Thanks to those of you who have been hitting the tipjars lately. I can’t send personal notes to the ones hitting my Amazon tipjar anonymously, but I can thank you here.

Some of the funds got immediately tacked onto my check to the Richmond Jewish Federation fundraiser Monday night and allowed me to give a bigger donation to helping Israel move people out of range of the rockets. The rest went into the Yourish General Fund.

That’s probably going to be the pattern for a while. When I’m back at work, I’ll be able to give more.

Vital Perspective has an important and surprisingly honest report from Anderson Cooper, along with a map showing the Vast Areas of Beirut That Have Been Turned to Rubble.

(Hint: The damaged areas are in gray. Look in the lower left-hand corner of the map. You may need to squint.)

Looks like Gorilla Boy is concerned about his proxy army.

DUSHANBE, Tajikistan Jul 26, 2006 (AP)— Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for a cease-fire in Lebanon and criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East on Wednesday, saying Washington wants to “recarve the map” of the region with Israel’s help.

Ahmadinejad’s nation is a major backer of Hezbollah and a sworn enemy of Israel, but he denied that Tehran provides military support to the militant group.

However, more than 60 Iranian volunteers set off from Iran on Wednesday in what they called a holy war against Israeli forces in Lebanon.

In addition to a cease-fire, Ahmadinejad called for talks on the Lebanon crisis without conditions and demanded Israel compensate the country and apologize for its actions.

You would think he’d be crowing about the “victory” of the IDF taking heavy casualties today.

At 5 a.m., Hizbullah operatives attacked IDF soldiers. They originally used light arms, later adding short-range rockets and mortars. A number of soldiers were injured in the initial attack, but the fight was far from over. Hizbullah forces fired on soldiers from a number of different vantage points, forcing soldiers to sustain fire from several directions.

[...] IDF sources approximate that there were a hundred Hizbullah members in the area on Tuesday who, during the night, were possibly joined by additional forces. A senior officer in the Northern Command revealed that, on Tuesday, forces avoided a similar attack when trying to rescue a tank struck in Lebanese territory.

IDF sources estimate that the IDF’s point force was fired upon for about an hour. Fire continued even as backup forces came in to evacuate the casualties. Commander of the Golani battalion, Colonel Tamir Yedai, coordinated the rescue operation from the command operations room, which is located in one of the nearby communities.

Cars containing Hizbullah members pulled up near the tank, in an effort to inflict further damage to IDF forces, but thanks to the alertness of the commander of an engineer battalion, who opened massive fire in their direction, the terrorists were killed.

Fox News anchor Shepard Smith just finished a breathless report on how difficult the fighting was today, and how awful it was for Israel’s forces. Shep, STFU. Yes, it was heavy fighting. Yes, the IDF took heavy losses. But so did Hezbullah, and it’s only one battle, not the war.

Israel is engaged in another battle for her very existence. That’s why the support for these actions has been so strong. This isn’t Iraq. The IDF can’t simply withdraw from Lebanon and that will be the end of the problem with Hezbullah. If the IDF withdraws now, Hezbullah wins. If the IDF withdraws without severely damaging Hezbullah, Hezbullah wins. If the IDF withdraws and Hezbullah simply retakes its positions along the border, Hezbullah wins. And a win for Hezbullah is a loss that affects Israel’s very existence.

Where can Israelis go? There is nowhere. There is only Israel, or the end of Israel. And Israelis know this. Listen to a soldier who was wounded in Bint Jbeil:

When asked whether morale plunged after casualties were incurred, the sergeant answered: “You’d be surprised, but even after a day like today, morale was soaring. We must not be discouraged. I want to leave here and go back there. Just let me out of here so I can go back to my friends. We’re going to win big.”

It’s not a spectator sport, this battle. It is a fight for Israel’s existence. Hezbullah must lose.

