli army really did say that. And they said that because the women were being used as human shields. Walking in front of Palestinian gunmen so that Israeli soldiers can't fire back at the people who're firing at them - that's what the phrase "human shields" means. It's not like this is up for debate - the article literally describes them acting as human shields. It's the definition of the word. It's so obvious that just a couple paragraphs above he literally calls them that! Anyone want to bet as to whether that the first, objective use of "human shields" was dropped in by a nervous editor to balance the obviously weasely "the Israeli army said..." further below?

"The Israeli army said"... what an offensively dumb rhetorical figure. It's as if we rolled our bike out the door, got on top of the seat, and started peddling away. And then you said "well, Mere Rhetoric biked" - and some Reuters jagoff takes that and writes "Mere Rhetoric rolled their bike out the door, got on top of the seat, and started peddling away. Witnesses claimed that Mere Rhetoric biked". Well no kidding witnesses said that - because that's what it means to get on top of a bike seat and peddle away. But the implication that this is merely witness testimony rather than verifiable fact - while plausibly deniable by the reporter - is very, very, very typical intellectual dishonesty on the part of main -stream Middle East journalists.

But again, it's unfair to judge this journalistic wire report by what some might call "journalistic standards". It's like judging a Shakespeare by the standards of a biology textbook. As our high school English teacher used to say: that's not what the author is up to. This isn't supposed to be journalism. It's supposed to be dramatic - supposed to be art. To pull at your heartstrings. To win you over to the Palestinian cause through the example of this Christ-like woman, who accepts her death willingly in order to bring life to the Palestinian terrorists.

Let's break this down, yeah?

"Slowly at first, then with growing confidence" -- [it's a journey, you see - there is some very subtle form/content going on in this morality tale... not exactly "subtle", but morality tales rarely are - illustrating abstract virtue should work like a cudgel, not a scalpel]

"the crowd of Palestinian women" -- [what crowd of Palestinian women, the audience might ask... where did they come from... why are they here? Odeh starts off in classic literary form, dropping a little in media res on the audience. A little conventional, sure, but it works just fine for a morality tale where the figures are supposed to stand in for abstract virtues]

"The women, around four dozen of them, some elderly and some teenagers" -- [more intergenerational universalism - this is like Shakespeare, really... it really speaks to everyone]

"wearing traditional hijab gowns and coloured veils, approached the outer wall of the Gaza mosque" -- [at a minimum, that's five out of fifteen words invoking tradition and faith... this is actually kind of clever... it does three things: (1) it gives a little umpff to the implication that the Jews attacked not just the women but traditional Islam itself, (2) kind of tied to that, it lets the women stand in for Islam - their sacrifice and fortitude is a credit to the faith and (3) it establishes them as women of faith, as taking courage from their faith - typical morality tale stuff... oh - and don't worry if you didn't pick up this "traditional faith" theme right here in the first sentence of the article - it's reintroduced and reinforced exactly at the second of the woman's death, just in case you forgot it... again, subtlety is not what we're after here]

"were hoping to help the gunmen flee, or at least act as "human shields" and press for their release unharmed" -- [if this was an piece of "journalism", here is where you'd expect the author to add something like "or to give the Palestinian gunmen cover as they continued to shoot at the Israelis"... but again, it's unfair to ask Odeh to do that - writing great literature is about SELECTING details that help to paint the picture you want... it's perfectly alright for an author writing historical fiction to heighten some elements and ignore others]

"As they walked together down a deserted road towards the mosque, pressing themselves up against a high sandstone wall on their right, with Israeli troops off to their left, gunfire rang out" -- [The villains are dramatically introduced to the audience! They will try to break our protagonist's will!]

