Olmert doesn't inspire confidence

Although he has generally been saying the right things during the hostage situation, Olmert does not strike me as someone who believes a word he is saying. I am very uncomfortable with a PM who seems to be more a bullheaded technocrat than someone who is acting out of pure love of Israel.

I have never felt such a disconnect to an Israeli PM before. Even milquetoast Peres has occasionally staunchly defended Israel's position well in the international arena. But when I see something like this coming out of the Prime Minister's office, all I can think of is that he is full of it:

These are not easy days for the State of Israel but we have no intention of capitulating to blackmail. Everyone knows that capitulating to terrorism today means inviting the next act of terrorism. We will not do this.

Um, and isn't forcibly removing Jews from their homes capitulating to terrorism? Just as with previous releases of prisoners, the intent was never to capitulate to terror - but the effect is exactly that, leading it to become Hamas policy. Words that should be inspiring end up looking like hypocrisy.

Similarly, when he spoke at the 35th Zionist Congress to the residents of Sderot:

I want to take this opportunity, here and now, to tell the residents of the south, to the people of Sderot, to kibbutzim such as Yad-Mordechai and Nahal Oz and Kfar Aza and other communities: no one is more familiar with the level of the pain, anxiety and uncertainty which you are experiencing these days.

Coming from someone who couldn't be bothered to actually visit Sderot, it feels like just what some speechwriter wrote for him, and not something he truly believes.

And no matter whether he is from the left or the right, Israel needs a leader who believes what he says.

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A new Arab diet

Two Palestinian women tear up an Israeli flag with their teeth during a protest against the Israeli military offensive in Gaza in the Ein el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp, in the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, Sunday, July 2, 2006. About 2,000 Palestinians protesting the Israeli military offensive in Gaza set fire to an Israeli flag and shouted 'Death to Israel' Sunday as they marched in Lebanon's largest refugee camp.

Since there is no shortage of Israeli flags in "refugee" camps, this should solve all those problems of starvation.

Just once, I'd like to see a mainstream media organization question exactly why Palestinian arabs are still forced to live in "refugee" camps - in Lebanon and Syria. Not to mention Gaza.

Finally, I am reminded of an incident that happened almost thirty years ago. I remember seeing the video on a Christian TV broadcast many years ago, but inexplicably I have never been able to find footage on the Internet. Here's the best description I have found:

To grasp the nature of Syrian barbarism, let me take you back to a ceremony which that regime celebrated on the tenth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. I watched that ceremony on Israel television, clips of which should now be shown throughout Israel. In that ceremony - and now I turn to its description in the October 21, 1983 issue of the JERUSALEM POST MAGAZINE -

"Syrian militia trainees [male and female] put on a show for Syrian president Hafez Assad. Martial music reached a crescendo as Syrian teenage girls suddenly bit into live snakes [some four or five feet long], repeatedly tearing off flesh and spitting it out as blood ran down their chins. As Assad applauded, the girls then attached the snakes to sticks and grilled them over fire, eating them triumphantly. Others [militiamen] then proceeded to strangle puppies and drink their blood."

Perhaps someone can find this little gem.

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HH 76

Irina at The IgNoble Experiment brings us this week's Haveil Havalim, appropriately enough #76 for the American holiday weekend.

She mentions 4 articles of mine, which is amazing:

• My article on bias in the Washington Post,
• Hostage taking in international law,
• How most Palestinian Arabs support terror attacks,
• and my list of female terrorists in Israeli jails that Hamas wants freed.

I shouldn't let it get to my head, though: she mentions Ezzie at least 8 times!

It is a huge effort, very well done, and you should check it out!

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Hamas threatens to bomb Jewish schools and hospitals

As Israel's incursion with no civilian victims continues, Hamas is showing its true colors:

Hamas's armed wing, Izaddin al-Kassam, on Sunday threatened to attack infrastructure facilities inside Israel, including schools, hospitals and universities. The threat, the first of its kind since Hamas won the parliamentary election last January, was issued in response to continued Israeli military strikes in the Gaza Strip.

The MSM seems to have missed this small story.

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Saudi refuses to play Israeli in computer game "world cup"

More tolerance from our friends the Saudis.

Hakeem Refuses to Play Against Israeli Saleh Fareed, Arab News

“I cannot play against a guy from a country that occupies the holy land of Palestine,” said Badr Hakeem. (AN photo) JEDDAH, 2 July 2006 — Twenty-one-year-old Saudi, Badr Hakeem, winner of last year’s Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC), has stepped down from participating in this year’s championship in protest against the Zionist state of Israel after he was drawn to play an Israeli gamer. “Unfortunately, the draw put me against an Israeli player and due to our stand against the Israeli aggression and occupation of Palestine, I raised my voice and said there was no way I was going to play against this guy,” said Hakeem speaking to Arab News after making his decision at the end of the first round of the tournament. The organizing committee accepted Hakeem’s decision.

