Thats’ quoting Al-Jazeera:
“If peace comes and the occupation comes to an end, Israel will live in a sea of peace,” he said on Tuesday after meeting his Israeli counterpart, Shimon Peres, in the Turkish capital of Ankara.
I hope it is not the Mediterranean sea that he has in mind…
Cross-posted on SimplyJews.
Tagged near the end of an article in the Jerusalem Post detailing Saab Erekat’s insistence that the Palestinians will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state is this interesting poll data:
Also according to the poll, 52.9% believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be solved if Jerusalem becomes a Muslim city while 26% believe east Jerusalem should be the capital of Palestine and west Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
Ten percent said they thought the city should be the joint capital of both nations and 7.4% said the capital should be under international control.
More than half the Palestinians are in effect insisting that if Israel surrenders utterly to the Palestinians, there will be peace. Otherwise, expect eternal war.
It’s interesting how there was no need for a Palestinian state, or a capital of such state in Jerusalem, for the entire time the Palestinians lived under a British mandate. There was no need for it when Jordan controlled the eastern half—with most of the religious shrines, from which they forbade Jews—from 1948 to 1967. And of course, Jerusalem is not mentioned at all in the koran, but it has been the capital of world Jewry for over three millennia, whether Jews were in Israel, or in exile.
But all we have to do is make it a Muslim city, and there will be peace, you see. Submit to the will of Allah, I suppose they’d say.
Shyeah.
Never. Gonna. Happen.
Whether or not the Palestinians officially recognize Israel as the Jewish state that it is doesn’t matter. Olmert doesn’t have the political capital to give up Jerusalem.
I think the only good thing about the Annapolis conferences is that ultimately, it’s going to fail. I’m not worried that Jerusalem will be split. I’m not worried that the Palestinians will have the control over the West Bank they’re asking for. And I’m not worried about a third intifada. Ehud Barak is preparing to take back the Philadelphi corridor and rid Gaza of much of its weaponry, explosives, and terrorists.
Whether Saab Erekat and his buddies admit it or not, Israel is the Jewish State. And Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish State, now and forever. The Palestinians don’t get to determine that fact. It’s been determined by history, by archeology, by facts on the ground, and most especially, by Someone whose name is most emphatically not Allah.
Get over it, Erekat. The Jews are never leaving Israel, or Jerusalem, ever again.
SNN is up, and we’ve got Charles Johnson discussing the war that is splitting the conservative blogosphere (and that almost cost us SNN).
My contribution this week is about British Muslim groups trying to hijack yet another Jewish issue and apply it to Muslims: The spurious analogy that saying that 2,000 Muslims in the U.K. are currently being tracked for ties with terrorists is just like the demonization of the Jews by Nazis during the 1930s. Uh-huh. They’re almost exactly the same. Except they’re not. Hilarity (well, much juvenile scorn) ensues.
I haven’t heard the rest yet, because today’s a workday. But go and listen, because this may be our most-listened to show, ever, and if you don’t hear it, you’re going to miss out.
You don’t need an iPod. All you need is Windows Media Player or something like it. And you don’t have to wait for a slow server. Right-click the link and go to file/save link as (in Firefox, it’s different in IE) and save it to your computer, then listen at your leisure. SNN is also on iTunes.
MK Yuval Steinitz is arguing that the United States should cut its foreign aid to Egypt by (a symbolic) $200 million.
Egypt effectively condoned Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, and has since stood by and allowed Hamas to build an army, MK Yuval Steinitz (Likud) wrote in a letter to the US Senate on Sunday. “Egypt’s de facto behavior in the field supports Hamas,” he said. Steinitz wrote the letter at the request of Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Arizona), with whom he chairs a joint US-Israeli committee on defense and foreign policy. “As long as Egypt is not required to pay a real price for this behavior, weapons and financial aid will continue to flow into the hands of Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza,” he wrote. Steinitz asked the Senate to approve a bill recently passed by the House of Representatives to freeze $200 million of the approximate $1.3 billion in annual US aid to Egypt each year until the Egyptian government changes its policy toward smuggling near and across its 14-kilometer border with the Gaza Strip. According to the IDF, Hamas has smuggled 20,000 rifles, 6,000 antitank missiles and 100 tons of explosives into the Gaza Strip since last summer. Steinitz said efforts by the Egyptians to stop the smuggling were ineffective and half-hearted.