"The women pushed on, walking faster and pressing closer together, chattering encouragement to one another as they went. More shots cracked overhead as the Israeli troops tried to force the women to turn back. Some did turn around, but others, the majority, pushed on." -- [Ah ha! But now you see! Our protagonist has already come too far in her physical and spiritual journey! She is somewhere that the evil villains can't reach her, having achieved a kind of Socratic inner peace and fortitude... We believe that Odeh is in fact directly alluding to the Apology here - it's a risky gesture, and in the hands of a less skilled author it would come off as forced... but he pulls it off with aplomb]

"Then, up ahead, where the front of the procession was advancing, several gunshots rang out from Israeli troops and one woman, dressed in a tan-brown hijab, fell to the ground." -- [In case you forgot from all the way back in the first sentence, here's your reminder: MARTYR FOR THE FAITH]

"Screaming and panicked, several of the woman's colleagues rushed to her side. As she lay motionless on the pavement, the cream veil covering her head fell away. A trickle and then a stream of blood emerged from under her body and ran into the drain at the side of the road." -- [This, ladies and gentlemen, is what we refer to as "pathetic writing"... when the author tries too hard to make you feel a particular emotion, but it just seems overwrought because the author goes SO over the top with really heavy-handed imagery]

"Bring an ambulance! Bring an ambulance!" screamed the women, throwing their arms up in the air and wailing. Others grabbed one another and began to flee, then thought twice and turned back, determined to push on with their protest." -- [The others take strength from the martyr's example - though tragic, it was not a failed martyrdom... the audience of this little morality tale gets the message: they too must draw the appropriate lessons from her brave martyrdom, and continue to hide in mosques and take potshots and Israeli teenagers trying to root out missiles that are fired at their younger siblings' schoolhouses. Or something like that]

"Within seconds two ambulances were on the scene, and the woman, her limbs hanging lifeless, was bundled onto a stretcher. Another woman lay critically wounded nearby, one of seven wounded in all" -- [it's a good thing that this REPORTER took the time to REPORT that the DEAD woman's limbs were "hanging lifeless"... because we might have not figured out that she was LIFELESS from being DEAD - good reminder... you know what that is, ladies and gentlemen? It's EMPHASIS. The key to a effective writi - actually, it makes for crap writing... but it's the key to good propaganda]

""World, where are you?" screamed a woman towards a television camera. "People are being killed. There are martyrs." Moments later, several women ran back down the road from the direction of the mosque, struggling to carry among them one of the wounded, a young woman in a black hijab, the bottom of her jeans showing beneath her garment. On the street, another woman held between her hands a patterned black headdress coated in blood. "Look! The brains of a woman of the resistance, splattered on her scarf. Look at it," she said, staring into a camera." -- [Let's review: the woman was martyred alone in the world, just her and her faith... the other women, some of whom had been running away before, now take strength and run toward the mosque... also, the Palestinians have been abandoned by the world and need to be saved from the evil Israelis who kill and splatter brains... oh, and that's one, two, three references to traditional Muslim dress - because these women are women of faith, remember]

"At a nearby hospital, men who had heard of the protest waited to find out what had happened to their wives. "I urged my wife to join the other brave women who went to help end the siege of the hero fighters," said Khaled Faleh, a 34-year-old husband. He didn't know if she was still alive." -- [Reuters won't quote Israelis calling people who blow up school busses "terrorists" because that would tilt their coverage, but closing with a quote from Khaled Faleh that involves action verbs like "urge" and "join" and glorifying adjectives like "brave" and "hero" is apparently just fine. And notice that of all the things that he is, Khaled is described as a "husband". Just a normal person like you or us... remember, effective writing is about painting a picture through SELECTION of details... But Khaled is confused: because he sent his wife to go stand in between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen, and now he's faced with the possibility that this might have been dangerous!]

And that's the end of the short story. It leaves you hanging, so you can imagine different endings and then discuss how they would effect the meaning of the story. It's a nice touch. In fact, it's probably the only thing that could propel this clumsy, C+ propagandist screed into B- territory. Then again, it's a judgment call - that passage where the cream veil glides off the martyr's visage and blood drains from her body to replenish the land she died for was literally eye-roll inducing, and that's never good.

