A mysterious blogger who set off an uproar in the Arab world by claiming he was God and hurling insults at the Prophet Muhammad is now behind bars — caught in a sting that used Facebook to track him down.

The case of the unlikely apostate, a shy barber from this backwater West Bank town, is highlighting the limits of tolerance in the Western-backed Palestinian Authority — and illustrating a new trend by authorities in the Arab world to mine social media for evidence.

Residents of Qalqiliya say they had no idea that Walid Husayin — the 26-year-old son of a Muslim scholar — was leading a double life

Known as a quiet man who prayed with his family each Friday and spent his evenings working in his father’s barbershop, Husayin was secretly posting anti-religion rants on the Internet during his free time.

Now, he faces a potential life prison sentence on heresy charges for “insulting the divine essence.” Many in this conservative Muslim town say he should be killed for renouncing Islam, and even family members say he should remain behind bars for life.

“He should be burned to death,” said Abdul-Latif Dahoud, a 35-year-old Qalqiliya resident. The execution should take place in public “to be an example to others,” he added.

At a time when the United Nations is trying to pass a resolution that would make blasphemy illegal, it’s important that we see cases like these as cautionary tales of what we can expect when we allow political correctness to trump free speech. There is no free speech in the supposedly secular, liberal Palestinian Authority. None whatsoever. There is no free speech in Iran, or in Saudi Arabia, or in Egypt, or in Pakistan, or in most of the countries sponsoring the resolution. And while the supposedly pro-freedom left marches and protests against the supposedly imperialist Israel and in support of the poor, suffering Palestinians, it can never be pointed out often enough just where the free speech limits exist in that part of the world.

Nor is it only in the Arab world where these laws exist. Ireland passed anti-blasphemy laws last year. Laws against blasphemy or religious defamation exist, to some varying degree, in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Greece, in Finland… even Canada’s hate speech laws allow for a lot of grey areas and potential abuse depending on which way the political wind blows.

These types of “anti-blasphemy” resolutions and laws are just tools wielded by extremists to silence any voices of freedom or dissent. Speech – whether or not it’s offensive – should be protected, and the right to satirize, insult, offend or simply denounce religion is a right that we need to protect, for all our sakes. And that, in a nutshell, is the basis for my position on freedom of speech.

Palestinians are indeed victims of mistreatment. But you won’t hear much about what they endure, unless someone can pin the blame directly on Israel. Conditions in Gaza, for example, have made for a tough existence there. But human-rights activists have turned a blind eye to the systematic assault on individual freedom that has beset the population ever since the Islamic militant movement Hamas took over in 2005.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Lisa Goldman).

I mention these examples because I think the world needs another ridiculous rule to solve some big problems. And it’s no fair saying my new rule is ridiculous because that’s exactly the point. The new rule would be this: Any land controlled by a country for 50 years straight is legitimately theirs. It’s like a statute of limitations for armed resistance.

Is it too soon to suggest that Dilbert be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize?

“There is widespread support for Fatah,” Dr. Jamil Rabah, director of Near East Consulting in the PA, told The Media Line. “They support the Fatah political process and don’t think Hamas is on the right path politically.” 

[ . . . ]

“It doesn’t surprise me that the sentiments of the people are in this direction,” Abdallah Abdallah, chairman of the Palestinian Legislative Council’s Political Committee, told The Media Line. “Over a year has passed since the Gaza war and still people are living in the streets. People want those responsible for this to go and I think the sentiments of the people after three or more years of this is that it’s about time that those who are not capable of running the affairs of the people – go.”

Hamas swept to power in Gaza first by exploiting people’s frustration with the corruption of the Fatah administration, and then through a violent show of force. Popular support for suicide bombings and attacks on Israeli civilians was high, and Hamas was able to claim to the world (though maybe not with an altogether straight face) that it was a “legitimate” political party. Now, after promising to “crush” Israel and succeeding in doing little more than crushing Gaza, it seems that the Hamas option has lost its shiny lustre to a lot of disillusioned Palestinians.

But it would be a mistake to take this polling data at face value. People vote out of ideology, sure, but also out of self-interest. And in the Palestinian territories, where hatred is a powerful weapon that can be stirred up almost at will to redirect people’s frustration, these things can shift quickly. There will be those who will back the strongest horse, those who go looking for the options that are even more extremist than Hamas, and those who will get disgusted with voting altogether in a place where democracy doesn’t exactly have deep roots.

We’ve seen this before. Support for a political approach rises among Palestinians when there appears to be no threat of any progress actually being made. The minute this threat arises – whether at Camp David in 2000, or after Oslo or Wye – the people balk and something triggers another wave of violence. And if it’s not Hamas out in front, then support will go towards whoever is shouting the loudest, shooting the most, and inspiring the most fear.

And what the poll won’t tell you is that the bigger picture in the Middle East is also a factor – maybe the factor. As Iran battles Saudi Arabia for regional dominance, Hamas is engaged in something of a proxy war against Iran-sponsored Hezbollah, jockeying for power using the gruesome metric of dead Israeli civilians as credentials.

But, for the moment at least, Hamas’s popular support is way down. And if the Palestinians actually had real elections, this might actually have implications.

The U.N. nuclear agency on Thursday expressed concern for the first time that Iran may currently be working on ways to turn enriched uranium into a nuclear warhead, instead of having stopped several years ago.

Its report appears to contradict an assessment by Washington that Tehran suspended such activities in 2003. It appears to jibe with the concerns of several U.S. allies that Iran may never have suspended such work.

Really now? What tipped them off? Ahmadinejad has been playing nuclear chicken with the United Nations for years. What exactly caused the U.N. to wake up today and tentatively acknowledge blazingly obvious reality, instead of continuing to close its eyes as it has been all along? Why now?

That’s the big question, after all. For the United Nations to even make such a statement, there has to have been a sea change somewhere else behind the scenes that triggered it. If China or Russia is prepared to put more pressure on Iran, this could be indicative of a change in the game, even if the U.N.’s statements are, in and of themselves, essentially worthless. The world will be watching closely, that’s for certain.

A nuclear physics professor who publicly backed Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi in the disputed June presidential election was killed Tuesday when a remote-controlled bomb rigged to a motorcycle blew up outside his home.

State media identified the victim as Masoud Ali Mohammadi, 50, a professor at Tehran University, which has been at the center of recent protests by student opposition supporters. Before the election, pro-reform Web sites published Ali Mohammadi’s name among a list of 240 Tehran University teachers who supported Mousavi.

And of course, despite the public call for the assassination of opposition voices by the Iranian leadership, three guesses who they’re blaming for this one. Don’t need three? Got it in one? Yeah, I thought so:

The government blamed the rare assassination on an armed Iranian opposition group that it said operated under the direction of Israel and the U.S.

Cause, like, sure, that makes sense. Then again, when has logic ever been a factor in cases like these?

Montazeri’s death pushed Iranian authorities into a difficult spot. They were obliged to pay respects to one of the patriarchs of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the one-time heir apparent to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

But officials also worried that Montazeri’s memorials could become new rallying points for opposition demonstrations. The ayatollah broke with Iran’s clerical leadership and became a vehement critic, denouncing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and calling the postelection crackdown the work of a dictatorship.

Mourners shouted “Death to the Dictator” and other slogans in displays of anger against Iran’s ruling establishment during the procession in Qom, a city of shrines and clerical seminaries about 60 miles (100 kilometers) south of Tehran, witnesses said.

The Iranian election and subsequent protests were named the top Twitter news event of 2009, with #iranelection the top trending news hashtag.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog’s board censured Iran on Friday, with 25 nations backing a resolution demanding that Tehran immediately freeze construction of its newly revealed nuclear facility and heed Security Council resolutions to stop uranium enrichment.

The trouble is, there’s no backup to the “or else”. And Iran knows it, too:

Iran remained defiant, with its chief representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency declaring that his country would resist “pressure, resolutions, sanction(s) and threat of military attack.”

Delegate Ali Asghar Soltanieh of Iran shrugged off the vote.

“Neither resolutions of the board of governors nor those of the United Nations Security Council … neither sanctions nor the threat of military attacks can interrupt peaceful nuclear activities in Iran, even a second,” he told the closed-door meeting, in remarks made available to reporters.

