Like 1941 All Over Again!

Ah, what a year. The Nazi blitzkrieg seemed unstoppable, a willingly obedient France was turning their Jews over to the Germans, and the ovens smoldered, and burned...

If you liked those days, it looks like 2009 is gonna be a bonny of a year for you:

Jews around Europe are increasingly under attack since Israel decided two weeks ago to defend itself after years of rocket fire at its civilian population. There have been arson attempts on synagogues in Britain, Belgium and Germany. Police last week arrested Muslim protesters who wanted to enter the Jewish quarter in Antwerp. Several Danish schools with large Muslim student bodies say they won't enroll Jewish kids because they can't guarantee the children's safety. In France, a group of teenagers attacked a 14-year-old girl last week, calling her "dirty Jew" while kicking her.

At rallies in Germany and the Netherlands over the past two weeks, protesters shouted, "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas."

The rage against the Jews that is exploding in Europe has been carefully nurtured; it is not spontaneous sympathy for fellow Muslims in Gaza. How else to explain the silence when Muslims in other conflicts, from Darfur to Chechnya, are being killed?

The depth of anti-Semetic propaganda in Palestinian and other Muslim societies is one of the most underreported facts about the Middle East. It is this anti-Semitism that predisposes Muslims in Europe to attack Jews and fuels the Mideast conflict...

Europe, secretly ashamed not of the Holocaust nor of their role in it, but of their inability to finish the job, have outsourced it to the Muslims, and like cowardly poussaint nobility, cheer on the victories of their mercenaries. Unaware, of course, that these armies of the damned will turn on them once they have emerged victorious.

Is it any wonder that the European's spiritual forebearer is dancing a jig?

The New Feminism

I guess feminism used to be about creating awareness of the "second-class" status of women in society, and trying to change that. Before my time, I reckon. Now it's about hardcore liberal ideologogy, putting a McBortions on every corner in America, and destroying any female who dares not abide by their standards (see Palin, Sarah).

Like many movements that have been co-opted by its radical fringe, feminism has descended into a place where reason, logic, truth, and morality do not come into play; these trifles becoming merely disposable inanimates that block the path to the desired end result of total domination of the discourse (see American Politics/Democratic Party).

Example: Feministing decries the twin evils of...reproduction, and families:

My understanding of reproduction is that it is the basis of the institutions of marriage and family, and those two provide the moorings to the structure of gender and sexual oppression. Family is the social institution that ensures unpaid reproductive and domestic labour, and is concerned with initiating a new generation into the gendered and classed social set-up.

Every wife a slave, every son a slave holder. Cassy Fiano puts the snarling hatred of the new feminist into perspective:

Modern feminism is no longer about equality or letting women choose their own paths; rather, modern feminism is a hate group that looks at all men as potential rapists and abusers, sees a traditional nuclear family as dangerous, wants to make stay-at-home mothers a permanent thing of the past, and wants to force all women to make the lifestyle choices they dictate they should have.

There's no such thing as real choice in modern feminism -- what was once something noble has been perverted and distorted into something grotesque and Stalin-esque. There's only one correct way of living, and that's whatever way feminists say it is. This post, about ending all reproduction, is just another example. Even though most women feel called to motherhood and look at it as a positive thing and a blessing, feminists don't care. They know better than us uneducated yokels anyway.

Thanks, Cassy.

And if you're a Jersey girl who believes you can be a mom and influence the political process without betraying your "sisters" or the planet, take a walk over here.

The Barack Obama Administration: A Failure !

Hey, don't blame me, its the folks at the New York Times who are already throwing in the towel:

White House reporters for The New York Times predict that the market collapse will force President-elect Barack Obama to abandon for now many of his campaign promises. If his stimulus plan "doesn’t work out, he may very well be a one-term president,” said Jeff Zeleny, who covered Obama’s campaign. “It’s hard to imagine that he could be reelected if the economy’s in the exact same position four years from now.”

“A lot of the things he said on the campaign trail you can now dispense with,” said correspondent Peter Baker."

Good news followed by good news - if only he dispensed with "most of" the things ( as opposed to "a lot of") he promised on the campaign trail, then I would sleep better at night.

