An easy and meaningful fast to all my Jewish readers.

This blog will be going dark until after my Saturday night break-fast.

You wouldn’t want me blogging on an empty stomach, anyway. You have no idea how crabby I get by sundown.

As Jews all over the world fast and pray on this Day of Atonement, I would like to point out that Israel is forced to enact a full closure on the West Bank, and set her armed forces to the highest alerts—because today is the day that terrorists most crave murdering Jews.

And now is the time of year for me to say: If I offended any of you, I ask your forgiveness. It wasn’t intentional. (Unless you’re a Jew-hater. Then it was.) Yeah, I know, that’s probably not how it’s supposed to work. But I have a problem with forgiveness. I’m working on it.

If you’re not Jewish, and want to help out this Yom Kippur, donate food to your local food bank. They tend to always need peanut butter, canned fish, canned soups, vegetables, and pasta.

The Jerusalem Post says the designation of Gaza as a hostile entity is a prelude towards dumping responsibility for Gaza back to Egypt—who, I’m sure, doesn’t want the responsibility. I wonder how that’s going to go over.

A day after the cabinet defined the Gaza Strip as “hostile territory,” The Jerusalem Post learned Thursday that the IDF is working on a proposal that calls for a “complete disengagement” from the Gaza Strip - involving the closure of all border crossings with Israel and the transfer of all responsibility over the Palestinian territory to Egypt.

[...] While Israel removed its military positions and settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, it has maintained a certain level of responsibility for the Palestinian population there, including coordinating the Gaza-based activities of humanitarian organizations such as UNRWA, the World Bank and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

According to the proposal, which officials stressed was in its early stages, Israel would completely disconnect from Gaza by closing off the Erez, Karni, Sufa and Kerem Shalom crossings and instead directing humanitarian organizations to work with Egypt.

“The idea is to finalize what was started with the 2005 ‘disengagement,’” explained a senior defense official. “No matter how much we try and what we do, the humanitarian organizations consistently blame us for the humanitarian situation in Gaza. This way they will no longer have a case against us, since we won’t be involved.”

[...] The parallel being suggested is southern Lebanon, which is home to Hizbullah guerrillas and their weapons but, following Israel’s withdrawal from its security zone there to the international border in 2000, is plainly no longer under Israel’s responsibility.

Could they have picked a worse example? Granted, Lebanon is no longer Israel’s responsibility, but gee, look at all the rockets in southern Lebanon aimed at Israel.

I think that it’s a good idea to completely disengage from Gaza in one respect—in that the world would no longer be able to blame Israel for the events within Gaza. Except for the fact that they will always blame Israel. The world will never let Israel take anything but the blame for the plight of the Palestinians. The world will never place the blame on the Palestinians, being stuck forever on the “oppressed” and “oppressor” roles. The world will never stop using this as a club to beat Israel.

And I’m sure the world will rise up as one and try to prevent Israel from shedding any responsibility for the Gaza Strip. They’re already freaking out at the prospect of Israel shutting off the fuel and power. Funny how you don’t see anyone considering ways to help Gaza create its own fuel and power sources. But then, you heard nothing about the destruction of the Gaza greenhouses after the disengagement, either. It doesn’t fit the narrative of helpless Pals vs. oppressing Israelis.

File this under: Never underestimate the power of a Trekkie to write yet another treatise on an aspect of Star Trek (TOS) that you never really thought about. This guy has analyzed the statistics on the Red-Shirt Phenomenon in Star Trek.

The basic stats:
The Enterprise has a crew of 430 (startrek.com) in its five-year mission. (Now, I know that the show was only on the air for 3 years, but bear with me. 80 episodes were produced, which gives us the data to build from.) 59 crewmembers were killed during the mission, which comes out to 13.7% of the crew. So, that will be our overall conversion rate, 13.7%.

Data Segmentation:
However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:

• Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
• Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
• Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
• Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

So, the basic segmentation of factors allows us to confirm that red-shirted crewmembers died more than any other crewmembers on the original Star Trek series.

Please do follow the link. It’s funny, entertaining, and informative.

Hat tip: Janet P.

It’s been a bit disquieting to read the newspapers lately. Something big is possibly happening and little if any reporting is being done about it. Until yesterday.