Iran can taunt the world and continue to develop nuclear weapons with impunity, in flat defiance of the Security Council or anyone else, because it knows full well that the UN can’t and won’t back up its threats with anything concrete. There’s no action that they can take. They can’t go to war or invade Iran. They can’t attack its nuclear facilities. They can’t even impose sanctions, which would risk alienating the strengthening resistence movement within Iran.

By the time anyone figures out a course of action on Iran, it will likely be too late. If it isn’t already.

Obama added: “Our expectation is that over the next several weeks, we will be developing a package of potential steps that we could take that will indicate our seriousness to Iran. . . . I continue to hold out the prospect that they may decide to walk through this door. I hope they do. But what I am pleased about is the extraordinary international unity that we have seen.”

Well, that’s nice. Even if it’s nowhere near accurate.

Better hope that umbrella is big enough to protect you from the ensuing shitstorm, Hillary.

“How long will Arab blood continue to be spilled, only to hear those who admit to miscalculating the scope and scale of Israel’s response?” Mubarak asked in a speech marking Egypt’s national day to honor its police force.

Mubarak’s comment came in reference to remarks reportedly made by Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal, who admitted at the end of the three-week Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip that he did not anticipate the scope of Israel’s operation. Similar sentiments were expressed by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah at the end of the Second Lebanon War between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.

Mubarak went on to say that resistance movements must take responsibility over the welfare of their people. “The resistance must take into account victories and losses. It is responsible for the people, who in turn should settle the score [with the resistance] over the gains it has achieved, but also the sacrifices, the pain and the destruction it has caused,” he said.

The split in the Middle East is heating up, with the rival Palestinian factions serving as proxies, as usual:

The Egyptian president also hinted that Hamas and other militant Palestinian factions are serving the Iranian agenda in the region, especially since the fighting in Gaza ended. “They are trying to take advantage of Israeli aggression to force a new reality on the current Palestinian and Arab situation. A new reality that will alter the equation and reorganize the balance in favor of known regional powers and will serve their agenda,” Mubarak said. His comment came in response to Meshal’s recent calls for the establishment of an alternative Palestinian body, to rival Fatah in representing the Palestinian people.

It’s not much of a secret that there’s no love lost between Hamas and Egypt, which supports Fatah in the factional struggle. Mubarak is appealing to the EU and the international community to try and maintain the regional balance of power. But analysts speculate this could be costly for him at home, where the extremist Muslim Brotherhood (from which Hamas is an offshoot) could make political gains in Egypt at Mubarak’s expense. The peace between Israel and Egypt has always been chilly and fragile, and it’s looking shakier than ever.

As for Israel? As long as Palestinian factions gain popular support by being perceived as the toughest against Israel, Israeli citizens will continue to pay the price for this power struggle.

“The leaders of Iran cannot give their children uranium for breakfast,” Peres said, adding that the world financial crisis would hamper Iran’s progress toward nuclear capability. “As the price of oil declines, Iran doesn’t have as much money to invest in uranium, missiles and terrorism,” he said.

Erm. Not sure about the logic of that one, Shimon. Worsening economic conditions usually breeds more hatred and a need for scapegoating, just as peace usually requires prosperity to achieve. But hey, way to keep up that optimism.

Every joke I could make here would be just too easy, so I’ll let it speak for itself.

The rubber-stamp legislature is likely to consolidate the rule of President Bashar Assad, who is expected to seek its nomination to run for a second seven-year term in July. There had been no doubt about the outcome, because the constitution guarantees the Baath Party and its allies a two-thirds majority in the parliament.

[ . . . ]

Interior Minister Bassam Abdel-Majid said the National Progressive Front, a grouping of 10 political parties led by Assad’s Baath Party, won 172 seats in the 250-member parliament in the tightly controlled elections on Sunday and Monday, an increase of five seats.

Abdel-Majid said the remaining 78 seats went to independents, who have to be approved by the government under Syrian law, and rarely challenge the administration.

Yes, we can clearly see how an election in which the ruling party is guaranteed to win, independents are hand-picked by the ruling party, and dissidents are barred from running or imprisoned, is free, democratic, transparent, and fair. That’s the kind of logic that apparently only applies in Syria… or maybe in Nancy Pelosi’s mind.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose new sanctions on Iran for its nuclear ambitions by targeting Tehran’s arms exports, state-owned bank and elite Revolutionary Guards.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki immediately rejected the council’s demand to suspend uranium enrichment, which can be used for making bombs and to general electricity. He maintained Iran’s program was for peaceful purposes.

It’s almost like watching paint dry, seeing the predictable moves play out. This is a game the U.N. has no desire to play, and Ahmadinejad knows it full well. He’s already concluded that there is nothing the world can do to stop him from going nuclear, and that by pressing the U.N.’s buttons like this, he’s only exposing its weaknesses further.

And with the United States tied up in Iraq, Israel facing an existential threat if it attempts to thwart Iran, and the rest of the world casually indifferent, the outcome of this game has been determined months ago. And even the best-case endgame scenario here is pretty damn frightening.

Eurovision Song Contest organizers said Thursday they might ban this year’s Israeli entry, “Push the Button,” because they say it has an inappropriate political message.

The song, to be performed at the contest in Helsinki in May, overwhelmingly won Israel’s competition Wednesday. It’s sung in English, French and Hebrew by the group Teapacks and seemingly refers indirectly to Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its hard-line leader, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“It’s absolutely clear that this kind of message is not appropriate for the competition,” said Kjell Ekholm, an organizer of the contest. “We’ll have all the delegation leaders here in Helsinki next week, and I’m sure we’ll talk about this case within the EBU (European Broadcasting Union) group.”

The song warns about the dangers of nuclear war, but in an interview with the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot, band members denied that the song is about Iran, calling that “absurd.”

The lyrics of the song refer to “demonic” and “crazy rulers,” and say that “he’s gonna blow us up to … kingdom come.”

Ahmadinejad’s recent anti-Jewish statements have added to fears in Israel that Iran’s nuclear program is intended to produce weapons that could be used against that country.

And apparently the contest organizers support Iran’s ambitions to wipe Israel off the map enough to believe that any song that protests against it – or against nuclear war in general – is “not appropriate”.

Hear that? It’s Israel Double Standard Time, still ticking away.

It’s looking more and more like Lebanon is headed towards yet another “civil war” – or at least, that’s what the media will insist on calling it. The same media that gives Hezbollah credibility as a “Lebanese opposition party”.

The war between Lebanon and Syria is once again coming to a head, with Hezbollah fighting for Syria by proxy. Today’s “strike” was initiated by Hezbollah to escalate the fighting.

The aim of Hezbollah is to topple the Lebanese government and take over Lebanon for Syria. It has never made any secret of this. To achieve this goal, Hezbollah uses violence, force, threats, and terrorist tactics. The “political arm” of Hezbollah exists only to further the aims and successes of the terrorist group. It’s a foreign army, paid for by a foreign country, with the goal of invading and taking over Lebanon for a foreign government.

So why, then, does the international media insist on legitimatizing Hezbollah by calling it the “opposition”?

Let’s call this what it is: A war between Syria and Lebanon, fought on Lebanese soil but paid for with Syrian money. To use the word “opposition” is to give Hezbollah a legitimacy does not deserve.

Israel’s prime minister spent Tuesday trying to put the nuclear genie back into the bottle after a remark in an interview was interpreted as confirming that Israel has nuclear weapons – widely assumed to be true, but never officially admitted by Israel.

Meanwhile, ambiguity has never been the strong suit of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad today told delegates at an international conference questioning the Holocaust that Israel’s days were numbered.

Ahmadinejad, who has sparked international outcry by referring to the killing of six million Jews in World War 2 as a “myth” and calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, launched another verbal attack on the Jewish state.

“Thanks to people’s wishes and God’s will the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards and this is what God has promised and what all nations want,” he said.

“Just as the Soviet Union was wiped out and today does not exist, so will the Zionist regime soon be wiped out,” he added.

Was Olmert’s statement a deliberate warning in response to Ahmadinejad’s blustering? Or was it an honest mistake? If the latter, then just chalk it up to Olmert’s long list of gaffes. But if the former, it seems nobody has ever bothered to explain Israel Double-Standard Time to Olmert. Either way, he’s likely going to pay the price for this one.

(Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust-denial conference, by the way? It’s amazingly sparking protests among Iranian students. This is bound to be deeply embarrassing to the Iranian dictator, and he will probably take some sort of steps to quell the dissent. Keep an eye on this one – it could be a big story.)