But maybe this will help:

"You’re not going to see universal health care, I don’t think, this year,” Baker said. “You’re not going to see a cap on carbon emissions, as he has promised, probably, this year.”

Maybe not ever? One can dream....funny, though, why do I get the feeling that these are the things that the NYT thinks will prevent Obama from winning a second term, when in fact the cautious realism that the Times bemoans are the very things that may actually help Obama get re-elected to a second term?

Now this - this is priceless:

"If Obama succeeds, it’s like Eisenhower after Truman,” Baker said, pointing out that Eisenhower perpetuated many of Truman’s anticommunist policies, winning over a public that had been resistant to his predecessor’s ideas.

So Bush is actually right about everything, but we must say he is wrong because he maintains membership in the socially incorrect political party? And therefore, all Barack has to do is maintain Bush policies - but with a friendlier face and better diction - and he is a guarenteed success?

The mind reels...but there may be less to all this than meets the eye. As Sarah Palin recently said about Katie Couric, " Katie, you're not the center of everybody's universe":

Assistant managing editor Rick Berke, who moderated the panel, noted that Obama had already departed from Bush’s precedent in one important respect: He hasn’t sat for a post-election interview with the Times.
“When the current president was elected, one of the first things he did was sit down with The New York Times and a battery of reporters,” Berke said. “This president has not sat down with our New York Times press corps in a very long time, as even Bush did.”

So is this the reason for the NYT's fit of pique, and subsequent declaration that his failure to strictly live up to liberal principles will lose him his job? Or are the just irked to see Obama "working the middle" ?

Me, I hope they're right, but for the wrong reasons...

Posting will be light this week as work continues to suck the very essence of my soul right out of me...Every now and then expect a random post to pop up, but I will be back full-time with a full-throttled vengenance before the inaguration of the Obamanation....

New Jersey: Voting With Their Feet !

How unliveable have liberals policies made the is the Garden State? The Asbury Park-Press reports:

The study, which tracked the number of moves United Van Lines, the nation's largest moving company, made into and out of each state, found that New Jersey had the third-highest percentage of out-migration in the nation, behind only Michigan and North Dakota. Of the more than 9,000 residential shipments United handled in New Jersey last year, 58.7 percent were outbound while only 41.3 percent were inbound.

Apparently, next to Jersey. the only worse places to live in America are Michigan - home of crime, bankruptcy, and sociatal collapse, and North Dakota - a frozen tundra, empty of opportunity, warmth, and women. The Park-Press lays the blame squarely where it belongs, and adds a depressing thought on what might be the only thing keeping the outflow from being a stampede:

Today's unaffordable taxes — likely to become even less affordable under the Democratic leadership in Trenton again this year — coupled with the sour employment picture aren't likely to alter the state's migration patterns. The only thing that might help check the outflow is the difficulty in selling one's home, which could force some people to defer plans to head to more affordable climes.

And thus the tax reciepts will continue to fall, in direct proportion to how much the rates are raised. What will Corzine and the toddlers in Trenton do, when their pet liberal projects cannot be funded? You got it - they'll raise them taxes some more! Or else they'll cut spending in imperative areas that will simply force others to collect the funds required for essential services:

[Corzine's] proposed cut of $90 million in combined aid to municipalities and public schools will surely mean yet another hike in local property taxes in a state that already is the nation's most heavily taxed.
And while Corzine proposes reducing Trenton's contributions to the state employees' pension fund by $115.6 million, it should be noted that he was the first governor since Christie Whitman, who had declared a "pension holiday," to mandate such contributions.

He's imposing a wage freeze on all non-union state workers, and asking the unions to reopen their contracts and forgo negotiated pay hikes. If they don't, he says, furloughs and layoffs will result.
Good luck with that, though: The unions have rejected Corzine's proposal, demanding that he raise the state income tax instead.

So even if state tax burdens do not get increased (a highly unlikely scenario, I grant), local municipalities will certainly need to raise theirs, in order to simply keep the schools open. And really, why do I think instead of seeing union layoffs, we'll see instead Jon Corzine struggling to explain why the state income tax must be rasied yet again?

This is gonna get way, way worse....

Richard Gere: Humanitarian !

