I thought I could not possibly loathe the ICRC any more than I already do.

I was wrong.

I was really wrong.

I’m sure the apologists will say that Eichmann just “slipped through” somehow.

That’s not good enough.

The passport used by high-ranking Nazi Aldolf Eichmann as he escaped to Argentina after World War II has been turned over to the Holocaust Museum in Buenos Aires after a judge stumbled upon it in a musty court file.

Eichmann, a leader of a campaign of mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe during the war, fled to Argentina in 1950 under the alias “Ricardo Klement.”

I’m really not fond of Argentina, either. It astonishes me that even now, so many nations protect their Nazis, using the excuse that the survivors are now old and infirm. Yeah. They weren’t old and infirm when they were murdering Jews, though.

My new hosting service is Bluehost, a service that I have been extremely happy with. Here’s the main reason why:

In the last month with my old hosting service, I received a link from Instapundit. The resulting traffic caused my old hosting service to redirect most of the referrers from Glenn away from my site. No, I am not kidding. They forced a redirect error to reduce server load. The traffic was only several hundred hits per hour, according to Sitemeter, but I can’t tell if that was before or after their little miracle cure.

Well, I am currently undergoing about twice the amount of traffic with another Instalink. As far as I can tell, my site is unaffected by the extra load, which is just under 1,000 hits per hour.

Another great service from Bluehost: If I can’t get to my site due to server load from someone else on the shared server, I can go to a page to check my server. Every time this has happened, within about a minute, the message is changed to “An administrator is checking the server load,” and shortly thereafter, my site is back to normal.

If you’re looking for a new hosting service, I’m recommending Bluehost. They don’t believe in ignoring their little guys and only making sure the big guns have excellent service. Big or little, they’re treated the same.

And no, I won’t name my old hosting service. I’d rather not play that game. I’m not going to get into a nasty blogwar. I’d much rather pay a compliment to Bluehost. They rock.

And thanks to a reader, I’ve just become a Bluehost affiliate. If you sign up through this link, I get cash.

And a banner.

Or maybe this one. I can’t decide.

Here it is again.

Ayalon, 61, has pledged to lead the centrist Labor out of its year-old partnership with Olmert if the prime minister’s Kadima Party does not choose a new leader.

Notes: The AP has not yet given Kadima an adjective. But they’re warming up the “hard-right” for Likud (which they already call “hardline”).

Opinion polls forecast the Likud Party, led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would win handily if elections were held today. Likud takes a hard line against concessions to the Palestinians, whereas both Barak and Ayalon are willing to cede large chunks of land in a final peace deal.

Say, remember that Soviet Mig-21 fighter pilot who landed in Israel and defected to the west? The one responsible for America getting the information we needed about the Soviet Mig-21?

It was an Israeli Mossad operation, not a spontaneous defection, as he told the press back in the day.

For the West, this was a dream come true. The Mig-21 was considered the number one fighter plane during the Cold War, and the United States had no clue as to how it was built, what its weaknesses were and what weapons should be developed against it.

Captain Munir Redfa, the Iraqi fighter pilot who flew the jet to Israel, said that he decided to defect to the West because of the remorse and guilt he felt over attacking Kurdish villages with napalm bombs.

But Redfa’s defection was not spontaneous, but rather the result of a comprehensive and bold Mossad-initiated operation, which was named “The Blue Bird – Operation Diamond,” and which ended a 20-year long US embargo on Israel.

[...] According to the film, the idea to try and obtain a Mig-21 was first raised in 1965, when then IAF commander Ezer Weizman asked Meir Amit, who was head of the Mossad at the time, “Get me a Mig-21.” Rehavia Vardi, who passed away last year, was appointed to command the operation.

[...] After a month in Israel, the Mig-21 was transferred to the American Air Force for testing and intelligence analysis. Thanks to this Israeli “gift,” Israel was finally able to replace its French Vautour and Mirage jets with the excellent US-made Phantoms.