I’m sure that the US administration expected this to be a pivotal moment and a resounding victory. Instead, Saddam’s execution will probably pass as a mere footnote to the ongoing violence in Iraq.

Still, there cannot be a punishment quite bad enough to befit the crimes that Saddam Hussein inflicted in the course of his dictatorship, and there really couldn’t be any other verdict but a death sentence. So, barring an unlikely appeal victory, Saddam Hussein will probably hang by next month, and one less horrible dictator will be alive in the world.

It won’t solve Iraq’s problems. Far from it. But now, that seems almost besides the point.

“We must speak out now, because we’ve got nothing to lose,” said Dr. Wafa Sultan, one of four Middle Eastern women taking part in a panel discussion in Montreal yesterday to argue their position on the West’s response to Islam.

The four were keynote speakers at an Institute of Public Affairs of Montreal conference. They talked before the event about the place of women under the yoke of an increasingly fundamentalist Middle East.

[ . . . ]

Iranian-born Nazanin Afshin-Jam, a former Miss Canada, has been leading an international effort to publicize the plight of an 18-year-old Tehran rape victim sentenced to death under sharia law. Afshin-Jam recalled a peaceful rally held in Iran in which the protesting women were dispersed by extremist, heavily veiled women.

“They feel more powerful,” she said of the veiled women.

Sultan said many Muslim women are not freely choosing to wear the veil, but do so because it’s in their best interest.

Islam has other ways of enforcing a bias against women, Afshin-Jam said: “In Iran, 65 per cent of university students are women but the laws say women are not allowed to be judges.”

And under sharia law, it’s very difficult for a woman’s word to be taken seriously, she said.

In the West, “we cannot afford to lose our cherished freedoms to radicalism,” Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese Christian, told the conference audience later in a Delta Hotel meeting room.

We often wonder where the voices are, speaking out against oppression and injustice. They exist; there are too few of them so far, they tend to get drowned out, and those who speak sadly – in this country where freedom of speech is cherished – often fear legitimately for their personal safety. But more and more, they exist. And we owe it to them to listen to what they have to say. Because the more people speak out, the more courageous the next people will feel… and the next… and the next.

This started off as merely an amusing tidbit but I wonder what’s in store. The blogosphere is one of the last arenas of freedom of speech, and it seems that Iran’s hardline religious leaders have chosen it as their next battleground. So far they’ve only been concentrating on Iran, but the global nature of the Internet makes me wonder how far off we are from seeing attempts by Islamists to control worldwide blogging content. It’s something every blogger ought to be keeping a close watch on.

Harper angered Lebanon and an assortment of other Arab, Muslim and French-speaking states in a meeting to draft a political declaration on this summer’s war between Israel and Hezbollah.

Canada’s rookie prime minister vetoed an amendment to a statement that said the 53-member organization “deplored” the effect of the month-long conflict on the Lebanese civilians it endangered. The amendment was brought forward by the Egyptian delegation and backed by “a majority” of countries at the table, according to French President Jacques Chirac.

“The amendment wants to recognize and deplore the war and recognize the victims of Lebanon. We are able to deplore the war, we are able to recognize the victims, but on both sides,” Harper
said at what was supposed to be a closing news conference.

“The Francophonie cannot recognize victims according to their nationality. Recognize the victims of Lebanon and the victims of Israel.”

Once again, Harper is standing up for what’s right, no matter what it costs him politically. I don’t always agree with him or his party, but I’m finding this incredibly refreshing.

• Sadaam’s judge doesn’t think he was a dictator. So what was he, then? A democratically-elected leader? A royal monarch? The winner of the first season of Iraqi Idol?
• The new Palestinian “unity” government appears likely to get its funding back from Europe, though the U.S. isn’t on board.
• Amnesty said Hezbollah committed war crimes, in what Charles Johnson over at LGF dubbed a flying pig moment. I’m shocked too. Amnesty gets so much more money and support when it’s directing its wrath at Israel.
• In a big sign of normalcy returning to the country, Israel’s getting its international soccer games back.
• Germany ordained its first rabbis since 1942. See that big middle finger in the air, you neo-Nazi assholes?
• Speaking of Jews and Europe, Pajamas Media is all over this under-reported story about the defamation trial that just begun in France against three Jewish citizens who questioned the French Channel 2 network for its coverage of the Mohammed Al-Dura affair.
• The Pope has pissed off Muslims, it seems, by making some statements that, regardless of their intent, will surely be taken way out of context. This could be a thing.
• Bibi said that Ahmadinejad is “more dangerous than Hitler”. You’d think such a normally-competent debater would’ve heard of Godwin’s Law, no?
• And in other news, Stephen Colbert’s bridge in Hungary looks like it isn’t going to happen, despite his large margin of victory in the online naming poll, due to the tiny problem of his failing to meet one of the qualifications – being dead. Whoops! (By the way, Budapest rocks!)

Okay, I think that about does it for the ten-second catch-up. Or, as the BUZZ puts it, some “temporary relief from ignorance”.

Iran’s hard-line president urged students Tuesday to push for a purge of liberal and secular university teachers, another sign of his determination to strengthen Islamic fundamentalism in the country.

With his call echoing the rhetoric of the nation’s 1979 Islamic revolution, Ahmadinejad appears determined to remake Iran by reviving the fundamentalist goals pursued under the republic’s late founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Iran still has strong moderate factions, and since taking office a year ago Ahmadinejad has moved to replace pragmatic veterans in the government and diplomatic corps with former military commanders and inexperienced religious hard-liners. His administration also has launched crackdowns on independent journalists, Web sites and bloggers.

Hey Mahmoud, what’s wrong? Can’t stand the blogging competition?

“When you walk in the streets of Gaza City, you cannot but close your eyes because of what you see there: unimaginable chaos, careless policemen, young men carrying guns and strutting with pride and families receiving condolences for their dead in the middle of the street.”

This is how Ghazi Hamad, spokesman for the Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority government and a former newspaper editor, described the situation in the Gaza Strip in an article he published on Sunday on some Palestinian news Web sites.

The article, the first of its kind by a senior Hamas official, also questioned the effectiveness of the Kassam rocket attacks and noted that since Israel evacuated the Gaza Strip, the situation there has deteriorated on all levels. It holds the armed groups responsible for the crisis and calls on them to reconsider their tactics and to stop blaming Israel for their mistakes.

“Gaza is suffering under the yoke of anarchy and the swords of thugs,” Hamad wrote. “I remember the day when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip and closed the gates behind. Then, Palestinians across the political spectrum took to the streets to celebrate what many of us regarded as the Israeli defeat or retreat. We heard a lot about a promising future in the Gaza Strip and about turning the area into a trade and industrial zone.”

Hamad said the “culture of life” that prevailed in the Strip has since been replaced with a nightmare. “Life became a nightmare and an intolerable burden,” he said. “Today I ask myself a daring and frightening question: ‘Why did the occupation return to Gaza?’ The normal reply: ‘The occupation is the reason.’”

Dismissing Israel’s responsibility for the growing state of anarchy and lawlessness in the Gaza Strip, Hamad said it was time for the Palestinians to embark on a soul-searching process to see where they erred.

“We’re always afraid to talk about our mistakes,” he added. “We’re used to blaming our mistakes on others. What is the relationship between the chaos, anarchy, lawlessness, indiscriminate murders, theft of land, family rivalries, transgression on public lands and unorganized traffic and the occupation? We are still trapped by the mentality of conspiracy theories – one that has limited our capability to think.”

Unusually frank words from any Palestinian official. But considering the source, this is pretty astounding stuff.

Some are taking this at face value, calling it a “flying pigs moment”.

But I’m a natural born cynic, and when something seems suspicious, it’s usually because it is. Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of this. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Something tells me that this is going to turn out to be a part of a new powerplay game between Hamas and Fatah, and that, as many suspect, Hamas is looking to throw a monkey wrench into the U.S.’s policy of backing Fatah by confounding Bush’s view that Fatah are the guys in the white hats and Hamas are the guys in the black hats.

If, however, Hamad was really being candid here, I hope for his sake that he has a lot of bodyguards.

My elation at Steve and Olaf’s release was quickly replaced by outrage when I heard about their forced conversion. The video turned my stomach. It should turn the stomach of every American and every person of whatever nationality who believes that the concepts of liberty and freedom have any value and any meaning. What sort of religion, in this day and age, would demand converts at the point of a gun or the blade of a sword? What sort of religion would even want such “converts?”

