Kassams vs. the IDF

Posted on 12/28/2007 by Meryl Yourish

Palestinian Islamic Jihad is missing a few terrorists today, thanks to the IDF.

A series of attacks launched by the IDF in Gaza Thursday has claimed the lives of at least eight militants, including Mohammad Abu Murshud, head of Islamic Jihad’s armed wing in the central Gaza Strip.

According to Palestinian sources, Murshud was killed when the car he was traveling in north of al-Mugarka (near the former Israeli settlement of Netzarim) was struck by a missile fired by Israeli aircraft. Two other Jihad members were killed and a number of others were injured in the attack, which was the IDF’s third of the evening.

Five Palestinians were killed in two attacks in Gaza earlier in the day: Two Hamas members and two Islamic Jihad gunmen were shot dead by Israeli soldiers operating south of Khan Younis in the southern Strip, while two more Jihad gunmen were killed near the al-Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.

And some Hamas members, too. This is good news. That makes about forty dead terrorists in the last week and a half. Do I hear fifty? Fifty?

Posted in Gaza, Hamas | 1 Comment

Israel allows a gift to Hamas: Armored vehicles

Posted on 12/28/2007 by Meryl Yourish

The political leadership, against the advice of the IDF, is allowing the Palestinians to receive 50 armored vehicles from Russia for use in the West Bank. The final barrier—mounting machine guns on them—has been dropped by the Palestinians. No doubt at a future date, they’ll get Russian assistance in adding machine guns to the vehicles, and we will see them used against IDF forces at some point in the future.

Palestinians have received Israeli permission to import 50 Russian-made armored personnel carriers into the West Bank next month, after resolving a dispute with Israel over arming the vehicles, the top Palestinian security official said Thursday.

Interior Minister Abdel Razzak al-Yahya said the Palestinians dropped a request to mount machine guns on the vehicles, clearing the way for the deal to proceed. Israel objected to the guns. Israeli officials had no immediate comment.

The arrival of the vehicles would be the latest step in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ efforts to impose law and order in the West Bank.

[…] Al-Yahya said his forces have made important strides, confiscating weapons from Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants and reining in the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, an armed group linked to Abbas’ Fatah movement.

“The situation now is much better, but we still need more weapons to enhance our forces,” he said. “No one will be allowed to possess weapons besides the security forces.”

It should be noted that the weapons given to the PA and stored in Gaza have all been taken over by Hamas, who did thank the Americans and Israelis for them. I imagine there’s a bit of celebrating going on at Hamas HQ today, because they know those 50 armored vehicles will be theirs in a matter of, oh, months, probably.

Posted in palestinian politics, Terrorism | Comments Off on Israel allows a gift to Hamas: Armored vehicles

Benazir Bhutto: Not quite the angel

Posted on 12/27/2007 by Meryl Yourish

Before you make up your mind about whether Benazir Bhutto’s assassination is bad for Pakistan, you might want to read this. I was looking around on some blogs and trying to remember why I never thought very much of Ms. Bhutto. Perhaps because I remembered that she was tossed out for corruption. But this op-ed in the LA Times makes her look as bad as Musharraf.

It is widely believed that Ms. Bhutto lost both her governments on grounds of massive corruption. She and her husband, a man who came to be known in Pakistan as “Mr. 10%,” have been accused of stealing more than $1 billion from Pakistan’s treasury. She is appealing a money-laundering conviction by the Swiss courts involving about $11 million. Corruption cases in Britain and Spain are ongoing.

It was particularly unappealing of Ms. Bhutto to ask Musharraf to bypass the courts and drop the many corruption cases that still face her in Pakistan. He agreed, creating the odiously titled National Reconciliation Ordinance in order to do so. Her collaboration with him was so unsubtle that people on the streets are now calling her party, the Pakistan People’s Party, the Pervez People’s Party. Now she might like to distance herself, but it’s too late.

Why did Ms. Bhutto and her party cronies demand that her corruption cases be dropped, but not demand that the cases of activists jailed during the brutal regime of dictator Zia ul-Haq (from 1977 to 1988) not be quashed? What about the sanctity of the law? When her brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto — my father — returned to Pakistan in 1993, he faced 99 cases against him that had been brought by Zia’s military government. The cases all carried the death penalty. Yet even though his sister was serving as prime minister, he did not ask her to drop the cases. He returned, was arrested at the airport and spent the remaining years of his life clearing his name, legally and with confidence, in the courts of Pakistan.

[…] And I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister’s politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.