The New York Times, not unsurprisingly finds all the reasons that Egypt should not be judged harshly.
Over all, Egypt’s relationship with Hamas is complicated by domestic political concerns. On one hand, analysts said, it is not in Egypt’s interest to improve relations with Hamas, an offshoot of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. On the other, Egypt does not want to be seen to be helping Israel over the Palestinians. “I do not think that Egypt is re-examining its relationship with Hamas, because any legitimacy for Hamas negatively affects the legitimacy of the Egyptian regime,†said Emad Gad, an analyst at the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “Any success for Hamas is a success for the Muslim Brotherhood.†When Egypt opened its border with Gaza in September to allow Hamas militants to pass through, analysts in Egypt said that it was probably part of some deal. Newspapers in Egypt reported that Hamas turned over a wanted militant from Al Qaeda in exchange for the passage, a deal the government never confirmed. “This would be a political crisis for Egypt,†Mr. Gad said. “People will say that Egypt is cooperating with Israel against the Palestinians. And Egypt cannot do this.†Analysts added that Egypt had cultivated an unofficial relationship with Hamas partly because it was such a large force that it could not be ignored and partly in the hope of bringing greater unity between Hamas and the Fatah faction of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.
The Times doesn’t explain if the greater unity between Hamas and Fatah means that both will be more or less favorably disposed to making peace with Israel. That it doesn’t address that question says something. The Jerusalem Post ends with
The Egyptian government has called the accusations against them “baseless” and harmful to Egyptian-American relations.
I think this is actually accurate. American wants Egypt to democratize. Egypt isn’t.
Egypt could support American policy in the UN. It doesn’t.
So the only active element of Egyptian-American relations is the aid the United States gives Egypt. Thus if Israel gives less to Egypt, it will harm those relations.
But because Egypt is supposedly supporting the chimera of peace the administration will fight the effort being coordinated between Steinitz and some senators to penalize Egypt for its malfeasance. That is the nature of the peace process. If an Arab country or group says that it supports peace it gets inoculated against any actions or positions it takes against real peace. The Bush administration is really no different from any administration that came before it. But because the President has stated that he wants actions to match words, it’s more disappointing that this administration fails to stick to its standards.
Crossposted at Soccer Dad.
On the anniversary of the death of the biggest mass-murderer of Jews since Adolf Hitler, his successor is promising to move Yasser Arafat’s remains to Jerusalem.
President Mahmoud Abbas has pledged to continue to work for the transfer of the body of the late President Yasser Arafat to Jerusalem.
The President made his promise during the inauguration of a mausoleum dedicated to the late president in the government’s headquarters in Ramallah. November 11 marks the third anniversary of the death of the Palestinian leader.
Abbas laid a wreath near Arafat’s tomb as a band played memorial songs.
The shrine is designed to allow its future transfer to Arafat’s desired final resting place in Jerusalem.
Mahmoud Shtayeh, head of the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, who supervised the building process of the shrine, insisted that the late president will be buried in Jerusalem.
This is why Israel must never give up control of the Temple Mount. You may have forgotten, but I have not, that the Palestinians requested that Arafat be buried on the Temple Mount. That murderer’s remains would desecrate our holiest site, and I would not be surprised to see the earth open up and swallow the entire complex whole. And frankly, if Israeli authorities were to let this happen, well, we’d deserve to lose the Wall.
HonestReporting is trying to increase awareness of the Philippe Karsenty/ France 2 trial. Toward that end they’ve put up a video of Karsenty discussing the unseen footage.
However as Fiery Spirited Zionist noted in the comments to my recent post on the topic, a strike in France threatens to delay the court proceedings.
Dry Bones turns serious in introducing the Coordinating Council on Jerusalem. (Well though deadly serious, the cartoon is a riot.)
The CCJ is a broad-based coalition of major American Jewish organizations which take differing views on many matters, but which unite around the firm conviction that Jerusalem is the Capital of the Jewish People and the heritage of all Jews everywhere and that oppose any negotiations which involve possible concessions of Jewish sovereignty or control over Jerusalem.
(h/t Yid with Lid, who has been very involved in this effort.)