In any event, as has been pointed out elsewhere (and it was my first thought after hearing about this “forced” conversion), Centanni and Wiig are now marked men if they retract their coerced statement of faith. That would make them apostates under Islamic doctrine, subject to the death penalty at the hand of any devout Muslim who wishes to glorify Allah by carrying out the sentence. So it isn’t over. Not by a long shot.

Read the rest. Now.

The statement does, however, represent the seething resentment of Sunni al-Qaeda, directed at what it sees as an attempted Shiite takeover of the jihad campaign in the Middle East.

In the speech, Rahman espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories inspired by the Russian forgery, the protocols of the elders of Zion: “We know very well from our history that the Jews target to occupy Lebanon, Syria and even the north of the Arabian peninsula even up to Iraq to the river of Furaat (Euphrates).”

However, he then turns his wrath to Hizbullah, Iran, and Syria, calling them “infidel entities,” and arguing that they are preventing Sunni jihadis from attacking Israel.

This pissing contest between Sunni and Shiite extremist groups is nothing new. It’s a battle of one-upmanship, with the barometer being which side can attack Israel the most. Which really makes me wish they’d cut out the middleman and just start attacking each other already.

“He is a person who would understand them and would want then to tell their story to the world. He is a man who understands the struggle for justice, and that peace depends upon justice,” Wiig told local media.

Olaf Wiig objected to Israeli action in the Palestinian territories and probably understood the desperation of his unknown captors, Wiig said shortly after the August 14 abduction.

“He’s the kind of person who understands the need for justice and would understand the kind of fear and trauma they’re going through,” he said.

I hope that Fiig and the other kidnapped journalist, Steve Centanni, are released and returned safely to their homes and families. But I also think that a Fiskie nomination might be in order.

Stephen Harper backed Jason Kenney on his comparison of Hezbollah to the Nazis, claiming it was “fair”:

“Like all comparisons, it’s true in some ways, and not in others,” he said, “but as near as I can tell, both Hezbollah and the Nazi party stand for the elimination of the Jewish nation. So I think that’s pretty fundamental and, in that sense, I don’t think it’s unfair.”

Though Kenney and Harper both have a point, they ought to realize that Nazi comparisons, even when justifiable, tend to obscure the original argument.

Meanwhile, one of the three MPs who originally called for Hezbollah’s legitimization, Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj, has resigned as foreign affairs critic (hat tip: Puck):

All 10 leadership hopefuls condemned the remarks. Scott Brison and Carolyn Bennett said Wrzesnewskyj should no longer retain his post as a foreign affairs spokesman.

The Liberal party has been floundering lately, with no clear voices emerging in this conflict. Wrzesnewskyj’s resignation, and the condemnation of his remarks by the leadership candidates, is the first hopeful sign in a while that perhaps the Liberals might find their moral compass that has been missing now for quite some time.

It seems to me that the problem is one of perception, and of which historical comparison is the most apt. Some, like Kenney and Harper, see Hezbollah as the new Nazi party, and view appeasement as dangerous and ultimately more destructive. Others, like Boris Wrzesnewskyj, Peggy Nash and Maria Mourani, see Hezbollah as the new IRA:

“You want to encourage the politicians of this military organization, you want to encourage the political wing, so that the centre of gravity shifts to them.”

Wrzesnewskyj compared the situation in Lebanon to the decades of sectarian violence by the Irish Republican Army.

“If there wasn’t a possibility for London to negotiate with Sinn Fein [the IRA's political party], we’d still have bombings in Northern Ireland,” he said.

Certainly, Hezbollah (and Hamas, and other groups that employ a political/social/terrorist combination strategy) would like to encourage the IRA comparisons. But there’s one key difference, that the Canadian MPs on their “fact-finding mission” seem to have missed: The IRA had, as its goal, the establishment of an independent Irish state. Say what you will about their methods – and I will condemn terrorism unequivocally – they did have a goal that could be pursued politically, and that would be legitimate if pursued politically. Hezbollah has no such goal. They aren’t vying for statehood or independence of freedom. Their goal is the destruction of Israel. And no matter what means they choose to pursue this goal, it cannot be legitimatized.

They appear to be typical of an alarming number of Canadians who think that compromise, which works so nicely in Canada, can work as well everywhere. But in Canada we don’t have parties, factions or demographic groups dedicated to the utter destruction of other parties, factions, or demographic groups.

How do you compromise with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who says “there’s no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel.” What does Nash imagine Nasrallah means when he says: “When the people of this temporary country (Israel) lose their confidence in their legendary army, the end of this entity will begin”?

Meanwhile, Jason Kenney reminds us that foot-in-mouth disease strikes all sides of this one:

Conservative government spokesman Jason Kenney compared Hezbollah to the German Nazi party Tuesday and said opposition Canadian MPs are providing political cover to the banned organization.

Oh, Mr. Kenney, didn’t anyone ever teach you Godwin’s law?

How can a terrorist group that provokes a war subsequently claim to be “resisters” when the going gets tough?

This utter hypocrisy is echoed by Lebanon’s prime minister, who initially claimed to be held hostage by Hezbollah, only to proclaim subsequently his outright support for the terrorist group. How in the name of God (anyone’s God) can people support a group whose leader is adamantly opposed to a peaceful accord and who has often said coexistence with Jews (not Israelis) is not an option? Racism and hatred don’t get any more blatant than this.

What she said.

According to rumors, Yasser Arafat’s widow marries Tunisian president’s brother-in-law, who was supposed to marry her sister, but chose Suha due to her large fortune.

What, you mean he wasn’t after her looks and charm?

Israel has begun pulling out of Lebanon. But the UN peacekeeprs aren’t going in – and nobody’s willing to hold Hezbollah to its obligations.

In the meantime, the Lebanese army is moving to take positions in South Lebanon… but not to displace or disarm Hezbollah. On the contrary, Hezbollah’s favourite puppet government has reportedly struck a deal to allow the group to keep its weapons. (Siniora now denies this, but actions here will speak louder than words).

Oh, and the kidnapped soldiers? Still not released.

What exactly is the basis for the claim that this cease-fire is in any way, shape or form good for Israel?

I wonder if this will be any more interesting than Paul Martin’s foray into the blogosphere. By the looks of it, not so far.

Israel didn’t achieve any of its continually-revised objectives.

Get back the kidnapped soldiers? Nope.

Destroy or then weaken Hezbollah? The opposite happened – Hezbollah has been strengthened in popularity among a Lebanese population who largely rejected them before. So much for the naive goals at the start of the war that had Israeli leaders actually believing that the Lebanese citizenry would take up common cause with Israel.

Disarm Hezbollah? On paper, yes. In practice? I don’t think anyone is quite that naive. And with Iran and Syria emboldened, this does not bode well for the near future.

Encourage the Lebanese army to implement 1559 and take control of southern Lebanon? On paper, maybe, but in practice, Saniora has become more of a puppet of Hezbollah than ever before.

Install an effective neutral peacekeeping force as a buffer? Instead of NATO, Israel got stuck once again with a crippled UN force that is more likely to be part of the problem than part of the solution.

World opinion? No comment. Things weren’t good, but then, they were never good on that score even beforehand.

Sure, the Israel cabinet is spinning the cease-fire as good news. What else can they do? But there will be a lot of tough questions being asked in the days ahead.

Israel had no choice: it was attacked and had to respond. But it isn’t always enough to be right. You have to be right, and you have to win.

The good news is, hopefully – hopefully – thousands of Israeli soldiers can come home, and thousands of civilians can return to their homes. In the short term, there’s no doubt that everyone wanted to see an end to this crisis – civilians in Israel and Lebanon alike were paying far too heavy a price. But the long term is worrying.

Pessimism when it comes to the middle east is hard to avoid, and I’m not really in the mood to play silver-lining today.

With the largest population of Lebanese-Canadians on their doorstep, Concordia University in Montreal and the University of Montreal have reopened closed application processes to students stranded by the war in the Middle East.

The two Quebec universities say they are fast-tracking applications from students who had planned to attend institutions in Lebanon this fall.

“It’s important that the current generation still have access to education,” said Guy Berthiaume, vice-rector of development and alumni relations at the University of Montreal.