One would think that they would dismiss the entire team for something like this, but - it's only "the Zionist state of Israel" he refuses to play.

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We get results!

In our article on the virulently anti-semitic article by Curtis Maynard for Mathaba.net, we mentioned how Google indexed Mathaba as a legitimate news source. We complained to Google and evidently so did others, because the article was removed and a strange blurb replaced it:

Incorrect categorisation

The original opinion piece was incorrectly categorised by a junior assistant editor and passed the usual checks due to a temporary resource shortage, as such it was inadvertently approved for news aggregators. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

This is hardly a retraction of the disgusting views mentioned.

And of course, Mathaba has a huge catalog of other articles by the same author as well as different authors, which include such gems as:

Why I admire Ernst Zundel

Jews Must be Removed from 9-11 Investigation Says Talk Show Host

Many people will laugh at the very idea that a Jew would consider any black to be an equal – as a rule, Jews loathe blacks more than they do whites, but they find that exploiting blacks is advantageous to the advancement of their agenda, and it is for this reason, and no other, that they associate with blacks.

In the end the article is nothing more than a recap, it reiterates the same tired and predicable story we see time and again in the United States, Goyim states fact, Jews react with litigation, litigation fails, Goy is smeared in the media, etc… etc… ad nauseum.

In fact the word "Jew" is found on the Mathaba search engine nearly 200 times, a strange obsession at the least.

Mathaba was delisted by Google for reasons unknown in April but it got reinstated. Their freedom of speech isn't the issue; it is that Google consistently applies different standards to far left news and opinion outlets than those of the right.

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Glorifying Hamas at The Australian

An outrageous display of lionizing terrorists and their supporters by Martin Chulov of "The Australian":

Chants and flags on streets, jets in sky Martin Chulov in Gaza

July 01, 2006

WAVING billowing green flags and with fists thrust skywards, Hamas's dedicated thousands took to the darkened streets of Gaza late on Thursday to show the world they remained defiant.

As an unmanned Israeli drone buzzed high overheard and attack helicopters and fighter jets rumbled through the distance, about 5000 people chanted in support of their jailed West Bank politicians and their Gaza leaders in hiding.

As the crowd made its way home through rubbish-strewn streets,[those littering Zionists again! - EoZ] past mosques and half-finished buildings, explosions sounded across the city. Hundreds surged towards the sound of the largest -- an air strike on the Interior Ministry that sent smoke billowing and masonry tumbling to the road.

These are testing times for the hundreds of thousands who elected Hamas in January, And more so for the many more who care not about the colour of the flag above the legislature.

All around is evidence of hardship: cars annihilated on bomb-lined roads, rotting fruit and vegetables swept into allies and rubbish piled high along main routes.

But defiance is a lifeblood. There is little hatred for the captured Israeli soldier, but little sympathy for him either.

"Perhaps he can see what it's like to live at the mercy of others and go back to his people and tell them," said Hanin al-Masri as she carried home her two five-year-old children, who she dressed with Hamas caps.

Sitting in the sand outside his home as a dog-eared Hamas flag flew from the balcony, Abu Hanifeh said: "We may have nothing left and I have two sons in Gaza and another one who has been martyred. But that's what makes resistance worthwhile.

"We have nothing to lose and everything to gain," he concluded.

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DoD loyalty test for Jews?

InsightMag.com has a blurb for a subscriber-only article that is troubling, to put it mildly:

Defense Dept. imposes loyalty test on American Jews
The Pentagon has banned security clearance to Americans with relatives in Israel. Government sources and attorneys said the Pentagon has sought and succeeded in removing security clearance from dozens of Americans, mostly Jews, who either lived, worked or have relatives in Israel. Official documents report that American Jews were asked by Pentagon examiners whether they would join a U.S. attack on Israel if the Jewish state was threatened.

Over at Free Republic there is some skepticism about this, both about whether it is true and whether it is standard operating procedure for all employees with relatives in other countries.

I would love to know whether Americans with Canadian or British or Australian relatives have to answer the same question. The question isn't dual loyalty - it is whether Jews are being discriminated against by our own government.

H/T to Jameel at DovBear.

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BBC: Dhimmified since 1935

Just found this:

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Clerics: Suicide bombers go to hell, unless they do it for the right reasons

For a moment there they almost sounded...human.

On Wednesday, top Islamic clerics at the Supreme Council of Al-Azhar University in Egypt, perhaps the most important in the Islamic world, said that the Islamic rule (Shaaria) forbids suicide, the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat reported.

