I watched the debate tonight. John McCain is finished. He isn’t saying what the Americans want to hear, he’s not challenging Obama on the right issues, he’s not answering the questions in the way that the sound bites will be repeated around the water cooler tomorrow and, frankly, he comes off like your friendly grandpa sitting around the dinner table nattering on and on.

Obama is going to sweep into the nation, and I think he will be the worst president since Hoover, as I believe he will be even worse than Jimmy Carter.

The best thing about the debate was Tom Brokaw. I loved that he didn’t let Obama roll over him with his “Can I respond to that?” the way that Biden did to Ifill.

I’ll be going to the Sarah Palin rally on Monday, because I want to see her. But I hold out almost no hope that McCain will pull this out.

You know what the best thing about coming home is?

Coming home to my actual home. Not an apartment. My very own home.

I really, really like being a homeowner. I love my condo. Hell, I even like having to put the garbage can inside garage. No more dumpsters. No more noisy neighbors. No more boom boxes shaking the walls as they drive through the parking lot at 2 a.m.

Just quiet. And home.

Yes we’ve heard of the terrible siege that Israel has laid against Gaza. Mere Rhetoric catalogues all of the charges against Israel and shows them to be bogus.

The latest to fall is how Israel’s blockade harmed the sick and injured in Gaza. Israel actually allows the vast majority of those who apply to leave for medical treatment to get treatment in Israel.

Elder of Ziyon has more.

Which means that during this horrible “siege,” Israel has been doubling and re-doubling the number of patients allowed from Gaza to Israel or the PA for treatment.

Additionally as the JCPA - the source for these figures - points out

# The facts are that Israel has provided ever increasing numbers of approvals of permits since the Hamas takeover of Gaza, despite increasing rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian population, including mortar and terror attacks directed at the Erez crossing used by patients.
# At the same time, there have been at least 20 incidents where Palestinians used medical missions to attempt terror attacks.

Reading things like this makes me wonder if Israel actually cares more about Palestinians than the Palestinian leadership does. The most recent medical efforts we saw from Hamas was its persecution of Fatah affiliated doctors, making health care in Gaza even less available. Yet it’s Israel that will be in the dock, accused by the likes of Amnesty International of preventing access to health care and other crimes:

Amnesty International raises concern over human rights violations entrenched in the normative and institutional structure of the Israeli state: the failure of Israel to recognize the applicability to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) of humanitarian and human rights law; the unlawful settlements in the OPT; the construction of a fence/wall mostly within the OPT; the demolition of Palestinian homes in the OPT and of Arab Israeli homes in Israel; policies which undermine the rights of the occupied Palestinian population to health, education, housing, work and an adequate standard of living in the West Bank and, in particular, in Gaza where Israeli authorities have imposed a stringent blockade; torture or other ill-treatment of detainees;

This goes beyond irresponsible. There exists no charitable explanation for AI and the other NGO’s who will be doing the will of the Arab world next year at Durban II and demonizing Israel. This isn’t about helping the Palestinians but about hating Israel and the Jews.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Secretary Rice is apparently planning to celebrate the first anniversary of the Annapolis summit with - another summit. Shmuel Rosner describes this proposed summit as maintenance as opposed to a desperate, ill fated and misguided attempt (like Taba in 2001) to reach a final agreement.

A summit in November is unlikely to provide a definitive answer as to which of these assessments is closer to reality. Nevertheless, Secretary Rice can make a strong argument for such a summit. She’ll argue that this event should not be seen as a last-minute attempt at reaching an agreement in the mode of Clinton’s Taba talks (following the collapse of the Camp David summit in 2000), but rather as a maintenance measure.

Aside from the success the PA has had in enforcing the law and order in Jenin, David Hazony writes that perhaps what’s motivating Mahmoud Abbas, is a sense of mortality.

Why now? Probably because for the first time, his regime is under a direct threat from a Hamas overthrow. According to reports, Fatah is preparing a major anti-Hamas assault in the West Bank, which comes on the heels of Hamas’ own threatening to repeat its successes from Gaza in the rest of Palestinian territory. In other words, things have gotten so bad for him that he has realized how much he really needs Israel and the support of major powers.

Meryl points out that Hamas is using the law to help their takeover attempts.

Hamas, the terrorist group that took over the Gaza Strip in a wave of violent attacks that included throwing bound Fatah members off buildings, rocketing civilian homes, and resulted in over 100 dead Palestinians, including, of course, women and children—yeah, that Hamas is pretending to care about the legitimacy of a law that they never followed in the first place except to put their people in place to take over.