[ . . . ]

Since Friday, Berthiaume said they’ve received more than 100 calls, mostly from local Lebanese-Canadians and many who were recently evacuated from the war-torn region.

The university is waiving tuition for the exchange students and is also raising funds for them.

“They will need money to live, pay rent and buy food,” said Berthiaume.

Meanwhile, an Israeli-Canadian friend of mine is having trouble getting her student loan and bursary application sorted out, because her parents live in Haifa and they can’t send in a bunch of the related paperwork because they’re, you know, living in bomb shelters.

Don’t expect any special treatment or fast-tracking there, though.

On that note, time for bed.

“I hope Nasrallah gets a rocket between the legs for what he is doing to me here, for harming grandma and grandpa.”

Meanwhile in downtown Montreal, fifteen thousand people turned out to protest and spew the usual rhetoric:

A demonstration billed as a protest for peace assumed a distinctly anti-Israeli flavour Sunday as protesters denounced the Jewish state for killing hundreds of Lebanese.

[ . . . ]

While many participants claimed they weren’t singling out either side in the bloody conflict, some carried placards that linked Israel to Nazi atrocities during the Second World War.

“Israel learned from Hitler and the student has surpassed the master,” read one sign.

If those fifteen thousand people truly desired peace, they’d be out there echoing Shadi Mzawin’s calls to put an end to Nasrallah, once and for all.

But I’ve had to shut down for a few days, to block out that whooshing noise that goes to my head every time I turn on CNN or read too many of the headlines in the papers. I get too angry, too depressed, too weary of the downwards spiral and the feeling that somehow we’ve been here before and we’ll be here again, far too many times.

I’m lucky enough to have the luxury of taking a breather here. A luxury not afforded to people currently in Haifa or Beirut. In the meantime, there’s certainly no lack of options for people looking to get some opinion, editorial or perspective on the events of the past few days. I won’t even post a reading list; there are far, far too many to list.

Please remember this when you hear about the “atrocity” of the Israeli bomb that killed many civilians in Kafr Qana, a place from which Hezbollah has fired hundreds of rockets at Israel. Unlike previous administrations, Mr. Olmert has my respect when he says: “They were warned to leave. It is the responsibility of Hezbollah for firing rockets amid civilians.”

Terrorists and their supporters have lost the right to complain about civilian casualties, since all they have is one goal: this entire war is to target civilians. Every single one of the more than 2,500 rockets launched into Israel, is launched into populated towns filled with women and children. Just today, another explosive belt meant to kill civilians in Israel was detonated harmlessly by our forces in Nablus.

So don’t cry to me about civilian casualties. Cry to those using babies and wives and mothers; cry to those who store weapons in mosques, ambulances, hospitals and private homes. Cry to those launching deadly rockets from the backyards of kindergartens and schools. Cry to the heartless men who love death, and however many of their troops or civilians die, consider themselves victorious as long as they can keep on firing rockets at our women and children.

Everything Ms. Ragen says is right. But I think she’s wrong.

There are too many people in the world who can’t tell the difference between a legitimate democracy fighting for survival, and a terrorist organization trying to wipe a nation off the map. They draw false moral equivalences. They put on blinders. They say ridiculous things.

I refuse to be one of them.

Yes, it’s true that Israel is better than Hezbollah. Anyone with half a brain can see that. And it should be obvious. It should be a given. There are too many people in the world who don’t get that, but by arguing the point again and again, we’re giving them credence. It shouldn’t even be up for debate.

But here’s the thing: that’s not good enough.

Israel shouldn’t be content to simply be held to a higher standard than Hezbollah. Frankly, that’s not saying much, is it?

When Israel fights a war, I don’t need anyone to convince me that civilian casualties are anything other than a tragic an accident. I take that for granted, because I know Israel and I know the truth about this and any war that she fights. These are wars of survival, fought by people with faults but with the best of intentions: to protect the security of Israel.

I’ve decided there aren’t nearly enough West Wing references on this blog. So here’s a quote from Amy Gardner:

“Jed Bartlet: Not quite as mean-spirited as the other guy.” Doesn’t really send me running to my polling place.

Israel isn’t quite as mean-spirited as Hezbollah. Hezbollah wants to kill Israeli civilians. Israel doesn’t want to kill Lebanese civilians. I get it. But I’m not content to simply make that point. It doesn’t send me running to the polling place either, so to speak.

The point is, all of the above isn’t enough. Being “not quite as mean-spirited as Hezbollah” isn’t enough for Israel. Nobody who loves Israel should say otherwise. We can’t simply be satisfied with the knowledge that we’re on the side of the angels here. When a tragedy happens, like dead children in Qana, the only way to truly show love for Israel is to ask the tough questions and demand the tough answers and the soul-searching that comes along with it. That’s how a country grows: with openness and freedom and a lively exchange of debate. And with a constant striving to do better, to do what’s right, to face up to blunders and wrongdoings and claim not only the relative moral high ground, but the absolute moral high ground too.

And so, I maintain that Naomi Ragen is right about the facts but wrong in her sentiment. I demand more from Israel, because I love and respect it so much and I know we need to judge it by the standard that it deserves.

Allison smells a rat, sensing that not all is as it may seem:

I am waiting patiently for a logical explanation of how a building gets bombed between 12 midnight and 1 AM, remains full of people and then 7-8 hours later, collapses the next morning.

Dave asks the same question:

An IDF investigation has so far found that the building in Qana fell approximately eight hours after being hit by the IAF. Some possibilities being examined are:

Hizbullah explosives in the building were behind the explosion that caused the collapse

The rickety building remained standing for a few hours, but eventually collapsed.

And for something a little different, Sarah talks about what it’s like to mingle at a singles event during a war:

Just before the meal started, someone dropped a box with something heavy, such as silverware, and it came down with a crash. Everyone from the north jumped about six feet. Talk about being on edge. I felt so bad for them.

Then, as the meal began . . . well, normally the conversation between singles goes like this:
What’s your name?
Where do you live?
What do you do?

But this time, it was:
What’s your name?
Where do you live?
How many rockets have you been getting?
How many minutes of warning do you get?

Talk about surreal.

Well, Sarah, you know what they say about relationships that begin under tense circumstances…

“Israel deeply regrets, is greatly saddened, by this attack on innocent civilians in Lebanon. Israel takes full responsibility and is going to start an open investigation to find out how this happened,” government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said.

Of course, this is a unilateral move. And Hezbollah will merely use the respite to re-arm and re-group.

But never mind all that. Never mind that Hezbollah deliberately targets civilians, while Israelis do their best to avoid doing so. Never mind that Hezbollah’s tactics of using civilians as human shields are designed to lead to exactly this kind of disaster.

The point is, it happened. And Israel must hold itself to a higher standard than a terrorist group. The fact that most of the criticism of Israel is unfounded or exaggerated can’t allow us to hide from the fact that no nation is infallible.

The general sentiment in reaction to what happened in Qana is understandably defensive. After all, the Israeli army had dropped leaflets warning civilians to leave. Hezbollah was using the spot as a missile launch site. There is no doubt that there ought to be ample justification. And yet… none of that matters. And the sooner the spin doctors realize that images of dead children will negate all their efforts, the sooner everyone can get past denial and onto reality. Israel is going to take more of a punishment on this one than it deserves… but to claim that it did nothing wrong is to walk around with blinders.

I wish to G-d that this had never happened. But it did. And it frightens me, because when Israel is right, it already pays too heavy a price. But when Israel is wrong, her enemies have long memories. And while my support for Israel is unwavering as ever, I – along with most Israelis – will not try to justify this one. And I am scared that the price Israel will have to pay for this blunder will be wholly “disproportionate” in the true sense of the word.

I think the actions of Stephen Harper’s government leave Canadian children confused and bewildered when they compare political actions against the educational principles taught in this country.

The Canadian education system encourages our children to become citizens who respect justice, equity and multiculturalism. School boards place much importance on non-violence and co-operation.

My son tells me that school kids aren’t allowed to respond with physical violence even if other kids hit them – instead they are told to get a teacher or adult to intervene in these incidents. In the end, the troubled kids pay the consequences, but in a non-violent way.

In a similar vein, Harper’s views on the current crisis in the Middle East are completely contrary to school polices which emphasize avoiding violence and encouraging dialogue and discussion.