My father was Benazir’s younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a “much higher” political authority.

Read it all. Then read some more about Bhutto before wondering if her assassination is good or bad for Pakistan—and for the U.S.

Update: Here’s another post from the same blog that you should read: Pakistan’s Arafat. Now there’s an epithet.

Posted in Terrorism, World | 9 Comments

As Israel deals for Shalit, the rockets fall on Sderot

Posted on 12/27/2007 by Meryl Yourish

How do you reconcile negotiating for the release of a kidnapped soldier on the one hand—with the probability that hundreds of convicted terrorists will go free to terrorize more—with the fact that rockets are raining down daily on Sderot. Nine on Tuesday. Eleven so far today.

I really don’t understand how the Israeli leadership thinks that this won’t lead to anything less than more kidnappings—unless it’s being done so that the IDF can go full-blown into the Gaza Strip after they get Shalit back. Now that—that I could live with. Not this.

The Palestinian News Agency Maan reported Thursday that a breakthrough has been accomplished in regards to kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

According to the report, Egypt has been able to convince Israel to accept some of Hamas’ demands, including the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners – some of them militant cell leaders – who Israel considers to be “extremely dangerous”.

However, we’ve read conflicting news reports about this subject a dozen times before. Yesterday Reuters reported that Hamas is not moving an inch on its demands for the release of over a thousand terrorists:

Hamas will not release a captured Israeli soldier unless Israel meets its demand to free nearly 1,400 Palestinian prisoners, including 350 with life sentences, a leader of the Islamist group in Gaza said on Wednesday.

[…] Muzaini said Hamas would not budge on its demand for 1,400 prisoners. “In March we closed discussions on this issue and we have no intention of reopening them. The ball is in Israel’s court,” he said.

Olmert will release terrorists with blood on their hands, putting more Israeli soldiers—and Israelis everywhere—at risk of kidnapping. The Palestinians think their tactics are working. And why not? Terrorism got Israel out of Gaza. Terrorism is turning Sderot into a ghost town. Kidnapping is about to pay off, big-time.

Only when the IDF is systematically killing terrorist leadership do the terrorists stop their murderous actions. You would think that Israel would catch on to that, sooner or later.

Posted in Hamas, Israel, Terrorism | 2 Comments

The Freddy’s Seven

Posted on 12/27/2007 by Soccerdad

via memeorandum

Keith Richburg has a front page report Not Relevant? Sharpton Scoffs at the Idea in yesterday’s Washington Post. Clearly the reporter scoffs too. There’s a sub-head line
“Activist’s Busy Calendar and Ringing Phone Speak to His Role in Civil Rights” which would have been more correct if it read “… His Role in Self-Promotion.” The article is a highly selective view of Sharpton’s career until now.

Richburg, of course, is scrupulous enough to mention that unpleasantness that plagued him early in his career.

In New York, his home base, Sharpton remains a polarizing figure for many, best remembered for championing the cause of Tawana Brawley, a black teenager who said she was abducted and raped by six white law enforcement officials but whose claims were later discredited.

That’s the sanitized Cliff Notes version of the incident. Sharpton made his name in the case. He accused the prosecutor in the area, Stephen Pagones, of raping Brawley and defiantly challenged Pagones to sue him if he was wrong. When Pagones did sue for defamation and won Sharpton refused to pay, or even apologize.

And the article doesn’t mention that Sharpton inserted himself into the 1991 Crown Heights riots on the side of rioters. He didn’t call for calm. He didn’t call for understanding. Rather he used Gavin Cato’s funeral as an opportunity to rail against the Jewish diamond merchants and falsely accuse Hatzaloh of being an “apartheid ambulance service.” (Hatzaloh personnel were directed away from the injured children by police who feared for their safety.)

Richburg uncritically echoes Sharpton’s case for relevance:

As evidence of his continued relevance on the political scene, Sharpton pointed to the presidential candidates chasing his endorsement. He planned to fly to South Carolina earlier this month to meet former president Bill Clinton until his flight was canceled. Last month, he shared a meal of chicken wings, cornbread and coconut shrimp with Obama at Sylvia’s, a Harlem soul food restaurant.”On the one level, they say we don’t matter. On the other level, they want to know who we’re endorsing,” Sharpton said, smiling at his own position.

Sharpton said he is going to decide among Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, Obama and former senator John Edwards of North Carolina. And like much of the black community, he is torn about which way to go.

“I really haven’t decided,” he said. He said he is most concerned about finding the candidate who will pursue his racial justice agenda.