Have you ever seen one of those movies or TV shows where the main character is trying to impress someone, and the fantasy sequence switches to the main character onstage, furiously dancing while juggling, clashing cymbals and drum of a one-man-band instrument, and blowing into the harmonica at the same time? And the entire time, the person to be impressed is standing, stone-faced, and asking, “What else can you do?”

That’s how I feel on the job-hunt these days.

I’m dancing as fast as I can.

The Jerusalem Post has an account of how tough the fighting is in Bint Jbeil, and evidence of more war crimes by the terrorists.

IDF sources reported heavy gun battles between soldiers from the Golani Brigade and Hizbullah guerrillas, and said that some of the shooting was taking place at point-blank range, in homes, and in courtyards.

From its duration and reported casualties, the battle is the heaviest combat between Hizbullah and Israel since the war erupted.

Hizbullah said through its Al-Manar TV station Wednesday that its guerrillas had ambushed an Israeli unit on the Massoud hilltop in Bint Jbail, causing many casualties whom the Israelis were unable to rescue because of heavy fire.

A senior Hizbullah official, Mahmoud Komati, told The Associated Press Wednesday that Israeli forces had managed to seize a few points inside Bint Jbail, but had not yet taken the town center.

And here we have the evidence of war crimes, and Hezbullah’s denial of culpability:

The Israeli army said several Hizbullah fighters had taken cover in a local mosque.

But Komati denied fighters were taking cover in a mosque and suggested they may be civilians. “Fighters don’t take shelter in mosques. They fight on the battlefield. If they can’t, they retreat but not to mosques.”

Rahhal, the Hizbullah spokesman, angrily responded to a question about the mosque refuge. “What’s the Israeli’s business that our fighters were in the mosque? Maybe they were praying at the time!”

You gotta love that one. Praying with Kalashnikovs at their right hands, no doubt. Or in them.

And look: Hezbullah names its operatives after Disney movies!

On Tuesday night, the IDF confirmed that a high-ranking Hizbullah leader called Al-Jafar had been killed in an IAF air strike in Lebanon.

Can a squawking parrot be far behind?

So let me get this straight. The United Nations has had a peacekeeping force in Lebanon for the past six years, under the aegis of UNIFIL, which has actively aided the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli soldiers, turned a blind eye to Hezbullah rocket attacks on Israel, and sips tea with the terrorists.

Today in Rome, world leaders and UN representatives ended a discussion on how to stop the current war in Lebanon, and the UN and world response was: Let’s put an international peacekeeping force, under the aegis of the UN, in Lebanon to stop the hostilities and keep them stopped.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the solution to the Mideast crisis should involve Iran and Syria. He also called for the formation of a multinational force to help Lebanon assert its authority and implement U.N. resolutions that would disarm Hezbollah.

After listening to a dramatic appeal from Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Saniora for them to stop the killing, the officials said they had agreed on the need to deploy an international force under the aegis of the United Nations in southern Lebanon.

“An international force in Lebanon should urgently be authorized under a U.N. mandate to support the Lebanese armed forces in providing a secure environment,” Italian Foreign Minister Massimo D’Alema said but there was no mention of who would take part or any other details.

Can you say, “What morons!”?

I knew you could.

They insist on the UN force, in spite of the fact that it has failed in its mission almost everywhere the UN has sent “peacekeepers.” They insist on a UN force in spite of the fact that Israel has flatly refused another bunch of blue helmets and said that they insist on NATO, where the troops know how to shoot and can be trusted not to help kidnap Israeli soldiers.

But sure, let’s do the same thing that led to the current war, because it’s not like it, well, works or anything. But at least it will make us feel like we’re actually doing something, instead of heating up the atmosphere with our discussions and adding to the problem of global warming. Oh, and it looks great on our resume: “Made peace between Israel and Lebanon.”

The fact that this process has always failed seems not to have entered the minds of the bureaucrats. I’m sure it has entered the minds of the Lebanese representatives. When Israel abides by UN rules, she always loses.

Egypt to Hezbullah: What you mean “we,” paleface?

