You simply can’t make this stuff up. Kim Jong Il rushes to the aid of Bashar Assad.

North Korea commented on the incident in which Israeli planes allegedly entered Syrian airspace last week, calling it a “dangerous provocation”, Chinese News Agency Xinhua reported on Tuesday.

“This is a very dangerous provocation little short of wantonly violating the sovereignty of Syria and seriously harassing the regional peace and security,” a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea strongly denounces the above-said intrusion and extends full support and solidarity to the Syrian people in their just cause to defend the national security and the regional peace.”

Axis of Evil, anyone?

North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.

Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom.

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens — leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections — then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred.

Kim Jong Il must be feeling very ronery right now. (Not safe for work.)

This week’s Shire Network News, featuring Reut Cohen talking about the anti-Semites at UC Irvine (and they are the top of the bottom of the barrel there, if you get my drift). My contribution: In which I read a letter from Iseema bin Laden, explaining why there’s a freeze-frame on the latest Osama bin Laden tape.

Haveil Havalim went up Sunday night, but I forgot to link it until now. Sorry, Gail.

Last, but not least, a fellow Richmonder took one for the team and sat through 90 minutes of Ward Churchill at VCU.

Really. Debunken gets the Patience Of The Year Award for only being caught rolling his eyes.

Once again, the world shows that Jewish blood is cheap to them.

Israeli politicians and defense officials have been calling for a more aggressive Israeli response to the near-daily rocket barrages out of Gaza. Attacks last week on the frequently targeted town of Sderot, including one near a crowded nursery school, led parents to pull their children out of school and brought demands for harsh retaliation.

“The question is not whether to create deterrence, but when,” said Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, a member of Olmert’s ruling Kadima party, told Israel Radio.

[...] In Washington, the State Department denounced the rocket attack, but called for Israeli restraint.

“We would only counsel, in this case Israel which has suffered injuries and losses as a result of attacks, to take into consideration the affects of what they might do in self defense on the overall political process,” spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

Meantime, Hamas, the organization that Jimmy Carter, the UN, and members of the EU say Israel should negotiate with, is ecstatic over the success of the PIJ’s lucky shot:

“We consider this a victory from God for the resistance,” Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said on Hamas radio. “We consider the resistance as the legitimate right of the Palestinians to defend themselves and restore their rights.”

Sure. Hamas wants peace. Now pull my other leg.

MSNBC is running the NBC 9/11 original coverage this morning, presumably uncut.

The thing that strikes me as most unusual is the way all of the journalists almost completely manage to cover their emotion. Katie Couric actually caught herself about to say “What the hell–” and changed it to “What the heck is going on here.” Their Pentagon correspondent was there when the plane hit, and is calmly and rationally explaining every tiny detail of what he felt when the “bomb” went off (in actuality, the plane hitting the building).

The closest we’ve gotten to emotion is the Pentagon correspondent pausing for a moment and saying, “Thank goodness that’s a helicopter going by. For a moment, I thought it was another plane.”

I didn’t see a lot of the early coverage, as I was at work that day. But the TV sets came out fairly quickly, especially after the major news sites on the internet were crushed under the weight of people at work (and around the world) looking for information.

I do remember hearing the wild rumors, such as that the Pentagon was bombed and that there were two or four more planes unaccounted for and heading for various sites. I had forgotten that a Palestinian terrorist group originally claimed credit for the attacks.

I also remember seeing the towers burning, and the fact that one tower was missing absolutely not registering in my mind. The enormity of it was unbelievable. The anchors saw the first tower fall, and have yet to understand what they saw. It took them about 20 minutes to understand that the building had collapsed.

When the second tower collapsed, Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw, and Matt Lauer were utterly calm, and the only blip of emotion comes from their correspondent at the site, who can’t find his coworker after the second tower collapses and can be heard shouting for him/her over the phone, not hearing the anchors asking him for news. Later, he apologized for sounding melodramatic as he described the aftermath of the attack and the towers’ collapse.

I am so glad I was never interested in becoming a television journalist. I could never do what they do.

Once again, I recall my cousin’s husband driving up to the WTC in the morning in time to see the first plane hit, turning around and going straight back home. My upstairs neighbor never got to work that day in the WTC, on one of the floors where none survived, because of his habit of never getting up for work on time.

