Looking to lose some weight this summer for Swimsuit Season?

Why not try The Hamas Diet?

Palestinian prime minister says the PA won’t flinch from cut off of international financial aid, won’t bow to pressure to drop violence and recognize Israel; ‘We are ready to eat salt and olives but we won’t be humiliated,’ he said

Sure beats the heck out of wolfing down five grapefruits a day. Now you can just suck down salt and olives, and you’ll be showing off your svelte figure, thanks to Hamas. (Before they beat you to death for immodesty, of course.)

Wait.. hold on… that doesn’t sound right. Just salt and olives? I don’t think YNet picked up the whole diet there.

Time to check in with Arab News:

A defiant Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh yesterday said his people would survive on “thyme, salt and olives” but would not bow to Western demands for a Hamas recognition of Israel.

Ah… okay… now it makes sense. Here I was, thinking they’d all starve to death on just salt and olives.

Bush should just forget about sending money anymore. Money just confused things. Just send salt and olives.

And thyme!

Days after Iran has succeeded in enriching uranium, its president once against announces his country’s intent to destroy Israel.

TEHRAN, Iran — The president of Iran again lashed out at Israel on Friday and said it was “heading toward annihilation,” just days after Tehran raised fears about its nuclear activities by saying it successfully enriched uranium for the first time.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Israel a “permanent threat” to the Middle East that will “soon” be liberated. He also appeared to again question whether the Holocaust really happened.

“Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation,” Ahmadinejad said at the opening of a conference in support of the Palestinians. “The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm.”

By “one storm,” of course, he means a nuclear bomb.

“The existence of this (Israeli) regime is a permanent threat” to the Middle East, he added. “Its existence has harmed the dignity of Islamic nations.”

I await the United Nations condemnation of a member nation threatening the destruction of another member nation.

David Blaine is going to live in an aquarium for a week. Tedium follows.

NEW YORK (AP) - David Blaine intends to sleep with the fishes - but only for a week, and in full public view.

The 33-year-old magician will perform his latest stunt by living underwater for seven days and nights in a “human aquarium” in front of New York’s Lincoln Center.

He will conclude by attempting to hold his breath underwater longer than the record of 8 minutes, 58 seconds.

I cannot sleep in anticipation! I will not be able to think of anything else besides David Blaine underwater for a week, and then — ohmigod, can I say it? — holding his breath! Wow! Holy cow! How exciting! How fresh! How — stoopid.

Blaine’s previous feats of endurance include balancing on a small platform for 35 hours and surviving inside a massive block of ice for 61 hours, both of which were performed in New York. In 2003, he fasted for 44 days in a suspended acrylic box over the Thames River in London.

You know what I like about the Brits? All these people came over to see him while waving food and laughing at him. I think some even had barbecues beneath him. My kind of people.

I’m really not sure why they call Blaine a “magician.” There’s nothing magical about the stunts he performs. And comparisons to the great Harry Houdini are despicable. Houdini invented death-defying magician stunts, and Blaine’s crappy routines don’t come close.

Among the stunts performed to publicize his American appearances, Houdini escaped from the prison cell that held the assassin of President James Garfield, squirmed from a straitjacket while hanging upside down, and broke free from a packing crate that had been nailed shut and immersed underwater. This showmanship also extended to his act. As a regular feature of his performances, Houdini was shackled and lowered into an oversize milk can filled with water and then hidden by a curtain. Though he was usually able to escape in three minutes, Houdini frequently stayed behind the curtain for up to a half hour, making his re-appearance all the more dramatic.

In your face, Blaine.

A surprising article in the Guardian today. Robert Tait tells a familiar story about the Big Brother in the modern environment.

The misdirected email or text message is a hazard of our age. It can sour relationships and upset the closest of our friends. But now a stray electronic missive has been blamed for a spate of arrests, a national scandal and a very grumpy president of Iran.

“Stray electronic missive”? Such naivete from a journalist? No matter, let’s see more.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Islamic nation’s firebrand leader, has taken umbrage at an unwelcome text received on his mobile phone. According to whispered accounts in the Iranian capital, his ire was stirred when someone sent him a joke suggesting he didn’t wash regularly enough.

Surely he uses uranium hexafluoride as mouth wash these days?

