Roger L. Simon is correct when he writes:

I was up early this morning to help with PJM’s ongoing coverage of the Al Dura Trial in Paris. We seem to be almost alone in the US media bothering with this trial, yet it has arguably tremendous historical significance.

Of course the U.S. media, and, I suspect the media around much of the world are incapable of introspection. The Enderlin/Karsenty case reflects badly on the media and their capacity to remain objective observers.

From what I’ve read of the case so far, France 2 has been incredibly arrogant in its approach. Back in Novermber its behavior led observers to believe that in an American court, the network would have been held in contempt for its correspondent’s blatant falsehoods on the stand.

According to Backspin that same old arrogance was evident today:

“It was a fight of the institutional thinking,” said Mozes. “The strongest argument France 2 could come up with is that Charles Enderlin is an institution in this country. They said that [Jamal] Al-Dura was visited by King Hussein, which shows how important this case is. France 2 wanted to show how respected personalities participated. They hardly challenged the facts and preferred to play up the players and institutions involved.”

This is beyond belief. The event in question occurred at the end of September 2000. King Hussein died February 1999, about 20 months earlier. So his visit to Jamal al-Dura was really important: either he was divinely prescient or he returned from the grave. I’m surprised that no one called France 2 on that.[see below for an update]
Regardless, Phillippe Karsenty isn’t out of the woods. Backspin’s correspondent writes:

Mozes said the French TV network’s lawyers also sought to discredit Karsenty with handwriting analysis, treating him him as lightweight. “They ridiculed him, like, how dare he criticize an institution like France 2″ Mozes said.Will the three-judge panel break from the conventional wisdom? That’s the million dollar question. “It’ll require a lot of courage,” Mozes said, crediting Judge Laurence Trebucq for giving Karsenty time and leeway to show all the material he wanted.

Although Mozes described Karsenty’s presentation as “cool and articulate,” Mozes suggests Karsenty may have overprepared. “There are so many strong arguments showing that something isn’t right with the video. Karsenty got lost in a huge number of arguments, rather than hammer home at three or four.”

For more background see this video interview with Tom Gross.

UPDATE: Originally Backspin reported that it was King Hussein. When I pointed out that King Hussein had already died at that time, my contact realized that the problem might have been in the transmission of the information. In an NYT story on the subject, it mentions Jordan’s king. It’s possible that France 2 used the same designation and the correspondent accidentally substituted the name of the longstanding monarch.Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Hamas claimed responsibility for the salvo of kassam rockets that killed a man who was committing the crime of sitting in his car.

A Israeli college student was killed on Wednesday after a Qassam rocket landed in a parking lot near the Sapir College campus in southern Israel. Medics alerted to the scene also treated two more Israelis for minor wounds.

The 30-year-old student who was killed reportedly died shortly after sustaining massive wounds to his chest.

The rocket attacks were proudly claimed by Hamas.

A total of 23 Qassam rockets were fired by Palestinian groups from Gaza on Wednesday afternoon, hitting a factory in an industrial zone and striking in and around the town of Sderot and other Gaza vicinity.

The last barrage included 11 rockets which were fired successively over the course of several short minutes. Hamas has claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks.

Watch for the non-Israeli media to use the “cycle of violence” motif and justify the kassam attacks because of this:

Five members of Hamas’ military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, were killed Wednesday morning after an IDF aircraft fired missiles at a bus and another vehicle carrying the group’s operatives west of the Gaza town of Khan Younis.

According to local sources, the bus was hit by several missiles as it was approaching a naval force post near Gaza’s coast. Several people were wounded in the strike.

Three of the men killed were reportedly senior commanders of the group’s rocket unit. Palestinian sources estimated that the bus had been under surveillance since it left the Jabalya area.

Gee, that was fast. Reuters wins the blame-Israel-moral-equivalence game.

Israel and Hamas violence spikes on Gaza border
A Palestinian rocket launched from the Gaza Strip killed one person in Israel on Wednesday, the first such fatality in nine months, after Israeli forces killed eight militants in the Hamas-controlled territory.

Note the headline, equating Israel’s striking terrorists who murder Israelis with terrorists, gee, murdering Israelis. Nice little moral equivalence game, Reuters. They’re absolute apologists for Hamas and other terrorist groups’ murderous attacks on Israel.

Earlier in the day, five militants, senior members of Hamas, were killed when the van in which they were travelling was attacked from the air near the southern Gaza town of Khan Younis, medical officials said.

[...] Hamas, which seized the Gaza Strip in June, struck back by firing more than 25 rockets at southern Israel, and two other militants were killed in an Israeli air strike on a launching site in the northern Gaza Strip, medical officials said.

But wait. There’s even more. Reuters may as well be Hamas’ PR company.

Hamas says attacks from the Gaza Strip, including rockets fired by its own militants and others, are a response to Israelimilitary operations in the territory and the occupied West Bank and would end if Israel stopped all such activity and lifted its blockade.

No one had been killed in Israel by a Palestinian rocket strike since May 2007.

