SNN is up, and we’ve got Charles Johnson discussing the war that is splitting the conservative blogosphere (and that almost cost us SNN).

My contribution this week is about British Muslim groups trying to hijack yet another Jewish issue and apply it to Muslims: The spurious analogy that saying that 2,000 Muslims in the U.K. are currently being tracked for ties with terrorists is just like the demonization of the Jews by Nazis during the 1930s. Uh-huh. They’re almost exactly the same. Except they’re not. Hilarity (well, much juvenile scorn) ensues.

I haven’t heard the rest yet, because today’s a workday. But go and listen, because this may be our most-listened to show, ever, and if you don’t hear it, you’re going to miss out.

You don’t need an iPod. All you need is Windows Media Player or something like it. And you don’t have to wait for a slow server. Right-click the link and go to file/save link as (in Firefox, it’s different in IE) and save it to your computer, then listen at your leisure. SNN is also on iTunes.

MK Yuval Steinitz is arguing that the United States should cut its foreign aid to Egypt by (a symbolic) $200 million.

Egypt effectively condoned Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, and has since stood by and allowed Hamas to build an army, MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud) wrote in a letter to the US Senate on Sunday. “Egypt’s de facto behavior in the field supports Hamas,” he said. Steinitz wrote the letter at the request of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), with whom he chairs a joint US-Israeli committee on defense and foreign policy. “As long as Egypt is not required to pay a real price for this behavior, weapons and financial aid will continue to flow into the hands of Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza,” he wrote. Steinitz asked the Senate to approve a bill recently passed by the House of Representatives to freeze $200 million of the approximate $1.3 billion in annual US aid to Egypt each year until the Egyptian government changes its policy toward smuggling near and across its 14-kilometer border with the Gaza Strip. According to the IDF, Hamas has smuggled 20,000 rifles, 6,000 antitank missiles and 100 tons of explosives into the Gaza Strip since last summer. Steinitz said efforts by the Egyptians to stop the smuggling were ineffective and half-hearted.

The New York Times, not unsurprisingly finds all the reasons that Egypt should not be judged harshly.

Over all, Egypt’s relationship with Hamas is complicated by domestic political concerns. On one hand, analysts said, it is not in Egypt’s interest to improve relations with Hamas, an offshoot of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. On the other, Egypt does not want to be seen to be helping Israel over the Palestinians. “I do not think that Egypt is re-examining its relationship with Hamas, because any legitimacy for Hamas negatively affects the legitimacy of the Egyptian regime,” said Emad Gad, an analyst at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “Any success for Hamas is a success for the Muslim Brotherhood.” When Egypt opened its border with Gaza in September to allow Hamas militants to pass through, analysts in Egypt said that it was probably part of some deal. Newspapers in Egypt reported that Hamas turned over a wanted militant from Al Qaeda in exchange for the passage, a deal the government never confirmed. “This would be a political crisis for Egypt,” Mr. Gad said. “People will say that Egypt is cooperating with Israel against the Palestinians. And Egypt cannot do this.” Analysts added that Egypt had cultivated an unofficial relationship with Hamas partly because it was such a large force that it could not be ignored and partly in the hope of bringing greater unity between Hamas and the Fatah faction of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

The Times doesn’t explain if the greater unity between Hamas and Fatah means that both will be more or less favorably disposed to making peace with Israel. That it doesn’t address that question says something. The Jerusalem Post ends with

The Egyptian government has called the accusations against them “baseless” and harmful to Egyptian-American relations.

I think this is actually accurate. American wants Egypt to democratize. Egypt isn’t.

Egypt could support American policy in the UN. It doesn’t.

So the only active element of Egyptian-American relations is the aid the United States gives Egypt. Thus if Israel gives less to Egypt, it will harm those relations.

