Went over to Heidi’s for dinner and to try to help her set up her wireless network. We failed at the network, but dinner was a huge success. Grilled chicken.

Sorena is visiting a friend in Texas this week, so Heidi and I had all the chat time in the world, except for dinner with G. But G. was right back to the TV room after dinner, while we finished the bottle of wine. No, wait, it got finished during dinner. We tried sitting outside, but it’s about 90 degrees and humid, so after all three dogs started panting (because they absolutely must follow Heidi wherever she goes, no matter if there’s not enough room, or it’s too hot, or they’re not wanted), we decided perhaps we should move inside. Plus, we were starting to sweat.

A while longer in the air conditioned Great Room, discussing our upcoming trip to the Outer Banks (beach house on a fairly private beach for nearly a week; they rented it and have an extra bedroom, which is now mine), things to bring, things to do, and just plain having a chat like we have not been able to have in a long, long time.

And there may be good news on the job front very soon. I’m hoping to hear tomorrow or Monday, but the signs are pointing towards being able to jump up and down and yell “YAY” pretty soon.

In the meantime, thank you again to those of you who hit the tipjars. I just got the bill for the ambulance, and I’m happy to say I’m only stuck with $51 for it. Thank heavens I got benefits at my last job—the hospital stay was covered.

I’m off to my GP tomorrow, who by now has consulted with the neurologist and read all my charts, and who will tell me in plain English what he thinks happened to me the other week.

I suppose all of this is a roundabout way of saying: I know there’s news out there. But for the first time in a very long time, I am far too relaxed to write about it. It can wait ’til morning. Of course I’m thinking about my friends in Israel and Lebanon; stay safe, all of you. (And the innocents of Lebanon, too.)

I am going to eat a few more of those Edy’s Dibs (knew I shouldn’t have bought them) and watch my soaps and bitch at the handycam that AMC thinks is new and improved.

Dear Idiot who thought the hand-held camera look would make your soap seem more real:

It doesn’t.

Let me remind you of a fact you seem to be forgetting: All My Children is a soap opera. Soap. Opera.

It is not high drama. It is not Shakespeare. And while it has some pretty damned good moments from time to time, it is, ultimately, a five-day-a-week continuing story. A serial drama about fake people, in fake towns, who hold fake jobs that they almost never go to, and yet, get paid fabulous wages for. It’s about fake families with fake long-lost relatives returning from fake amnesia attacks, fake medical procedures, and fake children who age from eight to eighteen in a matter of months.

In fact, we love soap operas precisely because they have so little to do with reality. They are an escape, people. We don’t watch them because we think we’re going to learn something from them, other than who is sleeping with whom, and how outrageous the writers are going to get during sweeps.

Your shaky camera angles do nothing but annoy your loyal viewers.

Kindly get over yourselves, and give us back a steady camera shot.

Best,

A fan who will stop watching if you don’t get rid of the stupid new hand-held camera thing.

This post was originally published in February of 2005.

The wandering Jew

Masked Boy: Go back to Germany! [unintelligible]. Get [the hell] back to Germany!

The world does not like the Jews. Oh no, they say reflexively, that isn’t true. Some people don’t like Jews, but certainly not everyone. No, not everyone. But indifference and inaction is as good as anti-Semitism, because the end result is the same: Dead Jews.

Sixty years after the Russian liberation of Auschwitz, 500 Russian journalists and 20 politicians sent a letter to their Prosecutor General, asking for an investigation into, and outlawing of, Jewish organizations in Russia. Why? Because they are “extremist.” Because they are “anti-Christian and inhumane, which practices extend even to ritual murders.” They even blame Jews themselves for anti-Semitic acts that have taken place in Russia, to “take punitive measures against patriots,” whatever that means. It doesn’t really matter what it means; the interpretation is clear: Jews are always to blame. Jews bring punishment upon themselves.

The Russians would know about things like this, because they have a long, bloody history of anti-Semitism. The Russians would know about this because they are the authors of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Czarist forgeries that have been used against Jews for nearly a century, and are even now being promoted in Muslim nations as the truth behind worldwide Jewish conspiracies. The Russians would know about this because even now, the Prosecutor General said he would not follow up on the charges because 19 of the 20 legislators withdrew their support from it—not because the charges were baseless and anti-Semitic. Because the letter was withdrawn.

The Russians do not like the Jews.

Europe does not like the Jews. Last year, the European Union commissioned a report on European anti-Semitism. When it was finished, they refused to release it. They said it was flawed. The real reason? The report showed that much of Europe’s anti-Semitism was attributed to its Muslim immigrants, and the Europeans are reluctant to portray Muslims in a bad light—even when the facts demand honesty and openness. The report was released anyway, and published by many Jewish sites—but overlooked almost entirely by the rest of the world media.