The clerics determined that a connection was mistakenly made between suicide and a "sacrifice to defend religion and the homeland". The clerics stressed that the faith of those who commit suicide is no less than hell.

"Those who commit suicide bombings in the name of religion are not Muslims but rather people who sold their soul to the devil," Islamic clerics ruled. "They didn't understand the principle of the religion according to which there is no killing allowed, except by law."

"There is a difference between jihad and terror, between sacrificing yourself and suicide," said Dr. Mohammad Rafat Othman, a member ofthe Jurisprudence Research Committee of the Islamic Research Academy, Al-Azhar.

Alas, it all fell apart in the end:

"Those using suicide bombing against the enemy, the land robbers, and the occupier of nations, are martyrs," he concluded.

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AFP photographer gets deep in his story

Seen through the shattered window pane of a car hit during an Israeli air attack, a young Palestinian supporter of the Brazilian football team gathers with others to inspect the damaged vehicle in Gaza City. Israel called a halt to a planned incursion into the northern Gaza Strip amid international appeals for diplomatic efforts to free a soldier captured by Palestinian militants.(AFP/Mahmud Hams)

So this means that the AFP photographer was inside the car when this picture was taken.

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Google News does it again

Here's another explicitly anti-semitic article , approvingly quoting Goebbels, on a site that Google considers "newsworthy":

"It's The Jews Stupid"

By Curt Maynard

I have long thought about writing this article but hesitated because I didn’t want the reader to conclude that I believed that all Jews are complicit in what amounts to a vast conspiracy to undermine western civilization and establish a Talmudic centered one world government. However, times have changed, and I feel obligated to write this and post it on the last bastion of freedom of speech, the Internet – before even that, in its present form is made unavailable to mankind.

Of course all Jews aren’t engaged in this nefarious plan, but unfortunately most of them will come to the aid of those who are. There are some exceptions, on occasion one will criticize another, but as a rule, those who are in a position to publicly denounce one of their own are still pro-Israel/pro-Zionist in orientation....One hears many excuses for this cohesive support, which only enables the criminals, fear of anti-Semitism, and/or fear of the next pogrom or holocaust. Unfortunately for collective Jewry, this excuse doesn’t wash – what they are doing, and what the Germans knew they were collectively doing in 1933, and what Americans are slowly becoming aware of now, is aiding and abetting their co-religionists to commit crimes that are tantamount to treason. In 1933 the German nation democratically elected a leader that promised them he wouldn’t allow this absolute and empirical reality to continue. George Bush on the other hand chose a Jew named Bernenke to replace another Jew named Alan Greenspan as the head of the Federal Reserve, a position that is without question perhaps one of the most powerful and influential positions in government today. In the words of Joseph Goebbels’ if Hitler were to have done something like that after the German people had suffered through a decade of hyperinflation, and the deprivation so associated, the German people would have “boxed their ears.”
...Goebbels’ was somewhat of a prophet pariah, he understood organized Jewry like few Americans do today, he understood that their collective calls of anti-Semitism directed at the Nazi leadership and indeed the German people themselves was a technique they had successfully used, even perfected, in order to advance their interests while at the same time suppressing any dissent from the gentile majority. We see this same technique at work today, all around the world, anytime anyone honestly divulges the actions of a Jew in some crime; they are immediately smeared with the label of “anti-Semitism.” This is not a recent phenomenon, it has nothing to do with Zionism, as Noam Chomsky might suggest, it is an ageless technique developed by Jewry over an extended period of time...
...many Jews are becoming aware of the fact that non-Jews are beginning to scrutinize some uncomfortable facts that implicate Jews as being behind a great deal of the issues that most effect them – this is getting harder to cover up, people are beginning to notice that Jews are disproportionately represented in the areas of life that the non-Jewish majority is most concerned with, and that is the degeneracy of western culture, the degeneracy of American culture, the degradation of Christian values, the collapse of the American educational system and the rape of our economy. In their haste to cover up their involvement in these areas, Jews are exposing themselves as they never have before, and because of this Americans now know that Jews dominate Hollywood, the media in all its facets, our economy, our judicial process and in many respects our very government. Once again, this is nothing new, Jews had attempted the very same thing in Germany after the First World War and in France, and in Poland, and in Spain – in fact ethnic Jews have been tossed out of more countries, not for their faith as they today allege, but because of their collective behavior, than any other ethnic group in history. Despite what your history professor will tell you about their ejection from Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella, it had nothing to do with the fact that they weren’t Catholic and everything to do with their behavior – they intentionally enslaved the Spanish people under their usurious yolk, they absolutely, without any doubt whatsoever ushered in the Moorish invaders from Africa and as a result they unquestionably committed treason, and the Spanish people knew it. It is for these reasons and no others that the Jews were ejected from Spain and you can bet there wasn’t a moist eye to be found among the Spanish victims. Bearing this in mind, carefully consider the words of Joseph Goebbels’:

The Jews aren't always so clever as they would like themselves to believe. Whenever they are in danger they prove to be the stupidest devils.