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak rejected calls for tougher action in response to Israel’s offensive in Lebanon, in comments carried by the state-owned press on Wednesday.

“Those who urge Egypt to go to war to defend Lebanon or Hezbollah are not aware that the time of exterior adventures is over,” he told reporters on the flight back from talks with Saudi King Abdullah.

Mubarak stressed that throwing the country into a war would be irresponsible when 73 million Egyptians “need development, services, work and housing.”

“Those who are asking for war will make us lose all of that in a blink,” said Mubarak, quoted by the government Al-Gomhurriya daily. He stressed that he was not ready “to spend the people’s budget on a war… which isn’t their war”.

“The Egyptian army is for defending Egypt only and this is not going to change,” Mubarak added.

Translation: “We’re not gonna get our asses kicked by Israel again. Plus, the U.S. would take away our $2 billion a year.”

Bint Jbeil is no walk in the park

At least 30 soldiers were injured in battles in the town dubbed as Hizbullah’s ‘capital,’ in one of the most bitter battles the IDF has known in recent years; three soldiers sustained serious wounds, two others were moderately wounded while the rest were lightly hurt in the fighting.
IDF sources said an extremely difficult phase of the battle developed when soldiers encountered terrorists face to face, accompanied by the setting off of explosives and the firing of various missiles.

And oh, yeah—more Hezbullah war crimes:

On Tuesday, many weapons in some of the homes were found, and rooms have been turned into war rooms for Hizbullah members.

On Tuesday morning, during early searches, fire was opened on forces, who returned fire. A number of terrorists fled into a mosque in the area and continued to fire from within the structure at soldiers.

Last week, a missile launcher was found in the mosque, IDF sources said.

“Hizbullah members don’t discount any means to kill or injure, including the use of civilians as a holy human shields. If there will be no choice, we will hit every place from which they shoot at our forces,” a military source told Ynet.

The Lebanese have moved into action: They’re arresting “spies.”

Lebanese security forces have rounded up at least 36 people suspected of spying for Israeli intelligence amidst a two-week old conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, security sources said on Wednesday.

With the help of Hezbollah, security forces detained the informants, many of them former members of a now defunct pro-Israeli militia, in the eastern Bekaa Valley and the south, which have seen heavy Israeli bombardment, they said.

I don’t know what’s worse: That all the “spies” are Christians, that Reuters passes along this information uncritically (without happening to mention that the SLA was mostly a Lebanese Christian army) and that Hezbullah is “helping” the Lebanese capture “spies.”

Chipmunk Cheeks to Israel: We haven’t killed enough civilians yet, so we’re aiming for more.

In a televised address, Nasrallah said Israeli incursions into southern Lebanon would not stop Hezbollah rocket fire into northern Israel and that the conflict was moving “beyond Haifa”.

Another Hezbullah scumbag is saying the target is Netanya. Netanya is the town where the Passover Massacre took place—the suicide bombing that finally pushed Israel into dismantling the terrorists in the terrortories[sic].

A senior Hizbullah official said that the organization has set a new target for itself - the city of Netanya, as reported by the Iranian news agency Fars in Lebanon.

But back to Chipmunk Cheeks: He has figured out the master plan.

The radical Islamic group head said Israel’s offensive in Lebanon was part of a conspiracy with the U.S. to create a new Middle East.

“In the new Middle East, there is no place for any resistance movement. The resistance movements in Palestine and Lebanon must be eliminated,” Nasrallah added.

Damn straight, fatso. And believe me when I tell you we are so looking forward to the new Middle East sans, well, you. May a bunker-buster with your name on it find you soon.

Is anyone having problems seeing the blogroll on the right-hand side of the main page? If so, please tell me what browser and which version you are using. It may be a browser thing, or it may be something that I did a while back to the right column.

