Hamas has stated yet again that they will never, ever recognize the rights of Jews to have a homeland in the land of their ancestors.

“Today you are here to send a message to those who say the land of Palestine is not for sale,” said Mahmoud Zahar, a fiery Hamas leader. “Whoever thinks we will recognize a Jewish state … are deluding themselves. There will be no recognition of the state of Israel.”

Remember this when you read another idiotic op-ed calling on Israel to talk to Hamas, or to accept the “ten-year truce” that Hamas continually offers. And then remember that the Hamas charter states explicitly:

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it

There is no truce with these people. There is no bargaining with these people. And to think that Fatah is the secular side of Hamas is to think wrongly.

Carl says that Olmert will announce the division of Jerusalem today. I hope he’s wrong. But I fear he’s right.

This is the gift that keeps on giving: The op-ed from the New York Times by Ismail Haniye’s “political adviser” that declared

“Palestinians want, on their terms, the same thing Western societies want: self-determination, modernity, access to markets and their own economic power, and freedom for civil society to evolve.”

[…] Our stated aim when we won the election was to effect reform, end corruption and bring economic prosperity to our people. Our sole focus is Palestinian rights and good governance. We now hope to create a climate of peace and tranquillity within our community.

And there’s this laugh-line as well:

We want to get children back to school, get basic services functioning again, and provide long-term economic gains for our people.

What, exactly, is Hamas doing to effect all of this? Well, they’re patrolling the streets in heavily armed teams of terrorists.

THE nights in Gaza belong to the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades. On potholed streets in the border city of Rafah last week, disciplined rows of fighters bristling with guns and rocket launchers listened to a midnight pep talk from their commander before melting into the darkness.

The militia that was once the underground military wing of Hamas, the Islamic extremist organisation, has become a feared unofficial army controlling this isolated strip of Palestinian territory.

[...] Each six-man unit travels with rocket-launchers, machineguns and grenades and carries a locally made antitank mine similar to the explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) that have wreaked havoc against allied armoured vehicles in Iraq.

And how are they using these patrols to “get children back to school, get basic services functioning again, and provide long-term economic gains”?

Like this:

Only believers feel safe; supporters of Fatah, the political organisation led by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, are routinely arrested and tortured. Journalists are harassed and unIslamic dress can result in a beating as well. More and more women in Gaza are covering not just their hair but their faces. Many bitterly resent Hamas.

And like this:

Courts are now being convened in mosques, based on sharia (Islamic law).

Last week two university students were taken to court for having a romance. The court tried to force them to marry but their feuding families refused. In the end, the court ordered the woman’s family to keep her at home and her boyfriend to leave the city for a year.

These are the people that Jimmy Carter, and others, insist that Israel should be talking peace with. These are the people that Jimmy Carter, and others, insisted that once they had to actually rule Gaza, they’d put aside their weapons due to the overwhelming work of the daily routine, like picking up the garbage and running municipalities.

Funny how they don’t seem to care if the garbage as picked up, as long as the women putting it outside are covered up according to their version of Islamic law.

Hamas has not moderated. Hamas will not moderate. Perhaps it’s time for world opinion to moderate. When will the world accept the reality that a terrorist group is running Gaza, and nothing will be accomplished until the terrorists are defeated?

I’m putting ten bucks on the Twelfth of Never.

When you start a sentence with “something is rotten in…”, you are usually trying to point out something more serious than a hangnail but still not as final and tragic as, to take one example, an incurable cancer growth. I am afraid that the time when a sentence about The Guardian could have been started this way has passed.

When a mere sports hack is starting his venomous Jewish conspiracy piece with “Roman Abramovich’s millions cast a long shadow over England’s Euro 2008 hopes“, and the editors see nothing wrong with it - we are beyond looking for a cure.

When even a dipshit Hezbollah supporter says “I support Hezbollah but find Scotts article pathetic.” in the comments to this crap, you can gather easily what kind of low was reached in the article.