Like that makes a difference. Two days ago a ten-year-old boy nearly lost his arm. A few weeks ago, a boy lost his leg. Nearly every single day, the residents of Sderot are forced to drop what they’re doing and run to a bomb shelter. The people of Sderot have no normal lives. But hey, nobody’s been killed in nine whole months, so that makes it all better.

Effing morons. Make the Reuters editors work from Sderot and see how fast the bias of the articles changes.

The other day the Jerusalem Post reported on some comments Sen. Obama made (via memeorandum):

“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you’re anti-Israel, and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel,” leading Democratic presidential contender Illinois Senator Barack Obama said Sunday.”If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress,” he said.

He also criticized the notion that anyone who asks tough questions about advancing the peace process or tries to secure Israel by anyway other than “just crushing the opposition” is being “soft or anti-Israel.”

(A complete transcript is here.)

Matthew Yglesias is encouraged by the comments:

This is music to my ears and, frankly, very much the attitude that’s Israel’s long-term future requires. Still, in some quarters the man may as well have just festooned himself with swastikas.

Elder of Ziyon disposes of this nonsense efficiently

It is curious that Obama is adopting an apparently anti-Likud stance. Likud, after all, was responsible for Camp David and the surrender of the Sinai to Egypt; and Likud was in power when Gaza was abandoned.Obama’s statement seems even more naive when the latest polls in Israel show Likud handily beating Kadima and Labor. As Shmuel Rosner asks, does this mean that a President Obama would not support a Likud prime minister?

Also, as The American Thinker observes, the word “Likud” has turned into a generalized anti-Israel term by the far left, pretty much their equivalent to “Taliban.” It is hard to read Obama’s comment as anything but influenced by the strong anti-Likud stance of people who clearly are anti-Israel.

As far as Rosner’s question goes, if a hypothetical President Obama is anything like former President Clinton, the answer is “yes.” As this article reminds us:

In the last two months, Mr. Arafat has traveled Europe and the Arab world extensively, from Finland to Bahrain. At his meeting on Tuesday with President Clinton, the second in recent months, it is highly unlikely that the President will promise to recognize a Palestinian state in the future. The Clinton Administration has long insisted that both Israelis and Palestinians refrain from taking any unilateral action on the issues — like statehood — that are supposed to be hammered out in the final status negotiations between them.But Mr. Clinton gives Mr. Arafat a kind of international recognition just by meeting with him — especially given what the Israelis have dubbed the American ‘’snub diplomacy” toward their Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

(Actually “snub diplomacy” was an American term mentioned in a Washington Post article a year earlier.)

This is how President Clinton acted and it undermined Netanyahu and brought Ehud Barak and the Labor Party to power. Prime Minister Barak was a lot more cooperative with President Clinton and withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon and continued negotiating with Yasser Arafat, including an attempt to give Arafat nearly everything he wanted at Camp David in July 2000.

We now know that the withdrawal from Lebanon strengthened Hezbollah and led to the eventual war with that terrorist organization. Clinton’s failure to side with Netanyahu and challenge Arafat to comply with signed agreements led to the so-called Aqsa intidfadah.

I know, as Elder of Ziyon observes, that “Likud” is an insult meant to dismiss a political opponent as ideological and impervious to reason. President Clinton worked against the Likud Prime Minister during his presidency and Israel paid a very high price.

If that’s what Sen. Obama advocates by his pro-Likud statement, then I think it’s safe to say that he doesn’t have Israel’s (or frankly, America’s) best interests in mind.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

In When Jihad came to America, Andrew McCarthy sketches a brief history of the blind Sheikh and his followers, especially El Sayyid Nosair, who killed Rabbi Meir Kahane, and the failure of authorities to tie them to the larger evil that they served. Still at the end McCarthy asks:

Would a successful interdiction of Kahane’s murderer, or swift and thorough investigation of Abdel Rahman’s circle in its aftermath, have prevented the monstrous deeds of subsequent years? That is of course unknowable. But an aggressive effort by United States authorities would have indicated a seriousness of purpose toward the threat of Islamic terrorism that itself might have changed the story of our times for the better. We still live, and will continue to live, with the consequences of our own blindness.

It is unknowable. It also recalls an article by Daniel Pipes and Steven Emerson who observed that information from the terror trials of those who blew up the American embassies in Africa told us that:

In the often long waits between terrorist attacks, Al-Qaeda’s member organizations maintained operational readiness by acting under the cover of front-company businesses and nonprofit, tax-deductible religious charities. These nongovernmental groups, many of them still operating, are based mainly in the U.S. and Britain, as well as in the Middle East. The Qatar Charitable Society, for example, has served as one of bin Laden’s de facto banks for raising and transferring funds.Osama bin Laden also set up a tightly organized system of cells in an array of American cities, including Brooklyn, N.Y.; Orlando, Fla.; Dallas; Santa Clara, Calif.; Columbia, Mo., and Herndon, Va.

This was written at the end of May, 2001. That date makes it almost prescient. Again its unknowable whether or not a more aggressive approach towards Al Qaeda operatives on American soil would have prevented 9/11. My suspicion was that the American based cells likely helped provide logistics for the 19 terrorists, but that has never been established.

