This week’s Shire Network News, with the second part of Tom’s interview with Professor Deborah Lipstadt, a.k.a. the woman who totally pwned Holocaust denier David Irving, is up.

And apparently there’s going to be a call-in conference on Saturday morning that nobody told me about. I wonder if that means I’m not invited.

Yes, I do have a contribution to this week’s podcast. I call it, “It’s the terrorism, stupid.”

This is what you get for letting terrorism grow unchecked within your borders:

Al Qaida-inspired militants battling the Lebanese army for more than 10 weeks hit a main power station in north Lebanon with Katyusha rockets on Thursday, disrupting electricity supplies to wide areas.

Security sources said Fatah al-Islam militants, holed up in Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, fired half a dozen rockets at Deir Amar power station. At least two rockets hit the plant.

Kamal Hayek, the chairman of the state-owned electricity company, told Lebanon’s official news agency that production at the 400 megawatt facility was halted while damage was assessed.

My sympathy meter for the Lebanese is pegged at zero.

In Beirut, military experts defused a Katyusha rocket wired to a timer and set to explode, security sources said. The device was found near the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra.

Once again, look how hard it is to find out how many civilians have been killed, compared to the boilerplate about “xxxx Lebanese were killed, most of them civilians” that we saw during last year’s war:

At least 253 people, including 127 soldiers, have been killed in fighting between Fatah al-Islam and the army which erupted on May 20. It is Lebanon’s worst internal violence since the 1975-1990 civil war.

The word “civilian” does not occur in this article. Probably because no Israelis were involved in the fighting. Interesting, that.

Yet another example of Arab diplomacy:

In a secret message relayed to Jerusalem, Syria warned the Israeli government that should it continue to reject Damascus’ peace overtures, a war of attrition may break out in the Golan Heights, according to a report published Thursday.

Yedioth Ahronot has learned that in recent days Israel received reports of increased Syrian presence on its side of the Golan Heights in preparation for a possible war.

Interesting timing, isn’t it? Why, it comes mere days after Ahmadinejad went to Syria to talk to Assad and Nasrallah, and then threatened Israel and the U.S. with a hot summer.

During the past year the Syrian government has encouraged its citizens to settle in the Syrian side of the Golan Heights; Israel has recently learned that many of those who have made the Golan their new home were officers in active or reserve army duty who had lost their jobs following Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005.

Should a military conflict erupt in the region, these officers are expected to spearhead acts of attrition against Israel.

The Golan Heights are still extremely valuable militarily. Because this is what Syria did when the Golan was under Syrian control:

From 1948-67, when Syria controlled the Golan Heights, it used the area as a military stronghold from which its troops randomly sniped at Israeli civilians in the Huleh Valley below, forcing children living on kibbutzim to sleep in bomb shelters. In addition, many roads in northern Israel could be crossed only after probing by mine-detection vehicles. In late 1966, a youth was blown to pieces by a mine while playing football near the Lebanon border. In some cases, attacks were carried out by Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, which Syria allowed to operate from its territory.

Israel’s options for countering the Syrian attacks were constrained by the geography of the Heights. “Counterbattery fires were limited by the lack of observation from the Huleh Valley; air attacks were degraded by well-dug-in Syrian positions with strong overhead cover, and a ground attack against the positions…would require major forces with the attendant risks of heavy casualties and severe political repercussions,” U.S. Army Col. (Ret.) Irving Heymont observed.

Why would anyone believe it would be any different today, when Syria is working arm-in-arm with Iran? The world ignores the near-daily rocket bombardment from Gaza. It would also ignore bombardments from the Golan into Israel. It did before.

Israel repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, protested the Syrian bombardments to the UN Mixed Armistice Commission, which was charged with policing the cease-fire. For example, Israel went to the UN in October 1966 to demand a halt to the Fatah attacks. The response from Damascus was defiant. “It is not our duty to stop them, but to encourage and strengthen them,” the Syrian ambassador responded. Nothing was done to stop Syria’s aggression. A mild Security Council resolution expressing “regret” for such incidents was vetoed by the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, Israel was condemned by the UN when it retaliated. “As far as the Security Council was officially concerned,” historian Netanel Lorch wrote, “there was an open season for killing Israelis on their own territory.”

I read recently an article that thinks August is the month for hostilities to break out. I’m wondering if that article wasn’t correct.