I wonder though, if there’s another factor that’s motivating Abbas.

Findings of the third quarter of 2008 indicate continued slow decline in Hamas’s popularity while Fateh’s popularity remains stable as it was during the second quarter. Similarly, findings show a slightly wider gap between the popularity of President Abbas compared to that of Ismail Haniyeh in favor of the former. Positive evaluation of the conditions of Palestinians in the West Bank remains higher than that of conditions in the Gaza Strip. This applies to overall conditions as well as those of democracy and human rights. Findings show also significant opposition to Hamas’s military entry into Shijaiah in the Gaza Strip in early August.

Surprisingly, the good government terrorists are alienating their constituents. Too bad we don’t hear more about this in the press.

I don’t trust Abbas. He continues to be a terrorist sympathizer and I suspect he was always was more involved in terrorism than his apologists allowed. I don’t know where this will lead, but it’s better if Israel has one less front that it has to defend. And despite the apparent improvement in his support, he remains a weak leader. Still a practical maintenance meeting probably will cause less harm than an all out effort to bridge the unbridgeable gaps.

So is Abbas motivated by fear or confidence? At this point I don’t know that it matters.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

via memeorandum

A recent pro-Obama video has some of the Israeli officials who appeared in it upset, for they feel that it misrepresented their views.

Former head of the Mossad Ephraim Halevy and former IDF deputy chief of staff Maj.-Gen. Uzi Dayan accused the group of taking their words out of context, saying that when filmed they had been told that the issue at hand was the challenges facing the next man in the White House, and not that the film was aimed at endorsing Obama for president.

“It’s not only misleading, it was an interview about what the next president was going to have to deal with,” Dayan told The Jerusalem Post, “and to know that they used this interview and took [only] five seconds [of it], and put me in a list of people praising Barack Obama…

Shmuel Rosner points out that the video’s less a problem because it misrepresents Sen. Obama, than that it mis-represents Israel.

Again, the problem with this clip is not that it gives a misleading impression of Obama. It’s the impression it gives about Israel that’s wrong. Yes, one can find some Obama supporters among the ex-officials of the Israeli Defense forces, but they will be in the minority. One of them, Amnon Shahak, is shown in both clips. Shlomo Brom, Yossi Alpher and Shaul Arieli - names most Israelis (and surely Americans) will not recognize - are all knowledgeable, respectable people, but can be usually counted on to be in opposition to most things the Israeli defense establishment believes.

Gens. Brom, Alpher and Arieli (as well as Naomi Chasan, who is also mentioned as being on the video) are all supporters of J-Street a “pro-peace, pro-Israel” organization that is closely tied to Sen. Obama.

Still this doesn’t mean that the misrepresentation was done by the Obama campaign, but by a group that supports Sen. Obama.

Rosner’s point is reiterated by Israel Matzav:

This is especially significant because, as I noted in the earlier post, Dayan is the only one interviewed with ties to a party on the right of the political spectrum, and it was Dayan who allowed the video’s makers to claim that the generals interviewed were from “across the political spectrum.”

Two other retired generals who were interviewed - Amram Mitzna and Giora Inbar (who is also now apparently a US citizen since he said he would vote for Obama), stood by the comments, although they too admit that they had no idea why they were being filmed. The rest of the JPost article I linked above is a rehash of yesterday’s JPost article about the video.

More at Daled Amos.

The truth is that the last polling numbers I saw actually showed that Israelis prefer Sen. Obama to Sen. McCain by a small margin. I forget where I saw them. I believe that those polls even had him leading among Likud voters. I don’t recall who the polling organization was, though I find those numbers surprising. (Of course, that does not mean that they’re wrong.)

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Internet posters blame Jews for financial crash, this blogger says. This one joins him too.

Judging by the number of surfers coming here with the “Bernanke Jew?” question, some people think they are getting wise to the real culprits of the latest mischief caused by certain parties on the financial markets.

Well, it is not enough to jump directly to the question whodunit. First of all, no one yet asked the most important question: if the initial value of all these stocks, property and stuff was X and today all this costs only Y, who pocketed the difference? Yeah, well, you know how it goes.

Also - no one noticed what happened in UN recently. First came the speech by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that raised an awful din in the Zionist-owned press. Notice that during the speech the Israeli representatives were absent. Then came a fiery retort by one and only Shimon Peres, and lo and behold - Iranian representatives are out for lunch! Isn’t it a hint?

