I have some Amazon gift certificates that I banked, and I want to use them up to buy something, but I just can’t decide. Should I get the Firefly TV/movie set? Should I get season two of Babylon 5? Season 4 of Buffy? Season 3 of Angel? Should I buy some music that I’ve wanted for a while, and get three CDs?

For some reason, I am utterly unable to come to a decision on how to spend my Amazon money.

Apparently, all that backlash against the Dixie Chicks isn’t stopping their album from hitting number one on the Billboard Country chart.

Oh, and they made number one on the Billboard 200 chart, which is the bible of the industry. I know, because I typeset that chart for five years when I worked as a typesetter. (Redesigned it two or three times myself; what a bitch that was, too. AND caught a few embarrassing errors, right, Drew?)

Now, while I don’t buy into the victimization of the Dixie Chicks, I have to point out that it seems their reduced airplay on country music stations isn’t hurting their career a whole lot.

I can see that. I never hear Mary Chapin Carpenter on the radio, but I know when a new album of hers is coming out.

Ultimately, it’s all about the music. I have a sneaking suspicion that Ms. Carpenter and I are on opposite sides of the political fence on more than one issue. But it wouldn’t stop me from buying her next album.

The only thing that can do that is support for terrorism (Yusuf Islam, a.k.a. Cat Stevens) or blatant sexism (Metallica). Speaking out against a president during wartime? Yeah, well, it makes you look like a jerk, but hey, lots of people look like jerks a whole lot of the time.

Selling 526,000 units their first week out is a pretty good sign that the backlash hasn’t really hurt the Dixie Chicks. Well, except for all those conservatives who said they’d never buy the album. But I’m betting most of them never owned any Dixie Chick albums to begin with. It was just another thing to rant about on the weblog.

The Dixie Chicks, I think, are going to be laughing all the way to the bank.

You’ve read in many places by now the decision by a British teacher’s union to boycott Israeli scientists unless they sign some McCarthy-like statement saying they don’t agree with Israeli government policies (”Are you now or have you ever been a member of Likud?”). Something leaps out at me in every single article that gives the Israeli viewpoint of British academics.

The Israel Science Foundation, the largest funder of basic research in Israel, sends out some 10,000 letters a year asking scientists to examine research proposals by Israeli researchers and decide whether they deserve funding. According to Professor Joseph Klafter, the ISF’s chairman, about 10 scientists have refused to participate in the review process this year. He said that the foundation first began encountering such refusals following Operation Defensive Shield in March-April 2002. Such refusals typically say something like “I respect my Israeli colleagues, but until Israeli policy changes, I will be compelled to refuse your requests.”

What was Operation Defensive Shield? Why was it instituted?

After two months of intensive suicide bomber attacks inside Israel culminating in the attack on the Park Hotel in Netanya on Passover eve, killing 30 people including entire families, the government authorized the IDF to enter Palestinian controlled areas (Area A) with full force.

Over 30,000 reservists were called into duty for the operation that included incursions into most of the major Palestinian cities on the West Bank.

The goal of the operation was fourfold: to destroy as much of the terrorist infrastructure as possible; to re-establish Israeli deterrence; to place the terrorist organizations on the defensive, and to isolate Arafat and weaken his authority.

An important byproduct of Operation Defensive Shield was utterly overlooked by most of the world at large: The IDF discovered documents directly linking Yasser Arafat to terrorist attacks on Israel while he was supposedly working for “peace.” The world issued a collective yawn, and denials that this proved Arafat was behind terror. The usual accusations of the Mossad manufacturing evidence occurred, in spite of incidents like the Karine A, in which 50 tons of weapons were prevented from reaching Israel, and Arafat’s complicity was again proven — and again ignored.

In March alone, more than 135 Israeli civilians were murdered in terrorist attacks.

That was the reason for Operation Defensive Shield.

