This one is making the rounds of YouTube, and it is effing hilarious. Watch out! There are hordes of gangs roaming the internet, and they want to steal your passwords!

I thought Mahmoud Abbas’ party was cracking down on this:

An armed Palestinian was arrested at the Hawara Checkpoint on Sunday night, Army Radio reported.

The gunman was carrying a pistol and a magazine when security forces caught him at the checkpoint, located south of Nablus.

And this:

Palestinians threw rocks at an Israeli car driving near Tekoa, south of Bethlehem, on Sunday night.

No casualties or damages were reported.

And this:

An Israeli was lightly wounded Sunday night after Palestinians threw rocks at his car while he was driving near Halhoul, north of Hebron.

No? So let us review: Hamas now controls the Gaza Strip. Abbas has his thugs sign a piece of paper that says they won’t attack Israelis anymore. In return, Olmert releases hundreds of Palestinian terrorists and hundreds of millions of dollars, allows Jordan to supply the PA with rifles, and is discussing having the Jordanian army help police the West Bank. And Abbas has his Prime Minister say that resistance against Israel is legitimate, but leave out the words “armed struggle.”

Wow. I’m underwhelmed with the results that Israel is getting from Abbas, and starting to wonder if the people who think the whole Hamas/Fatah war was a setup aren’t wrong.

Okay, no, not really. I’m not into the conspiracy theory mindset. But I do know that terrorists are opportunists, and Abbas has seized this opportunity with both hands and feet, and seemingly only one Israeli politician can get it right.

And oh yeah—the daily rocket bombardment continues. Not that the world cares, any more than they care that the Lebanese army has been bombarding Palestinian “refugee” camps for the past few weeks, killing civilians indiscriminately. The AP is covering up the casualty count, something they would never do were it Israel shelling the camps. But that’s a story for another post.

It looks like the Israelis have finally figured out that they’ve lost the media war for decades. They’re working to change the information battlefield.

A year after the Kafr Kana bombing during the Second Lebanon War and the IDF’s failure to speedily produce video footage justifying its attack, the IDF Spokesman’s Office has implemented a number of lessons aimed at preventing future operational failures from having detrimental diplomatic consequences.

[...] The Kafr Kana bombing has not been forgotten by the IDF and serves today as a key case study for the IDF Spokesman’s Office during training for field commanders on the importance of correctly utilizing the media.

According to a number of senior IDF officers interviewed by The Jerusalem Post, the failure to quickly release the rocket-fire footage was due to a misconception and under-awareness by the Israel Air Force of the event’s far-reaching consequences.

According to a high-ranking military source, shortly after the bombing an IAF general dismissed a number of requests by IDF Spokeswoman Brig.-Gen. Miri Regev to receive the footage, claiming that it was classified and could not be released to the public.

Yes, that’s the bad news. Now the good news:

Since the war, the IDF Spokesman’s Office under Regev has worked hard at training field commanders to better interact with the media. Last week, she laid the cornerstone for a military media school next to the National Defense College at Glilot that will provide compulsory classes on the media to high-ranking officers.

“The most important lesson learned from the Kafr Kana incident was that there needs to be better awareness throughout the IDF about the importance of cooperating with the Spokesman’s Office and to keep it in the operational loop,” a senior IDF officer said Sunday.

The lack of media awareness was not limited to IDF officers but was also seen in government officials, including a senior politician, involved in the decision-making process throughout the war, who said there was no point in releasing the footage earlier in the day since, according to him, the networks would broadcast it.

To improve this, the IDF Spokesman’s Office provides regular lectures teaching field commanders the importance of releasing footage and information about operations as quickly as possible. In addition, the IDF has recently made technological upgrades to some of its systems that allow for quicker collection, retrieval and release of media-worthy material.

The IDF Spokesman’s Office has also been working to train its reserve officers, particularly those from the Foreign Press Section, to better recognize events that could have diplomatic consequences and to more assertively state their case before field commanders.

File this under: About frakkin’ time. Years ago, the Israeli ambassador to Washington spoke at my synagogue. Afterwards, one of the congregants and I were discussing with the ambassador Israel’s negative image in the media. We tried to explain to him that Israel was getting hammered by the Palestinian representatives. He kept telling us, over and over again, that Americans supported Israel. Not the point, we told him, and tried to explain that you can’t keep getting hammered in the world media without seeing your image suffer. He absolutely refused to hear us, and we left feeling very frustrated. That was Israeli policy—and still is, in far too many quarters—toward the Palestinian media blitz that’s had decades to dig itself in. I can’t find the article, but I do recall reading that Arafat sent his media people to top PR classes and learned from the Soviets how to get his message across.

It’s about damned time that Israel finally started facing its crappy relations with the media and began fighting back with the same tools. If there’s video footage available, the networks will use it. That Qana video would have gone a long way towards proving that Hezbollah lied about stationing missiles in civilian areas. They should make these tapes available on YouTube, as well. Viral marketing isn’t only for commercial products.

Israel needs to get her side of the story out on a regular basis, and stop letting the terrorists frame the narrative. Hezbollah did that par excellence last summer.

When Israel launches an investigation into the failings of the Second Lebanon War, the investigation actually, well, investigates. When the Palestinians launch an investigation into the debacle that was the Gaza war with Hamas, they launch a kangaroo court.

“A week prior to the outbreak of the fighting with Hamas,” says Samir Masharawi, a Fatah leader from the Gaza Strip, “Abu Mazen [Abbas] called a meeting of the central committee of Fatah the leadership of the organizations. He asked seven of them to travel to the Gaza Strip and lead the organization, in view of the deterioration of Mohammed Dahlan, who was undergoing medical treatment, and due to the fact that Abu Mazen was busy with other issues. He gave them all the authority and explained, ‘You are authorized to do whatever you consider necessary to bolster Fatah. You claim that Dahlan is the problem. Now Dahlan is not there, take care of the problem.’”

Masharawi adds that, “Two of the committee members, Tayeb Abd al-Rahim and Ruhi Fatah (Abu Mazen’s adviser) agreed to travel to Gaza immediately. The other five found all sorts of excuses not to do so. In the end, none of the seven came to Gaza. How is it that a committee investigating the failure of Fatah and of the security organizations in the confrontation with Hamas, did not find them responsible? Where is the responsibility of the political leadership?”

“Does your Winograd Committee blame only the army officers or also the politicians? Like you [Israelis] say: ‘Blame the guard at the gate.’ Those really responsible have to surface,” the Fatah leader said.

Yeah, this is why I’m not too enthusiastic about the so-called “new” Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas. Until we see new leadership that isn’t made up of terrorists and terror-supporters, nothing will change. Here’s a question: Have the Palestinians stopped the incitement in their Friday sermons yet? Have they ordered new textbooks for the upcoming school year that actually show Israel on the map?

When both those questions can be answered in the affirmative, I will believe that change is coming.