Since the government has seen fit to give me back $600 of my own money, the topic came up in conversation yesterday. I was wondering what I was going to spend it on. A gift, I decided. Something that was completely impractical. I told Sarah I’d probably buy that iPod I’ve been talking about buying for months. Good idea, she concurred.

But then I got another thought. Maybe I should use the refund to buy an orange Maine Coon kitten. It’s not so easy finding another Tig at the various shelters. But if I order one from the factory, as it were, it’s a lot easier.

Which just goes to show you. I swore for years that I would never, ever pay $500 for a kitten. Too much. Maine Coons can’t be that special.

Wrong on all counts. (They’re way more than $500 now, anyway.)

I do believe that I may just buy myself a new Tig. And this one will come with a pedigree. A big, dumb goofball with papers. How cool is that?

Anyway, I sent out a few emails. We shall see what we shall see. Turns out there are a few catteries right here in the Richmond area, or within an hour’s drive.

I’m also open to suggestions from readers. But the cat must be male, and he must be orange, and he must be at least a Maine Coon mix. I’ve been checking Petfinder. Maine Coon Rescue up in MD doesn’t want to adopt out to me because they insist on checking out the home first, and it’s a two-hour drive. So even though I’m up in NorVA all the time, that won’t help. I should probably ask Ellen for assistance.

But I want my new Tig. It’s too quiet in this apartment. I’m willing to buy a purebred if that’s what it takes.

Backspin notes that Mahmoud Abbas has withdrawn his nomination to honor two terror abettors.

The Al Kuds Mark of Honor, the PLO’s highest medal, was meant be awarded in a ceremony in Ramallah Thursday to two female terrorists who helped kill Israelis. The terrorists’ families were slated to receive the honors in their stead.Abbas informed Itzik that the awards for the two terrorists, as well as for other Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, had been revoked.

 

Still as the Jerusalem Post reports, the decision to award the honors came was at the sole discretion of Abbas himself. Surely that calls his commitment to peace into question, whether or not he chose to do the right thing in the end.

Or as Israel Matzav points out:

The fact that under intense Israeli and international pressure, Abu Mazen backed off the intention to make the awards, is meaningless. It certainly gives no indication that he felt that there was anything improper about giving them. The fact that he even thought of giving awards of this nature shows that in Abu Mazen’s mind, there is still nothing wrong with terrorism. The intention to give out awards like this is not only “not conducive to peace negotiations.” It shows that we’re not even sitting at the same table.

 

(via memeorandum)

Yesterday’s Backspin noted that journalist Fiamma Nirenstein won a seat in Italy’s new government. It linked to an excellent article she wrote about how she became a “fascist.” There are more articles of hers available in English at her website. In particular I’d like to call you attention to How suicide bombers are made and Israel’s last line of defense.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The Washington Post today also features an article about the Fatah Hamas war focusing on the death of Majd Barghouti, a Hamas sympathizer. Missing from the account are the stories of how Hamas killed members of Fatah last year - by throwing them off roofs - or their “kneecapping” of their victims.

When the preacher’s body arrived at the hospital, his back was scarlet where he had been whipped with pipes. His legs were black with bruises. His wrists were sliced open and bloodied.The Palestinian Authority, which had been holding Majd Barghouti in an intelligence-service prison for the previous week, soon declared that the popular Hamas imam, or prayer leader, had died of a heart attack.

But eyewitness accounts, photographs, video and an independent Palestinian investigation released this month suggested that he was tortured to death during his February detention.

 

Later Griff Witte reports:

Historically, Hamas has been stronger in Gaza while Fatah has dominated the West Bank. But the trend lines of Palestinian public opinion in recent months have defied geography: Hamas’s popularity is surging across the board and Fatah’s is waning. Hamas’s appeal relies in part on a militant response to what it sees as Israeli aggression, such as the makeshift rockets that Gazans fire into southern Israel, while Fatah engages in peace talks with Israel that have yielded scant progress.