In Holland, soccer fans chant “gas the Jews.” Dutch soccer fans have been yelling anti-Semitic slogans for decades, but now they’ve added this charming phrase: “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.”

French anti-Semitic attacks have nearly doubled. And for some time, the French were refusing to admit there was a problem. Now, they’re making an effort to stop the synagogue fires, physical attacks, cemetery desecrations, and nonstop anti-Semitism from Muslim immigrants in French schools.

Europe does not like the Jews.

England does not like the Jews. In 2003, the Independent published a cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating palestinian babies. The cartoonist ultimately won an award for it. Tom Dalyell accuses a cabal of Jews of running Washington, mentions that Jack Straw has a Jewish heritage, then says he’s not an anti-Semite. Anti-Semitic attacks are up sharply in Great Britain, egged on by a media outcry against Israel. (Remember, Great Britain was the loudest and shrillest about the massacre-that-wasn’t in Jenin.) Muslim leaders boycotted Britain’s commemoration of the Holocaust. Rabbis are attacked and beaten on the streets. Synagogues are being burned down. A London community is suffering a series of anti-Semitic physical attacks. Cemeteries are desecrated. And diplomats complain that Israel, that “shitty little country,” is the cause of all the world’s problems.

England does not like the Jews.

Muslims do not like the Jews. Really, this category is almost too broad to enumerate. But let us use mathematics, one of the Muslim world’s proudest achievements. In 1948, there were 150,000 Jews in Iraq, 75,000 in Egypt, 100,000 in Iran, 30,000 in Syria, 20,000 in Lebanon, 38,000 in Libya, 105,000 in Tunisia, 55,000 in Yemen, and 140,000 in Algeria.

Today, the total population of Jews in all of those countries numbers less than 20,000.Muslim anti-Semitism? Yeah, we’ve got that.

Muslims do not like the Jews.

Palestine is not for Jews. An Israeli statesman tells an anecdote: The graffiti in Europe during the 1930s read “Jews, go to Palestine.” The graffiti in Europe today says”Jews, out of Palestine.”

The two-state solution is under attack, with much of the world starting to get behind the one-state solution, a “completely democratic” state, with all palestinian refugees (including, of course, third-generation palestinians who were born in different countries entirely) flooding the state of Israel and creating, in effect, a palestinian state with a Jewish minority. In other words, no state for you, Jews. No state for you.

Palestine is not for Jews.

Jews, go back to Germany. Germany’s Jewish population was in danger of dying out, at fewer than 30,000 only a few years ago. Then the German parliament enacted a law that allowed generous Jewish immigration from Russian Jews fleeing persecution, and the population is now at 200,000, close to what it was before the Holocaust. That, however, appears to be the limit of Germany’s patience for Jewish immigration. They don’t want any more Jews in Germany.

And so the circle closes, and the Jews are left outside.

The world does not like the Jews. The Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim says that Jew hatred has three stages:

You cannot live among us as Jews.
You cannot live among us.
You cannot live.

The world does not like the Jews.

Hezbullah:

The report of the killings in Israel created a feeling of pride among members of the organization. Announcers on Hizbullah’s al-Manar television stations wore wide smiles and, over the course of the broadcast, aired militant TV clips and messages from viewers, who called in to support the organization’s continued operations against Israel.

Israel:

The prime minister expressed regret for the attack in the southern Lebanon village of Qana on Sunday, which killed 56 people, among them 37 children.*

“I am sorry from bottom of heart for all deaths of children or women in Qana,” Olmert said. “We did not search them out… they were not our enemies and we did not look for them.”

And the world calls Israeli actions barbaric.

*The total killed has now been changed to 28. No word on how many children were killed. Funny, how that total keeps going down, and the story keeps changing.

Well, sort of.

You see, Ted Rall quotes the following news story:

If the non-Jewish population continues to outpace Jewish population growth, Israel could become an underdeveloped Third World country by 2020, a population expert predicts.

That’s the warning being sounded by University of Haifa’s professor Arnon Sofer. He says there is now a demographic balance in the number of Jews and non-Jews in the region from the Jordan River to the coast and running the length of Israel from north to south.

“Today, there are 5 million Jews and 5 million non-Jews. The latter figure is composed of 4.5 million Arabs and the remainder non-Jewish immigrants, mainly from the former Soviet Union, and foreign workers,” he told the Jerusalem Post.

And he uses those figures to state “Half of Israelis are Jews” in this cartoon.

Minor problem, though. The phrase “in the region from the Jordan River to the coast and running the length of Israel from north to south” means Israel, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Or, in Ted’s language, that’s Israel plus something called “Palestine.”

So by quoting the story as a source, he’s acknowledging that the territory Israel won in the 1967 war to defend its existence is legitimately held?