Yesterday’s Washington Post ran an editorial Shock Waves from Syria:

Media accounts are beginning to converge on a report that Israel bombed a facility where it believed Syria was attempting to hatch its own nuclear weapons program with North Korea’s assistance. The Post’s Glenn Kessler reported that the strike came three days after a ship carrying material from North Korea docked at a Syrian port and delivered containers that Israel believes held nuclear materials. It’s not clear whether U.S. intelligence agencies concur with Israel’s conclusion, and independent experts have said that Syria lacks the resources for a credible nuclear weapons program.

The previous Glenn Kessler articles are here and here. The independent expert is apparently Joseph Cirincione who told Foreign Policy Passport

This story is nonsense. The Washington Post story should have been headlined “White House Officials Try to Push North Korea-Syria Connection.”

This is a political story, not a threat story. The mainstream media seems to have learned nothing from the run-up to war in Iraq. It is a sad commentary on how selective leaks from administration officials who have repeatedly misled the press are still treated as if they were absolute truth.Once again, this appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted “intelligence” to key reporters in order to promote a preexisting political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria.

To which Kessler responded

All I can say in response is that I (and a number of uncredited colleagues) spent more than week knocking on doors of many agencies, seeking answers. No one tried to wave us off the story, including people who normally I thought would have tried their best to prevent us from printing it. I did note a number of caveats and explained that Syria never had much of a nuclear program. There appears to be a connection to the Israeli raid, which is now the subject of some of the tightest censorship in years.

To many “independent experts” the Bush administration is a bunch of out of control psychopaths looking for any excuse to go to war, whereas Kessler notes that even the more levelheaded members of the government believe that there’s something there. (Yes, there’s something missing in all this reporting, which I’ll get to later.)

Today there’s been a proliferation of American reporting on the topic. The Washington Post reported Israel, U.S. Shared Data On Suspected Nuclear Site and secrecy seems to be affecting every part of the story

The target of Israel’s attack was said to be in northern Syria, near the Turkish border. A Middle East expert who interviewed one of the pilots involved said they operated under such strict operational security that the airmen flying air cover for the attack aircraft did not know the details of the mission. The pilots who conducted the attack were briefed only after they were in the air, he said. Syrian authorities said there were no casualties.U.S. sources would discuss the Israeli intelligence, which included satellite imagery, only on condition of anonymity, and many details about the North Korean-Syrian connection remain unknown. The quality of the Israeli intelligence, the extent of North Korean assistance and the seriousness of the Syrian effort are uncertain, raising the possibility that North Korea was merely unloading items it no longer needed. Syria has actively pursued chemical weapons in the past but not nuclear arms — leaving some proliferation experts skeptical of the intelligence that prompted Israel’s attack.

The secrecy leads to this conclusion

“There is no question it was a major raid. It was an extremely important target,” said Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence officer at Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy. “It came at a time the Israelis were very concerned about war with Syria and wanted to dampen down the prospects of war. The decision was taken despite their concerns it could produce a war. That decision reflects how important this target was to Israeli military planners.”

(Bruce Riedel, whom you might recall from yesterday’s news apparently wears many hats. Yesterday he “… was a negotiator in the 2000 Camp David effort.”)

The NY Times finally does a little more reporting on the topic with Bush Declines to Lift Veil of Secrecy Over Israeli Airstrike on Syria.

One former diplomat who has spoken to Israelis involved in the decision to attack said the airstrike was aimed at what Israel believed to be a Syrian nuclear program in cooperation with North Korea. The two countries already have a relationship that has concentrated on missile technology, which North Korea has long exported.The former diplomat, along with current and former American and Israeli officials, said a shipment of North Korean material labeled as cement arrived by ship three days before the attack. That material was transferred to a facility, which Israel bombed.

Current and former American and Israeli officials have said the Israelis gave the Bush administration advance notice of the attack.

While the article also finds plenty of sources skeptical about the nuclear angle, there is an acknowledgment that Israel did something out of the ordinary.

Charles Krauthammer has valiantly tried to tie all the loose ends together, in Middle East Volcano (or here).

Tensions are already extremely high because of Iran’s headlong rush to go nuclear. In fending off sanctions and possible military action, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has chosen a radically aggressive campaign to assemble, deploy, flaunt and partially activate Iran’s proxies in the Arab Middle East:

(1) Hamas launching rockets into Israeli towns and villages across the border from the Gaza Strip. Its intention is to invite an Israeli reaction, preferably a bloody and telegenic ground assault.