 

I was pleasantly surprised to see a qualification here. “[W]hat it sees,” is correct. Israel, usually is defending its land not launching offensives.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

It’s astonishing—or perhaps not—how often the words “youths” and “children” are used when describing Palestinian casualties, civilian or otherwise. A 19-year-old Palestinian injured in battle with the IDF is often called a “youth,” even if the 19-year-old was actually working with the terrorists. Or was one.

Palestinian teenagers are always at least identified as teenagers, and often as “children.” Like in the headline and lede to the latest AP story about the IDF battles in Gaza yesterday:

Gaza fighting kills 20 Palestinians, including 5 children
Israel struck hard against targets in Gaza on Wednesday, killing at least 20 Palestinians in a day of heavy fighting that also saw three Israeli soldiers killed in a Hamas ambush.

Several civilians were among the dead - including five children and a Reuters cameraman killed while covering the conflict, according to Palestinian officials.

And how old are the children?

In the day’s deadliest incident, an Israeli helicopter fired four missiles at targets near the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza, witnesses said. At least 12 Palestinians, including five children ages 12-15, were killed, said Dr. Moaiya Hassanain of the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Let’s compare this to the massacre of Israeli children at Mercaz Harav, the yeshiva that a Palestinian terrorist walked into and deliberately gunned down 7 teenagers and one young man. How did AP report their ages?

Gunman Kills 8 At Jerusalem Seminary
A gunman entered the library of a rabbinical seminary and opened fire on a crowded nighttime study session Thursday, killing eight people and wounding nine before he was slain, police and rescue workers said.

They didn’t. AP doesn’t bother with the ages of the victims in the early stories. You don’t get the age until the funeral stories the next day:

Thousands of Israelis gathered outside a bullet-scarred Jerusalem rabbinical seminary on Friday to mourn eight students killed by a suspected Palestinian gunman, while an Israeli official said the country would not suspend peace talks.

A bearded rabbi recited Hebrew psalms line by line, the crowd repeating after him, in memory of the dead, one of whom was 26 and the rest between ages 15 and 19. People packed nearby balconies to observe the ceremony, after which the bodies were to be taken for burial.

So, a 15-year-old Palestinian is a child. But a 15-year-old Israeli? No. Not a child. A “student” at best.

Almost no non-Israeli media outlet ever names the victims of Palestinian terror. They rarely mention the age of the victims, even when they’re children. There is a constant dehumanization of the Israeli victims of Arab terror, and it has been so for decades.

What time is it, folks? That’s right. It’s Israeli Double Standard Time. Palestinian “youths” morph into “children,” while Israeli “children” morph into—something else. Something less sympathetic. Because that simply doesn’t fit the media narrative anymore.

The Washington Post has once again given op-ed space to the member of a terrorist organization. In it Mahmoud al-Zahar gets to criticize Israel and praise Jimmy Carter. Zahar of course starts off with an outright falsehood:

President Jimmy Carter’s sensible plan to visit the Hamas leadership this week brings honesty and pragmatism to the Middle East while underscoring the fact that American policy has reached its dead end. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is “business as usual” for the Palestinians.

Israel isn’t choking off fuel supplies to Gaza. The fuel company owners are refusing shipments from Israel.

Yet this Hamas op-ed is different from previous ones. For one thing the tone is much more hostile to Israel, suggesting that Zahar wrote this himself. For another, the Post ran its own editorial countering Zahar.