Listen, joking aside - this woman's death is tragic. We're not just saying that to backstop against charges of insensitivity. Civilians should stay and be kept out of wars - and not just as an a priori principle of just war. There's a sound empirical reason: wars fought army vs. army have a natural ending point - the destruction of one army by another. Wars fought population vs. population play out the same way, but our word for that is "genocide".

And you know what's going to keep throwing Palestinian civilian against Israeli civilian? Precisely this kind of utter garbage that Reuters just published. For all that we just mocked it, step back for a second and consider just how disgusting this article is. It is - from the first word to the last word - a literal celebration of civilians who act as human shields (a war crime) for gunmen who are being chased for launching missiles at Israeli civilians (a war crime), so that the gunmen can escape from the mosque that they fled to (a war crime). And it bears the imprimatur of one of the most important news outlets on the face of the planet.

Previously: Reuters Pretends That History Is What Reuters Would Like History To Be, Like Hezbollah, Hamas Uses Children As Human Shields, Palestinians Hide Bomb Under Baby, Prepare to Blame Israel Anyway, The Church of the Nativity: Palestinian Desecration of Holy Places / War Crimes

The former Prime Minister's heart and liver came down with infections:

Sigh.

Previously: Disaster, On Prayer, Predictable World Reactions to Sharon - White House Worried, Palestinians Celebrate

The HM timeserver went bonkers this morning. It took upon itself the role of divine worldmaker, decreeing that day shall be night and night shall be day. In other words, it decided to bump itself up 12 hours and push all of our posts live before the clock had chimed 2:30am PST / 5:30am EST.

So many of the posts that were supposed to be spread out over the course of the day are now up. Stupid HAL.

Previously: Changes at MR, Wherein We Try To Break MR With YouTube, The Freeman Center: Ugliest Design Ever, But Still Not The Klan

You know how we say that Egypt is one disgruntled general away from being the most dangerous country in the world? Yeah:

In exchange for 92 percent of Egyptians considering Israel an outright "enemy", the US has been giving Egypt cutting-edge weaponry for well over a generation. And Israel gave up the buffer zone of the Sinai. And Egypt is getting Israeli assent and US cooperation on their fledging nuclear program.

Hey, with over 9 out of every 10 Egyptians committed to the destruction of Israel... you don't think that any of them are involved in the security services that are supposed to be stopping Palestinians from smuggling weapons into Gaza? Maybe - just maybe - this helps to explain how Hamas has built and armed an Hezbollah-like force in Gaza by smuggling in weapons from Egypt.

Previously: Egyptian Women's Magazines Are Ironic, Reuters Gives Advice: Want To Dampen Muslim Extremism? Support People Who Want To Commit Genocide, Mid-East Nuclearization Watch

This might not be significant enough for a full post (as opposed to a roundup link), but it's just so shameless that we really wanted to devote some seperate space to it. Last week CAMERA's blog passed on the official BBC policy about using the "terrorist":

Any of us might object, but if that's the policy that's the policy. Right? Not so much. It does appear that the BBC usually won't "adopt other people's language as [their] own" or "let other people characterize" acts of terrorism - unless those other people are Arab spokespeople and the act of terrorism occured within an Arab country. Scroll down to Update 24 on the Syrian embassy bombing. Apparently, there are times when the BBC is more than happy to quote other people on the question of whether or not a particular act was terrorism.

Previously: The BBC Lies, The BBC Can't Even Write Coherent Anti-Israel Propaganda, No Seriously, You Blithering BBC Idiot, Explain to the Poor Sheltered Pope How Islam Works

"Just because it's tough, doesn't mean it's not love, ya'll".

Two comments:
(1) Obviously, the "the hajib makes it so Muslim women will get judged on their brains and not their looks" argument neglects the "the hajib is the result of women being third-class citizens" part of Muslim women's experience.
(2)The Southern girls - with the way they talk - they knock me out when I'm down there.
(3) Bridgette Gabriel is Pamela Oshry's long lost twin. This is a true and demonstrable fact. Obligatory link to phish bowl bikini vlog mashup.