It’s hard to see exactly how Sharpton’s endorsement would help anyone. Look at the primary results for 2004. Except for D.C. and South Carolina Sharpton didn’t reach 10% of the vote. Even in NY which is his supposed base he only got 8% of the vote. His delegate total was 27, just 4 more than Dennis Kucinich. And we won’t be seeing articles in the paper promoting Kucininch’s relevance. It’s only because he’s a self-proclaimed civil rights leader that anyone pays attention to him.

Bitsblog writes:

Sharpton gets media attention because editors have not forced their lazy reporters to update their Rolodexs.

Exactly. And politicians seek his endorsement because they’re really bad at math. Since it’s not about the math, Sweetness & Light is correct to observe

And what an appalling indictment of the Democrat candidates, that they are all seeking this racist thug’s endorsement.

Maybe you could understand it if Sharpton had some grass roots support that he could lend a candidate. Sure it would be cynical, but at least there’d be a purpose in sucking up to him. But all his support comes from the chattering classes. So there’s no excuse for supporting him.

Richburg quotes an admirer:

“He seems to have evolved into a new respectability, at least in the city,” said Norman Siegel, a lawyer and former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, who has known Sharpton for 20 years. Regarding the King celebrations, Siegel said, “Every single elected official, no matter what they said about him in the past, they’ll show up.”

“[N]ew respectability?” Where have I heard that before?

The primary battle silenced many detractors, whites and Republicans among them, who found “the Rev” more dignified — that was the word they used — than the seasoned politicians he faced. As Robert Abrams, the Attorney General, Geraldine A. Ferraro, the one-time Vice Presidential candidate and Elizabeth Holtzman, the City Comptroller, traded barbs, Sharpton followed the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s advice to “fly above the storm.”Everyone took note. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, after one particularly vicious debate, singled out Sharpton by favorable contrast, “Because he was positive, because he was mature.” The other three candidates, the Governor concluded, “all got hurt” in their debate. Reflecting on that change, Representative Maxine Waters of California, who herself successfully balances activism and mainstream politics, says she, too, was surprised by his transformation. “He obviously made a decision to show how smart he really is.”

Less than two years later, Sharpton got involved in a tenant/landlord dispute and led protests against a “Jewish interloper.” Kathryn Jean Lopez quotes Fred Siegel’s account of what happened.

Sharpton and his National Action Network turned a dispute between a Jewish tenant who rented the space for his store (Freddy’s) from a black church and his black subtenant into a racial hailstorm. Sharpton set up pickets outside the store, led by his lieutenant in the National Action Network, Morris Powell.Powell was an intimidating figure to many on 125th Street. An escaped mental patient who had thrice been accused of attempted murder, he had long threatened that “there will be war” against white merchants and “this street will burn.” His protesters, sometimes joined by Sharpton, shouted racial epithets like “Jew bastards” and “the bloodsucking Jews,” while referring to other whites as “crackers” and black customers as “traitors.”

One of the protesters, a man who called himself “Shabazz,” forced his way into the store shouting, “I will be back to burn the Jew store down.” He didn’t, but a man named Abubunde Mulocko did.

Apparently angered by the mistaken assumption that the store had hired Hispanics instead of blacks, Mulocko, a man with a long criminal record, his “paranoia goosed by the protests,” burned the store down.

Armed with a .38, he shot three whites and a Pakistani in cold blood (he had mistaken the light-skinned Pakistani for a Jew) and then set the fire that killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese and one black, the security guard who the protesters had taunted as a “cracker lover.”

Those are the wages of coddling a hate-monger like Sharpton.

Michelle Malkin explains why there’s a need to continue exposing Sharpton:

Some readers wonder why I continue to write about the Sharpton-MSM lovefest. Why? Because the enablers deserve to be held responsible and shamed publicly until they stop.If you hold up the mirror long enough, one of these fools is bound to glance over and see what slavish, race-hustling tools they all appear to be. And are.

Freddy’s happened another time after Sharpton had been declared “respectable.” So whenever someone in the media praises Sharpton for his activism they will now mention him in conjunction with the Jena 6. But the number they should remember is the Freddy’s 7. That defined who Sharpton is.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Jew Cooties, Media Bias, Politics | Comments Off on The Freddy’s Seven

Who’re you gonna call?

Posted on 12/27/2007 by Soccerdad

It’s been 3 years since a tsunami devastated large parts of southeast Asia.

Since then the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (NISPD) has been involved in the rebuilding effort.

