When all else fails, PETA is using boobies to draw attention to themselves.

Burlington, Vt. - This morning, PETA dispatched a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of ice cream icon Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., urging them to replace the cow’s milk in their products with human breast milk. PETA’s request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow’s milk in the food he serves. PETA points out to Cohen and Greenfield that such a move on their part would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health at the same time.

“The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn’t make sense,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Everyone knows that ‘the breast is best,’ so Ben & Jerry’s could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk.”

I predict a torrent of shuddering, followed by a deluge of laughter, ending in udder failure. (Why, yes, I did have to make that pun. Why do you ask?)

Loved the BBC headline from yesterday’s terror attack in Jerusalem:

Jerusalem car ‘attack’ hurts 15

Here’s how the story starts:

At least 15 people have been injured in an apparent attack in Jerusalem, Israeli police say.

They say a man drove his car into a group of people at a busy intersection, before being shot and killed by an armed bystander.

Rescue services took the injured to local hospitals. Police described the incident as a “terror attack”.

Here’s how Batya remembers a similar attack:

I remember noticing a badly driven car approaching, but I didn’t think he’d mount the sidewalk and run over us. I turned my back on it and planned on telling a neighbor that “Even if he’s going to Shiloh, we’re not getting in.” She looked up and then saw him ram into me and I was knocked down. She was unharmed, as he had turned sharp left on my foot and mowed down people the length of the sidewalk. I was still on the ground when I suddenly heard shooting.

Even then news reports tried to play down the terror angle. But the people at the receiving end of the attack knew what it was.

Here’s another classic of the genre:

Four hurt in ‘acid attack’ at West Bank checkpoint

Look, if the reporters were unconvinced of the substance, put “acid” in quotes, but it was a clear attack. But this was serious in that the soldier attacked has lost sight in one eye.

An IDF soldier has lost sight in one of his eyes after a Palestinian woman attacked him with acid at the Hawara checkpoint on Monday afternoon. The checkpoint is located south of the West Bank city of Nablus.

It’s also worth pointing out to those who wish Israel to remove checkpoints, that the assailant took advantage of the humanitarian lanes for quick passage through the checkpoint.

However this story remarkably had absolutely no scare quotes:

The cash-strapped Palestinian government on Monday received pledges of nearly $300 million in new aid on top of more than $7 billion promised last year, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said.

So let me rewrite that paragraph with some appropriate scare quotes:

The “cash-strapped” Palestinian “government” on Monday received “pledges” of nearly $300 million in new aid on top of more than $7 billion promised last year, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said.

The Palestinians likely have more cash than they admit. They receive the highest amount of foreign aid per capita in the world. They’ve received plenty and they’ve squandered it.

They ought to first turn to the estate of Yasser Arafat instead of to the international community. Then they ought to start turning to their top official who have been embezzling foreign aid for years. And the PA ought to stop paying the salaries of the Hamas thugs in Gaza.

Except for some limited areas there is no effective Palestinian government. About the only thing Fayyad does well is ask for handouts.

And finally, most of those pledges (often from Arab countries who care so much for their Palestinians brothers) are not fulfilled. The article later on notes:

At a Paris conference last December, donors pledged $7.7 billion in aid over the next three years, but the Palestinians say only a fraction of that money has been paid.

It’s remarkable the way the media will use scare quotes when dealing with terror against Israel, but when it comes to the phony (or at least self-inflicted) Palestinian financial crisis, they solemnly in pronouncing a crisis without the least bit of skepticism.

When will the media get serious about covering the Middle East instead of covering up for the Palestinians?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

*This post is now complete*

Clyde Haberman starts off well:

Once a year, the Israel-threatening, Holocaust-denying, nuke-building and child-hanging president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, comes to New York for the opening ceremonies of the United Nations General Assembly.

Many New Yorkers don’t like having him around. But they have no choice. Foreign leaders must be allowed to attend these sessions, no matter how Israel-threatening, Holocaust-denying, nuke-building and child-hanging they may be.

Glad he recognizes what Ahmadinejad is.

However, the article goes down from there. Haberman leaves out the part that the organizers did invite Biden who was otherwise occupied. And it’s nice of him dismiss that the whole episode angered “some Jews on the right.” Nice way to disparage those you disagree with. But of course he doesn’t mention the organized effort by Democrats to sink the Palin speech. And then he offers this observation:

But people on the left saw no equivalence between the Democratic senator and the Republican governor. Only one of them is a candidate. Inviting Ms. Palin, they charged, tilted the rally toward the Republican national ticket — an impression not likely to be dispelled by the many signs on Monday supporting Senator John McCain and none backing Senator Barack Obama.

Game. Set. Match to the Left.

Not so fast. In reaction to the partisan tactics of the left, many on the right stayed away. That’s an observation that Atlas made. So if the right wing groups stayed away, how was it that there were more McCain signs than Obama signs?

1) As a reaction to the partisan maneuvering of those allied with the Obama campaign, quite a few protesters of Ahmadinejad registered their dissatisfaction with the campaign that politicized the event.
2) The left wing groups had little interest in attending if Sen. Clinton wasn’t speaking.

Overall Haberman’s observation is based on a false assumption that because there were more McCain signs after the flap, it meant that the protest was partisan in its planning.

Gateway Pundit has more.