(2) Hezbollah heavily rearmed with Iranian rockets transshipped through Syria and preparing for the next round of fighting with Israel. The third Lebanon war, now inevitable, awaits only Tehran’s order.

(3) Syria, Iran’s only Arab client state, building up forces across the Golan Heights frontier with Israel. And on Wednesday, yet another anti-Syrian member of Lebanon’s parliament was killed in a massive car bombing.

(4) The al-Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard training and equipping Shiite extremist militias in the use of the deadliest IEDs and rocketry against American and Iraqi troops. Iran is similarly helping the Taliban attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Why is Iran doing this? Because it has its eye on a single prize: the bomb. It needs a bit more time, knowing that once it goes nuclear, it becomes the regional superpower and Persian Gulf hegemon.

Krauthammer earlier in his essay wrote

Second, there are ominous implications for the Middle East. Syria has long had chemical weapons — on Monday, Jane’s Defence Weekly reported on an accident that killed dozens of Syrians and Iranians loading a nerve-gas warhead onto a Syrian missile — but Israel will not tolerate a nuclear Syria.

All the MSM reporting and speculation has centered around a Syrian nuclear program. But what if the raid is somehow related to that chemical explosion a few weeks ago? Maybe the latest shipment wasn’t a new type of weapon but the expansion of Syria’s existing chemical program?

Meryl Yourish had already noted that the summer’s explosion probably involved Iran. Israel Matzav provides reasons why he believes that the Israeli target was chemical not nuclear. The Hashmonean doesn’t rule out the nuclear angle but concludes

Channel 10 reports local area hospitals had to treat many of the injured from the event, among them over a dozen Iranian technicians.. Makes further mention of the Iranian Syrian defense pact signed last year, stipulating one of the key areas of cooperation? The adapting / arming of Syrian Scud arsenals with chemical weapons.

(Emphasis mine.)

Could it be then that Krauthammer’s overall analysis is correct even is one detail is wrong? Iran is ratcheting up tensions in order to be able to complete its nuclear program. However, the WMD in the picture are not nuclear but chemical. I realize that neither Israeli nor American officials need to disabuse journalists of their mistaken speculations. However, why aren’t these reporters tying the Israeli strike to the chemical explosion?

And was PM Olmert’s expression of admiration for Syria meant as a taunt?

UPDATE: More at Memeorandum.

UPDATE II: via Small Wars Journal - Con Coughlin’s reading of the situation is alarming.

But judging from the small scraps of information that have emerged, it would be fair to conclude that a new axis of evil is under construction, with Syria assuming Iraq’s place. But unlike Iraq, Syria has well-documented links to the pariah regimes in North Korea and Teheran, and is cooperating with them on a range of projects, from the acquisition of long-range ballistic missiles to the development of chemical and nuclear weapons. The failure to find ready-to-use stockpiles of WMD in Iraq following Saddam’s overthrow may have seriously undermined the coalition’s justification for invading Iraq, but no such doubts exist about Syria’s capability. Even before the Israeli raid, Syria had been identified by a number of intelligence and government agencies as possessing the largest and most advanced chemical weapons capability in the Middle East. Moreover, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, Syria has the delivery systems to make them a palpable threat.

UPDATE III: Buzztracker 1, 2, 3.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

israel, syria, iran, chemical weapons.

Columbia University’s president, Lee Bollinger, says that we should allow Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a chance to speak. He’s going to ask the tough questions, he says, and force Ahmadinejad to answer them.

The event will be part of the annual World Leaders Forum, the University-wide initiative intended to further Columbia’s longstanding tradition of serving as a major forum for robust debate, especially on global issues.

In order to have such a University-wide forum, we have insisted that a number of conditions be met, first and foremost that President Ahmadinejad agree to divide his time evenly between delivering remarks and responding to audience questions. I also wanted to be sure the Iranians understood that I would myself introduce the event with a series of sharp challenges to the president….

There will be no robust debate. One thing you have to hand to Ahmadinejad is that he’s superb at avoiding questions he doesn’t want to answer, turning the issues around on the questioner, and refusing to answer the tough questions like the ones Bollinger thinks are going to be asked.

Case in point: Ahmadinejad’s 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace last year.