ON THE OPPOSITE page today we publish an article by the “foreign minister” of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, that drips with hatred for Israel, and with praise for former president Jimmy Carter. We believe Mr. Zahar’s words are worth publishing because they provide some clarity about the group he helps to lead, a group that Mr. Carter contends is worthy of being included in the Middle East peace process. Mr. Carter himself is holding what appears to be a series of meetings with Hamas leaders during a tour of the Middle East. He met one militant in the West Bank town of Ramallah on Tuesday and was reportedly planning to meet Mr. Zahar in Cairo today before traveling to Damascus for an appointment with Khaled Meshal, Hamas’s top leader.Mr. Zahar lauds Mr. Carter for the “welcome tonic” of saying that no peace process can succeed “unless we are sitting at the negotiating table and without any preconditions.” Yet Mr. Zahar has his own preconditions: Before any peace process can “take even its first tiny step,” he says, Israel must withdraw to the 1967 borders and evacuate Jerusalem while preparing for the “return of millions of refugees.” In fact, as Mr. Zahar makes clear, Hamas is not at all interested in a negotiated peace with the Jewish state, whose existence it refuses to accept: “Our fight to redress the material crimes of 1948 is scarcely begun,” he concludes.

I’m glad that the Post did these two things. It’s more defensible. However, I still don’t believe it should have run the op-ed. The editorial refuting Zahar is strong and points out the extremism of Zahar’s positions. Finally the editorial concludes:

Mr. Carter justifies his meetings with familiar arguments about the value of dialogue with enemies. But he misses the point. Contacts between enemies can be useful: Israel is legendary for such negotiations, and even now it is engaged in back-channel bargaining with Hamas through Egypt. But it is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state. That is what Mr. Carter is doing by lending what is left of his prestige to an avowed terrorist such as Khaled Meshal — or Mahmoud al-Zahar.

It’s good that the Post didn’t let either Carter or Zahar off the hook. I think it would have been better not to publish the op-ed in the first place, but at least like this, readers don’t have to go to far to read a necessary rebuttal.

UPDATE: Elder of Ziyon accentuates the negative.

UPDATE II: Picked up by Buzztracker.

UPDATE III: I must be mellowing. LGF, Meryl, and NRO’s Media Blog all hit the Post hard. And Boker Tov Boulder points out a distinction without a difference in the editorial.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

I have no proof—just a feeling—but I’d love to know whether Jimmy Carter had any input into this WaPo op-ed ostensibly written by Mahmoud al-Zahar, one of the chief terrorists of Hamas. And shame on the WaPo for posting this. Their editorial labeling him a terrorist does not excuse them for publishing this execrable Hamas propaganda. And of course, this isn’t the first time the WaPo gave room to terrorists on its op-ed page, and I suspect it won’t be the last.

This is simply disgusting. Disgusting. The language of Hamas is used on the pages of the WaPo as if it has legitimacy.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acts as if a few alterations here and there would make the hideous straitjacket of apartheid fit better. While Rice persuades Israeli occupation forces to cut a few dozen meaningless roadblocks from among the more than 500 West Bank control points, these forces simultaneously choke off fuel supplies to Gaza; blockade its 1.5 million people; approve illegal housing projects on West Bank land; and attack Gaza City with F-16s, killing men, women and children. Sadly, this is “business as usual” for the Palestinians.

Why, exactly, are those F-16s attacking Gaza?

Ten rockets were fired from Gaza at southern Israel since Wednesday night, landing in open fields in the western Negev.

And this is “business as usual” for the Palestinians. Listen to this disgusting defense of the terrorist attack on Nahal Oz. Remember that Gaza terrorists fired mortars to keep the IDF distracted while their gunmen then fired on defenseless civilians whose only crime was that they were working at the fuel depot so Gazans could have enough diesel fuel to run their hospitals. Remember that the attack was an attempt to kidnap more Israelis to use as bargaining chips during Hamas “negotiations” for a cease-fire.

Last week’s attack on the Nahal Oz fuel depot should not surprise critics in the West. Palestinians are fighting (1) a total war waged on us by a nation that mobilizes against our people with every means at its disposal — from its high-tech military to its economic stranglehold, from (2) its falsified history to its judiciary that “legalizes” the (3) infrastructure of apartheid. (4) Resistance remains (5) our only option.