Previously: Aussie Cleric's "No Head Scarves = Women Are Asking For Rape" Comments Go Viral, No Women In Iran's Cabinet, Saudi Arabia Discovers Women Need To Eat Food

We'll confess: there were two awesome academia stories yesterday, and we only really covered one of them. Call us homebodies if you must. We were kind of partial to the UCLA swastika graffiti story over the links that we kept seeing to some guy at UPenn who wore a suicide bomber costume for National Dress Like A Slut Day. But that's before we realized that the President of the University posed with him:

What nobody on the right seems to understand is that it wasn't a terrorist costume - it was a freedom fighter costume! And he was very brave for wearing it, because obviously there's a ton of official opposition to this stuff on the UPenn campus.

Previously: University of Michigan Campuses Both Charming and Not Charming, Juan Cole Is Not "Wrong" - He's Just "Deploying the Technique of the Hermeneutical Circle", John Mearsheimer - Not Anti-Semitic. Just Anti-Semiticish

The morning Daily Bruin is carrying news of this outrage at the University of California, Los Angeles:

Unlike the current situation in Irvine, there are actually pictures of what these bigots did. At Irvine, of course, someone painted over the Nazi graffiti before people could get photographic documentation. The police have thus far dragged their feet on releasing whatever evidence they have. Then again, swastikas are swastikas - and here's the picture from the Daily Bruin:

You know, it's not that unpredictable that this is would be happening across American campuses - including and particularly elite institutions. You're talking about an environment where anti-Israel and anti-American professors and administrators defend the plainest anti-Semitic canards as anything from legitimate anti-Zionism to "education". The problem, of course, is that most of the students doing the hating don't care about those kinds of fine-grained distinctions. And so an environment of loathing and hate develops, until it explodes into the kinds of incidents that we're witnessing across Los Angeles-area college campuses.

Previously: USC Muslim Student Union Slips Into Open Anti-Semitism, UC Irvine Gives Interview to Anti-Semitic Hate Group, Wonders Why Everyone Thinks There's Anti-Semitism on Their Campus, UC Irvine Course Description: American Unilateralism Responsible For Islamist Barbarism

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

Because our doctors make us avoid Ha'aretz editorial (blood pressure related, nothing to really worry about), we don't really get their good stuff until it gets pushed to us by leftist mailing lists (also blood pressure related, but in a different way). So we missed it when Amira "are you effing kidding - we though one really believed that" Hass wrote the following about a month ago:

If Amira Hass was worth fisking, this is where we'd belabor the part about "every time Israel opens up the border crossings terrorists slip through", but that's not what we're up to in this post. We'd like to bait the other side of the blogosphere (read: our demo (read: bad business decision)).

Sharon gave the Israel and international communities a lot of reasons for the disengagement. As far as they went, they were 100 percent true - Israel had to set its own secure borders because the Palestinians were not going to work with any Israeli government on any reasonable peace deal. But underneath everything there was always the "take Gaza and choke on it" justification - let the Palestinians see what it's like to manage their own affairs for a while, in a context where their usual "it's all Israel's fault" excuses didn't play. In the best case, they develop a sense of responsibility and come back to the table for a negotiated settlement. In the worst case, they fall into internecine violence (but ) and spare Israeli schoolchildren and cafe diners for a while. So with due respect to the three of you who will be pissed off enough about this post to write to us: it seems that at least that part has turned out to be more or less accurate.

Previously: Define "Failure" Please, Disengagement - Still Probably a Good Idea, Disengagement - Violence Was Going To Happen

Yesterday all our troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they're here to st - actually, that's a fib and we apologize. Our troubles were front and center yesterday too.

Here's hoping that you enjoy the roundup and the rest of your morning.