No, not really. Because the cartoon (in Ted’s usual rudimentary fashion) shows that Israel is only the 1967 Borders Israel, minus Gaza and Judea and Samaria.

So, despite his protest:

I have read similar statements elsewhere; thus my cartoon.

He’s wrong.

But then, you knew that already. Because it’s Ted, and it’s safe to assume that anything Ted says or draws is wrong.

Or is it? Ted does get something right in the cartoon…

He has no border between Lebanon and Syria like the maps Bashar Assad uses as bedsheets for his fantasies of Shia conquest. (Although that may also be a result of Ted’s rudimentary drawing skills.)

Once again, the president of Iran, a UN member state, calls for the destruction of Israel, a UN member state, in violation of the UN Charter, and his calls are met with silence from the international community.

PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia Aug 3, 2006 (AP)— Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday the solution to the Middle East crisis is to destroy Israel. In a speech during an emergency meeting of Muslim leaders, Ahmadinejad also called for an immediate halt to fighting in Lebanon between Israel and the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah.

“Although the main solution is for the elimination of the Zionist regime, at this stage an immediate cease-fire must be implemented,” he said.

Ahmadinejad, who has drawn international condemnation with previous calls for Israel to be wiped off the map, said the Middle East would be better off “without the existence of the Zionist regime.”

Israel “is an illegitimate regime, there is no legal basis for its existence,” he said.

Oh, wait, there’s one nation that responded to Gorilla Boy’s threats.

In Jerusalem, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev responded by noting the ties between Ahmadinejad’s regime and Hezbollah.

“Our operation in Lebanon is designed to neutralize one of the long arms of Iran Hezbollah,” Regev said. “Hezbollah is their proxy, being used as an instrument of Teheran to advance their extremist agenda and the blow to Hezbollah is a blow to Iranian interests and a blow to all extremist jihadist forces in the region.”

Wait, a search of Google News found me one source that is protesting the Iranian call for the destruction of Israel: Tony Blair.

In a press conference early Thursday afternoon, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said that he finds it astounding that President Ahmadinejad has called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” as a solution to the Middle East’s problems.

“If someone else were to call for Iran or Syria to be wiped off the map, people would be tearing the house down!” he added.

This is true. Imagine, if you will, that Israel called for the destruction of Iran. Just imagine the reverberations in such a case. In fact, let us remember the reverberations when President Bush called Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the “Axis of Evil.” (And by the way, he’s been proven right.) The world roared in outrage.

And yet, not a peep when the president of a nation threatens the destruction of another sovereign nation, as well as the legitimacy of its existence—which was, of course, upheld by the UN in 1948.

The Jew-hatred of the Islamic world continues unabated and unchallenged, even as Israel is fighting for her life.

The world does not like the Jews.

Update: The French have weighed in. Still waiting on Kofi.

Seven civilians were murdered in Israel today. Hezbullah proves that they’ve got the terrorist two-step down perfectly. They rained dozens of rockets on northern Israel, then paused. When the residents came out to survey the damage, they sent another barrage–which killed three people on their balconies. Five civilians were critically injured; the death toll may rise.

I await the world’s criticism of Hezbullah. I await the condemnations of the military attack on civilian areas. I await the world’s use of the word “massacre” to describe the death of seven Israeli civilians on Tisha b’Av, the Ninth of Av, one of the most mournful holidays of the year.

No, not really. I expect no condemnation at all from Kofi Annan, nor from the rest of the UN/EU crowd. They do not care about dead Jews. The world has proven this, time and time again.

Missiles are the Hezbullah’s main strength. The cowards are afraid to face the IDF in straightforward combat. This so-called “A-Team,” the so-called “best-armed, best-trained” anti-Israel force is nothing but a bunch of untrained terrorists who have rocket and missile launchers. Got a clue for you: I can do a hell of a lot of damage on a group of soldiers if you teach me how to use a missile launcher, and then give me a large supplies of missile and the high ground.

The term “antitank” is misleading; the missiles were originally designed to be used against tanks, but the IDF’s Merkava tanks and upgraded armored fighting vehicles are capable of withstanding most missiles in Hizbullah’s arsenal. But Hizbullah isn’t using them only against tanks. The range of these missiles - up to three kilometers - and the force of their explosive charges make them ideal for attacking groups of soldiers and IDF positions from afar.

Over the last two weeks, the tactic used by many of the Hizbullah teams has been to avoid close-range combat, where IDF soldiers’ high level of training gives them the upper hand. Instead, the Hizbullah men have been moving to positions high above villages and continuing to fire missiles at the IDF forces. Large stores of missiles were prepared in the hills in advance, for this eventuality.

[...] Col. Ofek Buchris, a former Golani battalion commander and the officer now in charge of offensive operations on the northern front, said this week, “Hizbullah aren’t as good soldiers as people have been saying, they don’t have good combat skills. In shooting battles, we beat them every time. What they do have is good antitank capabilities.