Goebbels’ was of course correct, contemporaneously and in a modern sense as well, organized Jewry has in fact become desperate, they exposed themselves completely on 9-11, and if the media were in other hands, their Fifth Column would long ago have been neutralized and the war on terror ended. If it were not for the fact that the entire media apparatus was kosher, Americans would know that 150 Israelis were arrested in the United States following 9-11 for espionage and then quietly deported without informing the American public by the Jew and dual Israeli citizen Michael Chertoff, who was at that time Assistant Attorney General under the flunky John Ashcroft....

On and on it goes, and it would be easy to dismiss as just another hateful moron - but Google considers it "news" and as such it needs to be exposed. (They have some Holocaust denial as well, for good measure.)

UPDATE: Mathaba deleted the article with a curious explanation:

Incorrect categorisation Posted: 2006/06/29 From:

	The original opinion piece was incorrectly categorised by a junior assistant editor and passed the usual checks due to a temporary resource shortage, as such it was inadvertently approved for news aggregators. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Doesn't exactly sound like an apology or a disavowal to me.

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Terror starts small and gets worse if not stopped

The lessons of Givat Ada

Givat Ada is a small community on Israel's coastal plain.

In 1936, Arabs destroyed vineyards and other crops in the town. Evidently, their hatred for Jews outstripped their supposed love of the land.

While this was hardly the only instance of Arab vandalism against agriculture - in fact, this was at the beginning of a huge wave of Arab tree destruction - it is important to see what happens when smaller crimes are not dealt with swiftly and properly.

Givat Ada suffered a much worse crime two years later. Three Jewish kids were kidnapped, their whereabouts unknown:

In 1940, their remains were found in an Arab village. A trial in 1941 of eight Arabs accused of the crime ended up in acquital as some witnesses recanted their testimony.

Barely two weeks after the kidnapping, Givat Ada was subject to a much more public and brazen attack. 200 armed Arasb arrived and killed three residents, including a mother of two:

In the space of two years, attacks went from arson to secret kidnapping/murder to open warfare against civilians. The acceptance of one level of violence naturally ends up empowering the terrorists to do more.

An absurd concept that has gained currency in the world today, seemingly only applicable to Israel, is the idea of "proportionate response." Somehow, when a terror act is committed, Israel is expected to pull its punches and only react in a proportional manner, in a similar fashion as the original crime.

This is exactly wrong.

The proper reaction to terror is swift and uncompromising disproportionate response. Anything less invites the terrorists to do more and more. When the terror leaders know with near certainty that they will still be alive after any of their attacks, they have no incentive to stop. In fact, they have a disincentive to stop - they know that they can get away with more next time.

Israel would do well to learn the lessons of Givat Ada.

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Beach bias at the WaPo

The Washington Post has a column called World Opinion Roundup, ostensibly to show other sides of news stories from other countries.

But when the reporter, Jefferson Morley, discusses the Gaza beach bombings, he introduces the discussion with a comment from an American blog.

Juan Cole's blog, to be precise.

Not surprisingly, he goes on to show how seemingly everyone in his universe believes that Israel bombed a family on the beach, and only the IDF seems to believe that Israel is not responsible. (He mentions the Sueddeutshce Zeitung as well.)He quotes the British newspaper triumvirate of Israel-bashers, he quotes Mark Garlasco (misspelled in his column) - as if HRW is a media outlet - and he quotes a slew of Arab newspapers calling it a cold-blooded crime.

Somehow, he doesn't manage to mention any reasons why Israel's account is far more believable than the critics'. He has no problem mentioning critics' not believing the timeframes, for example, but not a word about the shrapnel Israel found in the victims' bodies showing it was not from Israeli artillery.

Yet another example of bias in an "even-handed" report.

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Dead Arab score: Palestinians 3, Israel 0

So far there has apparently not been a single casualty from the Israeli return to Gaza.

However, at least 3 Palestinian Arabs have been killed by "work accidents":

Palestinians reported that two people were killed, including a young girl, in an explosion in a Khan Yunis home on Wednesday afternoon.

The explosion was apparently the result of a work accident.

An activist from Hamas' armed wing was killed yesterday in an explosion in Gaza City. No one took responsibility for the explosion of the vehicle in which he was traveling and Israeli sources said they believed it was a "work accident."

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