And they all lived happily every after. Well, no, they didn’t. There are some in the U.S. intelligence community who are actively anti-Israel (if not actively anti-Semitic), who don’t realize that America’s partnership with Israel is still yielding immense advantages (U.S. troops have been trained by the IDF in house-to-house urban combat, such as they have to face in Iraq).

They made a movie out of it. I’d love to see the film. I wonder if it will make it to the U.S.

Glenn links to an article about the Creation Museum, which has dinosaurs roaming the earth with Adam and Eve. Feh. Mark Twain beat the Creationists by a century, with the Diary of Adam and Eve.

MONDAY NOON.–If there is anything on the planet that she is not interested in it is not in my list. There are animals that I am indifferent to, but it is not so with her. She has no discrimination, she takes to all of them, she thinks they are all treasures, every new one is welcome.

When the mighty brontosaurus came striding into camp, she regarded it as an acquisition, I considered it a calamity; that is a good sample of the lack of harmony that prevails in our views of things. She wanted to domesticate it, I wanted to make it a present of the homestead and move out. She believed it could be tamed by kind treatment and would be a good pet; I said a pet twenty-one feet high and eight-four feet long would be no proper thing to have about the place, because, even with the best intentions and without meaning any harm, it could sit down on the house and mash it, for any one could see by the look of its eye that it was absent-minded.

Still, her heart was set upon having that monster, and she couldn’t give it up. She thought we could start a dairy with it, and wanted me to help milk it; but I wouldn’t; it was too risky. The sex wasn’t right, and we hadn’t any ladder anyway. Then she wanted to ride it, and look at the scenery. Thirty or forty feet of its tail was lying on the ground, like a fallen tree, and she thought she could climb it, but she was mistaken; when she got to the steep place it was too slick and down she came, and would have hurt herself but for me.

Was she satisfied now? No. Nothing ever satisfies her but demonstration; untested theories are not in her line, and she won’t have them. It is the right spirit, I concede it; it attracts me; I feel the influence of it; if I were with her more I think I should take it up myself. Well, she had one theory remaining about this colossus: she thought that if we could tame it and make him friendly we could stand in the river and use him for a bridge. It turned out that he was already plenty tame enough–at least as far as she was concerned– so she tried her theory, but it failed: every time she got him properly placed in the river and went ashore to cross over him, he came out and followed her around like a pet mountain. Like the other animals. They all do that.

A person’s power of self-persuasion is nothing short of miraculous. Watching the comedy unfolding in the Hay festival with the new darling of the British press, one Ghazi Hamad, I really do not know whether to laugh or to cry. The miraculous power that makes apparently intelligent people believe any outrageous lie and disregard the truth they are facing is really the best builder of mental walls. Read the report by Katharine Viner who is the features editor of the Guardian and, incidentally “the editor of the award-winning play My Name is Rachel Corrie” (nothing wrong here, it is all about art after all). The report deals with a momentous event - appearance of the above mentioned Hamas’ luminary on stage at the Hay festival for an interview.

In the beginning of the article Ms Viner goes out of her way to show how excited she is by that rare treat. She does not forget to mention that Hamad spent five years in Israeli jails, as his proof of authenticity, obviously (well, she didn’t tell why, so it is your guess), on the other hand she forgot to mention that he spent the same amount of time in Palestinian Authority jails. All around guy, so to say.

But then the report becomes just a recording of the guest speaker highlights. I shall skip most of it, including some pearls like “Arafat was poisoned by the Jooz”, “10 months of constant shelling of Gaza after the election” etc. Let’s focus on one item only:

He stated what is becoming the increasingly familiar Hamas position that Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders would effectively mean the end of the conflict.

So, Ms Viner has detected a growing peaceful tendency of Hamas. Interesting, and quite a pity the people of Sderot are not up to date on this one. But let’s leave Sderot for a while, what about Mr Hamas… sorry, Mr. Hamad himself? After all, according to Wiki, his opinion is quite different:

“Israel should be wiped from the face of the Earth. It is an animal state that recognises no human worth. It is a cancer that should be eradicated.”