Because everyone knows that if Israel just complains to the teacher instead of hitting back, the teacher will send Hezbollah to the corner and then force it to apologize. </Sarcasm>

Something tells me that the problem lies not so much with Harper’s position on Israel, but with the policy of the schoolboards that – apparently – not only fail to teach any context whatsoever in their history classes, but also seemingly fail to teach kids anything about how the world really works.

Cynthia Hess-von Kruedener said Tuesday’s attack was not the first on her husband’s outpost.

It’s difficult to blame a grieving woman for choosing to misdirect her anger. But her late husband apparently did not agree with her assessment. In fact, he placed the blame squarely on Hezbollah for the attacks that occurred on the UN post:

Six days before he was killed in an Israel Air Force bombing of a United Nations post in southern Lebanon, Canadian observer Major Paeta Hess-von Kruendener sent an email to his former commander in the Canadian army, in which he said that Hizbullah fighters were “running around” near the UN post struck by the Israel Defense Forces and that they were using the post as a sort of “shield” against Israel’s strikes.

(Emphasis mine.)

So far, the grieving widow blames Israel story is getting all the headlines here in Canada, and the Hezbollah uses human shields story is getting zero notice. Let’s see if anyone bothers to report the truth in the coming days.

Update Jul 30: The Gazette published my letter to the editor on this topic today, albeit a heavily-edited version. The link requires registration, but it doesn’t really matter, as the argument is much better-worded here than there.

The former commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, who served as a UN commander in Bosnia, spoke about the email in a Canadian radio show. He said that Hess-von Kruendener wrote that the IDF strikes near the post had “not been deliberate targeting, but rather due to tactical necessity.”

“That would mean Hizbullah was purposely setting up near the UN post,” he added. “It’s a tactic.”

“My information from him is weeks upon weeks they’ve been firing on there,” she said. “They’re UN soldiers, that should have been the safest place to be — they should not have bombed that site, period.” She accused Israel of not playing by the rules anymore.

“They’re fighting a whole different war, and it’s changing all the time. And now they’re choosing to, bomb, you know, UN sites. That’s unheard of.”

Someone must’ve told him that Hezbollah is getting its ass whopped.

The man has got to be on drugs to accuse Israel of deliberately targeting UN observers in Lebanon. What in the world would Israel possibly have to gain by killing and wounding representatives of the United Nations?

The answer is nothing, and it has everything to lose. And probably will.

“Syria is ready for dialogue with the United States based on respect and mutual interest,” Mekdad told Reuters in an interview. He said the solution to the crisis lies in an immediate ceasefire brokered by international powers, followed by diplomacy.

The United States hasn’t lifted a finger here, but Syria has to be dismayed at the severe ass-kicking that its proxy, Hezbollah, is receiving at the hands of the Israelis.

Syria will posture and bluster a lot about “international powers” and try to get the U.S. to commit to a deal that will benefit nobody but Syria. Nobody’s expecting much to come of this.

But none of that matters. Syria is blinking first.

Israel was never prepared to launch another war with Syria, and the United States isn’t too keen on getting entangled in another military conflict. But Baby Assad is obviously taking Bush’s rhetoric seriously enough to call for dialogue. If this has been a giant bluff, it’s clearly working – at least as far as Syria is concerned.

Iran? I wouldn’t hold my breath.

As Harper said: “There is a crisis because of the actions of Hamas and the actions of Hezbollah.” Exactly. Who kidnapped Israeli soldiers? Who fired rockets into Israeli neighbourhoods?

This is an interesting point of departure – the prime minister dares to speak truth, not to power, but to terror.

You can be certain that Harper’s unambiguous language was not written at Foreign Affairs. They don’t do plain speaking over there. They also like to be on both sides of this issue.

But the prime minister is making foreign policy himself, and he is realigning it significantly in the Middle East, as well as with the United States, to reflect first principles.

He can’t be doing it for the votes. The Jewish community in Canada votes overwhelmingly Liberal. Israel never had a better friend in Canada, until now, than Brian Mulroney, and it never got him anywhere with Jewish voters. There are also twice as many Muslim as Jewish voters in this country, and they’re not happy with Harper choosing sides. This is not even to mention the anguish in Canada’s Lebanese community, largely based in Montreal and Ottawa. As many as 50,000 Canadians, holidayers and dual citizens alike, found themselves stranded in the middle of a war zone last week.

If there’s no political gain in it for Harper, the only reason for him to be taking such a clear stand in favour of Israel is that he’s acting out of conviction.

MacDonald, who, it must be said, is a very intelligent man even on issues on which I disagree with him, is not giving Israel carte blanche. Far from it. He believes that Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s provocation is “disproportionate”. Okay, he’s entitled; a fair number of Israelis believe the exact same thing. But he’s applauding Harper for taking the stance that, proportionate or not, Israel’s reaction is one of defence against a terrorist organization, and that no moral equivalence can be drawn between the two.

Politicians who speak their minds are a bit of an anomaly in this country. Canadians aren’t used to them, and many aren’t quite sure what to make of Harper. I’ve never been a fan of Harper, but I do have to give him credit on this one. Trouble is, his “moral stance” is unleashing such a backlash that it threatens to cancel out the original intent. Would a waffling Liberal government have made itself such an easy target for criticism? Sure, that’s a backwards analysis. But think about it: If hatred of Israel gets stirred up into an even bigger frenzy because Harper is a convenient target as a right-winger who backs Israel, then who benefits in the long run?

In an early episode of The West Wing, Joey Lucas (played brilliantly by Marlee Matlin) bursts into Josh’s office demanding to know why the DNC is choking off funding for her candidate, who is trying to unseat a far-right Republican. The answer? Josh explains that “Every time he comes out with one of his declarations about brown people crossing the border, the DNC slaps it into a direct mail campaign and he’s good for two or three million dollars.” In other words, the Democrats get more mileage out of having a convenient poster boy for the far right to attack than they would get out of winning the seat.

Well, politics often work that way, unfortunately. In Quebec, for instance, support for sovereignty goes up during the years when the Liberals are in power, and down during the years when the PQ is in power. Why? Because it’s easier to attack from the opposition than to govern from the majority.

Is Harper, by signalling his clear intention to stand behind Israel in this conflict, doing more harm than good in a realistic sense, even though he’s theoretically doing the right thing? I wonder.

A group of Israeli journalists on Thursday renounced their membership in the International Federation of Journalists, after the organization’s General Secretary refused to retract his condemnation of the Israel Defense Forces’ bombing of the Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV station in Beirut.

[ . . . ]

The IDF attacked the Hezbollah’s TV station shortly after it began its offensive in Lebanon last week. The IFJ said in a statement last weekend that the strike is “a clear demonstration that Israel has a policy of using violence to silence media it does not agree with.”

Anyone else involved in a war who bombs communications networks is simply following good military strategy. When Israel does it, of course it’s part of the worldwide Jewish media conspiracy to silence opposition voices. Duh.

Meanwhile, IDF sources are saying that Hezbollah is preventing civilians from evacuating in Lebanon. I guess they’re more useful as human shields or as propaganda martyrs than as living, breathing people. (Via Meryl, who rightly uses the word “despicable”, though I can’t imagine why she would be surprised).

It’s sad that two communities being victimized by the same group are so at odds with one another. But then, that’s how groups like Hezbollah operate, manipulating people and playing groups against one another. Sadly, this too is nothing new.

The explosion, some 50-100 metres from the gold-domed Shi’ite shrine of Kufa, tore through the van shortly after it had pulled out of the busy market with a group of labourers.

“A man driving a Kia van with an Iraqi accent came and said: ‘I need labourers’. After the labourers got on and packed the vehicle he exploded the car,” said witness Nasir Faisal.

Pretty horrific way to jump up and down and scream “hey, look at me!”.

Bush replied: “See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hizbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.”

Gee, you think?

Some people find Bush’s candor refreshing. Others seem to have a more realistic take:

No one in the media seems to notice (or maybe they notice but they don’t care) that this isn’t candid, frank or dramatic. It’s the kind of simplistic blowhard chitchat my relatives exchange during ‘NFL Today’ commercials. You know… just git ‘em to do it. Git someone to git ‘em to do it.

Is that the best Bush can do?

My question exactly.

There’s been a long-running debate among observers of Dubya as to whether he really is that dumb, or if his “plain-spokenness” is partly an act to help him win votes. Certainly his aversion to words with more than two syllables is nothing new.