And no one, but no one at all noticed the proximity of these speeches to the financial do. So sit up and take heed - here comes the skinny. First of all, the whole brouhaha on the stock exchange and all that was orchestrated and carried out by the Illuminati, Talmudic Masons and Zoroastrians, of whom Mahmoud A. is really awfully fond, although himself he is a closet Baha’i. I know it may sound confusing for the newbies, so just call the whole bunch of them Elders (of Z, of course), since this is what it really is about.

Now, you may want to ask, what is that enmity between Iran and Israel about then? Simply for show, folks, nothing more. Notice the inventive way we use to exchange messages between us:

You will be surprised how easy it is to pass (and receive) a smallish capsule with written material (or even a memory card full with MP3/4 of the latest shit not yet on the market) when you tongue your good friend.

The rabbi whom you see transferring the capsule in the picture above has been the messenger of choice for the Elders for a long time. Unfortunately, he had to be replaced, due to some yucky fungus growing on his tongue from all that data transfer. So we had us a replacement. This time it is, while still a rabbi, a female one. Goes by the moniker of Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and seems to be located in Berkeley, California. Not a surprise, in fact the location was practically expected. Here is how she looks:

As you can see, we have done our best to keep the general look (and feel) more or less the same, with some redistribution of hair. To keep Mahmoud A. comfy. In any case, we have already organized an initial meeting between the two in Tehran a few months ago, so her appearance in that New York bash shouldn’t have been a complete shocker.

Of course, we couldn’t show here the actual act of kissing between the two, because the written dispensation for public kissing that Mahmoud A. got from his Ayatollah states that it is valid only for men. Some claim that it is a result of a clerical error or some mistranslation (after all, we all know that Farsi is famous for its ambiguity and resulting translation issues). Anyhow, the only people Mahmoud is kissing in public are of male persuasion, but at least he is doing it a lot and with fervor approaching religious.

In this case the kiss was not a public one. And no, Mahmoud didn’t agree to enter the women’s restroom, so the data transfer was performed this time in a cubicle of a men’s restroom. No big deal for a rabbi, albeit a female one.

Yeah, so this is how it goes, and both Mahmoud and the Elders have only one problem now: how to get the green stains off our fingers, what with counting and packing all that dough. Anyone has an idea?

Oh, and re that Bank crisis is Allahs revenge on US stuff: forget it. We are not sharing with him. No way.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

See if you can find the most interesting viewpoint in this article. Yes, you’ll have to read it through first. But here’s the basics: The AP is detailing how Hamas will refuse to recognize a change to the Palestinina Basic Law that extends Mahmoud Abbas’ term as president.

Hamas will cease to recognize Mahmoud Abbas as Palestinian president after Jan. 8 and replace him with one of its own leaders, according to a resolution approved by the Islamic movement’s legislators Monday.

The Hamas resolution demands that Abbas issue a decree by Wednesday to hold new presidential elections within three months, to coincide with what Hamas says is the end of his term.

[...] If Hamas does withdraw recognition from Abbas, it would sever another link between the two sides and also undermine Abbas’ legitimacy in the eyes of many Palestinians.

Okay, got the gist of it? Hamas, the terrorist group that took over the Gaza Strip in a wave of violent attacks that included throwing bound Fatah members off buildings, rocketing civilian homes, and resulted in over 100 dead Palestinians, including, of course, women and children—yeah, that Hamas is pretending to care about the legitimacy of a law that they never followed in the first place except to put their people in place to take over. And the AP repeats their lies uncritically. Get a load of how they describe the Hamas takeover. Remember, over 100 Palestinians were killed. Think about how they’d describe an action in which over 100 Palestinians were killed by the IDF, and then read this:

Hamas has been in control of Gaza since its violent takeover of the territory in June 2007, leaving Abbas only in charge of the West Bank.

Media bias? Media bias? What anti-Israel media bias? Whitewashing Palestinian terrorism? Come on. You’re imagining it.

All of this is prelude to Hamas’ attempt to take over the West Bank and encircle Israel. I know they want to try. I don’t think they’re going to be allowed to succeed. The IDF may have removed a few checkpoints in the West Bank, but the West Bank isn’t Gaza. Hamas won’t have such an easy time of it. The really sick thing is that I can see Israeli soldiers being put at risk to effectively save Fatah’s collective ass. Then agian, it is in Israel’s interest not to let the West Bank fall to the terrorists. The overt terrorists, anyway.