And how about another, quite important official of the same outfit, already quoted here:

Sheik Ahmad Bahr, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, declared during a Friday sermon at a Sudan mosque that America and Israel will be annihilated and called upon Allah to kill Jews and Americans “to the very last one.”

Oh, but it was all told in Arabic, which Ms Viner does not know, probably.

But no, I do not really think that Ms Viner (and too many others like her, unfortunately) is a fool. She just wouldn’t see, wouldn’t listen and wouldn’t believe anything that interferes with her desire to accept and to embrace one Ghazi Hamad and to encourage his burning desire for peace at all costs. Including the cost of wiping out that animal state.

She and others of her persuasion would believe this as well:

Alan Johnston, the BBC correspondent who was seized more than two months ago in Gaza, is healthy and unharmed and efforts to release him are “continuous”, a Hamas member of the Palestinian government said. Ghazi Hamad, the government spokesman, said he knew the group holding Mr Johnston and added that he was dealing with them personally as part of efforts to secure the correspondent’s release. “It is a small group which is holding Alan,” he told an audience at the Guardian Hay literary festival. “It is not secret, I met with them, what I know is that Alan is healthy, well and in a very good situation - this is my certain information.”

It is not a secret that Hamas knows perfectly well where Alan Johnston is kept and is, in effect, orchestrating the whole kidnapping business. So, one of the kidnappers is being interviewed by the kidnappers own - and nobody gives a damn about it.

No, it is not the gullibility of fools - it is just that Ghazi Hamad provides a perfect answer for those who wish to be duped. Although - I strongly suspect that even while being duped they know the truth in the hearts of their hearts…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

An interesting analysis in Ynet:

“Hamas’ intoxication with power” – that’s how sources in the Gaza Strip explain the difficult blows sustained by the organization in recent days at the hands of the Israeli Air Force. On Saturday, five members of Hamas’ special security force were killed in an air force attack on a Gaza post, and sources reported that special force members were abandoning their positions in wake of the attacks.

When Hamas was still a guerilla group with cells operating secretly, Israel was only able to eliminate a few activities here and there through missile strikes and targeted assassinations. Yet following Hamas’ election victory, and after the organization’s special security force was established by former Interior Minister Said Siam, Hamas’ military wing, or at least part of it, became part of the establishment.

[...] Today, the Hamas force threatens any Fatah activist in the Gaza Strip, ranging from the lowliest activist to commanders and officers

in the PA’s official security organizations. Yet this intoxication with power led Hamas to become more established, and this led to the abandonment of guerilla tactics.

Hamas’ security force started setting up above-ground posts, headquarters, training bases, and lodgings – in short, it has become a much easier target for detection by the Israeli Air Force.

And so, instead of a desperate pursuit for cells operating underground, the brawl between the IDF and Hamas is increasingly taking on the qualities of a war between two armies, where Israel enjoys much greater strength than Hamas. In such war, Hamas has no chance.

May it be so.

It’s a no-confidence vote by members of his own party. Say buh-bye, Amir.

Ehud Barak won the first round of the battle for the Labor party chairmanship. As of 5 a.m. Tuesday, with all votes tallied, he led Ami Ayalon 35.6% to 30.6 percent. But Barak can’t declare victory quite yet.

Since he failed to break the 40 percent bar necessary to win Labor party primaries, a run-off between the two top contenders will be held on June 12.

Voter turnout for the primary elections reached 65.2 percent. Amir Peretz, the current chairman, came in far behind, with 22.4% of the votes. The other two candidates, Ophir Pines-Paz and Danny Yatom, had slighting more than 10% of votes combined.

He’s such a loser he can’t even tell when he’s a loser.

Peretz, despite his loss, said he still has a strong camp of supporters able to make waves within the party. “My camp is an obedient one that will go in the direction I will choose,” he said in a closed meeting, after election results came out.

Dude. Put a giant “L” on your forehead. Stick a fork in him. He’s done.