When the same dipshit Hezbollah supporter uses a word like jewdom and the moderators of the above mentioned rag pass it over, I do not thinks I have to elaborate.

Via Shlemazl.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

I grew up in New Jersey, and was taught to hate handguns. Really. Shotguns and rifles were okay if you hunted (not that I ever had the desire to hunt), but handguns? Evil. Death machines. The only reason to have one is to use it to kill someone. People get killed all the time by handguns, mostly people who found one, played with it, and shot themselves or someone else by accident. At least, that’s the lore I grew up on. But I’ve known since I moved to Virginia that it’s a very gun-friendly state, and y’know, I’m a woman alone, and my neighborhood has gone downhill considerably in the last two years. I’ve been thinking a lot about learning to shoot and buying a gun.

Which is why I spent Sunday afternoon at the Blue Ridge Arsenal in northern Virginia learning to load, shoot, and unload four different kinds of handguns. Plus a rifle.

These are the pistols I used. There’s a Ruger Single-Six and a Colt Woodsman, both .22’s, a Colt Official Police revolver (circa 1940), and an Enfield Mark 2 (.38). There was also a Stevens 15-B .22 rifle.

My teacher, Stretch, is an ex-police officer. He spent some time beforehand teaching me how each of the guns are opened, loaded, and closed. We did this, of course, without loading the weapons at Chris and Janet’s. However, I got really good at shooting empty guns at the fireplace logs to get the feel of the trigger and the gun. I was also tickled to hear Stretch compliment me on holding my finger properly off the trigger of each weapon until actually firing it. Because believe it or not, I learned that from reading military bloggers. Their posts making fun of faux soldiers, terrorists, and fauxtography taught me how to hold a weapon properly.

After Stretch was satisfied that I had a good idea of how to use the guns, we drove to the shooting range. We had to wait a while, and I looked over the various weapons and gear. I got a kick out of the pocketbooks that come complete with a holster inside for your weapon.

While we were waiting, I could hear some very loud reports from inside the shooting range. I didn’t realize it was going to be that loud, and I have to say, I was starting to get scared. I was wondering if maybe this was one of the stupidest things I’d ever decided to do. By the time it was our turn, I was pretty positive I was going to hate it. Inside the range it was even worse—we had earplugs and ear protection, but it was loud and startling and I was getting really nervous. But I figured I was there, I’d paid, I may as well at least try to shoot. Stretch started me on the rifle at three yards.

You know, it took exactly one shot to make my nerves disappear. I loaded the rifle, locked the bolt, cocked the hammer, aimed, and fired. And I hit the target. Where it counts. This was the result of my first shot:

Granted, it was only three yards, but Stretch told me he started me out close to build up my confidence before moving on to tougher targets. It totally worked. I spent the next few minutes loading, shooting, clearing out the shell casing, loading, shooting, clearing out the shell casing… it was kinda cool to see the little pieces of metal go flying out of the rifle. (I saved the shell casing from my first shot. Think I’ll drill a hole in it and add it to my keychain.) And we moved the target back to seven yards.

The rifle was the most fun to shoot. I’m thinking my first purchase is going to be a relatively inexpensive .22 rifle, especially since everyone tells me that you can buy a brick of 500 .22 rounds for about $10 at Wal-Mart. That’s a lot of hours of target shooting. Have I mentioned how much I really, really liked shooting that rifle?

I did spend much more time firing the pistols, however, and I now find myself rather fond of revolvers. Those were fun to load, fun to shoot, and fun to empty the casings out of. They were a lot harder to shoot than the other two, though.

You may notice that I shed my coat fairly quickly. That’s because I only noticed the cold about as long as I noticed the noise from the other lanes, which is to say, both went away after I started firing the rifle.

You can compare my hold and stance if you like. Damned if I can tell which gun was which in this picture. Not after two hours, anyway.

Oh, wait. That’s not a revolver. I think that’s the Colt Woodsman. I’m sure Stretch will correct me if I’m wrong.