Although officials claim he possesses a lively sense of humour that belies his rather hairshirt image, on this occasion it suffered a serious failure. Realising the joke was doing the rounds of Iranian mobile phones, the notoriously temperamental president lodged an official complaint with Iran’s judiciary department.

That in turn has acted as a pretext for an official purge of the SMS system in the country. Mr Ahmadinejad has since told his staff to pay close attention to all jokes circulating about him by text.

An anti-regime website called Rooz Online claims that under the crackdown the head of the country’s mobile phone company has been sacked and four people arrested and accused of colluding with the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad.

Aha! I knew it will come up sooner or later. Then the news of the guy having, how to say it - hygienic problems, are thoroughly checked by Mossad and should be taken as correct!

“While the outcome of the recent arrests in connection with SMS messaging is not clear yet, what is certain is that SMS jokes have already put some people into serious trouble,” wrote the website Rooz Online.

The clampdown is in line with the authorities’ uncompromising stance on the internet and bloggers. Wary of modern communications as a means of spreading political dissent, Iran is second only to China in the number of websites it filters - using technology made in America.

Large numbers of the nation’s estimated 70,000 to 100,000 bloggers have faced harassment or imprisonment. The regime has acknowledged monitoring text message traffic. It first admitted it had access to text traffic last December when a military plane carrying more than 100 journalists crashed shortly after take-off at Tehran airport.

So it is not exactly a “stray electronic missive” after all, is it, Mr. Tait? The article seems to be written and signed by one person, so how difficult is it to connect the dots? How difficult it is to see the hand of the Big Brother, specially in a case when the hand is not hiding?

Which reminds me another article from the same place: an hysterical piece by Simon Jenkins. Hardly coherent, it includes the following passage:

One country in the region that has retained some political pluralism is Iran. It has shown bursts of democratic activity and, importantly, has experienced internal regime change. If ever there was a nation not to drive to the extreme it is Iran.

Some burst of democratic activity, indeed. Any more of these, and Iran will start importing barbed wire from the most experienced manufacturers, like Russia and China.

Which, in the context of the subject, reminds me an old Soviet joke: Khruschev tells Kennedy during a meeting: “You know, I just love and collect political jokes. I have already got two concentration camps full of this stuff”.

:-(

Cross-posted on SimplyJews

John Bolton managed to single-handedly block the OIC and the Arab bloc in the United Nations.

The United States on Thursday torpedoed a U.N. Security Council statement drafted by Arab nations and aimed at putting pressure on Israel to stop military strikes on Palestinian targets.

U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said the draft, even after three days of intense negotiations, “was disproportionately critical of Israel, and unfairly so, and needlessly so.”

Palestinian U.N. Observer Riyad Mansour accused Washington of “shielding and protecting Israeli activities and aggression against the Palestinian people.”

“It was obvious they did not want the Security Council to have a position,” Mansour said. Washington does not have formal veto power when it comes to council statements. But was able to block the draft single-handedly because council rules require that statements be unanimous supported by all 15 of its members.

Qatar, the council’s Arab member, gave up the fight, was behind the criticism of Israel in the draft. Asked by reporters to confirm that Washington alone had opposed issuing the statement, Bolton responded, “If I were the only holdout, I’d be proud of that fact.”

Is it time for a Nelson laugh? Yes, I believe it is.

But wait, there’s more. Bolton has a great bon mot regarding the next step the OIC is going to take:

Qatar, acting on behalf of the Arab group at the United Nations, the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference and the Non-Aligned Movement of 112 nations, immediately requested an open council debate on the Middle East, which was scheduled for Monday afternoon.

“I don’t see that that meeting is going to be productive, because I don’t think the Security Council is an exercise in group therapy,” Bolton said.

John, I forgive you for your goofy mustache.

(Note: Yes, this is the same topic as Lair Simon’s last post. We’re working on coordinating in the future so this doesn’t happen much, but hey, it’s a different viewpoint, and different quotes.)

The IDF caught some Hamassholes red-handed.

The Israel Defense Forces suspect that a Hamas cell carried out terror attacks in the West Bank city of Hebron over the past several weeks, in contradiction to the Islamist group’s official policy declared after it won the elections calling for calm (tahdia) in the territories.

On Friday evening an explosion in a Hebron apartment wounded three Palestinians, who were taken to a Palestinian hospital in the city.

