If I were truly evil, I’d put up a post yanking the anti-Semites’ chains.

Gee, it must really suck for you guys. I have moderated comments, so when you try to post the kind of filth you get away with posting on unmoderated weblogs, it has to go through me, first. And—then it gets deleted. Except for the tiny percentage that slips through the net, nobody else gets to read it, and frankly, I’ve become pretty good at sensing the message of hate in just the first few words.

Wow, you must just get so frustrated that nobody on my weblog is going to read your not-so-brilliant thoughts. Your message of hate simply doesn’t get past the censor.

Does that burn you up? Doesn’t it make you mad that you have absolutely no control over whether or not your thoughts get read on this weblog?

I have a solution for you. It’s the yourish.com mantra, and it’s a one-size-fits-all.

Anti-Semites of the world, just die already.

You see, if I were truly evil, I’d post something just like that.

And you know something?

This isn’t even a tenth of what I’d say if I were really going to let loose. Nobody has seen the full Evil Meryl online yet. Pray that you never do.

Since it seems to be war-war-war-war here, I thought I’d spell Meryl a bit with a pointless and silly vignette from my workday.

Today, Deskmerc and I went over to the nearby deli for lunch and had hamburgers.

The deli normally put on tomatoes, lettuce, mustard and/or mayo, and cheese.

However, I had this song going through my head:

Imagine there’s no ketchup. No mustard, too.

So my burger didn’t have mustard. Or ketchup. Or mayo. Or tomatoes.

Just pickles, onions, and two things I won’t mention since this is supposedly a Kosher blog.

Sometimes, it’s good just to switch things around when it comes to hamburgers. Heck, I used to slather deadly amounts of wasabi on my burgers until it became ordinary to me, so I switched to another odd combination of ingredients (guacamole and sprouts)…

Until the next burger came around.

So, folks, I challenge each of you to have a hamburger in an unusual way the next time the opportunity presents itself.

Leave off something you like. Put it on a wheat bun instead of a white bun, or maybe patty-melt style on weird bread. Mash up the meat with chopped onions… or chopped garlic… or chopped pineapple. Cook it with mesquite coals… or planked with cherry wood…

What’s the worst that can happen? You barf it up?

Fine. You’ve got room for another interesting burger. Repeat until it stays down.

Okay, you can get back to the whole war thing. I’m done.

See, here’s how my brain works.

Back when the U.S. was invading Afghanistan and Iraq, I don’t recall any calls for a cease-fire by any other nations.

I don’t think there’s been a single instance of Israeli self-defense where the world has not called for an immediate cease-fire, thus hampering and handcuffing the Israeli response.

So when I read something like this, the cynic in me says, STFU:

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin on Monday joined British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in calling for the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon, in order to end the spiraling conflict between Israel and Hezbullah.

Villepin also called for an immediate truce between Israel and Lebanon on humanitarian grounds.

De Villepin was speaking after meeting the Lebanese government in Beirut in an effort to find a solution to the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas.

“Humanitarian grounds”? Hezbullah is sending missiles into the heart of Israeli towns and cities. They obviously don’t give a damn about humanitarianism. One would think that, by definition, a terrorist organization is not humanitarian. Let us be honest: The grounds for the cease-fire are that Israel is bombing the crap out of her enemy, and for once, is not heeding calls to stop. This time, as the movie tagline goes, it’s personal.

Israel on Monday reiterated its opposition to the initiative of deploying an international force in Lebanon.

The Prime Minister’s Office said Sunday night that Israel would not agree to the deployment of any troops in south Lebanon, save for the Lebanese army.

Israel is concerned that an international force would make it more difficult for the IDF to respond to future attacks from Lebanese territory.

Why exactly would that be? Because the UN peacekeepers are already complicit in the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli soldiers by Hezbullah.

On October 7, 2000, Hezbollah forces illegally crossed the Israeli border with Lebanon through a UN patrolled area and kidnapped three Israel Defense Force soldiers, Adi Avitan, Binyamin Avraham, and Omar Souad. UNIFIL peacekeepers videotaped the incident; however, the United Nations denied possessing any such videotape for almost nine months. On July 6, 2001, The UN admitted, contrary to their earlier denials, that they had possession of the tape as of 18 hours after the incident occurred.