My shooting got better as I went along, until, after about an hour, I started to tire and my groundhog started getting away. Okay, not really, but I didn’t get nearly as many shots in the bullseye area with the two revolvers as I had with the previous three guns. Here’s my favorite grouping, using the Colt Woodsman.

Stretch pointed out to me that if you take the targets we were using, and place them over a person’s chest, I pretty much destroyed my home invader at 21 feet. Now I begin to see the practical purpose behind target shooting. (All the shots in the corner were Stretch’s. He got his guy, too.) My first shot at the groundhog hit him square in the head. Wish I could say I was going for his brains, but I was aiming at the orange dot in the middle. I got that orange dot more than a few times.

I had fun. And I learned a new skill. Now that I’m back in Richmond, my plan is to find a shooting range nearby and take a course. While I was at the range in northern VA, I was absolutely struck by the thought that every single person in the lanes next to me had the capacity to kill every other person there. And so did I (albeit a little more slowly, what with all the .22 weapons we were using). I don’t think I ever paid closer attention to anything else I’ve learned in my life than I did to whatever Stretch told me. Well, except for the names and makes of the guns. While he was telling me the history, I was looking at the trigger, the hammer, the magazine, the chamber, and the other parts of the gun and making sure I understood exactly what to do with the moving parts. I made only one mistake at the range. I put an unloaded weapon on the counter in the lane pointing into the room, not at the target. I won’t make that mistake twice. It might even have been this one.

I think it is highly likely I will at least buy a rifle for target shooting. As for home protection, I haven’t gotten that far yet. I’ll make that decision after I’ve learned a heck of a lot more about handling guns. But I’ve come a long way from the Triple-L liberal that was scared to death to so much as touch a gun.

UPDATE: Linked at memeorandum.

In Bernard Lewis’s “On the Jewish Question,” the scholar gives a brief history of the Palestinian Israeli conflict in order to illustrate the fundamental problem with negotiations.

If, on the other hand, the issue is the existence of Israel, then clearly it is insoluble by negotiation. There is no compromise position between existing and not existing, and no conceivable government of Israel is going to negotiate on whether that country should or should not exist.PLO and other Palestinian spokesmen have, from time to time, given formal indications of recognition of Israel in their diplomatic discourse in foreign languages. But that’s not the message delivered at home in Arabic, in everything from primary school textbooks to political speeches and religious sermons. Here the terms used in Arabic denote, not the end of hostilities, but an armistice or truce, until such time that the war against Israel can be resumed with better prospects for success. Without genuine acceptance of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish State, as the more than 20 members of the Arab League exist as Arab States, or the much larger number of members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference exist as Islamic states, peace cannot be negotiated.

So when Steven Lee Myers of the NYT writes in “Seeking a Mideast Path, Bush Offers a Nudge“:

A recurring criticism of Mr. Bush is that he has so clearly tilted American policy toward Israel that the United States is no longer seen as an honest broker, emphasizing Israel’s security over Palestinian grievances.That was the case in 2004, when he publicly expressed support for some of the nonnegotiable positions of the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, including Mr. Sharon’s objections to what Palestinians regard as the all-important right of return for Palestinians uprooted by the conflict. Mr. Bush’s assurances to Israel remain on the table.

he is confirming that the goal of the Palestinians is not peace with Israel, but the destruction of Israel. This equates supporting Israel’s right to exist with being “tilted” towards Israel.

The all-important “right of return for Palestinians” is code for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. With Palestinian leaders, even now, saying that the status of Israel as a Jewish state is a bargaining chip or a fiction, they are saying that they deny Israel’s right to exist because they are denying the historical link between Jews and Israel.

Others comment on the Lewis article. (via memeorandum)

Israel Matzav notes sardonically

Unfortunately, he [Lewish s.d] never figured on the suicidal Olmert-Barak-Livni government, which is apparently willing to negotiate whether or not the State of Israel should exist. Some day, that will make an interesting historical study.