Caroline Glick distilled things with doesn’t pull her punches when assigning blame to the likes of the NDJC and J-Street.

LIBERAL AMERICAN Jews, like liberal Americans in general, and indeed like their fellow leftists in Israel and throughout the West, uphold themselves as champions of human rights. They claim that they care about the underdog, the wretched of the earth. They care about the environment. They care about securing American women’s unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.

Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari’a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.

The lives of 6 million Jews in Israel are today tied to the fortunes of those women, to the fortunes of American forces in Iraq, to the willingness of Americans across the political and ideological spectrum to recognize that there is more that unifies them than divides them and to act on that knowledge to defeat the forces of genocide, oppression, hatred and destruction that are led today by the Iranian regime and personified in the brutal personality of Ahmadinejad. But Jewish Democrats chose to ignore this basic truth in order to silence Palin.

Solomonia writes somewhat more generally, but in the same vein.

And when it comes down to it, it’s not Jews in Israel that motivates Democrats, and it’s not Jews in America that motivates them either. It’s their own power. It’s their own little dinners, and board memberships, and their silly narcissistic college freshman platitudes…that’s what motivates them. And when they finally get around to looking out the window, their bogeyman isn’t an Iran armed with nuclear weapons led by a Holocaust-denying antisemitic America-hater…it’s “conservatives.” Ahmadinejad is, after all, an ocean away, but it’s conservatives here at home that prevent them from inflicting their peculiar vision of the worker’s paradise on all of the rest of us.

Instapundit observed

That may put an end to the gloating from J Street, anyway

That would be a good result from all of this.

Given that they claim to speak for American Jewry (and that was the pretext they used for opposing Palin’s speech, this result doesn’t look too good for them, does it? Too many more victories like this and that poll of Jewish New Yorkers may not be an outlier much longer.

Daled Amos links to an interview of Malcolm Hoenlein.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

First his two sons were murdered. Now he faces prosecution. The reason for Mithal al-Alusi’s troubles? Visiting Israel and advocating peace with the Jewish state - something Iraq’s leaders refuse to consider.

The Iraqi is at the center of a political storm after his fellow lawmakers voted overwhelmingly to strip him of his immunity and allow his prosecution for visiting Israel - a crime punishable by death under a 1950s-era law. Such a fate is unlikely for al-Alusi, though he may lose his party’s sole seat in parliament.

Because he had visited Israel, many Iraqis assume the maverick legislator was the real target of the assassins who killed his sons in 2005 while he escaped unharmed.

The State Department in its infinite fecklessness refuses to get involved, claiming that this is an internal Iraq matter.

Israel Matzav covered this first, so let’s quote him:

Is this what hundreds of American troops died for in Iraq? To create yet another Arab country that lives in the 8th century in eternal hatred of Jews (and rest assured that Christians will be next on the list).

Powerline seems resigned to the State Department’s refusal to say anything:

Meanwhile, the US Embassy has nothing substantive to say on the subject. This “is an issue for the Iraqi parliament, not the US Mission to Iraq,” said spokesman Armand Cucciniello. That’s not an unreasonable response, I suppose, as long as all we’re talking about is expulsion from parliament.

via memeorandum

But as Max Boot observed last week:

It is hard not to be a little awed by extreme courage like this. Some may say that Alusi is being foolish and counter-productive, and there is perhaps an element of truth to that charge, but every nation needs a few people like him who are willing to risk everything in the name of a higher cause without the slightest regard for self-preservation. In this case, his cause is our cause: He wants Iraq to be a Western liberal state that would be closely allied with the United States against Sunni and Shiite extremists. Although he may be a lonely voice in Iraq, he is hardly alone, as seen from the fact that he did manage to win a parliamentary seat as the only representative of the Democratic Party of the Iraqi Nation which he leads. It is imperative that the U.S. government do what it can to help and protect him.

By assuming that the lesser punishment will be removal from Parliament is what’s being discussed and being quiet, the State Department is doing more damage than it (or Powerline) realizes. As Boot points out, Alusi was elected to a seat in Parliament. What does it say to those who support his party that the United States isn’t willing to speak up for them?

Israel Matzav also refers to the story of an Egyptian boy, who’s being denied medication on account of: that it will have to be imported from Israel, with much the same reaction:

Israel signed a ‘peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, and completed the turnover of every last inch of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982. As a result of that treaty, Egypt is now the third largest recipient of American foreign aid after Iraq and Israel. One has to wonder about the purposes for which the Americans are spending their foreign aid money, and what advantage is to be gained by Israel out of making peace with an Arab country (let alone the ‘Palestinians’) if this is the result.

Nearly 30 years later, Egypt despite the fact that it receives plenty of aid from the United States for making peace with Israel, still, in many ways treats Israel as an enemy. The United States remains quiet, not attaching any conditions to its aid. And this doesn’t even gain the United States goodwill on the Egyptian street.

If the United States really wants to see change in the Arab world, when will it start insisting on a change of attitude towards Israel instead of simply accepting Arab hatred of Israel as the natural order of things?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

A Russian religious group called Union of Russian Orthodox Citizens proposed promoting the Saint Alexander Nevsky to the role of the patron saint of FSB - the Russian federal security service, the main successor of KGB. Here is Alexander:

When you stop laughing at the mere idea of a saint overlooking the essentially dirty business of the (not so) august organ, consider the following:
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