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
From the Jerusalem Post
Prof. Ada Yonath, a world-class molecular biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, has been chosen to receive the $100,000 L’Oreal and UNESCO “For Women in Science” Life’s Work Prize – one of only five awarded each year to outstanding female scientists on each continent.Yonath is the first Israeli to receive the prestigious prize after being nominated by the Education Ministry’s UNESCO committee, which is the government’s advisory body on UNESCO activities in Israel. As the recipient of the prize, Yonath is recognized as this year’s leading woman scientist in Europe.
This is a description of her accomplishments
Yonath, who was born in Jerusalem in 1939, is a crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes. She received her PhD at the Rehovot institute and accepted postdoctoral positions at MIT and Carnegie Mellon University. In 1970 she established what was for nearly a decade the only protein crystallography laboratory in Israel. Her research focuses on the mechanisms underlying protein biosynthesis by ribosomal crystallography, a research line she pioneered more than two decades ago despite much skepticism within the international scientific community.Yonath elucidated the modes of action of over 20 different antibiotics targeting the ribosome, explained the mechanism of drug resistance and the structural basis for antibiotic selectivity and showed how it plays a key role in clinical usefulness and therapeutic effectiveness, thus paving the way for structure-based drug design.
And if you’re interested her faculty page at Weizmann is here.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
I didn’t grok that Flicker could be used as a ersatz blog: just upload a picture and start carping around it. But here is an unexciting, albeit pitiful, wail from Ben Heine, he of the Iranian Holocaust cartoon competition fame.
No more and no less. Ehehe….
To put things straight, dear Ben: a cockroach squashed by a bulldozer can call itself a victim of industrial revolution with more reasons than you can call yourself a victim of this or any other lobby. A fart in a hurricane would be more apt as a description of your miserable life story…
In fact, all operatives of the Elders’ field units are under strict order to keep a safe distance.
It is the smell, you know.
Cross-posted on SimplyJews.
Live it up with Life in Israel who’s hosting Haveil Havalim #140!
Read about:
Kristallnacht.
Rabin and Amir.
The fair and balanced media.
A blogging (Jewish) rock star.
And a scholar reveals what Esav/Esau might have looked like!
Plus lots more.
via memeorandum
Richard Landes (Augean Stables) has an excellent essay on at Pajama’s Media Al Dura and the “public secret” Middle East Journalism. This week the judge handing the appeal of the Karsenty-France 2/Enderlin case will see the raw footage of the supposed killing of Al-Dura. In connection to the case, Landes asks and answers some questions, with unsettling results.
Which brings us to a problem more complex than the fairly straightforward observation that Palestinian journalists play by a different set of rules in which this kind of manipulation of the “truth†is entirely legitimate. What do Western journalists do with these products of propaganda? Do they know these are fakes or are they fooled? Do they tell the cameramen working for them and using their equipment that filming such staged scenes is unethical and unacceptable? And if they do, why do cameramen who have worked for them for years – Talal worked for Enderlin for over a decade when he took these rushes – continue to film these scenes. And how often do our journalists run this staged footage as real news?Here the evidence provided by the Al Durah affair suggests that, in some sense, journalists are “in†on the public secret. When representatives of France2 were confronted with the pervasive evidence of staging in Talal’s footage, they both responded the same way. “Oh, they always do that, it’s a cultural thing,†said Enderlin to me in Jerusalem. “Yes Monsieur, but, you know, it’s always like that,†said Didier Eppelbaum to Denis Jeambar, Daniel Leconte, and Luc Rosenzweig in Paris.
In the course of making his point, Landes writes about another incident that was a direct effect of the killing of Mohammed Al-Dura, the brutal lynching of two Israel reservists, Yosef Avrahami and Vadim Norzhich.
An incident at Ramallah, however, suggests that Western journalists have systematically submitted to Palestinian demands that they practice Palestinian journalism. On October 12, 2000, to cries of “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah,†Palestinian men tore to pieces the bodies of two Israeli reservists. Aware of the potential damage, Palestinians attacked any journalist taking pictures. And yet, one Italian crew working for a private news station, at great risk to their lives, smuggled out the footage.
Landes brings the case for a specific reason, but it also provides a contrast to the Al-Dura incident. At the time, the late Scott Shuger wrote Making Excuses for Ramallah. If journalists were prepared to believe the Al-Dura story because it fit their narrative, they played down the Ramallah lynchings because it was inconvenient to their narrative.