“They were trained for this especially by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. For intents and purposes, Hizbullah is Iran’s advance division here.”

Israel’s refusal to use the same tactics against Hezbullah—for fear of killing civilians—results in the deaths of Israel soldiers and civilians.

STFU, Kofi Annan. STFU, EU. STFU, Jimmy Carter. The humanitarians are the ones being fired on by Hezbullah.

And please: STFU, morons who think that Hezbullah has the strength to beat the IDF. If they had, you’d see pitched battles between two armies. Hezbullah is nothing more than a better-armed group of terrorists than Hamas or Al-Aqsa or Islamic Jihad. They’re what you get when you add Iranian petrodollars and Syrian support to the Jew-hatred that suffuses the Middle East.

Hezbullah can’t win this fight, and Hezbullah won’t win this fight—even though the world is trying to stack the deck against Israel. It is a war of existential proportions. Let us not pretend otherwise.

I know whose side I’m on.

So I have the news on mute and I’m writing an email, and I glance up and the Fox news crawl says:

Meat warnings from Massachusetts to S. Carolina

And I’m thinking, “What the hell is a ‘meat warning’?” Did someone find e. coli again?

Oh. Heat warning.

And I just got these glasses, too.

It’s only 92 F. in the shade right now in Richmond. Heading for triple digits again. Tig’s outside at the moment, but I suspect he’ll be indoors by noon.

Pat Buchanan is, probably, the best known adversary of Israel in the Washington corridors of power. If his bio linked above is to be believed, the man is an odious mixture or saurian conservatism, racism, isolationism and a few other isms*, not the least of them ZOG-ism. He so strongly believes in Elders’ control of everything that one wonders at his courage. After all, he rarely opens his big mouth without spewing some anti-Israeli drivel. Unless he is our paid agent**, this valiant approach leaves one wondering about his health.

Lately he publishes anti-Israeli articles non-stop. He seems to become an expert in Middle-Eastern affairs, although after a few reads the articles start to blur into a jumble of self-contradictory and bellicose utterings by somebody who is so used to descend to the general public with the tablets, that he could be hardly bothered to check his own texts for contradictions.

There is a lot of stuff in the four articles linked above (out of many more, no doubt) that shows the unmatched stupidity of the author. From the advice to use ground offensive (thanks, IDF probably knows better when to start it) and a diagnosis of the Vietnam syndrome here (we call it Lebanon syndrome, but thanks anyway) via the usual complaints about the almighty ZOG(true!) to stupid questions that seem self-evident to Pat:

But is it Hezbollah that is using U.S.-built F-16s, with precision-guided bombs and 155-mm artillery pieces to wreak death and devastation on Lebanon?

No, Pat - Hezbolla is using Syria and Iran produced rockets - some of 220 mm caliber and a lot of larger ones are in waiting. So?

But there is one passage that takes the proverbial cake:

Within 48 hours, it was apparent Israel was exploiting Hezbollah’s attack to execute a preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon — i.e, the collective punishment of a people and nation for the crimes of a renegade militia they could not control.

Aha! We are caught with our pants down. The only country in the whole blue world that has a military plan dealing with potential hostilities against a neighbour that is in a state of war with this country! Wow! Good job, Pat, the CIA could use a talent like this.

And that burp re “renegade militia” - somebody please call Pat and tell him that Hezbollah is represented in the parliament and even in the government of Lebanon.

Regarding the inability of Lebanese government to control Hezbollah: my glands responsible for generation of spit are out of my control right now, so that wet 20mm caliber globule flying in Pat’s direction is not followed by an apology. And all the following ones too…

But the passage in question does not stop there:

It was the moral equivalent of a municipal police going berserk, shooting, killing and ravaging an African-American community, because Black Panthers had ambushed and killed cops.

Of all the earthly images our valiant fighter against “disproportional response” has chosen the one involving African-American community, so close to his (dark, no question about it) heart! Would the wonders ever cease? Since when has Pat Buchanan become a champion of the African-American community problems? But to answer this mind-boggling parallel: if the above mentioned community will decide to become a collective warehouse of 12,000 rockets for the Black Panthers use, I think that even the ardent protector of this community like Pat B. may reconsider his stance…

Our Israeli friends appear to be playing us for fools.

The royal “we” in use by a citizen of American republic? There is one fool on my horizon at the moment to play with. Guess who it is, Pat.

(*) No, we would not blame Pat in anti-Semitism. SimplyJews rarely use this accusation, save in some clear-cut cases. Besides, if you look (again) at Pat’s bio, he accused Hitler of anti-Semitism. Does one need other proof that Pat is absolutely not anti-Semitic?
(**) No, he isn’t - failed the entrance IQ test.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews