My friends (especially some of them that are more into newspaper business than I am) always try to calm me down when I go on a rave about the titles some articles carry. It is not the authors, they tell me, it is the editors who perpetrate these small crimes (mainly crimes of stupidity, which is not considered a crime in most places and cases anyhow). Still, I do like some moderate raving from time to time - gets your old red cells moving.

The title that got me raving this time is Hamas fails to condemn Eilat bomb that killed three from Independent. I don’t know whether this title is invented by a bored/stupid editor or by the author (Donald Macintyre), but it could not be farther from reality.

Macintyre himself does confuse the issue even more:

Hamas, which controls the Palestinian Authority, notably refrained from condemning the bombing, with one of its Gaza spokesmen, Fawzi Barhoum, calling it a “natural response” to Israeli military policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as its boycott of the authority. ” So long as there is occupation, resistance is legitimate,” he said.

So, the article offers a spectrum of options, from “fails to condemn” via “refrained from condemning” to “calling it a natural response”.

I am an admirer of the British knack of understatement. Its pinnacles like this one from Wiki rarely fail to fill me with joy:

Event: British Admiral David Beatty had just watched two of his battle-cruisers explode and disintegrate under German fire at the Battle of Jutland, May 31, 1916. Comment: “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today…”

But in the case of this Indy’s article I seriously doubt whether pegging an outright support of the homicidal act as a failure to condemn it is an understatement.

Or just too much eagerness to embellish the stark and ugly reality of Hamas and what it stands for.

Bloody Indy - and this is an understatement of the century.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews

Christianity today reviews three books on Israel, including Jimmy Carter’s execrable “analysis.”

Carter is not an anti-Jewish ideologue. His views are not irrational, they are just unbalanced—driven by an unquenchable private need for vindication. He cannot let go of the fact that the only part of his Camp David Accords of 1978-1979 which has lasted (and that just barely) is the achievement of a Peace Treaty and exchange of diplomatic recognition between Israel and Egypt. He proclaimed at the time that the three parties (the United States, Egypt, and Israel) were committed under the Accords to persuade the Palestinians and all the Arab nations to resolve their quarrel with Israel along parallel lines. Because Israeli and American opinion can be affected by the disquisitions of former presidents and because Arab opinion cannot, Carter has been working out his frustration regarding the failure of the larger hopes for “Middle East peace” against the former ever since, seeking to shame us all into setting things straight.

But Carter’s Camp David formula was built on a fantasy: that the Arab world’s complaint against Israel has to do with geography. The creation of the State of Israel is an intolerable reversal of the judgment of the Prophet Muhammad that, for their refusal to heed his voice, “humiliation and wretchedness were stamped upon them [the Jews] and they were visited with wrath from Allah” (Sura II: 61; cf., Sura III: 112). It is for this unforgivable assault on the credibility of Islam that Israel cannot be permitted to stand.

This one, on Cross on the Star of David: The Christian World in Israel’s Foreign Policy, 1948-1967, is fascinating.

Among the themes which figured in early dealings between Israeli authorities and the churches were titles to property, missionary activities, the right to run schools and other facilities, and the right of representatives of the churches who are not citizens to travel in and out of Israel or to reside and to work in Israel. Of interest to historians of foreign policy are the connections that Israeli authorities made between settlement of these local issues and the behavior of parent church bodies in Europe as well as attitudes of nation-states which had among their citizens large numbers of members of certain churches which in the past had behaved as their protectors.

The recorded exchanges between the many parties to these negotiations make for colorful reading. Even more colorful are internal memoranda and diary entries which Bialer has located and quoted. We are shown a great deal that is not pretty. Here is Foreign Minister Sharett on his negotiations with Vatican principals (from the pope down) over the latter’s refusal to recognize the State and its determination to wreck Israel’s chances for survival by imposing “international status” upon Jerusalem: “[This is for them] a matter of retribution, the squaring of an account concerning something that happened here in Jerusalem, if I am not mistaken, 1,916 years ago when Jesus was crucified… . [They are saying] that the Jews need to know once and for all what they did to us and now there is an opportunity to let them feel it.” Here is Cardinal Tardini, the Vatican’s Secretary of State: “I have always been convinced that there was no real need to establish that state… . Its existence is a constant source of danger of war in the Middle East. Now that Israel exists, there is, of course, no possibility of destroying it, but every day we pay the price of this mistake.” As for diplomacy: “There is no possibility of contact or negotiations with the killers of God.” This is the kind of history that grownups like, because it requires us to make our own judgments about motives and meaning.

I think that one should go on my reading list.

AP wasn’t my personal cup of tea, there are people who are much better in this specific subject.