I found myself unable to work beyond noon. I left. After stopping at a supermarket to buy food (I was obsessed with the idea that everything would shut down the next day and decided to stock up just in case), I headed towards Eagle Rock Park. Eagle Rock has a stunning view of Manhattan. I wanted to see with my own eyes what I’d seen on TV. But thousands of other people had the same idea, and the police detoured me around the park, so I went home.

My upstairs neighbor and many of my other neighbors were sitting on the porch steps of our apartments. We stayed outside together for a long, long time. I kept the television on most of the rest of the day, and scoured the internet for information. That’s how I discovered Charles Johnson, and Glenn Reynolds.

People have forgotten, really, what happened that day. I never believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, and I don’t believe the Bush Administration tried to sell it that way, either. But the war that started before 9/11 has not ended, and Iraq is only one of its fronts. Israel is another, and six years later, the world still refuses to acknowledge that role.

Never forget. Al Qaeda is still trying to hurt us, and Iran is working with them to harm us in any way possible. And Iran is getting closer to nuclear weapons.

We should be running this footage on all of our stations today, during prime time. People have forgotten what it was like six years ago.

I haven’t.

It took me a long time to get up the nerve to look at the changed skyline.

The AP headline has changed, there’s a new author, the boilerplates remain, and the lede is different, but the spin remains the same:

Rocket Wounds Dozens of Israeli Troops
Sep 11, 7:58 AM (ET)
By YANIV ZOHAR

ZIKIM, Israel (AP) - A Palestinian rocket exploded in an Israeli army base early Tuesday, wounding more than 40 soldiers as they slept in their tents and drawing calls for a major military operation against militants launching rockets from the Gaza Strip.

The injury toll was the highest ever sustained in a single Palestinian rocket attack. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was meeting Tuesday with top military and security officials, and discussions were expected to include possible responses to the attack, Israeli officials said.

The wounded soldiers were all recent recruits undergoing basic training at the army’s Zikim base, just north of the Gaza-Israel border, and were asleep when the rocket hit an empty tent, the army said. Of the more than 40 soldiers in nearby tents who were wounded, 12 remained in serious condition, the army said.

The spin is still “crude, homemade rocket,” even though twelve soldiers are in serious condition many others were moderately wounded. These “crude, homemade” rockets can and have killed, but this is what the AP thinks of those deaths:

Crude homemade rockets land in southern Israel nearly every day. Although the rockets are inaccurate, they have killed 12 people in the past seven years, injured dozens and disrupted daily life in the area.

They have injured hundreds.

Reuters is treating it the same way:

Militants in northern Gaza frequently fire Qassam rockets across the border. Most land harmlessly but since a Palestinian uprising began in 2000, 12 people have been killed in the salvoes.

The AP buried this fourteen paragraphs down:

Another rocket hit an Israeli kibbutz near Gaza later Tuesday morning. Hamas militants also announced they had launched a mortar barrage at Kerem Shalom, a border crossing where humanitarian aid crosses from Israel into Gaza. There were no casualties in either attack.

Note how the fact that Hamas is claiming responsibility for firing mortars into civilian areas in Israel gets almost no notice from the AP. Imagine the placement of the account of Palestinian civilians hurt by rockets. Oh, wait. You don’t have to.

In the same AP story you can find this:

Four Palestinian civilians between ages 5 and 21, members of the same family, were wounded in the initial army response, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanin of Gaza’s Health Ministry. Two were treated briefly and released, and two girls - ages 7 and 17 - remained hospitalized, Hassanin said. The army would not immediately confirm any civilian injuries.

Please note that you have a named spokesperson, and the ages and genders of the victims, while most facts from Israeli officials are attributed to—”Israel” or “the army.”

The Jerusalem Post puts the information of the mortar attack in the third paragraph:

The rocket strike, which wounded 69 IDF soldiers, was followed by a mortar barrage on the Gaza border. The Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees claimed responsibility for the attacks, and the Islamic Jihad later posted a video on its website purportedly showing the Kassam rocket launch.

So once again, the mainstream media downplays the attacks on Israelis. They barely mention (if it’s mentioned at all) the mortar barrage that followed the kassam attack. Watch for them to move up the “retaliation” by Israel that wounded Palestinian civilians, or give it its own story.

MSNBC is replaying the 9/11 Today Show coverage.