* AK Sommer all over the place. A PJM post on Katsav, an Israel21c article on Israeli tech, and a tech story from a more personal perspective at Israelity. But best of all: she's going to start updating An Unsealed Room regularly again. The reasons that this is awesome are numerous, but mostly she just sounds different - more jaded but frantic suburban Israeli - when she's on her home blog. Which means now we have to go back and put it back on the blogroll. Luckily, that won't be a problem, since our laptop has learned to just kind of sigh and go to work whenever we hit "rebuild" in the MT backend.

* "Mr. Maher, this is the front desk. There's someone named Meryl Yourish at the door to see you Also - here's the weird thing - it looks like she's got a bat that literally has your name physically carved into it. Yeah, I dunno either - you want me to let her up?"

* Gracie's not out of the woods yet, but she's getting better.

* Oh no. We just realized that we posted a statement pretty much shrugging off the Kerry thing as a botched joke, but this and this were posted over the last few days. We're not saying we're wrong. We're just saying that it's going to be a long morning.

* And as if that wasn't bad enough, Stan clocked in this morning to smugly deprive us of the final couple of reasons we had to live.

* Richard Landes is a scholar. By all accounts, he's a damn good scholar. Good scholars are by nature cautious and careful, making modest statements that can be justified (Juan Cole is an obvious exception, but that's because what passes for scholarship in his field is unseemly ideological backpatting, so he never picked up academic habits). Anyway, Rich Landes - scholar, etc. So when he accuses Secretary of State Rice of cognitive egocentrism, that's not very good for people who think that the State Department has a clue about a clue about anything.

* Rick Richman is similarly unamused by Secretary Rice. And when Rick Richman is unamused, he gets very terse and posts poll figures that make the source of his unamusement seem stupid.

* Alexandra of the eponymous All Things Beautiful on Secretary Rice's sell out of Israel. PS - where does she get those pictures?

* Pamela on pimps and whores at Georgetown. We grabbed the URL and linked to it before we clicked through. We just figured it was going to be a Halloween photo gallery. But no. Just hypocritical leftist academic politics.

* Dave Bender has a podcast about the human toll of the disengagement. We're not particularly partial to that kind of red meat. But the millions we spend on focus groups have conclusively demonstrated that there is a high statistical likelihood that you are.

* Then again, we're here writing about how we're not particularly enamored with Dave's latest podcast. This distinguishes us from the Washington Post, which thinks that he rocks. VERY nice.

* This is no way for a young lady to speak.

* A while back we posted about Michael Marcus, a Karmiel resident and a UMich-Dearborn grad. Marcus is fighting the good (and, ioho futile) fight to keep his old campus from becoming a pro-jihadi swamp. The Michigan Journal has just published his letter critiquing the campus's student governance system. So maybe we're being a little too pessimistic. But we doubt ir. You can't cheat demographics, and "radical" unfortunately seems to be a trait getting passed down from parents to children in Dearborn (and, for that matter, Orange County).

* Tsk tsk - little bit of a tiff over at NRO about Derb not voting. For the record: us not voting has little to do with sending any kind of message to the GOP (which they won't hear because, uh, we live in CA and don't matter). On the other hand, it has almost everything to do with visceral disgust. A pox on both their houses.

* On Tuesday we missed our first One Jerusalem conference call in just about forever. It sounds like it was really good. Figures.

* A service called Jewswire has just gone beta. It has something to do with pushing Judaism-related press releases live , but we can't figure out exactly what. Not a good sign for a startup. Also: they need a new color scheme. Also: they need to tone down the MySpace-level shoving of ads into every available corner.

* We're horrible investors. Just awful. Mostly because we buy like one or two stocks (hey, student budget) and so can't really make up the commission margin. But it's also because we make terrible picks. People who short-sell should pay us to buy stock so they can make a profit. And of all our stocks, one of the very few that's actually in the green (eTrade color coding scheme) was JetBlue. So much for that.

