Allah is depressed. Hot Air traffic is down. That’s probably because I’m not reading the site as much as I was before I became Haftarah Study Girl. (Don’t have the tropes down yet, but I did cut my haftarah mp3 into 1- and 2-minute chunks to help me work on individual trope, and thanks, Audacity, you effing rock).

So go over and check out Hot Air. Not just to cheer up Allah. (And by Allah, we mean Allahpundit the blogger, not that faux—well, I better stop here, don’t want a fatwa out on me.) But because Hot Air has some of the best reading material in the blogosphere. It’s got a nice mix of original commentary, funny or interesting YouTube videos, and excerpts of the hot issues of the day.

From JPost, on a W/M talk at MIT:

“A critically important issue when talking about America’s terrorism problem is the matter of how US support for Israel’s brutal treatment of the Palestinians relates to what happened on September 11,” said Mearsheimer, who played the role of attack dog, while Walt set the stage.

Mearsheimer suggested that the notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the “most powerfully recurrent in [Osama] Bin Laden’s speeches,” who, he said, had been deeply concerned about the plight of the Palestinians since he was a young man. He said that Bin Laden’s concern had been reflected in his public statements throughout the 1990’s - “well before 9-11.” Citing the 9-11 Commission report, Mearsheimer and Walt argued that Bin Laden wanted to make sure the attackers struck Congress because it is “the most important source of support for Israel in the United States,” adding that Bin Laden twice tried to move up the dates of the attacks because of events involving Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt went on to argue that 9-11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experiences in the United States as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with US foreign policy favoring Israel. “Its hard to imagine more compelling evidence of the role US support for Israel played in the 9-11 attacks,” said Mearsheimer.

“In short, the present relationship between Washington and Jerusalem is helping to fuel America’s terrorism problem,” he went on to say.

I addressed the purposeful misreading of the 9/11 Commission Report, that time by Walt, last year. The 9/11 Commission emphatically said that OBL’s animosity towards the US was at best only peripherally affected by US support of Israel.
Notice also Mearsheimer’s sleight of hand - by saying that OBL was “deeply concerned” about Palestinian Arabs he is implying that this was his main motivation for 9/11. This logic is flawed - would they say that OBL’s fighting the Soviets was also motivated by his “deep concern” for Palestine?
Most of all, Bin Laden’s own statements make it clear that his concern for US support of Israel is almost an afterthought. Two fatwas from the 1990s can be found online calling on Muslims to kill all Americans. The 1996 fatwa is named “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” which makes it abundantly clear that it is American troops on holy Muslim soil that got his panties in a bunch, not its support for Israel - he buries that reason in the long text. And his 1998 fatwa spelled out his major three reasons to kill Americans, and support for Israel was a distant third:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have formerly debated the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it.

The best proof of this is the Americans’ continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, still they are helpless.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So now they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.

Obviously OBL and his like-minded Islamists hate Israel with a passion. But they also hate America - possibly even more - for reasons quite independent of Israel, as OBL’s words make clear. These “academics” once again fall into a trap of creating a theory to begin with and then finding facts to support that theory afterwards, ignoring any counter-evidence. This is not scholarship.

In short, Walt and Mearsheimer are liars when they say that support for Israel is the major reason for Islamic terror against America. Anyone who reads the entire OBL fatwas would see that clearly - but W/M know that most people won’t bother. And the inconvenient facts that terror attacks in the UK, France and elsewhere cannot be so neatly explained by their absurd theory are just not going to be mentioned.

(cross-posted to Elder of Ziyon)

Nothing to see here. Move on.

With revelations suggesting that Israel struck a nuclear facility, Syria eager to keep ts good name and reputation intact has invited journalists to see that nothing happened.

Foreign journalists perused the rows of corn and the groves of date palms pregnant with low-hanging fruit here this week, while agents of Syria’s ever present security services stood in the background, watching closely, almost nervously. “You see — around us are farmers, corn, produce, nothing else,” said Ahmed Mehdi, the Deir ez Zor director of the Arab Center for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands, a government agricultural research center, as he led two of the journalists around the facilities.

The real twist to the story is that the impetus for the Syrian spin was a report in the Israeli daily, Yedioth Ahronot.

Remember that the Israelis supposedly jammed Syrian radar to allow the raid to proceed? Well the report on the facility bombed by Israel in Yedioth by Ron Ben-Yishai also involved tricking Syrian defenses, albeit not high-tech defenses.

Mr. Ben-Yishai’s news report rattled Syrians for another reason: he apparently was able to slip into Syria, which bars Israelis from entering, and travel throughout the country. “I think he came in on a European passport,” said Ghazi Bilto, who said he was a graphic designer for the agricultural center.

Still the reporter for the Times seemed a bit skeptical of the Syrian display.

On Monday, journalists toured the agricultural center at the government’s invitation to prove, Mr. Mehdi said, that no nuclear weapons program or Israeli attacks occurred there. “The allegations are completely groundless, and I don’t really understand where all this W.M.D. talk came from,” Mr. Mehdi said, referring to weapons of mass destruction. “There was no raid here — we heard nothing,“ he added. An entourage of the center’s employees lined up with him to greet the journalists. In a seemingly choreographed display, they nodded in agreement and offered their guests recently picked dates as tokens of hospitality.

(emphasis mine)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

syria, israel.

At least this is what your Russian-English dictionary will tell you. Not from my experience, though. Recently, while following a link from Olly’s Onions, I have stumbled upon an amazing pair of articles in Pravda. One that explains how American imperialists faked the Moon landing.

American engineer Ralph Rene was the first who notices these faults: he declared that there was no Moon landing at all and that all pictures and films about the flight to the unexplored planet were a fake.

And more and more… The other Pravda article says that Aliens forced Americans out from the Moon.

The film stated that lunar creatures would not tolerate the presence of Earth dwellers for long. When Americans brought a dummy car to furrow Moon craters, the creatures living on the satellite began to demonstrate their furious protest against the US presence on the Moon.

Probably along the lines of “Yanks, go home!” or summat…

Anyway, Pravda should make up its collective (or hive, one has to say) mind about the whole business. Either Yanks got to the Moon and were subsequently thrown out by the (obviously progressive and freedom-loving locals/aliens) or, on the contrary, they never went there, faking the movies (who then pocketed the change from them 40 billion bucks?).

On the other hand, Pravda allows a lot of room for contradictory stuff, as it could be seen from this picture of its front page of October 8, 2007.

It’s a good thing I am not a woman and do not plan to become pregnant anytime soon.

And if you want to become even more discombobulated, here comes a smasher from the second of the two articles in the above snapshot:

Researchers studying obese women can gain little or no weight during pregnancy - and even lose a few pounds - without harming their babies.

Researchers have it tough, for sure…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.