But if, even off-camera, Bush’s understanding about the political situation in the mideast really is that oversimplified, then I think we all ought to be more than a bit concerned. Even if he was, in this case, perfectly right in what he said, it still has that “duh” quality to it that’s so pervasive in so much of what Bush says even publicly.

The decision by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to take a pro-Israeli stance is unwise and could cost him votes in the next election, particularly after seven Canadians were killed by an Israeli attack, political observers and commentators said on Monday.

Harper’s Conservatives, who took power in February after 13 years of Liberal rule, have a fragile minority and rely on support from other parties to govern.

Harper is widely expected to call an election in the first half of next year but to win a majority he will need to start winning seats in major cities like Toronto and Montreal, both of which have large ethnic Arab populations.

“A lot of Lebanese voted Conservative (in the last election) because they were tired of the Liberals,” said Mazen Chouaib, executive director of the National Council on Canada-Arab Relations.

“Those who would have been swayed to vote Conservative will not do so (next) time,” he told Reuters.

Note how the article only vaguely refers to “commentators”, before quoting a clearly biased interested party that makes no sense on the key issue because most Arab-Canadians didn’t vote Conservative in the first place.

This is nothing more than a thinly-veiled editorial disguised as news. I can sleep well at night knowing that such a high quality of journalim exists.

Oy. No matter what the facts of the matter are, the average headline-level informed Canadian is going to automatically side against Israel now.

“How are you?”
“I’m great!”
“Great? How can you be great?”
“Seeing a new guy and he’s amazing!”
“But how are you with what’s going on in Haifa right now?”
“A bit nervous… let me tell you about him though. I really think he’s ‘the one’.”

In the meantime, more rockets have hit Haifa and this time, there were injuries and fatalities. Not to mention the constant barrage of rockets that keeps raining down on the north. People have got to be scared.

Here are some reactions from Israeli bloggers on how they’re coping:

Allison wonders how to go on with daily life:

The government tells people from Tel Aviv northward to “be alert.”

OK, so I’m alert. Now what?

I’d love some specific instructions. Let the kids go play at their friends’ house or not? Go grocery shopping or not? Dentist appointment?

I guess I’m supposed to keep doing it as normal, but ALERTLY. Fat lot of good alert will do me if I’m in the dentist’s waiting room and hear a siren for a one-minute warning till a missile hits.

Meanwhile, Harry can’t tear himself away from the news:

Today was a bad day. I got ZERO work done today. Eight dead in Haifa. Fifty wounded. The bodies of the three missing sailors were found. And more and more missiles landing. Over 800 missiles and mortar attacks thus far.

Spent pretty much every second of the day reading news sites and blogs and watching television. I know I’m not the only one. A friend of mine who works at a fairly large corperation here IM’ed me earlier that everyone at his company must be surfing and not working because the network keeps crashing. Another friend’s company’s entire customer support system sits in Carmiel and the company is backlogged with hundreds of customer requests.

I went out briefly for some shwarma. Lots of people were out and about. Everyone of course was talking about the situation but the sense of detachment still exists. It’s just too surreal for people around here. I’m sure that will change as the missiles land even more south.

Lisa, who is angry about the whole thing, blogs about the absurdities of this war:

We watch each other’s television broadcasts, we talk to one another, and then…we bomb each other.

This morning a friend of mine called from Gaza. He’s not a journalist, not a politician – just an ordinary Palestinian guy in his twenties. He lives down the street from the offices of Hamas’s Ministry of the Interior in Gaza, which was bombed a few days ago by an Israeli fighter plane. He has about two hours of electricity a day in his house and about as much running water. But he called me to ask if I was okay, after he saw on Al Jazeera television that Nasrallah was threatening to bomb Tel Aviv. “I’m worried about you,” he said.

And late, late last night I chatted via Instant Message with this Lebanese blogger, while he sat on the roof of his apartment building and watched Israeli fighter planes bomb Beirut.

Speaking of which, here’s a post from the Lebanese blog that Lisa linked to:

A week ago, I might have told you that my heart broke because my favorite World Cup team lost – I almost cried. Now I would do anything to watch my team lose – and bring down my sense of disappointment to that level again.

What I feel now, as a citizen, and what everyone feels is disappointment, anger, anxiety, frustration. We’re scared and locked up at home. War came in a day. War in one day.

Of course, there are thousands of personal accounts from Israeli and Lebanese bloggers “from the ground”. I was only highlighting a few from some of my regular reads. But things are getting worse, and all I can do is watch in fear and hope that people stay safe, somehow.

Nor, I fear, will it for a while.

To say that the matzav has heated up would be putting it mildly. Nobody was injured in the Haifa attack, but sadly, in the North, people weren’t so lucky; rocket attacks killed 2 people and injured at least 120. Meanwhile, Israel is attacking Beirut, targeting Hezbollah stronghold areas. Israel may be after Hezbollah, but it’s Lebanon and Israel that are now engaged in what can only be called war.

Even as things escalate with the Palestinians, Hezbollah, and Lebanon, it’s not ending there. Hezbollah’s primary backers, Syria and Iran, are dancing close to the flame as well. Iran is threatening to retaliate if Israel strikes Syria. Meanwhile, Israel claims it has intelligence that Hezbollah is trying to transfer the kidnapped Israeli soldiers to Iran, which, of course, Iran is denying. The chances that Syria and Iran could get dragged into this mess are looking high.

Nor can Israel count on the unqualified backing of the United States. Bush is giving his cautious support even while Condi Rice is urging “restraint” – an all-too-familiar ploy that will end with Israel being falsely painted as the aggressor even by its allies.

Tonight, my friend’s family is doing the only thing they can: bunking down, biting nails, and waiting. Millions of Israelis and their friends and loved ones around the globe are doing the same thing tonight, and, I fear, for far too long to come.

This isn’t a song and dance about how war is never the answer. I’m not urging anyone to sit down and sing kumbaya. Israel needs to defend itself, and everyone here knows I support her actions 100%. But I can’t help the fear, the trepidation, the sense of dread. Unlike Israel’s enemies, who go straight into every war joyously envisioning wiping the “Zionist entity” off the map, Israel has never and will never go into war happily. Every war fought by Israel has been because there was no other choice, and every decision made by the Israeli government primarily considers the safety and security of the Israeli people. All I can do is echo the statements made in editorials and on blogs around the world: Israel will win because there is no other choice.

But I can’t help being afraid.

In Gaza, Hamas is thrilled that they have more “martyrs” and more fodder for inciting hatred. They’re stepping up their attacks as Israel is caught fighting on two fronts.

In Israel, nobody is celebrating. Olmert is talking and reacting tough against Lebanon; Bush is including Syria and Iran in his warnings.

The powder keg is simmering, and appears to be nearing a boiling point.

Lynn asks, is it war yet?

If it is, I have no doubt that Israel will stand strong and do what is required, but I cringe nonetheless. Anxious parents with sons and daughters in the IDF know that the country will not cave or yield, but it doesn’t make the situation any easier. I fear this is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets any better.

Saudi Arabia and other Arab states are expected to speed money to the Palestinian Authority within days to help it pay its employees after Israel halted tax payments, Palestinian officials said.

[ . . . ]

Hamas, which has carried out nearly 60 suicide bombings since a Palestinian uprising began in 2000, trounced Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s long-dominant Fatah movement in the January 25 parliamentary election.

In a joint statement issued in Islamabad, Islamic allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia urged the world to accept Hamas’s victory and “avoid premature judgments and hasty conclusions.”

Hamas has urged foreign donors to maintain aid but says it could still find other sources of funding in the Arab world. It has sent a delegation on a tour of Arab countries to urge them to keep the money flowing.

Unemployment in the Palestinian territories runs high, at 22 percent, and half the Palestinian population lives in poverty. In Gaza, many Palestinians live on an average of $2 a day.

Let’s see… we’ve got the requisite reference to Palestinian poverty, to Israel’s withholding of financial transfers, and to the election results and their aftermath. The implication, of course, is that it’s Israel’s fault that the Palestinians are living in poverty.

What’s missing? That’s right: no reference whatsoever to the fact that the billions of dollars of aid that have poured into the Palestinian coffers to-date used to finance terrorism, urge suicide attacks, build explosives and rockets, purchase weapons, and train militias. Oh yeah, and to line the pockets of the Palestinian Authority, and to finance Suha Arafat’s shopping habits. And no mention of the fact that Israel, if it were to release the money, would be contributing financially to attacks on its own citizens.