Wallace tried to ask him about Hezbollah’s use of missiles, rockets furnished by Iran, but he wanted to talk about Israel’s attacks with American bombs.

“The laser-guided bombs that have been given to the Zionists and they’re targeting the shelter of defenseless children and women,” the president said.

“Who supports Hezbollah?” Wallace asked. “Who has given Hezbollah hundreds of millions of dollars for years? Who has given Hezbollah Iranian-made missiles and rockets that is making — that are making all kinds …” he continued as he was interrupted.

“Are you the representative of the Zionist regime? Or a journalist?” Ahmadinejad asked Wallace.

Note how easy he accuses someone who contradicts him of being a Zionist. This is typical of Ahmadinejad’s style. He tries to put the spotlight on the person asking the question he won’t answer. It’s easier to dodge and accuse than to stick to the facts of the question, which was Iran’s multi-million dollar investment in Hezbollah over the decades. The question remained unanswered.

Ahmadinejad also likes to play a game where he refuses to acknowledge even obvious facts. Look what he does in his latest 60 Minutes interview, as excerpted by Matt Drudge:

PELLEY: Sir, what were you thinking? The World Trade Center site is the most sensitive place in the American heart, and you must have known that visiting there would be insulting to many, many Americans.

AHMADINEJAD: Why should it be insulting?

PELLEY: But the American people, sir, believe that your country is a terrorist nation, exporting terrorism in the world. You must have known that visiting the World Trade Center site would infuriate many Americans.

AHMADINEJAD: Well, I’m amazed. How can you speak for the whole of the American nation?

PELLEY: Well, the American nation–

AHMADINEJAD: You are representing a media and you’re a reporter. The American nation is made up of 300 million people. There are different points of view over there.

In fact, the reporter is not representing either the media, or the American people. He is asking Ahmadinejad a simple question, and pointing out the nationwide outrage that was sparked by news of his visit to Ground Zero. This is not a difficult thing to have picked up—it was on the internet, in the news, and in the blogosphere at the speed of light. And what’s more, Ahmadinejad knew this. But it serves his purpose to prevaricate, to turn the issue around on a journalist who quite frankly does have a damned good idea of what 300 million Americans think of the president of Iran. He’d have to be an utter moron not to be able to make that connection. But once again, Ahmadinejad is avoiding the question. It’s what he does.

He did the same thing with the Council on Foreign Relations last year:

Martin S. Indyk, who has served twice as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, and a tour as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, noted he had endeavored during the Clinton administration to work out a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, but that Iranian-supported terrorists “did everything possible” to prevent it. The Iranian president again repeated what he has said before, namely that all Palestinians should “decide” their future.

[...] Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, said “Iranian journalists are imprisoned and newspapers are closed” and that “elections are not free.” He added: “You speak of the rights of Palestinians but Iran provided rockets to Hezbollah that killed Palestinians in Israel. Would you be willing to change your policies at home?” This led Ahmadinejad to claim that his country was freer than the United States.

“Please don’t allow yourself to be involved in the domestic politics of other countries or there is much more we can all say. If you think you can affect our people with your statements you are wrong. We had free elections—I spoke with people and they chose me. This is a unique, pure democracy, which is impossible in your country. Which country is freer and more democratic? I am ready for an independent discussion on this. Let people decide for themselves. By creating a wind now you are creating a bigger storm,” Ahmadinejad said.

The man prevaricates, dodges, shifts the focus, does not answer the question, and flat-out lies. There is nothing positive that can come from his speaking at Columbia, other than yet another public relations victory for the man from Tehran. I’d love to see him go up against someone like, say, Michelle Malkin, but I know how it would turn out: He would refuse to answer the questions, accuse Michelle of being a Zionist stooge, tell her she doesn’t speak for Americans, and get yet another soapbox for his venom and lies.

There is no value in an Ahmadinejad soapbox at an American university, except, apparently, for the prestige that university thinks the visit brings. I’m of the opinion that the prestige of having an Ahmadinejad visit is right down there in the dirt with a visit from the likes of David Duke—whom Ahmadinejad invited to speak at the Tehran Holocaust denial conference last year. They’re two of a kind on at least one issue: That of Israel, and the Jews.

Bollinger should be ashamed of himself. There are some people who don’t deserve a platform. Ahmadinejad is one of them.