See this? It’s one of the first pictures of Tig3 and Gracie together.

And Gracie isn’t very happy about it. Tig just wants to be near the big cat, but he’s had a very, very tough day. See, this weekend I put the two of them together by allowing Tig to come downstairs at will during the daytime. He drove Gracie nuts. At first, she kept to the high ground—the sofa, the kitchen chair next to mine, or the shelf in between the living room and kitchen. And Gracie growled. A lot. Pawed at Tig when he got too close, and let him know he was not very welcome. But I figured they had to learn to live together, so I mostly let them be. I was waiting for Gracie to smack him around once or twice and settle things.

Be careful what you wish for. Because shortly before noon today, there was a hiss and a growl and suddenly Tig was running towards me, with his right eye closed—and dripping blood. I grabbed him, brought him upstairs, put him in the cat carrier, threw on a pair of jeans and my sneakers, called the vet and moved my four o’clock appointment with them to five minutes from the phone call, and rushed over. Poor Tig suffered one further indignity—I was so worried and driving a bit faster than usual, and didn’t pay attention to the carrier. It fell off the seat and wedged in between the dash and the seat. By the time we got to the vet, Tig was a bit terrified.

The good news is that by the time we got to the vet, I was pretty sure Gracie hadn’t hit his eye. The vet checked him out and confirmed my suspicion. Gracie’s claw caught Tig’s inner eyelid. He’s going to be just fine. But boy, did he have a tough day, because after that, he got two shots, as today he was scheduled for his next series of vaccinations.

So we went home, and I locked him in my office. He fell asleep fairly quickly, and slept all afternoon. I let him come downstairs after he woke, but he was very, very cautious around Miss Gracie. Who didn’t growl at him, satisifed that she showed him who was boss.

Well, he decided that he’d stake out his spot on the sofa. She tried to bully him out of it. I told her who was the REAL boss in this house, and she shut up and settled down. Which is good, because he has every right to his spot on the sofa.

Yeah, rough day for Tig. For me, too. But we’re better now.

I found a new blog today, the Bookworm Room. It is blogrolled. Check it out: Israel, politics, books, and dogs. I think Harrison would like this blog a lot.

Come to think of it, use the comments here to recommend blogs that I may not have read yet. Time to add some to the blogroll.

Via Glenn, Mars is adding a scientific division.

All the talk about chocolate being good for your health is starting to get serious. Mars Inc., of chocolate bar fame, has established a scientific division.

And a group of researchers, some in Germany, others with the new Mars division known as Symbioscience, has just published a report showing that an enriched hot cocoa beverage can improve blood flow in people with type 2 diabetes.

“The study is the first of its kind in terms of its rigor, as well as the population studied,” said Harold Schmitz, chief science officer of Mars. “Diabetics treated as well as they could be treated with pharmaceutical intervention did see, on average, a 30 percent improvement in vascular function.”

Out of the goodness of my heart—and purely in the interests of advancing science—I am hereby offering myself to join any and all of Mars scientific testing. Particularly the ones involving Milky Way bars.

Please, Glenn. Let Mars know that I’m with them, 100%.

From the Times of London (h/t Backspin)

Some Israelis object to this program. They remember that Saddam Hussein fired Scuds into Israel during first Gulf War and find it offensive that Iraqis now seek their help but had no objection when the late Iraqi leader was trying to kill them.

Well no, that’s not how the article was written. It was written from a different troubling perspective.

Shatha’s friend, an Iraqi Kurd from Kirkuk who was too afraid to give her first name, also travelled to Jordan so that her son, Ahmed, could be assessed for a heart operation. She too turned down the free treatment offered by SACH.“Now I can sleep with a clear conscience. I’m able to hold my head up high and not be ashamed by having my son treated in Algeria,” she said.

Think about that, the hatred for Israel is so strong that some Iraqis would rather risk their children’s lives than seek treatment in Israel.

Save a Child’s Heart has a list of results from the organization. What’s interesting is that 2007 ( the last year that they have results from) the number of successful operations on Iraqi children was up - by a lot - in 2007. Twenty five Iraqi children were save by the organization last year. The previous high was 8. Maybe the reporters were finding a handful of parents whose hatred of Israel was so great that they’d risk their children’s lives. But SACH’s statistics show that more parents are agreeing to having the surgery done in Israel.

Elsewhere,

Egypt’s Culture Minister Faruq Hosni, a candidate to head UNESCO but under fire from the Jewish state, said on Tuesday he “dreams” of normal ties with Israel once it has made peace with the Palestinians.Hosni has drawn fire from Israel and the Wiesenthal Centre for saying he was prepared to burn Israeli books.

“I’d burn Israeli books myself if I found any in libraries in Egypt,” the minister said in parliament on May 10 in reply to questioning from an opposition MP.

Since UNESCO is a cultural institution that wouldn’t be good form for its leader. (Of course, it’s also an institution of the UN, so anti-Israel sentiment should be expected.) Mr. Hosni offered an explanation though.

Hosni says he only used “a popular expression to prove something does not exist”: Israeli books in Egyptian libraries.On Tuesday, he went a step further, telling AFP it was “a big mistake that Israeli books have not yet been translated (into Arabic). I have officially asked for it to be done. If people protest, I don’t give a damn.”

I’d like to think that’s sincere. More likely he’s weaseling out of responsibility, as he adds this.

But he opposed a normalisation of cultural ties with Israel before it has made peace with the Palestinians.”It is a dream. We must wait for the right moment to come when Israel will have signed peace with the Palestinians. If it happens tomorrow, I will be in the front row the next day for this normalisation,” he said.

If that’s his view, then there probably was no nuance to hs statement about burning Israeli books. His clever excuse was just an exercise in post-facto posterior covering.

