Kassams continue to rain down on Israel daily. Closing the crossings just isn’t enough. What is Barak waiting for?

Two Qassam rockets were fired from northern Gaza towards Israel on Thursday afternoon, one of them landed near a kibbutz in the Sha’ar HaNegev Regional Council.

No injuries were reported and no damage was caused.

Shortly after 3:40 pm the Color Red rocket alert sirens blared throughout Sderot and neighboring communities in the western Negev, sending residents running to bomb shelters.

Fatah’s military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, claimed responsibility for the fire. The organization said this was in response to the killing to Talal Abad near Jenin on Wednesday.

That would be this killing, of a Palestinian who refused to stop even after shots were being fired in the air.

Earlier on Thursday a Palestinian man was killed by IDF fire near the Kissufim crossing. The army said that at around 4:00 am soldiers manning an observation post spotted a suspicious figure advancing towards the security fence near the Kissufim crossing on the Gaza border. Infantry troops who were alerted to the scene called for the man to halt and fired warning shots in the air.

However the man continued to advance towards the Israeli side of the border, at which point the soldiers fired in the air once more and then aimed at the suspect’s lower body; when he did not stop the soldiers resumed their fire and killed him.

The AP spins it, of course. Read the article and see how they manage to blame Israel for the rocket attack in the lead. Notice also how many ways they paint the 18-year-old as a “teenager” or “youth”.

Israeli troops shot and killed a teenage Palestinian militant along the country’s border with Gaza Thursday in the first deadly incident since the two sides reached a cease-fire last month.

A faction of the militant group Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades said the 18-year-old killed in Gaza belonged to its ranks. It vowed revenge and claimed responsibility for two rockets fired at southern Israel after the shooting.

“We will not let this crime pass silently,” the group said in a text message to reporters.

Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which had previously violated the June 19 truce by firing rockets at Israel, did not say what the militant was doing along the border.

Gee. Planting bombs? Scouting for terrorist attacks? Setting up rocket launchers? Who knows?

The AP also managed to present Hamas as the voice of moderation—for not “vowing revenge” over the killing of a terrorist.

Hamas, the Islamic militant group which rules Gaza, said it considered the pre-dawn shooting a violation of the cease-fire, but did not vow revenge.

Gee, Hamas. Thanks for not promising to murder civilians because soldiers killed a terrorist who refused to stop coming towards them. And it’s not like the terror groups are denying he was one of theirs. Not that it makes a difference to AP.

Israeli troops fired on the youth after he did not respond to warning shots and calls to stop, a military spokesman said. The soldiers thought he was armed but, after inspecting the body, found that he was not, the spokesman said.

And again… an Israeli spokesman is contacted and spoken to, but not identified. Israeli spokesmen are almost never identified. There are three direct quotes from identified Palestinians, including a member of Hamas.

Your objective media, hard at work.

Newsweek’s reporting (h/t Noah Pollak)

Borrowing television formats isn’t new; some of our most successful franchises—”American Idol,” “Survivor,” “The Office,” to name three—started in Europe. But with two shows hitting TV this year and another two in development, it’s Israel that is fast becoming Hollywood’s cheat sheet. “B’Tipul,” a drama about a therapist and his demanding clientele, was adapted into HBO’s critically acclaimed series “In Treatment.” Premiering this fall on CBS is “The Ex List,” which was adapted from the Israeli series “Mythological X.” “List” is a romantic comedy about a woman who learns from a psychic that she has already dated—and broken up with—her soulmate, and if she can’t narrow him down from her lengthy roster of suitors, she’ll spend life as a spinster. It’s no wonder Israel is such a close friend of the United States. To judge from their television shows, the Israelis are just as neurotic as we are.

And what about “All in the Family?” It’s interesting that Israeli television has progressed to the point where American television seeks to emulate it.

Daled Amos points out that there are another couple of concepts in the pipeline too. (Also from the Newsweek article.)

Also forthcoming are adaptations of “Merhak Negia” (”A Touch Away”), a story of forbidden love between an Orthodox Jewish woman and a Russian immigrant, and “Loaded,” an “Entourage”-like comedy about a quartet of dotcom millionaires. And as long as Israeli television shows combine high quality with low price tags, it doesn’t take a psychic to predict that more television executives will be making pilgrimages to the Holy Land.

Interesting about those dotcom millionaires. I guess that show doesn’t have as much to do with neurosis as American admiration for Israeli tech know-how.

Anthony, the managing partner of New York-based venture-capital fund 21 Ventures, told a Montreal audience that Israel is “the single best place in the world to invest in technology ventures.”

Anthony was the guest speaker at the inaugural Albert Einstein Business Forum, co-sponsored by the Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Government of Israel’s Economic Mission to Canada. The guests came largely from Montreal’s financial and investment sector.

He founded 21 Ventures four years ago when even high risk-tolerant investors were shying away from Israel after the tech bubble burst and the intifadah was still being waged.

He has investments now in 20 seed and early-stage technology companies in Israel and the United States, mainly in the physical security, clean energy and mobile software fields, and is actively seeking more.