In the search for the journalistic Yeti leaving all these footprints, that mucky New York Times “explanation” of Ramallah is instructive. “Collision” suggests an accident between objects moving towards each other with equal force. “What each side sees” suggests that in the Middle East, one can never escape ethnic perspective to get at the plain facts. And “core ugliness” suggests that in this region, neither side is blameless.Now, looking at the whole sad history of the place, all these ideas are probably true. But the problem is that none of them accurately describe “what happened today” at the Ramallah police station: the Israeli soldiers were defenseless when set upon, therefore it was objectively wrong to kill them, and therefore on that particular day in that particular place, unequal blame can be apportioned.
Potentially the outcome of the Karsenty-France 2/Enderlin case should force the media to look at their preconceived notions about the Middle East and how their coverage doesn’t meet the standards of objectivity that they claim to believe in.
In reality if Karsenty wins his appeal it will be because, as Landes notes,
…Enderlin has claimed that the tapes prove him right and show the boy in such unbearable death throes that he cut them out of his report. But several experts who have seen the tapes (this author included) claim that the only scene of al Durah that Enderlin cut was the final scene where he seems alive and well…
This case should be to journalism what Watergate was to American politics.
PowerLine sums up the Landes column:
I would urge our readers to read Landes’s article with care, because it has implications far beyond the Al Dura case. First, Landes argues that western journalists are widely aware of the fact that much of the Palestinian video footage that comes to them is staged, but they prefer that their own consumers in the West not be in on the “secret.” Second, Landes notes that the Islamic Mass Media Charter, which sets out a code of ethics for Muslim journalists, implicitly encourages false reporting by establishing, as principles of journalism, the twin obligations to “censor all materials” where necessary to protect the umma, and to “[t]o combat Zionism and its colonialist policy of creating settlements as well as its ruthless suppression of the Palestinian people.”
Western news agencies rely on local stringers, reporters, and photographers in order to get news from hot spots such as Gaza, the West Bank, Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. As the al-Dura incident has shown, they don’t care much for editorial fact-checking afterwards as long as they get something juicy enough to sell newspapers and TV advertisements. It doesn’t hurt, either, when the result confirms institutional biases against Israel and the United States.
Israel Matzav hopes that soon to be released tapes will have a good result.
At Pajamas Media, Richard Landes has a must-read article on the staged death of Muhammed al-Dura. The original France 2 tapes are to be played before a French judge this Wednesday, and the entire fraud may be exposed.
Except the media seems oblivious to the significance of what’s going on. I checked the Washington Post’s coverage. I searched both the papers recent and longterm archives for the name “Karsenty” and got no results.
The New York Times’ archives did return a single result about the case, but it was from two and a half years ago. The article is well reported and mentions a German documentary about the case.
The scenes were filmed by its Palestinian cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma, who was the only one to capture images of what Mr. Enderlin characterized then as the killing of a child by gunfire from an Israeli position. Mr. Enderlin was not present during the shooting.Esther Schapira, a German producer in Frankfurt, said she tried unsuccessfully in preparation for her 2002 documentary to see a master copy of the tape and was astonished when France 2 did not share it because European stations commonly exchange material. “If there is nothing to hide,” she said of France 2’s initial reluctance, “what are they afraid of?”
Still Enderlin insisted
Mr. Enderlin wrote letters insisting: “We do not transform reality. But in view of the fact that some parts of the scene are unbearable, France 2 was obliged to cut a few seconds from the scene.”
But a former France 2 reporter differed:
“That image has had great influence,” said Daniel Leconte, a former correspondent for France 2. “If this image does not mean what we were told, it is necessary to find the truth.”
It wasn’t just that the Al-Dura narrative was used by the Palestinians (second clip) to foment anger against Israel, it was used all over the Arab world.
Egypt and Tunisia issued postage stamps of the boy, Muhammad al-Dura, crouching against his father and under attack from a fusillade of bullets in September 2000. Egypt named a street in his honor, and suicide bombers invoked the boy as a martyr in videotaped farewells.
The Israeli government had quickly posted an annotated picture of the Netzarim juncition showing the positions of all those shooting. It shows that the Israeli solider could not reasonably have known that there were civilians in the area and that the Israelis weren’t at an angle where they could have easily hit the al-Dura’s. Yet no media outlet followed up on their claims. The idea that Israel had used overwhelming force to repel a popular (not staged) rebellion controlled the coverage of the shooting.