But I have stumbled by accident on an article Palestinian bomber had lost his daughter by one Sarah El Deeb, AP writer. The title triggered a chain of guesses even before I started to read the text: uhu, probably these Zionists deliberately (as usual, of course), shot the bomber’s daughter to pieces, which act of murderous genocidal maniacs was the turning point in the life of the young idealistic Mohammed (this is the name of the bomber).

It appears that I was wrong:

The Palestinian who blew himself up in the Israeli resort of Eilat on Monday was unemployed, despondent over the death of his baby daughter and driven to avenge his best friend’s killing by Israeli troops, relatives said.

Dozens of neighbors celebrated outside 20-year-old Mohammed Siksik’s house after the fiery attack that killed him and three other people, waving his photo and praising him as a martyr. Inside, his mother greeted mourners with a smile.

“He told me: ‘Meeting God is better for me than this whole world,’” said Rowayda Siksik, wearing a white veil.

She said her son told her only that he was going to carry out an operation inside Israel. “He said, ‘Goodbye, I am going, mother. Forgive me.’ I told him, ‘God be with you.’”

Siksik never found steady work, getting by with occasional jobs with his father, installing tiles. “You can’t find work in this place,” his mother said. Her son lost his 7-month-old daughter to a nerve disease, she said.

A quick analysis of the above quote shows:

• That the bomber’s daughter has succumbed to a disease - not to a hail of Israeli bullets
• That the bomber was unemployed
• That at some unspecified time IDF killed his friend, for unspecified reasons
• That dozens of neighbors (also called “mourners” further) celebrated the occasion
• That the “bereaved” mother is greeting the “mourners” with a smile
• That the above mentioned mother gave her son a blessing, sending him to commit the murders

I was trying for a moment to imagine an Israeli, some unemployed Moshe (we have quite a lot of unemployed too, unfortunately) whose daughter was taken from this life by a disease and whose friend was killed by a Palestinian bullet or bomb or by a Hizballah’ rocket. I have tried to see Moshe building himself an explosive belt and going to Gaza or West Bank to blow himself up in a bakery or pizzeria or hotel.

I have failed.

But, assuming that our Moshe succeeds in this imaginary task, I have tried to imagine an AP (or CNN, or AFP, or Reuters) writer sitting down a day after the atrocity that has taken three innocent lives and writing an article that will be as full of understanding and sympathy to the plight of Moshe as the article we are talking about here is to the plight of Mohammad. I have tried to imagine an article that will not mention the perfidy of the insidious Zionists, the brainwashing that Moshe underwent in his synagogue (if our Moshe was religious, otherwise in his Zionist cell). I have tried to imagine that this article will not mention Moshe’s innocent Arab victims in more than one measly sentence…

I have failed again.

And of course, I have made a supreme effort to imagine the Jewish crowd celebrating our Moshe’s “martyrdom” near Moshe’s house and his mother smilingly receiving the celebrating “mourners”. And handing around video clips with Moshe bravely embracing that AK-47, with the Israeli flag on the background, berating the Palestinians and singing Hatikva just before embarking on his last murderous adventure.

I have failed again.

Oh, but I am reminded by the usual suspects - it is that occupation of Gaza…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews

The backstory: I called Sarah to tell her I’m going to change my name to Smith, because yet another person from my past found me via Google and the weblog. (Okay, so I dated this guy [censored] years ago, and he wasn’t a nutjob, but still, we barely dated, and it was a long, long time ago, and isn’t there a statute of limitations on remembering names that far back? Hell, I forgot his name, but he remembered mine and even remembered how to spell it!)

Anyway, while talking to Sarah, she told me about this extremely strange entry on Wikipedia (she got it from Scott of AMCGTLD. It’s a giant pink bunny in the mountains of Italy. So we’re looking at the picture (you can click on it to see an enlargement), and Sarah points out that there are people on it. And I say, “What’s that stuff between the arm and the leg? It looks like poop.” She says, “I think it’s guts.” So then she clicks on the Gelitin website and says, “Holy cow, it is guts, I was just kidding!” So then I start reading this:

The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent; and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy.

The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitÌs body, a country dropped from the sky; ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines.

Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel. Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside.

Such is the happiness which made this rabbit.

i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me.

Oh. My. God.

These people are seriously ill. Or, at the very least, they have some major potty-training issues.

Those really are its guts. And what is up with this:

ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines.

So do you think the weirdness comes from being artists, or from being European, or from being European artists? Because any way you look at this, it’s effing lunacy.

On the other hand, it sure got me off the subject of guy I dated for a brief time [censored] years ago suddenly popping up in my email.