“When the stage of the immediate disaster relief is over, the media, the celebrities and even most of the donors are gone,” Dr. Yehudah Paz, chairman of the Negev Institute for Strategies of Peace and Development (NISPD), said last week.Not so the NISPD, one of several Israeli organizations that initiated a program to assist Sri Lankan cooperatives to get back on their feet after the 2004 tsunami ruined their livelihood.

Here’s the background:

The NISPD works closely in Sri Lanka with the International Cooperative Alliance (ICA), an umbrella organization of the world’s cooperatives and the largest non-governmental organization in the world.A few months after the tsunami, NISPD representatives arrived in Sri Lanka with a plan to rebuild ruined businesses by establishing an educational business program.

B’nai B’rith International joined this effort, with envoys that were at first busy providing Sri Lankan survivors with food and rebuilding their houses, and later helped finance and coordinate the NISPD program.

The third participant in the Israeli-Jewish humanitarian collaboration is the American Jewish Committee (AJC), which funded most of the activity and allocated $300,000 for the entire project.

IsraAID – the Israel Forum for International Humanitarian Aid – served as the overall coordinator.

The four organizations contacted the ICA in Sri Lanka, which has six million members in the disaster-stricken country.

Specifically this is the role they played:

Over the past three years, the groups have worked with the cooperative movement in Sri Lanka, training 1,500 business managers of agricultural, tourist and retail cooperatives that were damaged in the tsunami. These business managers reach out to thousands of small businesses and merchants in southern Sri Lanka.”The purpose was not to rebuild what was ruined, but to use this disaster as an opportunity to promote these cooperatives and the local economy,” Rafi Goldman, director of the International Center for Cooperative Studies, a division of the NISPD, told the Post.

In related news, Israel recently joined a committee of the UN devoted to responding to disasters:

The United Nations emergency teams that support Member States in coordinating disaster response within hours of tragedy striking conducted nine missions to the Americas this year, the highest ever, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported today.Overall, the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) teams carried out 14 missions in 2007, higher than the usual yearly number, 70 per cent of them in response to hurricanes and floods, “possibly a glimpse of the shape of things to come given the reality of climate change,” OCHA said.

The UNDAC system consists of more than 160 national emergency managers from 57 countries together with staff from OCHA and 12 other international organizations, including UN agencies and the Red Cross and Crescent movement in cooperation with non-governmental organizations and private sector companies. This year Israel and the United Arab Emirates joined the system.

Though it’s largely under the radar, Israel continues to be one of the world leaders in disaster response.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel | Comments Off on Who’re you gonna call?

Woof

Posted on 12/27/2007 by Meryl Yourish

Harrison’s blogging again.

Harrison, I can read your blog without having to crack a rib from trying not to laugh out loud now. I work from home four days a week. Not that I read blogs during the time I should be working. I just have to work a little longer if I check out blogs during the daytime.

Huckabee. Hmph. We’re Rudy Guiliani voters in this house. Well, I am. The cats frankly don’t give a damn who gets elected, so long as I keep the food and treats coming.

If you’ve never read Harrison, do yourself a favor and check any of the links under “Harrison’s Crunchy Bits,” and trust me when I tell you not to read them at work if you’re not supposed to be laughing at your desk, or while drinking or eating. Spit-monitor warning is in effect for most of them. (It’s been a while, I think at least one is serious, but I can’t recall.)

Posted in Bloggers, Cats | 1 Comment

Egypt on border smuggling: Blame the Israel Lobby

Posted on 12/26/2007 by Meryl Yourish

The IDF has videotape of Egyptian border guards either turning a blind eye to the smuggling between Egypt and Gaza, or actively aiding and abetting it. The tape has been given to members of the Pentagon. It was not supplied to Congress. Based on the tapes and other reports of Egyptians aiding weapons and explosives smuggling into Gaza, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told the Knesset that Egypt was doing a “terrible” job on the Philadelphi corridor. (Those of us who follow such events are not surprised. We predicted this.)

“The need to dramatically decrease the amount of arms that are being smuggled into Gaza is an Israeli strategic goal, and of course this affects our relations with Egypt,” she told the committee.

“The Egyptians played a positive role at the Annapolis Conference, but that does not contradict the fact that what they are doing at Philadelphi is deplorable and problematic,” Livni told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

So what do the Egyptians do? Well, first they tell Livni to sit down and shut up, and go back to her knitting or something.

Egypt on Tuesday strongly rejected criticism by Israel’s top diplomat that Cairo is doing a “terrible” job of securing its porous border with the Gaza Strip against smugglers, saying Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni did not understand the issues and should have remained silent.

