Feminism, the Mainstream Media, and Pop Culture.

A depressing number of conservatives treat the above three things as, if not equivalent, then at least collusive. I don’t see it, myself.

The problem is, you have a mainstream media outfit–let’s take the New York Times–who hires, say, Maureen Dowd, and she writes in a stereotypically feminine, that is, girlish, way, and sometimes she talks about the dreaded Women’s Issues.

“Oh,” goes the reaction in some quarters, “Here we have a woman, writing for the New York Times, talking about things that don’t always include men. I know what that is! That’s a feminist!”

Of course, there’s more.

Two members of Al-Qaida are on trial.

Oh, did I mention that they were Palestinians who joined up and took money to plan terror attacks while they were visiting Old Palestine Jordan?

Two men from the West Bank became on Tuesday the first Palestinians to be charged with membership in Al-Qaida.

The two 20-year-old Nablus residents, Azzam Abu Al-Ades and Bilal Hafanawi, were charged in a Samaria military court with planning a terror attack and membership in Al-Qaida.

Some two months ago, Israeli intelligence figures said evidence indicated Palestinians from Nablus and Jenin had made contact with groups identified with Al-Qaida and received from them financial support for their operations.

Al-Ades and Hafanawi received money from Jordan for carrying out a terror attack. They were arrested at the Allenby Bridge border crossing in December 2005 upon their return from the Hashemite kingdom.

So now that Al-Qaida is slowly but surely making inroads to a fertile deathcultist Palestinian environment, how will the world react?

Probably the same as they react to Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, PFLP, Fateh, and every other group bent on the destruction of Israel. It’s just resistance operations, you know.

Zaman Online, a Turkish news source that is pretty standard anti-Israel fare, published this opening paragraph in a story about closing the Karni crossing:

With the closure of the Karni border crossing point, the only ammunitions route to Gaza, for security reasons, Palestinians living in the area are in danger of starving.

Yes, sometimes, the truth just stares you in the face, doesn’t it?

Okay, so I may have grimly suggested responding to the whines about food shortages in Gaza with truckloads of Bird Flu infected chickens, but did they actually take me seriously?

Bird carcasses were discovered on Tuesday at the site of former Gaza Strip settlement Netzarim.

Tests were being conducted to determine whether the birds had been infected with and died of bird flu, Army Radio reported.

“We made a mistake in handling the birds’ carcasses, and from now on, we kill and bury,” Agriculture Minister Ze’ev Boim announced at Tuesday’s special Knesset meeting dealing with the recent outbreak of avian flu in Israel.

Um… did those birds die in Israel and were dumped in Gaza, died in Gaza from the natural progression of the bird flu, or were they killed by Gazans for propaganda purposes?

Stay tuned.

No, really.

“We were traveling along the highway, on a beautiful spring day … and suddenly we saw a helicopter swoop down and anti-terror forces speed by,” Yonatan Danino, a witness, told Israel Radio. “Suddenly we saw a car with security forces surrounding it. They even came out of the bushes.”

The van was stopped at a roadblock near Latrun, located halfway between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Police removed the bomb from the car, setting off a panic among nearby motorists.

“People started to run away from the cars,” Danino said. “Police were shouting into megaphones, ‘live bomb, live bomb,’ and people were running in every direction.”

Jerusalem police spokesman Shmuel Ben-Ruby said the assailants were carrying 11 pounds of explosives and intended to plant a bomb in central Israel. He said 10 people were arrested.

Just another day in the country that Hamas wants to cease to exist.

As an FYI, there are only 19 stories on the Google News portal about this, and four of them are Israeli news sources.

However, if the Israeli helicopters chasing the van had fired a missile and killed the terrorists, guaranteed it’d be all over the news, replete with the lie that they weren’t terrorists.

Just sayin’.

Because as of 9:45 p.m. last night, this paragraph

Hamas’ failure to bring Fatah or other more moderate Palestinian lawmakers into the government was likely to set off painful Western aid cutbacks. The main bone of contention was Hamas’ refusal to compromise on its right to violent resistance against Israel and its rejection of the Jewish state’s legitimacy.

was in 384 newspapers across America and the world that used the AP story verbatim. The right of Hamas to “resistance” — terrorspeak for blowing up civilians with bombs — goes unchallenged.

And a palestinian source in the AP goes to bed happy that he has once again skewered the news — in another subtle way — against Israel.