And this week, we have another Nobel Laureate making nice with an organization devoted to Israel’s destruction. Jimmy Carter’s fellow addled “elder,” Bishop Tutu embraced Ismail Haniyeh, the man whose forces fire rockets at Israeli civilians and at the fuel depot that supplies Gaza.

Nobel peace laureate Desmond Tutu on Tuesday held talks with a senior Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip where he led a UN fact-finding mission into the killing of 19 Palestinian civilians in an 2006 Israeli artillery attack.Tutu met Palestinian former prime minister Ismail Haniya, who was dismissed by moderate president Mahmud Abbas last June when Hamas seized control of Gaza from forces loyal to the president.

The dispatch informs us:

The army said it had been aiming its artillery at an area from which Palestinian militants were firing rockets at Israel, but due to the technical problem the shells instead hit two homes.

Which, of course, is why it’s against international law to launch attacks from civilian areas. But I don’t suspect that either Tutu or the UN is interested in the law; they’re both interested in bashing Israel. Else maybe they’d be investigating who’s been attacking Nahal Oz.

And finally, when Israel deported Norman Finkelstein, Finkelstein was allowed to argue that Israel was violating his academic freedom by deporting him. But as HonestReporting UK points out, Finkelstein was deported for his actions not his ideas:

Israel, however, did not deport him for his political opinions. It deported him because his activities - which include meetings with Hezbollah leaders - make him a threat to Israel’s security.Any democracy, including the UK, US and Israel, has the right to refuse entry to foreign nationals whose presence may not be conducive to the public good. Israel has every right to consider Finkelstein’s presence to be a security threat and thus to prevent his entry into the country. The Guardian’s report minimises this to create a false context behind the incident.

In these various news stories we see the way Israel is still demonized fifteen years after Oslo. For all the talk of Israel freeing terrorists or otherwise sacrificing its security as confidence building measures, there’s precious little talk about how the international community might build Israel’s confidence by isolating those who seek its destruction.

If the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was simply about building a Palestinian state, it would have been done by now. Rather it is just as much about destroying the existing Jewish state. The propaganda war, actively joined by the media and international organizations, is one front in that war for Israel’s destruction.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

A source says that Israel and Syria agree on 85% of the issues they need to agree on to give Syria back the Golan. What’s part of that 15%? Well, besides Syria trying to grab land it never had to begin with, a teeny, tiny problem: Syria’s support for terrorists.

The paper reported that according to the source, 85% of the issues standing between the two countries on the way to a peace deal have already been agreed. One of the issues which have yet to be discussed is Israel’s demand that Syria detach itself from Hamas and Hizbullah and break its strategic alliance with Iran.

“I am optimistic,” the source told the newspaper reporter. “This does not mean that Syria will have to sever its ties with Iran and its followers in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, but it will join those influencing them in a positive manner – in accordance with the peace relations between Israel and Syria.

“We have a clear example for that – the relations between Syria and Turkey, just like Damascus withdrew its support for the PKK (Kurdish militant organization fighting for independence from Turkish rule).”

Except that once again, let’s be clear: Syria has no intention of making peace with Israel.

Syrian President Bashar Assad dismissed on Tuesday Israeli demands for Syria to abandon an alliance with Iran as a requirement for a peace deal.

Assad told British MPs that the Baath Party government intended to maintain its “normal relations” with Iran while it conducts indirect talks with Israel to regain the Golan Heights, a source familiar with the meeting told Reuters.

[...] “The president said Syria has normal relations with Iran. He made it clear that any suggestion to drop them was not a reasonable request,” the source said.

“He said if Israel could question Syria’s relations with Iran then Syria could question Israel’s ties with other countries, particularly the United States,” the source added, referring to Israel’s main ally.

Yeah, because American is just like Iran. Oh, wait. We’re the polar opposite. My bad.

Thankfully, Olmert is going to fall soon, and these discussions will be moot.

This time, he’s not going to manage to stay in office. Ehud Barak is calling on Olmert to step down.

“The prime minister must detach himself from the daily management of the government. He can do so in a variety of ways: Suspension, vacation, resignation or leave of absence. This will not be determined by us,” Barak said.

Maybe then Israel will think about revising its parliamentary system, which protects incompetents and corrupt politicians who know how to play the game. Really. Imagine if Bill Clinton’s sin wasn’t having sex with an intern and then lying about it. Imagine if he took half a million dollars in cash bribes. He’d be gone in an instant. But this is at least the beginning of the fraying of the coalition keeping one of the weakest, most corrupt, least accountable Prime Ministers in Israel’s history in office. The man didn’t have the courage to take the blame for the failures of the Second Lebanon War. He blamed his generals instead.

The defense minister noted that “Olmert cannot deal with the challenges Israel faces, like Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, Iran and the kidnapped soldiers, and run his personal affairs at the same time.”

He added that “the Labor Party will not hold a stopwatch in Kadima’s face, but things have to happen as soon as possible… The State deserves stability, and therefore we must have a government in the Knesset. I am not afraid of elections. The public will decide and we will win.”

[...] A source in the Labor faction told Ynet following Barak’s press conference that if a new government is not formed within two months, his party will work towards pushing up the elections.

The source said that the timetable Barak intends to work by is limited by the current Knesset term.

I’m sure Ehud Barak thinks he’s going to be PM again. Tzipi Livni thinks the job is hers, especially after the poll saying that Kadima would take the election. But I think Israel is going to go Likud. There are too many rockets pointed at Israel, from too many directions.

Besides, it would be the biggest slap in the face to Israel’s critics. They call all Israelis who are interested in self-defense Likudniks. May as well make them right about it, for a change.