Hey, you know that part of a virus infection that feels like a head cold and makes you stuffy and achy in the sinuses before finally getting to the stage where the virus has successfully conquered you and now is reproducing, causing you to sneeze and spread it everywhere?

Yeah, that’s where I am.

And I have hours left of work to do today.

That’s okay. I haven’t been sleeping well. I expect to be up around 2 a.m., sleepless again, doing the work I couldn’t do while napping this afternoon.

Of course, the joke is on my virus. Living alone means I have no one else to give it to. Evolutionary dead end, sucker!

I’m going to boil my toothbrush tonight.

Following up on yesterday’s attempt to evade responsibility for terrorism, Palestinian PM Salam Fayyad continues his PR blitz with the willing participation of the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler complaining that since Annapolis Israel hasn’t done enough.Kessler, like any good PR flack makes sure that we all know Mr. Fayyad’s qualifications.

Fayyad, a former economist with the International Monetary Fund, enjoys good relations with U.S. officials. He is visiting Washington this week to meet with U.S. officials — including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Bush — and to promote a new public-private partnership to create educational and economic opportunities for Palestinian youth, such as refurbishing West Bank youth centers in Nablus, in Hebron and in Ramallah.

.Fayyad has his say:

Fayyad, in comments during an appearance at the Aspen Institute and in a separate interview, said Israeli officials often shower him with praise, then take no concrete steps on dismantling security roadblocks or restraining the growth of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. “You see no change in the way that Israel operates,” he said.”Atmospheres are much better, [but] checkpoints have increased, not decreased. We have good meetings, friendly meetings. A lot of promises of ‘We will think about this, this makes sense,’ ” he said. “I am happy when somebody tells you you are making sense. I would be a damn lot happier when I see things begin to happen.”

In the interview, Fayyad insisted that his comments were “not meant to be pejorative. This is the reality. I am just trying to state it as it is.”

At least Kessler quotes an Israeli source who disputes this:

A number of Israel officials, including Ambassador Sallai Meridor, were in the audience when Fayyad spoke at Aspen. An Israel official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he did not want a public spat, strongly disagreed with Fayyad’s assessment. He said Israel has released Palestinian prisoners, transferred Palestinian tax revenue, signed agreements on industrial zones and handed over security responsibility of some Palestinian areas.”Israel’s made a strategic decision to help strengthen the Palestinian Authority in an effort to cooperate in fighting terrorism and reaching a historic compromise of two states for two peoples,” the official said. “Unfortunately, Palestinian terror continues against Israeli citizens, including by elements affiliated with the Palestinian Authority.”

Three recent terrorism attacks against Israelis were committed by members of the Palestinian security services, the official charged.

“the official charged?” Come on. They were committed by members of the PA’s security services. No qualification necessary.

Fayyad gets a last word in.

“You have to overcome years of mistrust,” Fayyad acknowledged. “I am trying to tell them is this is a new period. If something bad happens, I feel bad, but it is not policy. This is a big difference.”

Well when your security forces are still engaged in terror and your propaganda still calls for the destruction of Israel, it doesn’t really help to overcome the mistrust does it?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The Washington Post today features a fawning profile of HRW activist Marc Garlasco, The Man on Both Sides of Air War Debate

Garlasco is uniquely suited to understand both sides of the air war debate: He knows what the bombs can do, and he knows the price of errant attacks. In the five years since he moved from targeter to human rights advocate, he has lobbied for greater deliberation in the military’s use of air power. He has made it his mission to prevent the use of cluster munitions and has argued for smaller bombs that have less impact on surrounding areas — like the bombs that the Air Force now uses in Iraq.

and

“The objective is not to end war, it’s to change the way militaries wage war,” Malinowski said. “In order to do that, we need people who can speak with credibility to military leaders. Marc is effective because he speaks the language of the community he seeks to influence, he comes from that culture. . . . They tend to see him as a constructive critic rather than the enemy.”

Hard to argue with that.
Or maybe not so hard.

The problem with this approach is that it ignores article 28 of the Geneva conventions.

The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations.

(h/t Seraphic Secret) What Garlasco is doing is pushing for democracies and respecters of human rights to reduce the lethality of their military attacks in order to absolve terrorists and rogue states from their responsibilities according to international law. The pressure HRW brings to bear is only on the side of those who respect human rights. Their efforts will have no effect on the rogue elements of the world who don’t give two hoots.Going to Page 2 of the profile we learn:

Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap Jr., the service’s deputy judge advocate general and an advocate of air power, said Garlasco’s background has helped him build relationships in the military.”I think that Marc is the prototype of what many nongovernmental organizations are seeking — that is people with real expertise,” Dunlap said. “I have not always agreed with Marc, but I have never found him to be driven by an ideological agenda.”

And here is where I disagree completely. I didn’t just find this article at random. I saw the name Garlasco and I remembered something about him. Nearly two years ago a Palestinian family at the beach on Gaza was hit by an explosion killing 8. Garlasco immediately blamed Israel for the blast using his credential as a military expert for HRW. The problem is that his expertise was in targeting, not damage assessment. But that military credential shielded him from questions that ought to have been asked.

Worse, a timeline established by NGO Monitor show how Garlasco reversed himself, seemingly to remain true to HRW’s (anti-Israel) agenda rather than acting independently. HonestReporting also scores Garlasco for contributing to a report faulting Israel for destroying houses that hid smuggling tunnels. (Israelly Cool! points out that smuggling tunnels are still a big problem and aren’t always so easy to spot.)

I’d probably have questioned Garlasco’s sincerity regardless. However knowing of his past I’m not just guessing. Given the article’s failure to mention Garlasco’s fiasco from Gaza, it really is a fluff piece more suited for the Style section than the A section.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Wow.

I’ve been saying that you can’t count out the European self-preservation instinct. I don’t believe that the nations that have millennia-old history of war and bloodshed will just lie down and die when their way of life is threatened. And here’s proof I’m not wrong:

Denmark’s five major daily newspapers republished on Wednesday one of the 12 drawings of the Prophet Muhammad which angered Muslims around the world, as a protest against a plot to murder one of the cartoonists.

A Danish citizen of Moroccan descent and two Tunisians were arrested on Tuesday in western Denmark for planning to murder 73-year-old Kurt Westergaard, a cartoonist at Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that originally published the drawings in September 2005.

The five newspapers—Jyllands-Posten, Politiken, Berlingske Tidende, BT and Ekstra Bladet—on Wednesday republished Westergaard’s cartoon, which depicts the founder of Islam with a bomb in his turban.

Apparently, even the left recognizes existential threats. And their response has none of the xenophobia and bigotry of the far-right anti-Muslim parties like Vlaams Belang.

“Regardless of whether Jyllands-Posten at the time used freedom of speech unwisely and with damaging consequences, the paper deserves unconditional solidarity when it is threatened with terror,” It said.

This is exactly the reaction that Muslim organizations don’t want. The West, it seems, is not going to kowtow to the bullying and threats of the radical Islamists. Not counting, of course, morons like the Archibishop of Canterbury.

There is no inherent right not to be offended. Time to let the professional victimologists know that.