My nephew was superb. The rest of the choir wasn’t bad, either.

Safe and sound in NJ, and busy until sometime tomorrow afternoon. Posting may be a bit light ’til then.

He’s such a sweetie. Tried to let me have his bed and he’d sleep on the sofa. Not on a school night. They’d throw me out of the Aunt’s Guild.

You know how teenagers’ minds are on other things. My brother had told Alex several times that I was going to drive up for his concert. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw me before the show and realized that I’d driven 350 miles today just to see (and hear!) him sing. That made the entire trip worthwhile. I’ll be banking smiles on that one for about four or five years, I think.

They did something special for the seniors in the choir at the end of the show, and their behavior reminded me of my senior year in high school. The last two weeks of school—particularly once finals were finished—I was not on my best behavior at all. And I, well, urged my friends to act up a little as well. “What are they gonna do, throw us out?” I asked.

Well. I did get thrown out of the library, which was quite a feat for me, because my five-books-a-week habit made me a perennial favorite of the librarians. It was one of my proudest moments, though. Almost as good as the sit-down strike I led in gym class earlier that year.

Hm. Come to think of it, I probably shouldn’t let my nephew read this post.

Off to NJ to see my nephew perform in his school concert tonight.

Be nice to each other while I’m on the road.

I won’t have much time on this trip to visit anyone other than family and old friends. I have to be back for a bar mitzvah on Friday. And it’s a working trip: Both places I’m staying have WiFi, and I will be working on a SharePoint site for Northern VA Company. SharePoint is amazingly simple, and amazingly complex. Yeah, that’s Microsoft for you.

On the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War, Ukrainian pipeline workers found a mass grave of Jews murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. That would be the one that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the man who is counting down the days to Israel’s defeat, says never happened.

A mass grave holding the remains of thousands of Jews executed by the Nazis during the second world war has been discovered in southern Ukraine by workers digging pipelines.

The workers stumbled upon the remains by chance last month in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near the Black Sea port of Odessa, Jewish leaders said yesterday.

The discovery provides further chilling evidence of the scale of Nazi brutality in Ukraine, which was occupied by both German and Romanian forces in 1941.

According to Roman Shvartsman, spokesman for the regional Jewish community, the Nazis established a ghetto near the village. In November 1941 the ghetto was transformed into a concentration camp and at least 4,000 Jews were killed at or near the site between the end of 1941 and the beginning of 1942.

The world media has been full of news articles spinning the 1967 victory as a “disaster” for Israel. A “wasted victory.” 40 years of “bitter harvest.” I have two words to say to those people: Bull and shit.

The world would have stood by if Israel had lost the war, and tsk-tsked as Israelis were slaughtered by the Arabs—who threatened exactly that: Extermination. The Saudi king, in an interview contained in the documentary “Six Days in June,” said the Arab goal was “extermination.”

Charles Krauthammer, quoting Michael Oren, points out another Arab threat of complete destruction of Israel’s Jews. (The PLO, remember, was formed three years before there were any “occupied territories” in Israel.)

Egypt, already in an alliance with Syria, formed an emergency military pact with Jordan. Iraq, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco began sending forces to join the coming fight. With troops and armor massing on Israel’s every frontier, jubilant broadcasts in every Arab capital hailed the imminent final war for the extermination of Israel. “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants,” declared PLO head Ahmed Shuqayri, “and as for the survivors — if there are any — the boats are ready to deport them.”

These were the words of the true aggressors of the war:

Nasser ordered the UN Emergency Force, stationed in the Sinai since 1956, to withdraw on May 16. Without bringing the matter to the attention of the General Assembly, as his predecessor had promised, Secretary-General U Thant complied with the demand. After the withdrawal of the UNEF, the Voice of the Arabs proclaimed (May 18, 1967):

“As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel. We shall exercise patience no more. We shall not complain any more to the UN about Israel. The sole method we shall apply against Israel is total war, which will result in the extermination of Zionist existence.”

An enthusiastic echo was heard on May 20 from Syrian Defense Minister Hafez Assad:

“Our forces are now entirely ready not only to repulse the aggression, but to initiate the act of liberation itself, and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united….I, as a military man, believe that the time has come to enter into a battle of annihilation.”

Nasser challenged Israel to fight almost daily. “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel. The Arab people want to fight,” he said on May 27. The following day, he added: “We will not accept any…coexistence with Israel…Today the issue is not the establishment of peace between the Arab states and Israel….The war with Israel is in effect since 1948.”

The fact that Israel still has most of the territory captured in 1967 is not due to religious Jews or the “settler” movement. It’s because the Arab League met in Khartoum shortly after the war ended, and declared the three no’s: No recognition, no negotiation, and no peace with Israel.

Odds are that everything but the eastern half of Jerusalem would have been given back, if only the Arabs had agreed to live in peace with Israel.

Now, the Palestinians will have to settle for much less of the territory they could have had in 1967, and the Syrians may never get back the Golan. But the world should stop blaming Israel for doing her utmost in 1967 to prevent the discovery (in some horrible alternate universe), sixty years later, of mass graves of Jews—which doubtless would have been received by much head-shaking and tsk-tsking, while the elites wrote letters to the editor and op-eds about how Jews never should have tried to establish a state in the heart of the Arab world.

Fortunately for us, that scenario never came to be. With God’s help (and with a little help from the IDF and some flat-out Jewish ingenuity), it never will.