The spring of 2002 is when world opinion, never very fond of Israel, turned vehemently against the Jewish state. The constant terror attacks were ignored, or excused as an expected response to the “crimes” of “occupation” (this, in spite of the fact that the PA ran the terrortories [sic] under the corrupt Jew-hater, Yasser Arafat (may his name be erased). Jews blown up on buses? Well, hell, that’s what they get for not letting the palestinians have their own state. Jews gunned down at a Bat Mitzvah celebration? It’s their own damned fault for occupying the indigenous people’s territory. Jews fight back to destroy the terrorist infrastructure? Hey! Hey! YOU CAN’T DO THAT TO THE POOR LITTLE UNARMED, UNDERFED, UNEMPLOYED, INNOCENT PALESTINIANS!!! YOU HAVE TANKS! THEY DON’T! YOU HAVE HELICOPTERS! THEY DON’T! YOU HAVE AIRPLANES! THEY DON’T!

That is essentially the attitude and the argument that came out of Israel’s actions of self-defense. You will still hear that argument today, as well as the accusations of massacres, war crimes, etc., etc. You will never hear a peep from the world about palesitnian atrocities. They have pretty much ignored the murder two days ago of a couple who were accused of “collaboration.”

This is the turning point for British academia. In the spring of 2002, when Israeli children on their way to school were being blown to pieces on buses, and the Israelis finally said “Enough!” and began to clamp down on the palestinian terror infrastructure, the world rose up in indignation against — Israel. Not against the murderers of children. Not against the murderers of Holocaust survivors at a Passover seder. Not against the corrupt, murderous, lying regime of Yasser Arafat.

Against Israel.

The British academic boycott has nothing to do with academic freedom. It has nothing to do with ending “apartheid” policies. It has everything to do with the British intellectual elite being unable to get over its centuries of Jew-hatred, or to allow the Jews full citizenship in the world.

If the British academics truly believed that it is wrong to take over a country, displace the indigenous population, colonize and settle it with your own, and force your rule on it — they’d be boycotting themselves, because that is what Great Britain did to Ireland.

I say again: Thank you, Great-grandfather, for emigrating from Scotland to America. Thank you for not making me a citizen of the U.K.

The IDF sent out more than a shot across Hebullah’s bow last week. They’ve followed it up with a warning:

Lebanon and Hizbullah will pay a “heavy price,” senior IDF officers warned Monday, if the Iranian-funded group fails to learn its lesson from Israel’s massive retaliatory strike on Sunday and launches additional attacks against northern Israel.

“We hope the message from our response [on Sunday] was understood correctly by the other side [Hizbullah],” Commander of the Galilee Division Brig.-Gen. Gal Hirsch told reporters on Monday as a tense quiet prevailed in the north after rockets flew over both sides of the border on Sunday .

“If the message was not internalized and violence recurs, we will know how to retaliate even stronger,” he added. “We are ready for another day of fighting if it comes to that.”

But despite the quiet in the region, the IDF Northern Command continued to maintain a high level of alert on Monday, as the defense establishment expressed fears that Hizbullah might renew its rocket attacks along the northern border.

On Sunday, Israel destroyed most of the Hizbullah’s military positions along its northern border in the heaviest fighting since the IDF withdrew from southern Lebanon six years ago. Sunday’s rocket and artillery exchanges killed two gunmen in Lebanon and wounded two IDF soldiers.

It’s about damned time Israel started working on getting rid of the Iranian proxy army on her northern flank. It’s also past time for the UN and Lebanon to take action on that UN resolution that tells Hezbullah to disband.

Where is my mind this morning? I burned the toast, not once, but twice.

I left the phone off the cradle all night, and forgot to hibernate the laptop. And all this (except the toast) was before I didn’t get enough sleep last night.

Say, “burnt toast” could make a great code phrase for something. “Did you hear? She is so burnt toast, man.” “Hey, she burnt the toast!”

Mind you, I have no idea what it would mean, but it’s fun to think about anyway.