Richard Gere received the prestigious Joel Siegel Humanitarian honor at the Critics Choice Awards, and the "Pretty Woman" star was certainly eager to express (even more) political opinions backstage.

And what types of views do humanitarians hold these days?

As for his thoughts on our next president and first lady...

"I think Michelle (Obama) is bright and engaged and real," Gere said. "It's astonishing; we actually elected two real people after eight years of aliens."

Mind you, Gere won’t be attending the upcoming inauguration due to a "fear of crowds".

Does our "humanitarian" have any sense of awareness of what Bush has done for the people of Africa, and how well he is perceived there? No, Gere the "humanitarian" disgrees with some of the views Mr. Bush (and apparently his wife) hold; therefore, they are "aliens" to him, and not fellow humans.

Wonder if by defining them thusly Gere can now be abusive towards the Bushes -they're not human, by his definition - and still hold onto his "humanitarian" title?

See, you start by giving Yasser Arafat the Nobel Prize, then suddenly every award, even the Joel Siegel Humanitarian Honor, starts getting defined down...

"The Jews Have Gone Crazy !"

I'll get to that in a minute...

Remember in the days and weeks after 9/11, how all we heard from the media and the talking heads was "it's not if it will happen again, but when"?

Then George W. Bush showed up, and went batshit-nuts in Afghanistan and Iraq, refusing to pull back even when we suffered (gasp!) military casualities and occasional battlefield losses!

And all of a sudden....no more attacks on American soil. No more attacks on American interests overseas - this, after eight years of bi-annual slaughters carried out by the Islamists. True, we lost many good soldiers, but at least they were armed and had a chance to fight back...and boy, did they ever.

So more recently we were told that Israel lost the 2006 war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, thus proving that war is never the answer. And yet...the Northern Israeli border has been awful quiet the last 2 1/2 years. Even now, when one would suspect that Hezbollah would want to support their murderous cousins in the South....nothing. Sure, a few rockets were fired into a retiree home last week (where's the outrage?), but Hezbollah couldn't wait to disassociate itself from that.

So why is the Israeli foray into Hamas looking more and more like a success? Because the vaunted Arab street is doing a big-time freakout...via Powerline:

Israel may have reached a deterrent moment in its war in Gaza against Iranian-backed Hamas. I spoke with a senior Arab diplomat last night. He told me that the Arab street is afraid that "the Jews have gone crazy."

Yes, it's true. He noted, "Israel has begun to restore its deterrence" in the Arab world. "Hamas miscalculated," he added. They had thought Israel would not attack, but would merely accede to tougher Hamas demands for an improved "Tahdiya," their version of a temporary calm.

It's also notable that Al Jazeera's reportage yesterday avoided interviewing ordinary Gazans. Arab sources in Gaza confided that the public anger is not directed at Israel any more than it is at Hamas.

Fatah officials in the West Bank are also demoralized. Nasser Juma'a, a Palestinian Legislative Council Member from Nablus told a well known British reporter yesterday that the "Hamas are insects" and noted that the Palestinians would likely not see a Palestinian state in his lifetime."

Hopefully, the UN, EU, and Barack Obama will stay the f*ck out of Israel's way, and let them finish the dirty job of wiping the most henious bunch of anti-Semetic fascists off the face of the earth. Let the Jews go crazy now, for in the long run, many more civilians - in both Gaza, Lebenon, and Israel - will live longer lives, and live them in peace....

Reported As Fact....

Isn't it interesting that every Palestinian civilian death count is treated as fact by the media, despite years of lying by so-called Palestinian "medics" on this very issue (remember the blood libel of Jenin? Hamas does...). The AP provides a nice case in point:

One Israeli airstrike killed two Hamas militants and another unidentified man, while another flattened a five-story building in northern Gaza, killing at least seven people, including an infant, Hamas security officials said. By midday, 19 Palestinians had been killed.

In all, Israeli aircraft struck more than 30 targets before dawn, and constant explosions continued after first light. Friday's deaths in Gaza pushed the Palestinian death toll to more than 760 in the two-week-old conflict, with at least half of them civilians, according to Gaza health officials.