[..] Livni infuriated Egyptian officials on Monday by accusing Egypt of doing a ”terrible” job in securing the border, saying this stands in the way of Israel’s negotiations with the Palestinians because it strengthens extremists in Gaza.

”It is better for the Israeli minister to concentrate on negotiation efforts with the Palestinians, instead of speaking randomly about issues she should not be dealing with if she is not fully aware of the situation,” a statement from the ministry here said.

Why would the Egyptians allow smuggling into Gaza? There are many reasons. Money, for one. Bribes have to be sky-high with this much cash flowing both ways.

The defense official went on to say that if Egypt wanted to take control of the smuggling into Gaza it would have done so by now. The remark came despite a Post report on Tuesday that Cairo had bought advanced tunnel detection systems.

He claimed there were some one hundred tunnels, allowing for a tremendous amount of weapons and other goods to be moved from the Egyptian side of Rafah Crossing to the Palestinian side.

The official added that the tunnels had turned into a massive source of profit and a “real industry.” He explained that smugglers paid $3,000 a day to Hamas for the use of the tunnels and recounted how a month ago, the group closed one of the tunnels after smugglers refused to pay the fee.

There is also the fact that if the arms are being smuggled into Gaza to fight Israel, they’re not being smuggled into Egypt to arm their own terrorists.

And that’s just the beginning. Egypt then tried to blame Israel by saying agreements between the two nations forbid Egypt from having enough guards to adequately police the border. This does not, of course, answer the question of the videotape evidence of the guards that are on the border turning a blind eye to the smuggling. Or aiding it. Israel has no intention of allowing Egypt more armed guards on their border, having learned a lesson decades ago about what happens when too many armed Egyptians approach Israel. So Egypt tried another tack.

Now, Egypt is blaming “the Israel Lobby” for causing tensions between Egypt and the U.S. It doesn’t matter that they have been caught in the act. It’s all the fault of the Jews.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit on Wednesday accused the Israeli lobby of aggravating its relations with the United States by using the issue of smuggling across the Gaza border as an excuse to cut Washington’s military aid to Cairo.

[…] “The latest months have seen the Israeli lobby’s efforts to harm Egypt’s interests with the Congress,” Aboul Gheit told reporters, adding that since Hamas took control of Gaza in June, Israel has been trying to pressure Egypt.

And here’s the part that always makes the top of my head blow off. It’s perfectly fine, you see, for Egypt to criticize Israel.

Egypt criticized Israel’s renewed efforts to build settlements around Jerusalem, calling them damaging to the peace process, in talks between President Hosni Mubarak and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh on Wednesday.

Mubarak echoed Palestinian demands that Israel cancel a project to build 307 homes in Har Homa neighborhood announced earlier this month, describing it as damaging to the peace talks, according to presidential spokesman Suleiman Awwad.

“This settlement activity will hijack the only outcome of the Annapolis conference, which was the re-launching of peace negotiations,” he told reporters following the meeting.

Got that? Israeli “settlement activity” is what is preventing peace. And Egypt gets to have a say in that, because Egypt wants to have peace in the region, as they tell us over and over again. But when it comes to Israel objecting to the tons of weapons being smuggled into Gaza, aided and abetted by Egypt’s crappy border guards? That’s when Egypt says to Israel: MYOB.

“We will not allow a third party to interfere in the Egyptian-American relations which is bilateral and includes one regional power and one international power that try to discuss all issues openly and in cooperation,” he said.

Egypt on Tuesday strongly rejected criticism by Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni that Cairo was doing a terrible job of securing its porous border with the Gaza Strip against smugglers. Egyptian Foreign Ministry statement said Livni did not understand the issues and should have remained silent.

So you see, it’s perfectly fine for a third party to interfer with Israeli building activity, but it’s not okay for Israel to object that Egypt is in breach of the agreement signed during the withdrawal of Gaza. Nor is it the only breach of the Egypt-Israel agreement.

On Monday, for the first time since Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in June, Egypt unilaterally opened the Rafah border terminal and allowed 700 Palestinians, who claimed to be religious pilgrims on their way to Mecca, to pass through. On Tuesday, another 1,000 crossed through the terminal.

“This is a clear breach of agreements we have made with the Egyptians,” a senior diplomatic official said Wednesday, in reference to the November 2005 agreement under which the Rafah Crossing was opened. The official said the unilateral opening of the border had been preceded by another breach of agreements in October, when Egypt allowed 85 Hamas operatives to cross back into Gaza after cutting a hole in the border fence.