So it’s interesting to read this article, Imam From Va. Mosque Now Thought to Have Aided Al-Qaeda in light of the knowledge of the degree to which Al Qaeda cells were operating on American soil.

The FBI also learned that Aulaqi was visited in early 2000 by a close associate of Omar Abdel Rahman, known as the blind sheik, who was convicted of conspiracy in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and that he had ties to people raising money for the radical Palestinian movement Hamas, according to Congress and the 9/11 Commission report.But the bureau lacked enough evidence to bring a case, and closed its investigation. Around the same time, two future Sept. 11 hijackers — Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, fresh from an al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia — turned up at Aulaqi’s San Diego mosque in early 2000.

Witnesses later told the FBI that Aulaqi had a close relationship with the hijackers in San Diego. “Several persons informed the FBI after September 11 that this imam had closed-door meetings in San Diego with al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi and another individual,” the Joint House-Senate Inquiry reported. In press interviews at the time, Aulaqi denied having such contacts.

This doesn’t prove my suspicion, but it suggests that my suspicion was correct.

Taken together all three articles illustrate that the possibility of more terror on American soil was very real. One thing that the Bush administration deserves credit for is keeping the homeland safe. I don’t think after 9/11 it was obvious that we wouldn’t be struck again.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The first viewpoint: A Ynet article on the number of African refugees in Israel, and their effect on the country. The lede:

More than 7,400 refugees from African countries have infiltrated Israel through Egypt over the past year, Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter estimated Sunday during a special discussion initiated by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

During the discussion, it was decided to make a distinction between refugees in need of aid and infiltrators arriving in Israel to look for work, and to ask the Egyptian security forces for help in blocking the wave of infiltrators.

Another article details the number of refugees over the years:

An unusual number of 1,000 African refugees have infiltrated Israel over the past two weeks, official sources told Ynet on Monday.

According to police and IDF estimates, some 10,000 people have entered Israel from Africa over the past five years through the Egyptian border. The breached border has made the infiltration very simple.

And the reason:

Shmuel Rifman, head of the Ramat Hanegev Regional Council, told Ynet that the large majority of the refugees came to Israel became the average monthly salary in Egypt is $10, while in Israel it stands at $1,000.

And now, the AP article:

Israel: No Promised Land for Africans
Sitting on a thin mattress in an underground bomb shelter that reeked of urine, Tasfa Mara said he’s happy where he is. The 24-year-old Eritrean escaped forced conscription, beatings and a treacherous trek across three countries before reaching his promised land.

“Only Israel safe,” he said in patchy English, his hands and feet heavily bandaged from lacerations he suffered on the barbed-wire barricade between Egypt and Israel when crossing last week. “All African countries the same.”

Mara may not have a safe haven much longer. This week Israel plans to begin deporting thousands of African migrants who have slipped in through the porous southern border with Egypt. It remains unclear how the expulsions will be carried out and where Israel will send them.

Founded six decades ago in the wake of the Nazi genocide, Israel finds itself torn between a sense of duty to help people fleeing persecution and fears of an onslaught of illegal immigrants. The result has been a confused policy.

That’s one of the most biased headlines I’ve seen since—oh, Christmas, and the usual “Jesus wouldn’t make it through the wall” stories. And while some of the story is positive—it does show the enormous difference between they way Africans are treated by Israel, and the way they are treated by Egypt, it’s an overall negative piece.

And of course, the great unasked questions hover over the entire article: Where is the UN Commission on Refugees in all this? Why does the UN spend so many hundreds of millions of dollars on UNRWA, which tends only to Palestinian refugees and the descendants of refugees, when it’s obvious that there are thousands of real refugees in dire need of help? Is the UN providing food, shelter, clothing, and medical care to the Eritreans and Sudanese refugees in Israel? Well, no. Check out their budget for Israel. It’s a whopping $232,138. I’m assuming that includes salaries. So nope, Israel is S.O.L. on the UN supplying any bucks for the African refugees. But the UN is providing assistance in declaring refugee status for the Africans.

As usual, though, where the world falters on humanitarian needs, Israel does not.

Tel Aviv has embraced them warmly. Most Darfurians now live in apartments, enjoy the city’s welfare services and their children attend its schools. Volunteers have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and helped arrange thousands of work permits.

“They have been through such traumas. Their motivation is not to come here, it is to escape their fate at home,” said Yael Dayan, deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. “Whoever gets here, we take them in, but the government has to decide on a policy … It will not happen by itself.”

No, it will happen by inches. And you know that racist, apartheid state? Well, it’s taking in thousands of non-Jewish Africans that Egypt doesn’t want.

Yassin Moussa, 30, arrived in Israel from Darfur 2 1/2 years ago. After spending 16 months in detention, today he coordinates relief efforts for the new migrants, arranging housing and employment.

Moussa witnessed the execution of his father and uncles and was separated from his mother, sisters and wife when he fled Darfur. He does not know their whereabouts, or if they survived.

Today, he navigates the streets of Tel Aviv with ease, cell phone in hand, communicating easily in Hebrew. “I feel like an Israeli,” he said.

Sounds like he acts like one, too. Hey, who knows? Maybe they’ll decide to convert to Judaism. Then what will Israel’s critics say?