Five lies in two sentences. 1: Israel is not waging a “total war,” but Hamas is doing so. If Hamas were to stop attacking Israel, there would be no attacks on Gaza. 2: Holocaust denial in the WaPo op-ed section, as well as the denial of Israel’s origins and history. 3. The apartheid lie, easily disproven by the fact that Arabs vote, hold office, etc., etc. If he means Gaza and the West Bank, you cannot have apartheid with a people that are not a part of your nation. Gaza and the West Bank citizens are effectively enemies. 4. The lie of “resistance,” the terrorist’s pseudonym for “terror attacks.” 5. Peace is an option. Living with Israel is an option. Not firing rockets and mortars on a daily basis is an option.

And here is the worst, the absolutely most disgusting comparison ever, and shame on the WaPo for letting this stand:

Sixty-five years ago, the courageous Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose in defense of their people. We Gazans, living in the world’s largest open-air prison, can do no less.

Sixty-five years ago, the Germans were trying to eradicate the Jews from the face of the earth. Today, Hamas seeks to eradicate Jews from the Middle East, while denying that the Holocaust ever happened. This is the most perfect example of the simultaneous Holocaust denial and attempt to co-opt its imagery that the Palestinians have been using for years. I am amazed that God did not strike down dead the man that wrote the sentences above.

And oh, here we go again—the open-air prison lie. Talk to Egypt about your other border. You tore it down. They built it back up. Why is that, again? What is it that keeps your neighbors building walls to keep the Palestinians out of their territory? Could it be all the terror attacks Hamas is responsible for?

Here we have the call for sympathy. Al-Zahar wants you to feel sorry for his family of terrorists.

Only three months ago I buried my son Hussam, who studied finance at college and wanted to be an accountant; he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In 2003, I buried Khaled — my first-born — after an Israeli F-16 targeting me wounded my daughter and my wife and flattened the apartment building where we lived, injuring and killing many of our neighbors. Last year, my son-in-law was killed.

Last month, Israel buried seven teenagers and a 26-year-old man, all of whom were studying Torah. They died because of the Palestinian insistence on “resistance”—that we know as terrorism. Al-Zahar’s sons were terrorists. His son-in-law was a terrorist. You make choices and you live by them—or die by them, if you happen to be fighting a war of terrorism against Israel.

Hussam was only 21, but like most young men in Gaza he had grown up fast out of necessity. When I was his age, I wanted to be a surgeon; in the 1960s, we were already refugees, but there was no humiliating blockade then.

Yes, they blow up so fast these days. In the 1960s, Egypt was the occupying nation, and yet, there was no world outcry for independence for the Palestinians under Egyptian control.

Next, we have the new language that Carter is pushing among his terrorist buddies—the language that makes me wonder how much input he had into writing this op-ed, and getting it published by the WaPo.

But now, after decades of imprisonment, killing, statelessness and impoverishment, we ask: What peace can there be if there is no dignity first? And where does dignity come from if not from justice?

It won’t be long before you have protests in the Gaza Strip with Palestinians holding signs and chanting “No justice, no peace!” Watch for it.

And now, the statement of pride in terrorism:

I am eternally proud of my sons and miss them every day. I think of them as fathers everywhere, even in Israel, think of their sons — as innocent boys, as curious students, as young men with limitless potential — not as “gunmen” or “militants.” But better that they were defenders of their people than parties to their ultimate dispossession; better that they were active in the Palestinian struggle for survival than passive witnesses to our subjugation.

And yet, they were “gunmen” and “militants.” They were involved in attacks on Israeli civilians. They would, had they lived, gone on to murder Israelis for the rest of their lives. And al-Zahar is proud of this.

Lastly, there is the demand for Israel’s total and complete surrender to Hamas: Return all the territories won in 1967, including the Temple Mount, allow the “refugees” to return, etc., etc.—the end of Israel as a nation, in other words.

A “peace process” with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

Al-Zahar uses air quotes throughout whenever referring to the peace process. Throughout. It’s a small thing, but deeply meaningful. It implies that Hamas does not believe there is a peace process which, we already know, is true. Hamas is using Jimmy Carter, and the Washington Post, to spread its propaganda and to distract the world from the real issues. Those issues are written in their charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic caliphate, which quotes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and which even says that Jews control the Rotary clubs of America.