Egypt is failing on many counts to keep its word regarding policing the Gaza Strip border. And when Israel has the gall to ask Egypt to actually stick to the agreement, Egypt tries to cloud the issue by jumping on the Walt-Mearsheimer bandwagon and blaming “the Israel Lobby.”

And the Israel Lobby as scapegoat for the world’s ills continues its way down the slope. The pebble is not a pebble any longer. It’s definitely a rock. This was the title of the AP article on the subject:

Egypt: Israeli Lobby Harms US Relations

And this:

Egypt criticizes pro-Israeli lobby ahead of Mubarak-Barak meeting

The story is all over the wires now, complete with the Israel Lobby smear. Thanks, Walt. Thanks, Mearsheimer.

Yeah, I saw this coming, too.

Posted in Gaza, Israeli Double Standard Time | 2 Comments

Dashing through the snow

Posted on 12/26/2007 by Meryl Yourish

Glenn links to an article about police in Wisconsin trying to get kids to wear helmets while sledding. But I don’t think they’re going far enough.

I chipped a tooth sledding. I was 13, hit a bump at the bottom of the hill. The metal part of the Flexible Flyer hit me in the chin, my tooth chipped, and I had to have a root canal.

I say add mouthguards to sledding protection as well. The ones that boxers use would probably work.

If you’re going to have a nanny state, make sure you do it right, dammit!

And then, come to think of it, we should have eye protectors too. You never can tell what’s going to fly in your eye as you sled down a hill at the horrifying speed of 17 mph. Goggles for sledders. And perhaps we should start a movement to get all bicyclists to wear goggles, too. Helmets are not enough.

Update: Welcome, Instapundit readers. You don’t need a helmet to check out the rest of this site. Yet.

Posted in Juvenile Scorn | 8 Comments

Freakishly funny post of the day

Posted on 12/26/2007 by Meryl Yourish

Michael Jackson’s kid accidentally punched him in the mouth. And his lip fell off.

Michael Jackson reportedly underwent emergency surgery after his young son accidentally punched him in the face.

The Thriller hitmaker – who has undergone multiple cosmetic surgeries on his face in the past – was recently photographed in a Los Angeles bookstore wearing numerous bandages around his mouth.

But sources tell Finditt.com the singer’s son, Prince Michael II, caused the injury: “He was whacked in the face accidentally by his younger son Prince Michael II while playing around and part of Jackson’s upper lip collapsed.

“That mishap led a hysterical Jacko to make a beeline for the plastic surgeon for a bit of quickie repair work.”

Let that be a lesson to you: If you’re going to have enough surgery to become a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster, don’t play with kids.

Some might call this karma.

Exit question: How the hell does your lip “collapse”? What, he’s got balloons for lips now?

If any of my readers are plastic surgeons, please don’t tell me the truth. I don’t want to know.

Posted in Evil Meryl | 2 Comments

Purchasing peace

Posted on 12/26/2007 by Soccerdad

In 80 years on, massacre victims’ kin reclaims Hebron house, Nadav Shragai reports:

Ten months have passed since the settlers entered the three-story building, which covers an area of over 3,000 square meters. The $700,000 to buy the house came from people in New York who originally wished to remain anonymous. But they are nurturing a grudge against Israeli bureaucracy, and this week, they decided to speak out: The buyer’s son, a religious Jewish businessman from New York who agreed to be identified only as B., spoke with Haaretz about his plans for the house and his motives for buying it.”My paternal great-grandfather lived in Hebron before the riots and the deportation of 1929,” said B., referring to the murder of 67 Jews that summer by Arabs incited by false rumors of Jewish-orchestrated massacres of Arab Jerusalemites. “Part of my mother’s family also lived there. They experienced the horrors of the massacre and knew many of the victims.”

The carnage, 19 years before the creation of the state, had a deep effect on the Jewish community. The survivors were forced to flee Hebron, and their property was seized by local Arabs and occupied until after the Six-Day War of 1967.

Notice that Jewish Hebron was occupied for 38 years! Yid With Lid did. Peace Now didn’t.

In fact Peace Now seemed not at all concerned with the Arab occupation of Jewish land. It also isn’t concerned with the legality of the purchase or even the threat of death faced by the Arab seller of the property.

It is interesting that despite this purchase, someone sees Hebron as becoming an example of co-existence.