When IDF troops arrived at the apartment they discovered it was used as an explosives lab and held a large amount of explosives. According to an initial investigation, four pipe bombs were made in the apartment by Hamas men and were used against IDF troops in Hebron over the past few weeks.

There is no “truce.” There are only lies and deception.

John Bolton pust up the block against yet another out-of-context slam on Israel in The Picasso Room in Turtle Bay:

The UN Security Council failed to agree on a statement Thursday on a recent surge in violence between Israel and the Palestinians, after the United States said the proposed draft was unfairly critical of Israel.

The draft proposed by Qatar on behalf of the Palestinians would have expressed concern about the “indiscriminate shelling against the Gaza Strip, resulting in extensive human casualties” and called on Israel to halt “military operations and excessive use of force that endangers the Palestinian civilian populations.”

The United States had argued for its long-standing belief that any such statement mention both sides’ obligations under the road map and cite Palestinian attacks against Israel as well.

Sure, it’s wasn’t hard to predict, but I wasted a few K’s of space anyway back in December.

I went searching through news archives for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs statements that were hopeful that Israeli business ties with Qatar and other very low diplomatic ties would result in a somewhat moderate stance by the “pro-terror” seat in the Security Council.

Not just fat chance, but Fat Albert-sized fat chance, folks.

Anyway, this opens up another opportunity to waste a day watching the streaming madness on UN’s Media website:

Because the draft failed, the Security Council will hold an open meeting on Monday when any of the 191 member states of the United Nations can speak. The council will also hold a monthly meeting on the Middle East a week after that.

There’s a six-minute whine by Dr. Riyad Mansour to the press in the lineup now, but the guy’s no out-and-out bats-, bugf- loony with a borrowed Moscow Express platinum card like Yasser’s nephew Nasser Al-Kidwa was.

(In case you’re curious, Mansour’s PhD is apparently in Counseling from U. of Akron.)

This is promising. I have heard that Poland has worked very hard to erase its anti-Semitism, and this is a major step towards proving it.

WARSAW - A Polish Catholic priest apologized on Wednesday for allowing the broadcast of anti-Semitic statements on Radio Maryja, part of a powerful religious media empire he runs.

Radio Maryja ran an opinion piece by a nationalist commentator in March that said Jewish groups sought bribes from Poland in the early 1990s in exchange for their support in the country’s efforts to join NATO.

[...] “We did not mean to hurt anyone’s feelings. We respect each person regardless of nationality, age, race or religion,” said Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, whose radio became a mouthpiece for the ruling conservative Law and Justice party in recent months.

“If someone felt touched by the comments of one of our known Polish commentators, we feel very sorry,” he said.

Radio Maryja came under fire from media ethics and other rights groups for allowing xenophobic and anti-Semitic statements on its programs and it was rebuked by the Vatican for not respecting the church’s political neutrality.

And there aren’t any weasel words in the apology, either.

I have yet to find a Muslim news outlet that has ever apologized for anti-Semitism.

Say, remember just the other day when the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem said that Muslims don’t oppress Christians?

He’s right, if you don’t consider murder and stabbings “oppression.”

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Worshippers at three Christian churches came under attack from knife-wielding assailants during Mass Friday. Police said one worshipper was killed and more than a dozen wounded in the simultaneous attacks in the northern city of Alexandria.

Police were searching for three men, one in each attack.

Hundreds of Christians gathered in angry protest outside the Coptic Christian churches, and witnesses said clashes erupted between Christians and Muslims.

Initial police reports said a total of 17 people were injured: 10 at the Saints Church in downtown Alexandria and three at the nearby Mar Girgis Church. A third attacker wounded four worshippers at a church in Abu Qir, a few miles to the east.

One worshipper was killed and at least two others were in serious condition, a police official said on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

And here is the AP boilerplate “This is the exception to the rule” excuse:

Coptic Christians account for about 10 percent of Egypt’s population of 72 million and generally live in harmony with the Muslim majority, though violence flares occasionally.

But they end their story with this:

In October, Muslims attacked churches and shops in Alexandria over the distribution of a DVD of a play deemed offensive to their religion. Four people were killed in weeklong riots.

Yes, Muslims treat other religions perfectly well. Uh-huh. Sure.