Once the media were deprived of the poor Palestinian who had been beaten by the Israeli policeman, they needed another symbol. That symbol was Mohammed al-Dura and nothing was going to prevent the media from appropriating him. Not even the truth.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
On the eve of Kristallnacht, the night that is considered the beginning of the Holocaust—the extermination of six million of Europe’s Jews—the Muslims of Britain are evoking the memories of the treatment of Jews by Nazis as a comparison to the British announcement that Al Qaeda is recruiting young British Muslims, and that the nation is at its greatest peacetime risk in history.
Reuters uses the N-word in its headline:
The BBC is more discreet, waiting a few paragraphs before going there.
UK terror tactics ‘create unease‘
The government’s approach to terrorism is creating an atmosphere of suspicion and unease, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain has said.Muhammad Abdul Bari told the Daily Telegraph the amount of debate relating to Muslims was disproportionate.
He cited Nazi Germany in the 1930s as an example of how people’s minds could be poisoned against a community.
And they quote the ever-present Inayat Bunglawala, who is so quick to blame Israel for the problems of the Middle East, and even quicker to bring the conversation around to Jews whenever Muslims are criticized (because the Bible is just like the Koran with its calling for the stoning of adulterers except, gee, name the last time a Jewish or Christian society stoned an adulterer. Now name the last time a Muslim society did the same.
Inayat Bunglawala, the council’s assistant general secretary, agreed – telling BBC Radio 4’s Today programme there was a danger of the terror threat being magnified “out of all proportion”.
“What you had in the 1930s was all sorts of popular fictions were spread about the Jewish community that they were responsible for all ills that were occurring to Germany.
“They were made into folk-devils, and I think there is a danger that the word Muslim in the UK is becoming synonymous with bad news.”
There are still more odious comparisons to the 1930s, which is obviously the Muslim organizations’ talking point of the day—wait for it to reach CAIR:
Britain must, he warns, beware of becoming like Nazi Germany.
“Every society has to be really careful so the situation doesn’t lead us to a time when people’s minds can be poisoned as they were in the 1930s. If your community is perceived in a very negative manner, and poll after poll says that we are alienated, then Muslims begin to feel very vulnerable. We are seen as creating problems, not as bringing anything and that is not good for any society.”
There is, in his view, no such thing as Islamic terrorism.
“Terrorists are terrorists, they may use religion but we shouldn’t say Muslim terrorists, it stigmatises the whole community. We never called the IRA Catholic terrorists.” Dr Bari thinks Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, made the extremists’ job easier by giving a bleak picture of the threat on the eve of the Queen’s Speech.
Let us put aside the nonsense that announcing there are Muslim terrorists in Britain will make the recruiting of Muslim terrorists easier. It’s yet another way the MCB manages to blame Britain for its own problems instead of owning up to the problem of Muslim terrorists living in Britain.
Here is my big problem with the use of the 1930s Germany imagery when talking about Muslim terrorists living in Britain: The propaganda of the 1930s was a lie. The lies were spread by the Nazi party to delegitimize and dehumanize the Jews of Germany and Europe. The Jews were scapegoated by a party that found a way to unite Germany on a cause that has ever united the world: Hatred of the Jews.
The Jews of Germany did absolutely nothing of what Hitler accused them. They were not out to destroy Germany. There was no secret plot to murder and plunder Germany and the rest of the world. The Jews were not criminals, not plotting against the government, not plotting to destroy Christianity, not plotting to take over the world.
On the other hand, MI5 has concrete evidence that Muslims in Britain are plotting terrorist attacks. Muslims in Britain—British citizens—have perpetrated terrorist attacks. They have murdered British citizens. They have murdered Israeli citizens. The reason that the MI5 warning that 2,000 Muslims are being watched for terrorist links is not comparable to the lies of the 1930s is because what the MI5 says is true.
The comparison is completely invalid. It is being evoked only to play the Muslim-as-victim card, something that the MCB does very well. The narrative of Muslim-as-victim is upheld. And the media play along. The angle of the story is the 1930s analogy. The angle of the story is that Muslims are being unfairly tarnished with accusations. Buried deep within the stories are the defense of the MI5 announcement:
Sir Paul Lever, former chairman of the joint intelligence committee, told Today that Jonathan Evans had a duty to warn the public.