And of course the UN - the international body most responsibel for legitimizing anti-Semitism (can you image? Hitler could only have dreamed of a world like this!) - is never questioned on their body counts either, despite being fully in bed with Hamas:

Details are emerging of other incidents in which civilians were killed. A U.N. agency said Israeli troops evacuated Palestinian civilians to a house in Gaza City on Jan. 4, then shelled the building 24 hours later, killing 30 people.
The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report was based on eyewitness testimony. It added details to an incident previously reported by The Associated Press and an Israeli human rights group.

The U.N. agency said 110 people were in the house. The 30 people reported killed is a far higher figure than in other accounts.

It seems as if even the AP is a little skeptical of the UN here; perhaps they should expand their doubt to their legion of Palestinian medics.

And perhaps CNN should be a bit more wary of spreading Palestinian propaganda so openly. After highlighting a story/video that showed a Palestinian "paramedic" desperately trying to revive a dead child, they abruptly pulled the video when it was pointed out that they were being scammed:

I’m no military expert, but I am a doctor, and this video is bullsh-t. The chest compressions that were being performed at the beginning of this video were absolutely, positively fake. The large man in the white coat was NOT performing CPR on that child.

But they didn't pull the story. Just left the anti-semetic libel up on the site, and pulled the evidence that it was false. Gotta prop up Hamas somehow, you know?

Somewhere, Hitler dances a jig....

Best Blog Post Ever...

...is this one, from April of 2004, over at BlackFive, entitled Taking Chance Home. I've kept it bookmarked since the first day I read it, all those years ago, and still read it a few times a year when, you know, I have something in my eye that needs to be washed out.

If you aren't familiar with it, please read it. It is a tale of death and redemption, and of the pure and unadulterated goodness of America. Of course, a tale that would never be told by the mainstream media.

Except now, kind of. HBO has taken BlackFive's post and made it into a movie entitled "Taking Chance". Starring Kevin Bacon, it airs February 21st at 8pm. Here's the trailer:




Seems like they've included some of the smaller details of the story which made it all the more personal, painful, and real.

Let's hope HBO did it justice. It was warmly recieved at Sundance (which, granted, may not always be an endorsement), and reviewed thusly by Sundance programer Geoffrey Gilmore :

Taking Chance is, without question, one of the most powerful and vital films ever made about Iraq—or, for that matter, the military—and yet its potency comes not from melodramatic or political statements but simply from its reality and execution.

See what can happen when you try to show the military in an honest light? Good for HBO...

Die Hamas Die !!

You wanna know why?

Take a look at the quick clip below, see a brave member of Hamas drag a young child, kicking and screaming, across the street and into the line of fire to use as cover from an Israeli attack.

Be prepared for 17 seconds of sheer human evil...via Gates of Vienna:



Raymond over at Jihad Watch offers us the following Islamic excuse for the ugliness of the Muslim fighter:

Regarding sympathy and deceit, al-Qaeda, while discussing the important role of deception in the jihad, quote the classical exegete Ibn Hajar, who wrote: "Revealing one thing while secretly planning another is the essence of deception; moreover, the hadith incites [Muslims] to take great caution in war, while [publicly] lamenting and mourning in order to dupe the infidels" (from The Al Qaeda Reader, 142).

We would be wise to pay heed to the words of Benjamin Netanyahu today:

We fight to defend ourselves, but in so doing we are also fighting a fanatical ideology that seeks to reverse the course of history and throw the civilized world back into a new dark age. The struggle between militant Islam and modernity — whether fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, India or Gaza — will decide our common future. It is a battle we cannot afford to lose.

All this, as the world aligns itself behind Hamas, and refuses to let Israel do the dirty work that Western democracies have not the stomach for...

It's Such A Small Thing...

...yet it says volumes about Obama, the Democrats, the media, and the liberal intelligentsia. I'm talking about Barack Obama's nomination of CNN’s Sanjay Gupta for the position of Surgeon General. The guys is a neurosurgeon - cool enough, he also performed emergency brain surgery multiple times while serving as an embedded reporter in Iraq - but he is also a correspondent for CNN and CBS.

Sigh...and yet another member of the media joins the Democratic administration...isn't there any sense of discomfort within the profession that a number of high-profile television and magazine personalities/executives have left their allegedly neutral positions to work for one particular political party? Yeah, I know - unlikely. But how can we trust them next time, knowing that most of the media may simply be shilling for a job in the next administration?