So if Jews legally purchased land in Hebron and peace hasn’t been derailed, exactly what is so upsetting to Peace Now?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel | 1 Comment

“Peaceful” Palestinians nearly murder Israeli in Ramallah

Posted on 12/26/2007 by Meryl Yourish

Stories like this happen all of the time. An Israeli gets lost and winds up in an Arab city in the West Bank, and the “peaceful” Palestinians—who only want peace and their own state, side-by-side with Israel—nearly murder him.

The Bat Yam resident recounts the horror that followed. “I ended up at an army checkpoint…and they let me through even though I was wearing a kippah and had Israeli license plates… I ended up in the center of Ramallah, stuck in traffic and surrounded by Arabs,” he says. “I still didn’t realize where I was because I relied on my GPS.”

Soon, however, Ochana was spotted by the local Arab residents. “One Arab merchant came up to my car and started rapping on my window….He asked me if I was Jewish and I answered ‘yes’. I immediately knew that something was wrong.”

The Arab merchant then entered Ochana’s vehicle through the window, punched him in the testicles and stole his cellular phone. “He began to yell ‘a Jew, a Jew’ and other Arabs soon approached me. They stole my GPS and my other cellular phone, “said Ochana.

This mugging, however, was soon the least of Ochana’s problems, as a near-lynch ensued. “An entire mob approached me and began to throw rocks at my car….they broke both the front and back windows….I began to cry and ask ‘why me?’” Ochana recalled.

Well, according to all of the pro-Palestinians, it’s because you stole their land, you see. And you’re oppressing the Palestinians with checkpoints and the separation fence. Therefore, you deserve to die.

Just as Ochana began to fear the worst, however, help came from an unexpected source. “Two Arabs came out of nowhere…One of them pulled me out of the car and asked me if I was insane. They ran with me to the Qalandiya checkpoint while we were chased by rock-pelting Arabs the entire way, and handed me over to Israeli soldiers,” he recounted.

Those would probably be the twenty percent of Palestinians who don’t think that suicide bombings are the way to get a state. Interesting, though, that the Arabs asked the Israeli if he was insane for having the nerve to show his face in an Arab town. This is the Palestinian state to come: Open to everyone but the world’s Jews. Watch for it.

Posted in Israel Derangement Syndrome | 5 Comments

Iran away

Posted on 12/26/2007 by Soccerdad

The largest group – since the time of Shah – of Jews from Iran just arrived in Israel. Ha’aretz reports:

A group of 40 new immigrants from Iran touched down at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Tuesday, the largest since the fall of the Shah and Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979.The immigrants, from Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan, each received a $10,000 grant from international Jewish organizations.

Relatives screamed in delight and threw candy at the newcomers as they emerged into the airport reception hall after a long bureaucratic procedure.
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Two brothers, Yosef and Michael, said they were glad to be in Israel. They declined to give their family name in order to protect relatives.

“I feel so good,” said Yosef, 16. “I just saw all of my family. You can’t put that into words.”

Two paragraphs at the end of the article are worth noting:

In 2000, Iranian authorities arrested 10 Jews, convicted them of spying for Israel and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from four to 13 years. An appeals court later reduced their sentences under international pressure and eventually freed them.No comment was available Tuesday from the Iranian government or the country’s Jewish lawmaker.

The freeing of the ten Jews was somewhat gradual and it was rather uncertain for the men’s relatives. And yes, there is a token Jew in Iran’s parliament.

I don’t know that a lot can be read into this aliyah. Even if this is the largest group of Iranian olim in 30 years, there are at least an estimated 25,000 Jews left in Iran.

Though they’re receiving $10,000 each, the new olim stand to lose their assets in Iran. According to the Jerusalem Post:

Iranians who choose to leave Iran can appoint legal custodians to manage their assets, but if they don’t, their assets are transferred to the state. However, according to sources familiar with their immigration process, the 40 new arrivals – 10 families and three singles, mostly from a middle to lower-middle financial bracket – have not appointed any such custodian. Some will lose those assets entirely.

The immediate danger facing Iranian Jews seems to be uncertain.

According to well-informed sources, imposing a travel or immigration ban on Iran’s remaining 25,000 Jews would not be in the interests of the Iranian government, which is trying to show the rest of the world that despite its problems with the US and Israel, there is a humane regime in Teheran that treats its Jewish minority well.Similarly, the Iranian authorities, fully cognizant of the latest group of 40 Jewish emigrants, can point to the relatively small number and say that the vast majority of the country’s Jews have chosen to stay.

However, not all of the Iranian expat community or those still residing in Iran are happy about the slow trickle of Jews to Israel; some say this phenomenon endangers Jews who choose to stay in Iran.