* Steven Weiss seems to have really taken the whole blogs are about honesty thing to heart.

* As well as we can tell, we agree with every single word of this Dean Barnett essay on the what the tactic of forced outing reveals about the contemporary left.

* Let's just all go live in the hills, nuke the whole damn planet, and start over. It's so stupid and yet somehow still so infuriating.

* Carl is way too far right for our tastes. But his commitments do give him a certain drive to find the most absurd aspects of the miserable failure that is the collection of UN-supplied human shields in south Lebanon. Pics and tons more at Israellycool.

* Sheer brilliance over at Elder of Zion.

* We're shocked that almost-too-liberal-to-pick-through-for-news LAist is opposing the California parental notification initiative. MR of course supports a nearly unlimited right to abortion, but only as a byproduct of our more general support for infanticide. Also on the LAist (and seriously, we can't even begin to count the levels on which this is ironic and unreflexive)... anyway, also on the LAist, there's the opinion that the entire country will rise up to impeach George Bush if the voters in Berkeley, CA choose to do so. Because apparently people will be so shocked that the residents of Berkeley hate the President that they'll start rethinking their own support for the Commander in Chief.

* Daled Amos: Israel is THE place for Jewish innovation. Actually, that's our bedroom. HEY-O.

* Jewlicious has a new site design up. Same center-left blogging, now with a new hottie logo.

* We think that SimplyJews's Snoopy kind of has a crush on right-wing goddess Caroline Glick. It's kind of cute.

* Toward the end of October, Smooth Stone asked if Al Qaeda was going to pull off an October surprise. No.

* SoccerDad is now also a ballet dad. And it sounds like his daughter is maybe 6 months away from establish a MySpace blog designed in various shades of grey and dedicated to describing how emo she is.

* Dave Schuler from The Glittering Eye has pretty much had it with having to keep the blogosphere informed about all the polls he's been passing on.

Previously: (J)Blog Roundup - 2006-10-20, (J)Blog Roundup - 2006-10-19, (J)Blog Roundup - 2006-10-18

WikiHow has a post up about How to Write Political Fiction. It was originally aimed at people who want jobs as NYT political reporter, but there's a rule on the Internet that only one site is allowed to bait Mickey Kaus in any given two-week span. And TNR already had a pro-Israel article on Oct 25.

Oh, also, check out this angel in the TNR comments section:

We think there's a chance that this is meant sarcastically (although on second and third readings it doesn't appear to be the case). Still, the point remains - isn't it troubling enough that you just can't tell?

Oh, and by the way. When he says "Zionist", he means "Jew". Just an FYI.

Previously: Anti-Semitism as Anti-Zionism, Campus Liberal or Mentally Challenged Asylum Escapee?, Cindy Sheehan's New Strategy: Exhibitionism and Neo-Confederate Conferences

The Bush administration has spent the last two or three days going after Iran and Syria for trying destabilizing Lebanon. As of this morning, that effort is now officially totally useless:

We're not even sure which way this cuts. If Nasrallah fails, does it mean that Hezbollah lost the war? If Nasrallah succeeds, does it mean that the Bush administration - by reigning in Israel in an effort to save the Saniora government - helped pave the way for the demise of the Cedar Revolution? Does the Cedar Revolution even matter if this is the kind of government that democratic elections in Lebanon produce?

Previously: List of Things That Would Cause Us to Have More Sympathy for Lebanon's Prime Minister, Israel Does Everyone's Dirty Work, Gets Condemned Anyway, Lebanon PM Has a Plan - Israel Will Stop Defending Itself, and Then Hezbollah Will Be Disarmed By the Make Believe Army that Exists Only in His Mind. Brilliant!

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

This video is getting all kinds of love on Digg tonight / this morning. CNN interviewed Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. Within thirty seconds of the interview, Hitchens has corrected the interviewer twice. Within a minute and a half, he has used words and concepts that the interviewer patently does not understand. By the middle of the interview, Hitch and Sully more or less give up on the interviewer and start just having a conversation with each other.