“One can’t deny the facts, and the facts are that al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist terrorism – and I use the term Islamist, not Muslim or Islamic – is the biggest threat that our country faces today,” he said.
He added: “We mustn’t demonise the whole Muslim community. It is a very, very tiny minority who are involved. But though 2,000 people may be a tiny proportion, it is still, in absolute terms, an alarming threat.”
And it is Britain’s biggest threat. Trying to deny the threat by blaming Britain’s foreign policy—which both Bunglawala and Bari are doing—is smoke and mirrors. Perhaps the MCB should stop trying to deny that there is a problem, and instead, start dealing with it. Watch the video at the link I mentioned above. Watch Bunglawala bring in Judaism and Christianity at every opportunity, trying to say that religious Jews are just like Islamist Muslims, preaching hatred of the other. Watch him say the same about Christians.
And then find me a news story of a single Jew or Christian who has strapped a bomb around his chest, walked into a crowd of people, and blown himself up. The comparison is spurious. Jews and Christians are not advocating death and destruction, nor hatred of the other, in weekly sermons.
The 1930s analogy doesn’t fly with me. But I will make a prediction: It will fly with the British press. It will fly with the world media. Soon enough, we’re going to hear that the Muslims of the 21st century are just like the Jews of the 1930s.
Except that is a lie, and it’s easily proven so.
Greyhawk on how we won (yes, he uses the past tense) the war in Iraq:
How did we win this war? There are complex answers to that question, but there is also a simple one that is true and is the basis for all the complexities that spring from it: We won the war because United States Soldiers and Sailors and Airmen and Marines do not quit.
The reason the press is beginning to forget about Iraq: We’re winning. The narrative has turned there, as well.
Via Instapundit.
It’s now a week since my bat mitzvah crunch, and I’m blowing off synagogue tonight and relaxing. I worked all week, so the relaxing has to come about now. Especially since I had company until Monday morning.
The other big thing that was going on in my life was my exploration into homeowning. I’ve been looking at condos and townhouses in the area, and found one condo complex in particular that I absolutely love. So I went the pre-qualification route, and learned that I am prequalified by two banks (four, if you count Lending Tree) for the amount of the mortgage I’d need. The problem, however, is that I’m still paying down debt accrued from four years of under-and unemployment. (I wish I could say I had all kinds of neat things to show for it, but I don’t. I used the credit cards for things like paying the rent and the bills.) I don’t have an emergency fund, also due to the unemployment and underemployment. (REALLY longtime readers will remember that I started this blog on the heels of being laid off from my second programming job in six months when the tech bubble burst in 2001.)
I have been climbing steadily upward financially since the days when I was working three jobs, seven days a week. The past two years in particular have been good for me financially and jobwise. I now have a terrific job at Company in Northern VA, where I commute on Mondays and telecommute the rest of the week. Between this job, and the jobs I had the previous year, I have paid down over half my debt, and am steadily working my way towards solvency. I figure in about another eight months, I will be completely in the black, and able to start saving for that new home. Because I decided that I can’t buy a condo just yet. If I lost my job, or something happened requiring a large influx of cash, I’d be stuck. And at this stage of the game, I can’t afford bankruptcy. It takes seven years to recover financially from defaulting on a loan. I’d never own a home if something happened. Plus, I’m starting to like actually having money again.
The good news is, I feel really good about not buying a home this year. I just paid off one of the last of my credit card debts. I owe a bunch of money on two specific cards, and since I got really good at playing revolving balances between cards, my combined interest rates are about four and a half percent between the two cards.
So now I can start enjoying the fact that I’m earning a little extra money, and treat myself once in a while. I’m planning on buying that big-screen TV this month, as a birthday present to myself. I wanted the Samsung 42-inch DLP, but it’s not available any longer. I have to go up to the 50 inch. Bummer. Well, I’ll survive. Plus, I have at least $150 in Circuit City gift cards to spend via my rewards cards.
Any suggestions on speaker system to go with the TV? I want it to be good, but it doesn’t have to be great.
I am very much looking forward to sitting in The Chair That Swallows You Whole, watching Heroes on my brand-new big-screen HDTV. It won’t be as good as it would be in my own home, but that will come. I am undergoing a Meryl Renaissance. I am becoming the woman I used to be before I lost my job, with the state of mind I used to have, and with another six years of experience and wisdom.