An Iranian Jew who immigrated to Israel six years ago, however, said that families continued to communicate with each other by phone without too many problems. From Israel, one can dial directly to Iran, and from within Iran, many families are using VoIP technology to communicate with their relatives in Israel via the Internet.

From what I’ve heard, freedom of movement for Iranian Jews is not as easy as the Jerusalem Post reports here.

Boker Tov Boulder asks (and answers) a related question:

That’s funny, only 25,000 and it’s the largest Jewish community in the Muslim Middle East? Hmmm, how could that be? Why so few Jews, when Jews have been all over the Middle East for ages? I guess that’s another truth disappearing into the black hole that Dhimmedia has become.It’s estimated that in 1945 more than 870,000 Jews were living throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Read the rest, for the answer.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

Posted in Iran, Israel | 1 Comment

Revolving door story

Posted on 12/26/2007 by Soccerdad

A few weeks ago Caroline Glick reported that Israelis had to enter the conference area through separate entrance. Ms. Glick is now retracting that claim.

Of course as Daled Amos who noticed the retraction pointed out:

There is plenty to criticize about what happened at Annapolis.
Now, there is one less thing.

UPDATE: At the suggestion of Daled Amos, I’m including a few paragraphs from Caroline Glick’s “Lies and Deceits” to clarify.

Even when independent media outlets use their best efforts to report the facts in a credible way, they sometimes get it wrong. For instance, on November 27, the Jerusalem Post reported a quote made by an Arab diplomat to AFP news agency in Riyadh claiming that the Bush Administration had bowed to the Arab demand to force the Israeli delegation at the Annapolis conference to enter the conference hall through a separate entrance from the Arabs. In the diplomat’s words, “The Saudis told Washington that they do not want to meet anyone from the Israeli delegation, either by chance or by prior arrangement. Hence it was decided that … delegations would enter into the meeting room from different doors.”His assertion was made credible by statements from US officials regarding the Saudi demand for segregation between the Arabs and the Israelis at the conference. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, “As the Saudi foreign minister put it, nobody’s interested in these uncomfortable situations where there are theatrics for the sake of photographs. We’ll of course be respectful and mindful of that as we’ll put together the various events.”

It was these twin reports that informed my own decision to begin my Nov. 30 column “Apartheid not peace” with the story of the separation of Israeli representatives from Arab representatives at Annapolis. Happily, after my column was published, both the State Department and Israeli officials denied that the US had enforced the Arab demand for segregated entrances.

YET WHILE the Bush administration did not bow to the Arab demand for segregation at Annapolis, it is moving to advance the Arabs’ bigoted demand for apartheid rather than peace in the Middle East.

That the request was made appears to be confirmed. However it was also clearly rejected by the administration.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Posted in Israel | 1 Comment

Sweeney Todd movie review

Posted on 12/25/2007 by Meryl Yourish

I saw Sweeney Todd this afternoon, in a theater that had a decent-sized crowd. I can see why Steven Sondheim gave the movie his blessings. It’s quite good. It has its flaws, but overall, I enjoyed it immensely.

Flaw number one is that Helena Bonham Carter is a great actor, but she can’t sing for squat. Tim Burton really needed to give the role of Mrs. Lovett to someone who can actually sing. Johnny Depp isn’t a great singer, but his voice was good enough for the film.

Flaw number two was that I was immensely peeved that the introduction and finale were both skipped. The film ended too abruptly, and I really, really missed the finale.

Other minor quibbles: I thought most of the songs were sung too slowly. The comedic songs, especially, weren’t as quick and funny as they could have been. And Helena Bonham Carter either doesn’t do comedy well, or didn’t get that Mrs. Lovett wasn’t a dark, tired, sad woman all the time. I guess I really can’t compare her to the Angela Lansbury version, since Angela won the Tony for her role. But she could have been a little funnier.

Really, though, I did like the film. I’ll probably see it again, or maybe even buy it, spurting blood from throats and all. Tim Burton might not have wanted to make it so bloody, though. I’ll bet a PG would have gotten him legions of Johnny Depp tween fans. It’s rated R. Sorena couldn’t get in to get us seats early; she had to come get me to get her past the ticket-taker.

Overall, today was a very good day. And I got some cash in the karma bank because we discovered someone had left his keys hanging out of the door of his Toyota convertible, so I left a note on the windshield and the keys at the box office. I imagine someone got a nice little present when they got out of their movie.

Posted in Holidays, Movies | 2 Comments