Update 12:30 p.m.: Well, you were right. There were a number of scripts and strange things in EricJ’s “Urgent Request For Donations” post. I found the first few, but looked more carefully when you all said it was a problem for you, and discovered that I am truly blind. There were, like, a hundred or two of them. Escape characters, javascripts that don’t exist, line endings with the slash-n command—hoo-boy, what a bunch of garbage. Let that be a lesson to us not to cut and paste into WordPress without first either switching to the plain text editor or putting it into something that will strip out the junk. TextPad comes to mind.

What threw me off was the comment saying it has been bad for weeks. I’ve been playing with various things in the sidebars, and thought I’d done something.

Things are all fixed now. And folks, please don’t hesitate to tell me that the display is all screwed up. I use Firefox and forget to check it in IE when I’m home, and, well, unemployed at the moment, so no IE. So I had no way of knowing that the page simply ended at the post in question. You folks probably missed a bunch of stuff that went up earlier that day.

The backstory: I ended a friendship many years ago that was essentially dead in the water due to its being entirely one way—from me to my former friend. She knows my brothers (we grew up together from about the time I was 13 on), and used to see them occasionally and talk to them and ask after me. I pretty much lost contact, and didn’t try to re-establish it, because, well, we’re over.

So imagine my surprise when my brother Eric tells me that he got some kind of news article from MJ about the current war in Israel. Curious, I asked him to forward it to me. Turns out it was a newsletter from David (oh-so-perfectly-named) Icke, a well-known British nutjob and anti-Semite. Except he doesn’t seem to be that well-known; I’ve never heard of him before tonight. A quick Google search, and here’s what I found. Please put down your drinks, and finish chewing that sandwich or snack.

David Vaughan Icke, pronounced /aɪk/ (born April 29, 1952) is a former professional football player, reporter, television sports presenter, and British Green Party national spokesperson. Since 1990, he has been what he calls a “full-time investigator into who and what is really controlling the world.” [1]

The Green Party distanced itself from him in 1991 after he announced that he was “the son of God,” [2] (video) and a “channel for the Christ spirit.” [3] He began to dress only in turquoise and maintained that the world was ruled by a secret group called the “Global Elite”, or “Illuminati”, which he linked to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic tract. [4] [5] In 1999, he published The Biggest Secret, in which he wrote that the secret world government consists of a race of reptilian humanoids known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, and that many prominent figures are, in fact, reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie. [4]

Okay, I get the George W. Bush reference, and the QEII reference, but I am simply stumped that Kris Kristofferson and Boxcar Willie are lizards. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Icke doesn’t like country music. Or maybe he saw the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson version of “A Star is Born” and realized that man simply couldn’t be human.

Of course, Icky gets into the Jew-hatred pretty early on, blahblahblah Rothschilds, blahblahblah Illuminati, blahblahblah Zionists, and effyouverymuch, too, Icky-poo, but hey—he knows what he’s talking about, because he is [use dramatic voice here] The Son Of God.

I’m surprised he doesn’t pretend to be the Big Guy Himself, but then, perhaps Icky-poo feels that might be stretching our willing suspension of disbelief a tad too far.

In any case: MJ was always a sucker for stupid things. She’s the one that bugged and bugged and bugged me until I tried Transcendental Meditation (click here for my most recent views of that vaccuum of time I could have spent doing other things), and went into a host of other things that I refused to follow her into (I can only suspend my disbelief so far, and MJ, well, let’s just say “credulous” is a pretty good description of her intuitive powers). It’s part of why we’re not longer friends. She believes all things paranormal, I believe only in Gd.

What I cannot believe is that she has become an anti-Semite. I choose instead to believe that, true to form, she is utterly clueless about the depths of depravity and bile that Icky-poo is spreading.

In the meantime, I don’t think she’ll be sending my brother any more emails from Icky-poo. He cut and pasted the Wikipedia entry into his response and asked if she had known about Icky’s proclivities towards the, uh, insane.

You know, psychiatry really needs to do a study on paranoids and their relation to anti-Semitism. Maybe they could develop a drug that would help us rid the world of the worst of them.