So, that ending of terror that Mahmoud Abbas is supposed to be doing?

Yeah, not so much.

A number of IDF troops were wounded during an operation in Nablus Thursday which exposed a large explosives laboratory.

Three prepared explosive devices, each weighing roughly five kilograms, were found in the laboratory, along with numerous weapons, magazines and materials used to manufacture bombs.

Israeli army forces entered Nablus Wednesday to operate against terrorist infrastructure and locate illegal weapons caches. The large-scale operation was launched after intelligence information indicated that terrorists in the city were planning a number of attacks in Israeli territory.

Wednesday afternoon soldiers discovered another weapons cache containing a pipe bomb, a Kalashnikov rifle, a hand gun and two grenades. At another location in Nablus troops found an M-16 rifle and a telescopic sight. The weapons were confiscated and the grenades were detonated in controlled explosions.

Our pal Mahmoud? Well, he outlawed all illegal weapons and bombs. No, really. You can stop laughing now.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday outlawed all armed Palestinian groups except for the official PA security services.

[...] “On the basis of the declaration of a state of emergency in the Palestinian territories, and by virtue of my authority, all armed militias, groups and brigades that do not belong in practice to the security services shall be treated as illegal organizations,” read the first order.

The order forbade such groups to conduct any activity, whether secret or public, and said that criminal investigations would be opened against anyone caught participating in such activity.

“The government must halt the phenomenon of armed groups, prevent the bearing of arms and confiscate guns, explosives and any type of weaponry purchased illegally, since they endanger the public order,” the decree continued.

And it went over really well.

The Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, which is linked to Abbas’s Fatah, was among those to announce an intention to keep their weapons. Zacharia Zubeidi, the group’s head in Jenin, said, “Abu Mazen [a/k/a Abbas] meant the illegal weapons owned by criminal organizations, but our weapons are legitimate—the weapons of the resistance organizations.” Another wanted terrorist, Abu Aziz, called Abbas’s proclamation “irresponsible,” but said he would consider turning in his weapons if Israel would guarantee his safety.

More at Jihad Watch.

This week a series of annoyances managed to all roll out one after another, forcing me to bring out my inner Hulk—albeit, the kinder, gentler Hulk.

About two weeks ago, I got new neighbors: A young couple with two young children, an infant and a four-year-old. They also have a cat with three kittens, and they’re trying to push the orange one on me. (Not gonna happen. Tig and Gracie hate other cats, and at the age of ten, I think it’s unfair to them to bring a stranger in the house.) But here’s the thing: Their four-year-old has been bothering me incessantly. She knocks on my patio door to tell me Tig wants to come in. Meantime, he was sound asleep on the patio until she came by to bother him, whereupon he woke up and frantically tried to get inside to get away from her. She knocks on my patio door to tell me she’s wearing a new shirt. She waves at me through the kitchen window while I’m preparing dinner, because my window looks out on my patio and she is in my backyard area, because she is not, apparently, being watched very carefully by her mother. And to top it all off, her mother knocks on my front door to tell me Tig wants to come in, and I have to explain to her that no, he doesn’t, he wants to sit on my porch and not be bothered, and that he knows how to let me know when he wants in. If he can’t get me to hear him scratching on the door, he will either yowl until I hear him, or come around to the patio door and get my attention that way. Really. I’ve been living here for five years, and my cats are thoroughly adapted to their environment.

Then, for the past week or so, we have the added annoyance of my cats misbehaving. Tig kept waking me up at 5 a.m. by yowling at me to get up and pay attention to him. This happened night after night until I finally woke up enough to start throwing shoes at him. I never hit him. I throw them in his general direction, and he gets the message. So it took two nights of throwing my slippers—no, three nights. He finally stopped waking me up. Now it’s Gracie’s turn. She’s discovered that I work from home now, so that means I can pay attention to her 24/7. Well, uh, no. She’s been yowling at me to come pet her upstairs. She’s been doing this every couple of hours. Two days ago, I got fed up with all of her noise and went to the foot of the stairs and had words with her. She sat on landing at the top of the stairs, eyes growing wide, and listened. She also got the message. I heard a yowl just now as I was writing this post, and yelled, “Gracie!” in super-stern voice, and she stopped.

Finally, yesterday, neighbor child knocks on my patio door—the blinds are closed—in midafternoon. Tig is asleep in the corner, ignoring her. She grabs her shirt and tells me that she’s wearing her new teddy bear shirt.

“What did I tell you about bothering me while I’m working?” I asked.
“But I’m wearing my new teddy bear shirt!”
“Briana, GO!” I said. I pointed. I never point. But she was really pissing me off.
She took off running.

I have not been bothered since.