The Israeli government requested the tape to help investigate the incident and hopefully recover the soldiers. However, the United Nations refused to turn the tape over to Israel, citing a desire to maintain a neutral role in the region. Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer sent a strongly worded letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan on July 8, 2001, calling the UN’s decision not to hand over the video “altogether puzzling and incongruous.”[1] UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno responded by claiming that since “South Lebanon is a war zone,” giving an unedited tape to Israel, “would be considered by one party as providing intelligence to another party and would certainly put in danger the security of our people in Lebanon.”[2] Israeli officials pointed out that not only was Israel the victim in this kidnapping, but that the UNIFIL officials ought to have prevented the abduction in the first place, fulfilling their mandate as peacekeepers – it was their job to keep the area from becoming a war zone.

Israel remembers. Pull the other leg, Kofi. This one isn’t working.

So I’m watching this video of Dan Gillerman, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, on the O’Reilly Factor, and all I can think of is: Gee, he’s sexy. Love that voice. I think I’ve found my future husband.

Actually, it’s the voice, and the accent. I swear, this guy sounds like Maurice Chevalier, only without the baggage of being French.

Okay. So I have strange thoughts. Like you don’t?

I wonder if we could get him to sing a song or two from Gigi?

Via Imshin.

Go head-butt to your heart’s content.

Ynet’s got excerpts.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the Knesset plenum Monday regarding the fighting in the north: “Israel did not ask for these confrontations, but there were those who interpreted our will for peace as a sign of weakness. Our enemies were wrong to think our restraint was a sign of weakness.”

“Israel has no territorial argument, neither on the southern or northern border,” Olmert added.

[...] “The current fight is against terror organizations in Lebanon and Gaza. These organizations are subcontractors, acting under the authorization, encouragement and funding of terror supporting organizations and opponents of peace - the axis of evil that runs from Tehran to Damascus,” Olmert said.

The prime minister continued: “Israel will not be a hostage – not of terror organizations and not of sovereign states.”

“We are standing at a moment of national truth. Will we agree to live under the threat of the axis of evil, or will we hew our internal strength and show determination and level-headedness? Our answer is known to each and every Israel, and today it echoes in the entire region. We are not seeking war and confrontation, but when they are necessary we will not avoid them. We have the right to our freedom, and when we have to, we know how to fight for and defend that freedom,” Olmert said.

Ehud Olmert’s speech to the Knesset. Now.

The gist: The war will continue until Hezbullah is destroyed and Israelis can live without the threat of rockets falling on her citizens. That goes for Hamas, too. The current crisis can cool down if the IDF soldiers are returned.

Pointed out that Lebanon is responsible, because they never deployed their army to enforce Resolution 1559.

Via Israellycool, a YouTube video of a missile attack on Haifa

Lileks found a moron on Huffington Post (what are the odds of that?) who wrote a particularly stupid anti-Israel post (and what are the odds of that?). I found it via AbbaGav, who can still manage to be funny even during times like these.

The gist of the post is that Israel is all wrong, disproportionate force, yadda yadda, blahblahblah, yeah, sure, tell me something I haven’t heard. But there is this little gem, that Lileks picked up on:

Just a final thought - although I doubt it, is it totally beyond the pale that these two Israeli soliders were instructed to allow themselves to be kidnapped in order to foster the chain of events I have just described?

Well, you’d have to be sixteen different kinds of stupid not to pick up on a thought like that, but you’d have to be about forty different kinds of stupid to actually believe it. Because gee, that’s exactly the orders that the IDF gives its soldiers on a regular basis: “Men, if you’re sneak-attacked by Hezbullah launching mortars at your humvees, if you don’t die, make sure you are kidnapped by the terrorists so we can start a war over you!”

I swear, it’s in the manual. Any one of my friendly neighborhood Israel bloggers could find that for you.

But here’s the thing you have to realize: On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. What that means is that you can pretty much pretend to be anything you want, or, put another way, you don’t really have to have any expertise in the field of which you are currently blogging. Now, before people leap up to point out that I am, after all, a writer and web developer and editor and whathaveyou with zero experience as a war analyst or Israel pundit, let me point out something: I have never pretended otherwise.