I don’t buy the WaPo editors’ reasoning behind publishing the op-ed.

ON THE OPPOSITE page today we publish an article by the “foreign minister” of Hamas, Mahmoud al-Zahar, that drips with hatred for Israel, and with praise for former president Jimmy Carter. We believe Mr. Zahar’s words are worth publishing because they provide some clarity about the group he helps to lead, a group that Mr. Carter contends is worthy of being included in the Middle East peace process.

[...] These facts would hardly need restating were it not for actors such as Mr. Carter, who portray Hamas as rational and reasonable.

Funny, but in 2006, these words went utterly unanswered by the WaPo editorial staff:

The “kidnapped” Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit is only a pretext for a job scheduled months ago.

[...] We present this clear message: If Israel will not allow Palestinians to live in peace, dignity and national integrity, Israelis themselves will not be able to enjoy those same rights. Meanwhile, our right to defend ourselves from occupying soldiers and aggression is a matter of law, as settled in the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Note Haniyeh’s lies are almost exactly what Al-Zahar wrote today, but couched in gentler tones. Perhaps it wasn’t nasty enough to get the WaPo’s editorial board’s dander up. I fail to see the distinction between Haniyeh’s lies and al-Zahar’s, but then, I’m not a professional journalist. They must teach that in J-School or something. The editors conclude:

But it is one thing to communicate pragmatically, and quite another to publicly and unconditionally grant recognition and political sanction to a leader or a group that advocates terrorism, mass murder or the extinction of another state. That is what Mr. Carter is doing by lending what is left of his prestige to an avowed terrorist such as Khaled Meshal — or Mahmoud al-Zahar.

Or publishing op-eds by Ismail Haniyeh without the same caveats given about al-Zahar’s op-ed.

Shame on the Washington Post. Shame on Jimmy Carter.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to accept more and more violent behavior.

The news media seem to have that concept down perfectly when it comes to Israel. Always, when Israel launches offensives against terrorists—and always, the offensives are launched after terrorists have attacked and murdered Israelis—the media insist that Israel’s actions are “threatening” to “derail” or “unravel” or simply “threatening a fragile” and here we have our choice of “lull,” “cease-fire,” “quiet,” or even “peace negotiations.” It’s like the AP/Reuters/NYTimes version of Mad Libs. And now, in the latest AP version of defining deviancy down, Israel is responsible for threatening “to unravel an Egyptian effort to mediate a cease-fire.”

Have you got that? It’s Israel’s fault that the Egyptian effort is going to fail. There has been no concrete cease-fire. There has been no peace. There are only efforts, and Hamas basically tells Egypt that no, they’re not going to have any kind of cease-fire that doesn’t include the West Bank as well as Gaza, and yet, the AP manages to spin this as Israel’s fault. Because Israel’s response to the murder of three of her soldiers is the threat to the effort to try to maybe get Hamas to think about really, really, really ceasing their terrorism against Israel.

It wasn’t the action of terrorists planting a bomb on the Gaza border that threatened to unravel the effort to mediate the cease-fire. It wasn’t the firing of mortars that threatened to unravel the effort to mediate the cease-fire. It wasn’t yesterday’s and today’s firing of kassam rockets that threatened to unravel the effort to mediate the cease-fire. No. None of these things caused the AP to discuss the unraveling of the effort to mediate the cease-fire.

But Israel’s response to all of these things? Now that’s a reason to threaten to unravel the effort to mediate the cease-fire.

And the AP continues to define deviancy down. Nothing that the terrorists do affects the phantom lulls, cease-fires, truces, and efforts to mediate a cease-fire. Nothing. Anything that Israel does? Well. That’s what violates the truce. Or the calm. Or the lull. Or the effort to mediate a cease-fire.

And they wonder why journalists are among the least-respected professions in the world. Here’s a clue: People can read. Really they can. And they can especially read between the lines.