Ahhhh. That sound you hear is the sound of me getting my privacy and control back.

This time next year, I hope to be working from my own townhouse. I’m going to install a fence.

A big one.

Update: She crossed the line. She squirted Tig with a water bottle. And in order to do this, she had to sneak onto my patio—all the way onto my patio—and get him while he slept in the corner near the door. She did. But I saw the tail end of it. I went next door and told her mother to keep that child away from me, my patio, and my cat. I was not nice. I was not patient. And I wasn’t accepting excuses.

I do not want that brat anywhere near me or mine again.

Hezbullah has been re-arming since the end of last year’s war.

Since a UN-brokered cease-fire came into force last August 14, the group has been steadily gearing itself up for the next round, with the same determination and secrecy that have made its reputation, the experts say.

“Immediately after last summer’s war Hizbullah began refortifying its positions and working on new ones,” said Judith Palmer Harik, author of the book “Hizbullah: The Changing Face of Terrorism.”

“They are rearming … In fact, there has been no interruption in their receiving of more arms,” she told AFP.

Make no mistake about it, Hezbullah has been energized by the Hamas takeover of Gaza. Michael Young points out that even if they didn’t set off the bomb that murdered six UN peacekeepers, they allowed it to happen.

There were probably two principal reasons, aside from the kill factor, for the car-bomb attack against the soldiers. The first was to make UNIFIL more timorous in its patrolling of the border area, in such a way that, with the removal of Lebanese Army units to fight in Nahr al-Bared, more room would be cleared up for Hizbullah to rebuild its military infrastructure south of the Litani River. That’s not to say that Hizbullah detonated the device that killed the UN soldiers, but it’s very difficult to accept that the party was unaware of what was about to take place. Hizbullah, for all its declarations of sympathy for UNIFIL, views the international force and the Lebanese Army as grave obstacles to the pursuit of “resistance” in the South. For an organization that could not survive without armed struggle, that recently saw its Hamas comrades establish an autonomous territory alongside Israel in Gaza, now is the time to act, in collaboration with Iran and Syria, to again make of South Lebanon a front line against Israel.

[...] Perhaps most disquieting is that if the UNIFIL mandate begins breaking apart, it will be Israel that looks for ways around Resolution 1701 to defend its northern border. This would suit Hizbullah and its Iranian and Syrian patrons just fine, since it’s the Israelis who would take the blame for returning South Lebanon to where it was before the summer 2006 war.

The question, I think, is when–not if.

So, Mahmoud Abbas is going to stop terror in the West Bank.

Really. Because seven IDF soldiers were wounded during operations in Nablus.

An IDF officer was severely injured, three soldiers were moderately hurt and another three sustained light wounds as Palestinians hurled four explosive devices at a force operating in the West Bank city of Nablus on Wednesday night.

An officer who was moderately injured in one of the explosions was evacuated via helicopter to the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer, where his condition deteriorated and is now defined serious. Another three soldiers were evacuated by ambulance to the Rabin Medical Center in Petah Tikva.

[...] The IDF reported that military activity against terror infrastructure in the West Bank continued early Thursday morning, and the forces entered Nablus for the purpose of arresting wanted Palestinians.

According to the IDF Spokesperson’s Office, once the forces entered the city, some 50 Palestinians opened fire on them in two separate incidents. In both cases, no one was injured.

Two explosive devices were also hurled at the IDF forces, and no soldiers were injured. A third device was thrown at the soldiers shortly afterwards, leaving one IDF officer moderately injured from shrapnel.

Why, exactly, was the IDF in Nablus? Oh, that’s right. Because Nablus is a safe haven for terrorists. And because Mahmoud Abbas is not Israel’s partner. He is her enemy.

As a result of objections by Poland, Auschwitz has been renamed. Because the Poles were oh-so-very-good to the Jews during and after WWII, right?

On July 4, 1946, townspeople and security officers, spurred by a false rumor that Jews living at 7 Planty St., had kidnapped a Christian boy, attacked Jewish Holocaust survivors living in the building. They killed 42 people, almost all Jews, over several hours, and about 30 more were killed in a violent frenzy that spread across the area.

So now Polish feelings are more important than the reality sixty years ago.

UNESCO has officially renamed the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland to make clear it was established and run by occupying German Nazi forces, a World Heritage Committee spokesman said Thursday.

The camp will now be known as “Auschwitz-Birkenau. German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945),” said Roni Amelan, a spokesman for UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee.

The committee agreed to change the name from “Auschwitz Concentration Camp” at a meeting in New Zealand following a request from Poland, and the change is effective immediately, Amelan said.

Pardon me while I roll my eyes at yet another useless move by the UN.