And really - is Sanjay Gupta the best Obama can do for this country? Or is Obama as clueless about this cabinet post as he is about so many others (say, head of intelligence!), so he just picked the guy he saw the most on TV, thinking he would be "cool"? Shoot, if the Democrats are simply the celebrity party (Obama, Kennedy, Franken, Gupta) why not take one of the doctors from Scrubs? At least we'd get a few laughs - and, after all, laughter is the best medicine....

But who best to sum up this whole intellectual quagmire than the man who is a walking intellectual quagmire - Mr. Paul Krugman of the New York Times! His beef against Gupta is that he dared come out against the psuedoscience of the Film-maker of the Democratic Court, Mr. Michael Moore:

I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”...

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. [wrong again, Krugman, but that'll be the subject of a different post - ed.]

And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

Make sense to you? Yeah, me neither. But that's what comes out of the oven when government, politics, celebrity, and activist journalism get thrown into the pot together...

And The Scales Fell From His Eyes....

Richard Cohen - a self-loathing liberal Jew who usually can't wait to prove his progressive bona fides by blaming Israel every time a sparrow falls from a tree - sees though his ideological dogma in today's Washington Post, and discovers some truths:

It took no genius to see the imminence of war. It takes real stupidity to blame it on Israel...

On some days, dozens of rockets fell on Sderot...I get the impression that Israel is expected to put up with this. The implied message from demonstrators and some opinion columnists is that this is the price Israel is supposed to pay for being, I suppose, Israel. I am informed by a Palestinian journalist in a Post op-ed that Israel is trying to stop "amateur rockets from nagging the residents of some of its southern cities." In Sderot, I saw homes nagged to smithereens.

Anyone could have seen this war coming. The diplomats and demonstrators who are now so engaged in the problem and the process were nowhere to be found when rockets began raining down on southern Israel.

He's right, although he never actually blames Hamas - or discusses Hamas' purely evil intentions - he simply pleads with us not to blame Israel.

Fair enough. I'll take what friends I can in this lonely bunker, a single sharpshooter against the massive armies of Islamofacism, supported by dictators and democracies alike. And I'll allow Cohen to make one more point, as he turns convention liberal wisdom on its head and points out how, in fact, harsh military retaliation can in fact keep the peace:

Conventional wisdom says that when Israel went into Lebanon in 2006, it lost that war. Hezbollah stood up to the mighty Israeli army; Israel could not muzzle Hezbollah's rockets. That may not be the way Hezbollah sees things, however. After the war, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said he had miscalculated. He was not prepared for the fury of the Israeli attack. He apologized. Now, Hezbollah takes no role in the current war. It will be back, but it still has wounds to lick.

They may be back. A decisive Israeli military victory in Gaza would go a long way towards keeping the dogs of Hezbollah leashed tightly, lest they feel the wrath of the war-weary people of Lebanon...

A Sense of Proportion

"If you're in your apartment, and some emotionally disturbed person is banging on your door, screaming, 'I am going to come through this door and kill you,' do you want us to respond with one police officer, which is proportional, or with all the resources at our command? There is no such thing as a proportional response to terrorism."

- Mayor Bloomberg, after being asked whether Israel is responding
disproportionately to Hamas rocket attacks

From the editorial pages of today's New York Post...

Kristallnacht 2009

But this one's even better than Germany's 1938 killfest- it's not just limited to one country, the fun is world wide!

First, we go to Antwerp, where rioting - instigated by the AEL (Arab European Leauge) - took aim at Jewish neighborhoods:


Many Jews in Antwerp did not go on the street Wednesday after the demonstration from the AEL against the war violence got out of hand.

Gates of Vienna has more:

In recent days the Jewish community in Antwerp received a dozen death threats from Islamists...

The Jewish community preferred to keep the death threats quiet. After it became known today that strangers tried to set fire to a Jewish home where 12 children live, the Antwerp Jews found it time to go public with the news...
In the comments on the Internet the anonymous writer says he will not hesitate to commit a suicide attack. “You are no longer secure anywhere. I know where to find you guys. A Child for a Child”....