And you know, for someone who’s turning fifty in less than a week, I don’t look half-bad, either. Maybe I’ll put up a bat mitzvah picture. I’ll have to get everyone to email them to me, of course. I was too busy enjoying myself to take any pictures.
Life is good right now.
Ehud Barak is giving Hamas and the Palestinians advance warning that the IDF is about to retake the Philadelphi Corridor.
Israel has informed PA authorities in Ramallah of its intention to send the IDF into the Gaza Strip in order to regain control of the Philadelphi Corridor and put an end to Hamas smuggling of weapons and cash through tunnels from the Egyptian side of the border, the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported Friday morning.
According to the report, Israel has told a number of Arab states that after the November 26 Annapolis conference it intends to embark on an extensive operation in the Strip.
Of course, rather than agree that something needs to be done to stop the rocketing of Israeli towns, Mahmoud Abbas is doing all he can to prevent Israel from, gee, preventing the rocketing of Israeli towns. Because Abbas’ aims are the same as Hamas—it is only their methods that are different.
Palestinian sources received explicite information stating that during the projected first stage of the operation, Israel is determined to gain control of Rafah and areas along the Egyptian border ranging as far as Khan Yunis, the paper said. The second stage will reportedly include an incursion into the central and northern Gaza Strip.
According to Al-Quds Al-Arabi’s sources, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who rejected out of hand Israel’s plan to recapture the Philadelphi Corridor, intends to send emissaries to regional countries in an effort to convey the sense of urgency regarding the danger of an Israeli incursion.
And here’s the laugh-line:
Abbas, the paper said, will state that an Israeli incursion would destroy the Gaza Strip and its infrastructure.
Really? Because it’s not like Gaza is already the place where Palestinians ripped out all of the greenhouses and everything useful that Israel left? Or where, instead of working to grow some sort of economy, Hamas has worked only to grow the number of weapons, bombs, bullets, and explosives smuggled into or created in Gaza. The infrastructure will be destroyed? Gee. Perhaps the Gazans should stop trying to murder Israelis. Then there’d be no reason for the IDF to come in.
As I said earlier—this is going to be a big one. There are going to be casualties on both sides. And there’s a new metaphor being used by Hamas. No more “opening the gates of Hell,” I suppose. Now we have this charming symbolism:
A top Hamas leader warned Israel on Friday that its soldiers would be “cut to pieces” if the army launched a much threatened widescale offensive on the Islamist-run Gaza Strip.
“The occupiers should know that if they intend to enter the Gaza Strip they will leave cut into pieces,” Mahmud Zahar told a Hamas-organised rally in Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip.
Actually, I’m thinking it’s the other way ’round. But we shall see.
Cue the ISM idiots in Rafah, trying to protect Hamas. Wait for it.
Hamas isn’t even trying to hide its intentions any more. Mahmoud al-Zahar, the former Prime Minister, said straight out that Hamas will take over the West Bank as soon as Israeli forces leave. Imagine then how many rockets will rain down on Israel, and where they will land. It won’t be the Negeve and Sderot. Rockets will be raining down on Jerusalem.
Hamas Islamists, who seized control of the Gaza Strip in June, would take over the West Bank if Israel pulled out of the territory, a senior Hamas leader said on Friday.
The comments by Mahmoud al-Zahar contrasted with remarks by Ismail Haniyeh, who serves as prime minister of a Hamas-led government dismissed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
[…] “Israel says the party in Ramallah (Fatah) serves Israel, and if Israel quits the West Bank, Hamas will take it over. And we say this is true,” Zahar said at a rally for Hamas supporters in Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza.
[…] “We say to those in the West Bank take a lesson from what happened in Gaza,” Zahar said, an indirect reference to the fierce violence that led to Hamas’s takeover of the coastal strip.
The Annapolis conference is going to recommend that Israel exit the West Bank and give the Palestinian Authority the control it had over it in the years before the second intifada. Hamas is telegraphing its intentions should the IDF leave. And still, the world will insist that Israel abandon the West Bank.
The problem is, this time the intifada is going to be armed with rockets, tons of explosives, modern weaponry, anti-tank missiles, RPGs, night-vision scopes, and the terrorists will be trained soldiers. There will be a war, not an uprising. Many will die, on both sides.
Leaving the West Bank will be a major mistake. Here’s hoping Olmert can’t force it.