The Spine uses Lewis as a way of refuting Roger Cohen’s NY Times op-ed. The Spine, Martin Peretz, refutes Cohen nicely too:

What does Fayyad want? Cohen endorses his interlocutor’s formula: “Fayyad is right. A return to the 1967 lines, plus or minus agreed swaps, is the only basis for a two-state accord.” “Convince Israel that its long-tern security lies in compromise.” “Bush must tell Israel it’s strong enough to bet on Fayyad’s vision of co-existence.” This last line is the most preposterous in the entire article. Israel must bet on Fayyad’s vision of co-existence? And what if that bet turns out bad? Doesn’t Israel’s prior dealings with the Palestinians indicate that this bet might actually be folly? Bet? Is Cohen nuts? Does he really want Israel to give up the West Bank on the wager that rockets will not be aimed at Jerusalem and Tel Aviv as they are — daily — from Gaza onto Sderot?

Real Clear Politics adopts the view that Annapolis isn’t about Israel and Palestine but about containing Iran. He cites Lewis to show that even if containing Iran is the goal,

But this can’t be done, presumably, without some kind of “peace” between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Does anyone seriously believe that can happen in Annapolis?

And it can’t be done. As long as the issue isn’t Israel’s border but its existence. Israel’s size does not matter.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In an article on Mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s offer to be an “observer” (H/T: Hot Air) in the 2008 presidential elections, Robert Tait of the Guardian—and his many layers of fact-checkers and editors—missed a vital fact of the American presidency. How many of you readers can figure this one out?

Having failed to win a response with an 18-page letter to President George Bush or to a request to visit the site of the September 11 2001 attack on New York, Ahmadinejad has offered himself as an observer in next year’s presidential election.

The proposal came in a speech to volunteers with the Basij, a pro-regime militia. He said he was prompted by a belief that Americans would vote against the current administration in a truly free poll.

However, the terms of Ahmadinejad’s offer appeared to betray some confusion about the potential candidates.

“If the White House officials allow us to be present as an observer in their presidential election we will see whether people in their country are going to vote for them again or not,” he said. The US constitution prevents Bush from seeking a third consecutive term, while no member of his administration is expected to be in the running in next November’s poll.

Here’s a hint: It’s the last sentence of the quote.

Give up?

The 22nd Amendment says nothing at all about consecutive terms. The amendment states only that the president cannot be elected for a third term, with the exception of having served two years or less to fill a term. Witness:

Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.

Now, we can argue that it’s mere semantics. But the Constitution is all about semantics. By using the modifier “consecutive,” the Guardian implies that President Bush could run for another term at a different time, which he cannot.

Oh, come on. How could I resist taking a shot at the Guardian and Mad Mahmoud in the same post? Because Ahmadinejad is so uneducated in the American political system, that he doesn’t get our two-term limit for the presidency (if only we had that for Congress). Plus there’s the fact that Mad Mahmoud is so stupid he thinks that American voting isn’t free. Sorry, Mahmoud, but not all countries are like Iran, where you have to have your candidates approved by the Mullahcracy.

Of course, what Ahmadinejad is really doing is what the experts in modern victimology do the best: They claim victimhood by taking the charges made against their tyrannical regimes, such as the fact that Iranian elections are not really free, and trying to turn them around on the nations that call them on it. It’s the same logic the Iranians use to pretend that Iranian Jews are happy to remain in Iran, and that many mainstream media outlets are quick to parrot. What is never mentioned is the fact that Iranian Jews are not allowed to take a family holiday in another country without leaving at least one member of the family hostage in Iran. And while they’re constantly pointing out that Iranian Jews have a seat in the Iranian parliament, Iran and its lackeys in the media fail to mention that Iranian Jews are not in charge of their own religious schools—they’re run by Muslims, and have an Islamic agenda—and Iranian Jews are forced to go to school on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.

In Iranian terms, freedom isn’t really free. But you won’t know that if you don’t dig a little more deeply than the media surface level.