But because Egypt is supposedly supporting the chimera of peace the administration will fight the effort being coordinated between Steinitz and some senators to penalize Egypt for its malfeasance. That is the nature of the peace process. If an Arab country or group says that it supports peace it gets inoculated against any actions or positions it takes against real peace. The Bush administration is really no different from any administration that came before it. But because the President has stated that he wants actions to match words, it’s more disappointing that this administration fails to stick to its standards.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

On the anniversary of the death of the biggest mass-murderer of Jews since Adolf Hitler, his successor is promising to move Yasser Arafat’s remains to Jerusalem.

President Mahmoud Abbas has pledged to continue to work for the transfer of the body of the late President Yasser Arafat to Jerusalem.

The President made his promise during the inauguration of a mausoleum dedicated to the late president in the government’s headquarters in Ramallah. November 11 marks the third anniversary of the death of the Palestinian leader.

Abbas laid a wreath near Arafat’s tomb as a band played memorial songs.

The shrine is designed to allow its future transfer to Arafat’s desired final resting place in Jerusalem.

Mahmoud Shtayeh, head of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, who supervised the building process of the shrine, insisted that the late president will be buried in Jerusalem.

This is why Israel must never give up control of the Temple Mount. You may have forgotten, but I have not, that the Palestinians requested that Arafat be buried on the Temple Mount. That murderer’s remains would desecrate our holiest site, and I would not be surprised to see the earth open up and swallow the entire complex whole. And frankly, if Israeli authorities were to let this happen, well, we’d deserve to lose the Wall.

HonestReporting is trying to increase awareness of the Philippe Karsenty/ France 2 trial. Toward that end they’ve put up a video of Karsenty discussing the unseen footage.

However as Fiery Spirited Zionist noted in the comments to my recent post on the topic, a strike in France threatens to delay the court proceedings.

Dry Bones turns serious in introducing the Coordinating Council on Jerusalem. (Well though deadly serious, the cartoon is a riot.)

The CCJ is a broad-based coalition of major American Jewish organizations which take differing views on many matters, but which unite around the firm conviction that Jerusalem is the Capital of the Jewish People and the heritage of all Jews everywhere and that oppose any negotiations which involve possible concessions of Jewish sovereignty or control over Jerusalem.

(h/t Yid with Lid, who has been very involved in this effort.)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

From the Jerusalem Post

Prof. Ada Yonath, a world-class molecular biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, has been chosen to receive the $100,000 L’Oreal and UNESCO “For Women in Science” Life’s Work Prize - one of only five awarded each year to outstanding female scientists on each continent.Yonath is the first Israeli to receive the prestigious prize after being nominated by the Education Ministry’s UNESCO committee, which is the government’s advisory body on UNESCO activities in Israel. As the recipient of the prize, Yonath is recognized as this year’s leading woman scientist in Europe.

This is a description of her accomplishments

Yonath, who was born in Jerusalem in 1939, is a crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes. She received her PhD at the Rehovot institute and accepted postdoctoral positions at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University. In 1970 she established what was for nearly a decade the only protein crystallography laboratory in Israel. Her research focuses on the mechanisms underlying protein biosynthesis by ribosomal crystallography, a research line she pioneered more than two decades ago despite much skepticism within the international scientific community.Yonath elucidated the modes of action of over 20 different antibiotics targeting the ribosome, explained the mechanism of drug resistance and the structural basis for antibiotic selectivity and showed how it plays a key role in clinical usefulness and therapeutic effectiveness, thus paving the way for structure-based drug design.

And if you’re interested her faculty page at Weizmann is here.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

I didn’t grok that Flicker could be used as a ersatz blog: just upload a picture and start carping around it. But here is an unexciting, albeit pitiful, wail from Ben Heine, he of the Iranian Holocaust cartoon competition fame.

No more and no less. Ehehe….

To put things straight, dear Ben: a cockroach squashed by a bulldozer can call itself a victim of industrial revolution with more reasons than you can call yourself a victim of this or any other lobby. A fart in a hurricane would be more apt as a description of your miserable life story…

In fact, all operatives of the Elders’ field units are under strict order to keep a safe distance.

It is the smell, you know.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.