(h/t NY Nana at LGF links)

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck—it’s an effing duck. (H/T: Charles.)

On June 29th, MSNBC personality and three-time presidential candidate Pat Buchanan appeared on a neo-Nazi radio program to promote his new revisionist history of the Second World War, Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. James Edwards is the host of the program “Political Cesspool,” the stated mission of which is to “represent a philosophy that is pro-White.” Edwards and his colleauges seek “to revive the White birthrate above replacement level fertility and beyond to grow the percentage of Whites in the world relative to other races” and believe that “Secession is a right of all people and individuals. It was successful in 1776 and this show honors those who tried to make it successful in 1865.”

According to the researchers at the Anti-Defamation League, who listened to the show, Buchanan defended Charles Lindbergh, saying, “…his reputation has been blackened because of a single speech he gave and a couple of paragraphs in it where he said that … the Jewish community is beating the drums for war … but frankly, no one has said what he said was palpably untrue.”

Buchanan is in good company. Perusing the guest list of Political Cesspool, one sees Willis Carto, (perhaps the most prominent anti-Semite in America), Mark Weber (Director of the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial outfit) and Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance, a eugenicist publication. A political cesspool indeed. Calling Buchanan a “brownshirt” a few weeks ago may have seemed a little impertinent at the time, but it’s entirely accurate.

A quick reference to the Wikipedia entry on Lindbergh gives you some idea about his thoughts on Jews. They’re not unlike Buchanan’s, I think.

Lindbergh’s reaction to Kristallnacht was entrusted to his diary: “I do not understand these riots on the part of the Germans,” he wrote. “It seems so contrary to their sense of order and intelligence. They have undoubtedly had a difficult ‘Jewish problem,’ but why is it necessary to handle it so unreasonably?”

In his diaries, he wrote: “We must limit to a reasonable amount the Jewish influence… Whenever the Jewish percentage of total population becomes too high, a reaction seems to invariably occur. It is too bad because a few Jews of the right type are, I believe, an asset to any country.”

So let’s take a look at what our newly uncloseted neo-Nazi has to say about the Jews, from his piece titled, “Who’s Planning Our Next War?”

Yet Israel is even today pushing Bush into a pre-emptive war with a naked threat to attack Iran itself should Bush refuse the cup.

[...] Ehud Olmert came home from a June meeting with Bush to tell Israelis: “We reached agreement on the need to take care of the Iranian threat. … I left with a lot less question marks regarding the means, the timetable restrictions and American resoluteness. …

“George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on the matter before the end of his term. … The Iranian problem requires urgent attention, and I see no reason to delay this just because there will be a new president in the White House seven and a half months from now.”

If Bush is discussing war on Iran with Ehud Olmert, why is he not discussing it with Congress or the nation?

[...] Moving through Congress, powered by the Israeli lobby, is House Resolution 362, which demands that President Bush impose a U.S. blockade of Iran, an act of war.

Is it not time the American people were consulted on the next war that is being planned for us?

Blaming the Jews: Check. Blaming Israel: Check. Blaming “the Israel lobby”: Check. Implying that Israel and/or Jews are running American foreign policy: Check.

You could easily interchange Lindbergh’s and Buchanan’s words and not know which was speaking. No wonder Buchanan defended Lindbergh on a neo-Nazi radio station. They’re brothers-in-ideology, separated by a few decades.

And in case you’re thinking that people are exaggerating about neo-Nazi quotient of the radio program, here are some quotes from the host’s blog:

At any rate, it’s nice to see that, while Jews in the government, media, and among the neocons work feverishly to get America to attack one Muslim country after another because of “Islamofascism” and “the Muslim threat to Israel”, other Jews are condemning white Europeans for not warmly welcoming tens of millions of these same Muslims into their midst.

Oh, but there’s more:

Jews have always been the biggest pushers of interracial marriage in America. Not for themselves, of course, and God forbid interracial marriage should be legal in Israel! But, as Greenberg makes plain, Jews think white people people marrying blacks should happen a lot.

This one’s just too-too:

Boy, here’s a surprise. A homosexual Jew editor over at The New Republic doesn’t like Pat Buchanan’s new book on World War II.

That’s about as much hate as I can take in one sitting.

Remember when I said just a few weeks ago that Buchanan had gone about as low as he could go? I was wrong. He’s now fully down in the gutter with the Jew-hating scum, and no longer bothering to hide it. (I wonder if Michael Kinsley would like to change his assertion that Buchanan doesn’t have a problem with Jews.) Buchanan is now openly on David Duke’s level, and in fact, has now spoken on the radio station that proudly interviewed David Duke as well. The question is, will NBC finally fire him?

Debbie Schlussel has quite a lot of stories about her personal experiences with Buchanan’s Jew-baiting. Why is it that the news shows seem to think Buchanan is immune, but sportscasters like Jimmy the Greek get fired for racist remarks?

Oh, wait. I forgot. It’s The Exception Clause. Bigoted statements are cause for immediate firing, except when made about Jews.

Time for the Yourish.com mantra: Anti-Semites of the world, just die already.