Hmmm...his rage must be due to all that "Islamophobia" I keep hearing about (but never quite see). Anti-semitism is so 1970, apparently....

More attacks on children - boy, are those Muslims brave! - in Yemen:

The children of Yemeni Jews in Raida district of Amran province were assaulted on Sunday by Yemeni Muslim students due to the Israeli attacks on Gaza. Some Jewish children were injured, one seriously, when Muslim students threw stones at them in “solidarity with the Palestinian kids in Gaza”. Zaher Kafra, Jewish, was seriously wounded and immediately taken to the Raida Hospital for treatment.

This incident took place one day after the authorities announced that preparations for relocating the Jewish Community in Amran to live in the capital Sana’a following of threats members of the community have recently received.

Hmmmm..."relocating the Jews for their own safety"....now where have I heard that before?

OK, OK, so I am not-so-sublimely bringing Hitler and the Nazis into the picture. And maybe that's unfair - to Hitler. 'Cause Hamas is way, way worse. Ron Rosenbaum, the author of "Explaining Hitler", tells us why:

The Hamas founding covenant explicitly calls for the extermination of all Jews. Hitler never made total extermination an official plank of the the Nazi party platform.

Hitler made efforts to conceal the purpose of the death camps and distanced himself from them, avoided written as opposed to oral orders for the Final Solution. Hamas makes no effort to conceal the fact that it wants to kill Jewish civilians, not just combatants, but women and children–all Jews (it’s in the charter, remember)—because Hamas feels this will make them more popular.

Hamas calls for a system of law in which women are mutilated and murdered (sometimes beheaded) if they dare to transgress their inferior status under sharia law. Hitler consigned women to a subordinate “breeder” role for the most part but did not mandate their mutilation and murder as women if they sought an independent existence. Unless of course they were Jews.

The people of Germany supported Hitler, yet many still claim the Germans didn’t really know what he was doing to the Jews, gays, gypsies or his plans for other ethnic minorities. The people of Gaza voted Hamas in by a larger percentage than Hitler ever got. They knew that the Hamas charter called for genocide and supported Hamas attempts to kill as many Jews as they could.

There's more, much more, at the link. As the Jews burn in 2009's version of a global Kristallnacht, and the liberals parade in support of Hamas, will people really be able to claim in the future - after the innocent dead are buried - that they did not know what the Muslims really had in mind for the Jews, and for the West?

The "German excuse" carries very little weight as it is. The UN's, the EU's and the Left's excuse will carry even less....

The Gaza Conflict: A Few Quick Truths

Ralph Peters' column is a bit of a tough read, only because the truths he points out are so ugly, they are almost painful to see on paper.

If it finds its back against the wall, Hamas may pretend to accept a truce to save itself, but it will never accept real peace with Israel. Hamas exists to kill Jews. Peace would erase its purpose...

But I think most of the world knows this. And that is why they support Hamas in this battle, in the hope they will eliminate the "Jewish problem" in the Middle East. No surprise to see French President Sarkozy leading the charge to save Hamas, either.

There's going to be ugly fighting ahead, as the terrorists set layers of ambushes while using Palestinian civilians as human shields...And let's be absolutely clear: Except for dead Jews, there's nothing Hamas leaders like better than dead Palestinian women and children, since the global media's appetite for dead kids verges on necrophilia.

Nasty vision, but this is the way it will go down. Hamas will hide behind innocents, a few of them will get shot up, and Hamas will parade their bodies before the international media, who will jostle and shove for close-ups, and then accuse Israel of acts of barbarism. And it makes sense, in a sick kind of way - why would the media turn on their bread-and-butter (Hamas), who provides them with such good phto-ops, and allows them to write from a predictated storyline?

Read it all - Peters provides an excellent military analysis as he explores the strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli strategy, and he has plenty of other double-downer commentary, in case you should feel momentarily optomistic about the state of the world in which we live....

BBC: "Root, Root Root for the Hamas Team...

...if they don't win it's a shame..."

The BBC dares Israel to enter Gaza, and offers all the same dire predictions of the doom that was supposed to undo American soldiers fighting in Iraq, and in Afghanistan:

Israel's move to ground operations in the Gaza Strip gives Palestinian militants their first chance to trade blows on a more or less equal footing with the Israeli army in the current conflict.