Incidentally, that thing about Kerry's joke. They're right - it was a failed joke about Bush being dumb. It was not aimed at the soldiers. Bravo and all that to the Democrats for screwing it up as badly as they have, but yeah - it was about Bush being uneducated and stuck in Iraq, not the troops.

Incidentally - and we know it's an unpopular position nowadays - but we still think that Andrew Sullivan contributes positively to public discourse. If nothing else, Chris Hitchens thinks he's a valuable voice - and while we don't always agree with Hitchens's ideology, his judgement still seems sound.

Previously: Christopher Hitchens Has Been Kidnapped, Turns Out, Iraq did have WMD capability. Who Knew?, Rabbi Lerner has Never Met an Anti-Semite He Didn't Like - Cindy Sheehan Edition

The AP story on this went up almost exactly an hour ago. Iran is test-firing dozens of Shahab-3s:

The Shahab-3 can be loaded with a nuclear warhead, and it can read Israel. So Iran named their exercises - preparation for a war that could trigger a nuclear war - "Great Prophet". Good thing there's no apocalyptic strain in the Iranian leadership hierarchy.

When nuclear war breaks out because of the world's fickleness to this generation's Hitler wannabe, it'll be Israel's fault. Because everything is Israel's fault.

Previously: Psst: Iran's Going Nuclear, Iran, Much of the World Kind of Anti-Semitic, We Continue To Be Frustrated and Baffled By The World's Reaction To Iran

Apparently Israel is yet again under attack for interfering with Palestinian ambulances. The usual routine is to give you tons of links proving that Palestinians use ambulances as military vehicles. But (a) it's Wednesday night, and Wednesday is the new Friday and (b) a quick examination of our exit logs conclusively demonstrates that no one clicks on those links anyway. So instead, here's a video of how Palestinians use their UN-bought ambulances as tanks.

Terrrorists using ambulances to attack Israelis. Or as the academic left likes to call it, "Palestinian resistance". But, saith terrorist apologists, those are soldiers being attacked. Palestinians are allowed to use ambulances to shoot at Israeli soldiers, because they're just resisting the Occupation! It's a war!

Well first of all, that's obviously a stupid argument because using ambulances for military purposes is still illegal in warfare. That's why we call it a war crime. But more importantly, it appears that the Palestinians are unable or unwilling to make these fine-grained, juridical distinctions for themselves. For instance, here's a video of them using an ambulance to transport bombs for suicide bombers into Israel:

Personally, we're still blaming the Israelis for forcing these little angels to use ambulances to facilitate inhuman crimes. If the Israelis would just die, the Palestinians wouldn't have to use ambulances to try to kill them. See? Viewed from the right perspective, it really is all Israel's fault.

We've read these two paragraphs at least ten times. Tell us if we're crazy, but that quote is totally incoherent right?

If a "large... minority" is anti-Semitic, doesn't that mean that there's "a significant presence of anti-Semitism"? Like isn't that what the words mean?

It's a somewhat dishonest claim anyway. Norway's royals have demonstrated remarkable inability to not seem anti-Semitic when the lack of anti-Semitism in their country has triggered murderous attacks on synagogues.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]

We're wont to droning on and on about how there are few things that are genuinely Orwellian. The manipulation of language in the interest of destroying meaning for political benefit is perhaps the very essence of what it means to be Orwellian. Look what we found on Google News:

Nice touch there by Curt Maynard, explaining that he's the one who's concerned about language and the other side doesn't think it's significant. We've written about this very literal Orwellian device to eradicate the meaning of anti-Semitism before:

It warms our cold academic little hearts when rhetorical analysis and theory can be directly applied to the real world. It would be nice if the conclusion wasn't that there is a UN-sanctioned movement spreading through press outlets that is trying to make opposing Jew-hatred impossible. But in this day and age, really, you have to take what you can get.

[Cross-posted at IsraPundit]