For the past several years, I have read thousands of news articles and analyses of the situation in Israel and the Middle East. I read a wide variety of sources, and include blogs on that source list. I give you my opinions of what I read, and you can figure out where I stand quite clearly. I rarely write any kind of analysis, because I am not a policy analyst. I’m just someone who reads a lot, absorbs the information, and gives it back to my readers with a few of my opinions thrown in.

But Russell Shaw, who wrote the idiocy quoted above—this guy’s a tech writer. Period. Look at his CV on his website. Let’s see… tech writing. Tech blogging. Tech writing. More tech writing. ZDNet. Weblogs Inc.

Oh, yeah. This guy is eminently qualified to write about Israel on the Huffington Post.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog—but people can figure out pretty quickly that you’re an idiot.

The bar is set abysmally low at HuffPo.

Haveil Havalim, the Carnival of the Jews, is up at A Barbaric Yawp, and I’ve actually been afraid to ask Ozzy what a yawp is.

And of course, there’s the Carnival of the Cats, who don’t think about war, unless you try to take away their toys. Or food. Or humans. Hm.

The media caught President Bush using a naughty word. Big effing deal.

Bush’s remarks were picked up by closed-circuit television at the G8 summit in St Petersburg, Russia, as the leaders were being filmed sitting down to eat.

“See, the irony is what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this sh*t and it’s over,” Bush told Blair as he chewed on a buttered roll before the Group of Eight leaders began their lunch.

Some members of the Arab League are criticizing Hezbullah.

BEIRUT, Lebanon - With the battle between Israel and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah raging, key Arab governments are taking the rare step of publicly blaming Hezbollah, underscoring their growing fear of the group’s main sponsor, Iran.

Saudi Arabia, supported by Jordan, Egypt, several Persian Gulf states and the Palestinian Authority, chastised Hezbollah for “unexpected, inappropriate and irresponsible acts” at an emergency Arab League summit in Cairo on Saturday.

The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said of Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, “These acts will pull the whole region back to years ago, and we cannot simply accept them.”

The Arabs have always hated the Iranians, who are not Arabs. I’m not very surprised to see them not want Iran to win this one.

Haifa was hit again. Residential areas, of course. The ones that Liar Nasrallah says he isn’t aiming for.

On the day after the deadly attack on the Haifa Bay, rockets hit the city again Monday afternoon. Seven explosions were heard in the northern city following air raid sirens at 2 p.m. A number of rockets landed in central Haifa.

After another hour of sirens, a second barrage hit at 3 p.m. One rocket struck a three-story building in the city causing two floors to collapse.

Magen David Adom ambulances and firefighters were dispatched to the scene. Rescue services pulled six people out of the wreckage - one of them in serious condition and another two in moderate condition. The injured were taken to the Rambam hospital and Bnei Zion Medical Center.

A major terror attack was foiled in Jerusalem by alert security forces.

Police officers operating a metal detector noticed a Palestinian walking toward them, carrying a bag. They demanded that he undergo a security check, and then he told them he was carrying an explosive device.

[...] In his interrogation, the man said that he planned to carry out a terror attack, and according to estimations the target was the center of the capital. It is still unclear whether he planned to detonate himself with the device or leave it in the area and flee.

How can you tell when a terrorist is lying? His lips are moving. This is rich:

Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said Sunday that despite Israel’s attacks, the guerrillas were “in their full strength and power” and that their “missile stockpiles are still full.”

Sure, and that’s why you’re hiding in your rathole, like the cowardly little subhuman you are.

The officer spoke about one moment in which 100 aircrafts flew over Lebanon, and in which Hizbullah forces were “harshly crushed.”

Israel has information about places where the rockets are being hidden, and the Air Force is engaged in intercepting them. An officer from the intelligence department said that it appears Nasrallah has not dyed his beard for days, and the reason is simple – “he has not left the pit where he is hiding.”

I look forward to the day we hear the news that the IDF found your rathole and sent you a bunker-buster for a housewarming gift.