... if the conflict transfers to the narrow alleyways of Jabaliya camp, or any of Gaza's teeming urban areas, it will be a different story.

....Hamas has had months to prepare for bitter urban warfare which will give its fighters a chance to inflict casualties on the Israeli military.

So it was an unsurprisingly bellicose Khaled Meshal, Hamas's Damascus-based leader-in-exile, who spoke in an Arabic TV interview before ground operations began on Saturday night..."Soldiers of the enemy... you must know that a black destiny is waiting for you, and you will either be killed, injured or imprisoned," he told al-Jazeera television.

...there is no shortage of weapons in Gaza or people who might want to pick up a gun against Israelis forces.
Standards of training and discipline for the Brigades have been raised recently, and it is believed to have fairly sophisticated communications systems...

One can almost see our fair-haired BBC reporter (Martin Asser) as he penned this report with eyes misting over, wishing he had the courage to take on the horrible, horrible Jews just as his heroes in Hamas are about to. No, he lacks the courage to pick up a gun and fight (best left to others, he knows) but he can do one thing for his heroes in the black masks whom deliberately target women and children: He can write propaganda for them.

And so he has, puffing up his gang of weapons-toting thugs as some type of revolutionary army, trained at the feet of the best terror masters the world has to offer, ready, with dark intent, to slay their enemy - in this case soldiers of a constitutional democracy - and make the streets run red with their blood. Mr. Asser writes not to inform, but in an attempt to scare the Israeli army away from Gaza, so that his beloved militants can rain down rockets upon civilian targets with impunity.

He's a failure, of course. He probably is confusing the Israeli army with the British Navy, who was disgraced by the behavior of 15 sailors captured by Iranian forces back in 2007. Furthermore, his rhetoric about Palestinians dying to "pick up a gun against Israelis forces" goes against decades of historical footage of Arabs meekly raising a white flag and cowering as soon as a bullet is fired. It's wishful thinking on his part.

But again, Mr. Assar, if you feel so strongly that Hamas is going to be the winning team, and are so sure that women and children will pick up weapons and fight hand to hand against a Western army in the streets - well, go ahead and join them.

You'll die a martyr- not to Allah's cause (unless you have already converted?), but a martyr to media blindness. Your contemporaries will write well of your courage (wishing they had the same), and you'll be eulogized heroically by your equally banal replacement.

What say you, valient BBC reporter? Care to put on the black mask, and take your chances?

Looks Like The Flying Shoe is on the Other Foot

So they said if we would only elect Barack Obama, the world would love us the way we love it (hey, didn't Barack Obama himself say that?)...

Well, anyway, the first and most sacred cow of the Left - "it's all Bush's fault !" (screeched, or shrieked) - is already on the floor of the slaughterhouse.

That slaughterhouse being the Middle East, the one place where we were assured the name "Hussein" (may it never be spoken) would immediately begin the return of our long-lost credibility with the Muslim world.

Poor bastard isn't even in office yet:

And with the cigarette, to boot. Somebody ought to tell our sensitive new prez-elect that smoking in a sin in some parts....

Powerline:

Many liberals enjoyed the disgusting attacks on President Bush by anti-American critics around the world. It will be interesting to see how they react when Obama is the target.

With rightous indignation, no doubt...

Most Inane Political Statement on the Israel/Gaza War

...goes to British Foreign Minister David Miliband, releasing the following statement after the Czech presidency of the European Union said the influx of Israeli ground troops in Gaza was "defensive, not offensive."

God forbid a statement of moral certainty go unanswered. Miliband is up to the challenge, with a textbook prototype in EU-speak:

"Unfolding events show the urgent need for the immediate cease-fire that we have called for. The escalation of the conflict will cause alarm and dismay," he said in a statement.

What "unfolding events" ? An Israeli victory? Why is using ground troops an escalation, when it will likely cost more Israeli lives than scattershot bombing would?

And "cause alarm and dismay"? WTF?? With who? Hamas, who sees their defeat at hand? Hezbollah, who sees their future? Iran and Syria, who sees their patrons getting a well-deserved ass-kicking? Or with the Palestinian "civilians", whose lives are so much more precious than those of the Jews? Well, they might feel a lot of things, but "alarm" is not one of them at this point...

