Vote for Shire Network News in the Wizbang Weblog Awards. Because we’re just. That. Good.

Okay, mostly because I’m asking nicely.

You can vote once a day until the awards are over, a practice which I still find extremely stupid, but hey, they’re not my awards. I just try to win them.

Tony Blair:

“This is something that I know you feel deeply and passionately about,” Blair told Bush. “You are the first president who committed yourself to the two-state solution.”

From Wikipedia on Harry Truman:

In 1946, an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry recommended the gradual establishment of two states in Palestine, with neither Jews nor Arabs dominating. However, there was little public support for the two-state proposal, and Britain, its empire in rapid decline, was under pressure to withdraw from Palestine quickly because of attacks on British forces by armed Zionist groups. At the urging of the British, a special U.N. committee recommended the immediate partitioning of Palestine into two states, and with Truman’s support, this initiative was approved by the General Assembly in 1947.

Shouldn’t Harry Truman be considered the first, or was he more realistic about Arabic/Islamic rejectionism than George W. Bush is?

James Baker is shaping up to be the Republican Party’s next Pat Buchanan. You want me to vote Republican? Shyeah. Because of tactics like this? Right.

WASHINGTON - According to Thursday’s issue of the conservative Washington Times’ Insight magazine, the White House was looking into proposal by former Secretary of State James Baker to hold a Middle East peace conference without Israel .

According to the report, the United States government was going to consider the possibility of having a second Madrid Conference in which Arab states would participate, including Syria and Iran, but with without Israel being invited to participate.

As reported by the magazine, officials said the conference would be promoted as a forum to discuss Iraq’s future, but actually focus on Arab demands for Israel to withdraw from territories captured in the 1967 war.

A source in the US government was quoted in the report as saying, “As Baker sees this, the conference would provide a unique opportunity for the US to strike a deal without Jewish pressure. This has become the hottest proposal examined by the foreign policy people over the last month.”

Other sources in the government told the magazine that the proposal was supported by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Under Secretary of Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, and National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

So, they want to exclude Israel from a conference that affects her future directly, and they want to do this because of those horrible Jews, who have the nerve to have an interest in the outcome of matters that concern the land of Israel—land of their origin.

And they want all this, because—and this is the kicker—it will affect the war in Iraq.

No, it won’t. Iraqi Shi’ites aren’t murdering Iraqi Sunnis because of Israel’s treatment of the palestinians. Syria isn’t supplying arms and terrorists to Iraq because of Israel’s treatment of the palestinians. Iran isn’t supplying arms and soldiers to Iraq because of Israel’s treatment of the palestinians. All of these things will continue, even if Israel gives back every inch of land she got in 1967.

It’s the Islamism, stupid.

Yasser Arafat was given the best shot at a palestinian state, and he turned it down—because Israel is on an Islamic “waqf” and Islamists will never acknowledge that the land is no longer theirs.

Eff you, Baker, and eff your cohorts at State who think this is a good idea. It is reprehensible and blatantly anti-Semitic to exclude Israel because of “Jewish pressure.” But then, we already knew Baker doesn’t like Jews.

No other country in the world would stand for agreeing to the outcome of a conference that didn’t include it. I don’t believe Israel is going to agree to whatever this “conference” comes up with.

At least, that’s what one out of three Ukrainians said in a poll.

I guess it’s a good thing for them that most Ukrainian Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, hm?

One in three Ukrainians do not want Jews to be citizens of their country, a survey found.

Conducted by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, the survey found that 36 percent of respondents do not want to see Jews as citizens of Ukraine, compared to 26 percent in a similar survey conducted in 1994.

Researchers also found that anti-Semitic attitudes were especially widespread among younger respondents.

The survey of 2,000 respondents in 24 regions of Ukraine was conducted Oct. 13-24 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

And to think, just last week, a former reader here insisted I was dead wrong about worldwide anti-Semitism being both widespread and on the rise.

Uh-huh. Because it’s so normal to say that you don’t want Jews living in your country in response to a poll question.