And they call us the simpletons...!

Gaza: Civilian Casualty Watch !

And let's drop a bomb on that old saw about "the first causalty of war" being truth, when it really is the media that bites it first...The AP reports:

The new deaths brought the death toll in the Gaza Strip to more than 500 since Dec. 27. Palestinian and U.N. officials say at least 100 civilians are among the dead.

The only problem is that the AP, UN and Palestinian officials have been using the "at least 100" figure for quite a while; note this 400 dead/100 civilians report from a few days back. What, have the Israelis killed over 100 consecutive enemy combatants in a row without offing a single civilian? Most humane army ever, that's what I'd say....

But not the French, who report an unsubstantiated and unrepeated claim by the Palestinians that:

At least 75 of those killed have been children, according to emergency services inside Gaza.

They also refer to Hamas fighters as mere "Palestinians" in this article as well, so perhaps there is nothing but civilian casualties, as far as the French are concerned. Then again, as a bulk of brave Hamas' front-line soldiers are often teenagers, maybe the report is accurate.

And now one begins to wonder...how many of the dead "civilian" bodies being turned up by the UN were actually killed by Hamas thenselves? The J-Post reports:

Fatah officials in Ramallah told The Jerusalem Post that Hamas militiamen had been assaulting many Fatah activists since the beginning of the operation last Saturday. They said at least 75 activists were shot in the legs while others had their hands broken.

"Hamas is very nervous, because they feel that their end is nearing," a senior Fatah official said. "They have been waging a brutal campaign against Fatah members in the Gaza Strip."

Meanwhile, sources close to Hamas revealed over the weekend that the movement had "executed" more than 35 Palestinians who were suspected of collaborating with Israel and were being held in various Hamas security installations.

The sources quoted Hamas officials as saying that the decision to kill the suspected collaborators was taken out of fear that Israel might try to rescue them during a ground offensive.

Nothing here is surprising - not Hamas' brutal savagry towards their fellow Palestinians, nor the media's unwillingness to tell this story, lest it interrupt their by-rote storyline.
But do the math - assuming the AP/UN/Pali civilian body count is high by at least 30% (it is usually closer to 50%), and "at least" 35 Palestinians were killed by intertribal warefare, then we see that fully half of the noncombat deaths in Gaza were by Hamas' own hand.

Again, the figures bespeak to an amazingly accurate targeting regimen by the Israelis...Gaza civilians are lucky that the Israel does not go with the simple-but-effective "Hamas-style" of missile attack, that is to say, firing rockets willy-nilly into strictly civilian targets. I think the Palestinians would thank the Israelis if they could, but since Hamas has either killed them or busted up their hands and legs...

"Especially Nauseating"

That's how Victor Davis Hanson describes the reaction and coverage of the Arab-Israeli war du jour:

There is something especially nauseating about the latest Middle East war — scenes of worldwide Islamic protests with photos of Jews as apes, protesters (in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida of all places!) screaming about nuking Israel and putting Jews in ovens, parades of children dressed up with suicide vests and fake rockets, near constant anti-Semitic vicious sloganeering, Gaza mosques stuffed with rockets to be used against civilians — all to be collated with creepy Hamas rhetoric about the annihilation of Israel. This is the world in which we now live.

Almost no other issue in recent memory has illustrated the moral bankruptcy of much of the international community...

And the moral bankruptcy of the media - via Powerline we get a photo and a caption:

"Israeli right-wing activists take part in a demonstration in Tel Aviv supporting Israel's military operation in Gaza."

Think of the morality behind that caption - Israelis, begging Hamas to stop using human shields are simply right-wing nuts, and protestors demanding the destruction of Israel are...protestors. Powerline has a list,click the link if you have the stomach for it....

And for more "especially nauseating" tidbits, check out some of the anti-Semetic attacks taking place right here in the United States.

Remember, these "protestors", as Reuters would call them, don't hate Jews - including the Hamas supporters in Florida who chanted "back to the ovens!" at Jewish counter-protestors - they're just anti-Zionist, that's all.

Riiiiight...nauseating, indeed.