And the high Palestinian unemployment? No mention of the fact that, prior to 2000, unemployment was much lower because so many Palestinians were working in Israel and crossing the border daily without any problems. Nothing about how the chosen strategy of violence forced Israel to close these borders and therefore cost so many Palestinians their livelihood. No reference to how all the jobs were in Israel because the Palestinians haven’t built any industry, infrastructure or opportunity – in short, necessary ingredients for a sustainable state. Or how, despite claiming to want statehood, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Palestinians that a viable state can’t live forever on handouts. It’s so much easier to talk about destroying Israel than to talk about actually building a state, isn’t it?

And it’s more convenient to imply that Israel is to blame for Palestinian poverty than it is to tell the truth, I guess.

Bullshit.

The Palestinian people have chosen one form of terror over another form of terror. The only difference between Hamas and Fatah is that Hamas is open about its aims, while Fatah carries out terror attacks and then pays lip service towards “condemning” them. The people chose Hamas because it is perceived as less corrupt than Fatah, not because of any failings of the peaceful alternative. There was never a peaceful alternative.

The real question is, now what? There will be an element who insists on turning a blind eye to the truth and fooling itself that Hamas will reform, suddenly giving up its weapons because it’s got a role in government. These are the same people who keep insisting that there’s been a truce effective this past year.

The United States will refuse to deal with Hamas… maybe. Expect a lot of waffling on that one in the coming months. Europe will deal with them, probably with lip service about how much they’ve “changed”. Again, these are the same people who repeatedly insist that there’s a truce.

For Israel – dare I say – little is likely to change. Negotiations were a non-starter even with Abbas, and Israel will still have to prioritize security measures in defence of its citizens, just as before. Maybe there will be less hypocrisy now. But don’t count on it.

Tim Blair has a roundup of reactions. Jonathan has some day-after musings. And, as usual, Meryl has lots to say.

There’s little I could add that isn’t being said all over the media or the blogosphere already. So I’ll just say this: While the results aren’t yet in and the implications are still to come, today’s election was both good news and bad news: Good news that democracy, of a sort, is beginning to take root for the Palestinians. Bad news that so many are flocking to candidates bent on extending the self-destructive path of violence and rejectionism that got the Palestinians to where they are today. After all, Hamas’s main goal is Israel’s destruction, and despite what the world media is saying, Fatah – far from being a force for peace or moderation – is not much better in the terrorism department. It kind of makes our Canadian party choices seem a whole lot more attractive by comparison.

Does that mean he feels that the world can afford a nuclear attack by Iran on its enemies. How would that affect the delicate world economy, Mr. Caruso?

• Iran chose now to press the nuclear issue, figuring the U.S. can’t do much because of Iraq and the rest of the world couldn’t ever do much about it.
• The U.N. is powerless to stop Iran from going nuclear, and no Security Council sanctions – even if agreed upon by Russia and China – would be strong enough to get Iran to cave.
• U.S. Intelligence estimates that Iran is “very close” to mastering nuclear weapons technology, perhaps as close as a year.
• Unlike with Iraq, the world cannot count on Israel to stop Iran from going nuclear, as it has neither the range nor the capacity to prevent disastrous reprisals for an attack. It would likely come down to the U.S. to take military action, if it were to come to that, and at the moment this seems unlikely given the war in Iraq.

All in all, the analysis paints a very bleak picture in which Iran is marching steadily towards acquiring a nuclear bomb that it may have every intention of using to wipe Israel off the map.

If North Korea was the number-one threat to the world not too long ago, Iran has suddenly jumped up a few positions. However, I don’t believe we’re headed towards World War III tomorrow. There are still steps that can be taken, if the world recognizes the dangers in allowing Teheran to acquire nuclear technology. I only hope that these steps are taken, and that they are effective.

“I am fine, I am fine … They gave me cigarettes and tea,” Bernardini told reporters, looking shaken but unhurt.

“I will never change my idea about the occupation,” he said, referring to Israel’s occupation of land that Palestinians seek for a state. “I am with the Palestinian people.”

An armed offshoot of Abbas’s own ruling Fatah movement said it carried out the kidnapping.

Fatah. Not Hamas. Not Islamic Jihad. But Fatah’s “armed wing”. Did any of the people relentlessly promoting Mahmoud Abbas as a “moderate” ever stop to think about why Fatah has an armed wing in the first place?

Oh, and there’s more:

Hours earlier, gunmen stormed a United Nations club in Gaza City and blew up the bar — the only place where alcohol is served openly in the conservative Muslim territory. Nobody was hurt, but the attack added to security fears.

The United Nations is generally seen favorably in Gaza, where it is the second biggest employer after the Palestinian Authority.

Wow, talk about shooting yourself in the foot! The Israelis leave Gaza and suddenly the Palestinians are attacking their best friends, the United Nations?

My predicted U.N. response: “We will never change our idea about the occupation. We are with the Palestinian people”.

S.S.D.Y.

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned Western music from Iran’s radio and TV stations, reviving one of the harshest cultural decrees from the early days of 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Songs such as George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” Eric Clapton’s “Rush” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California” have regularly accompanied Iranian broadcasts, as do tunes by saxophonist Kenny G.

But the official IRAN Persian daily reported Monday that Ahmadinejad, as head of Iran’s Supreme Cultural Revolutionary Council, ordered the enactment of an October ruling by the council to ban Western music.

Cause after all, everyone knows that the saxophone stylings of Kenny G. contain hidden Zionist brainwashing propaganda.

Though we may scoff, cultural restrictions are key components of Ahmadinejad’s renewed fanatical war on the West and against any kind of freedom or reform for his people. One only wonders how far he can push before the forces for change in Iran push back.

I’m sure that threat has Ahmadinejad shaking in his boots.

The real question is whether Ahmadinejad is calculating and shrewd, or if he’s merely off his rocker.

Most of the time, rhetoric and provocation like this is done on purpose by despots looking to pick a fight for political gain, deflect attention away from their oppressive policies, or quell dissent at home, to name a few reasons. It’s entirely possible that Ahmadinejad is doing this in order to provoke the West to the point where someone takes action, and all hell breaks loose. Strange as this may sound, this would actually be the preferable of the two options. If Ahmadinejad is crazy like a fox, as opposed to merely crazy, then he probably wouldn’t actually unleash nuclear weapons on Israel – he’d just talk about it in order to stir up hatred. As I’ve said repeatedly, the very last thing that most of the dictators of the Arab world want is for Israel to disappear off the map. Because without Israel as the single unifying factor, they would simply attack each other (well, more so than they already do).

However, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s entirely possible that Ahmadinejad is just as crazy as he seems. His fanatical hatred of Israel might not be calculated, but real. In which case, the world has real cause to worry, because he might not care if Iran is wiped off the map as long as he can take Israel down with him. This is where the prospect of a nuclear Iran becomes very, very scary.

So which is it? Column A? Column B? A little of both? I don’t really think we have the option of waiting around to find out. But then, who’s left in the world to actually do anything to stop Ahmadinejad, before it’s too late?

We can’t be naive and assume that the mere fact that today’s election took place means that democracy will take firm root in Iraq. But it’s a beginning. Baby steps.

But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s spewings are ironically worrisome precisely because he seems to believe them. Unlike many Arab leaders who frequently call for Israel’s destruction when in truth it’s the last thing they actually want, Ahmadinejad actually seems crazy enough to put pragmatic or political concerns aside in favour of his virulent hatred.

Ahmadinejad knows that nobody in the world will stop him from going nuclear. He knows he can say the most hateful things possible and all the world will do is shake their heads and scold. And he knows that if he ever unleashes nuclear weapons at Israel, the Israelis would – and probably could – retaliate by wiping out Tehran.

The problem is, he may actually hate Israel so much that he doesn’t care.

If suicide bombers are so dangerous because they have no regard for their own life, then Ahmadinejad is the king of all suicide bombers; unpredictable and possibly likely to sacrifice his entire country to satisfy his blood lust. And it may well be too late to do anything to stop him from acquiring nuclear power.

Ahmadinejad has engaged the rest of the world in the ultimate game of chicken, and the rest of the world swerved first. The only question now is, can the Iranian forces for moderation and change respond quickly enough to rein him in? I’d like to think so, but it’s not looking good.

Initial indications are that the crash was due to engine trouble. But with Iran’s military, who really knows? I’m not about to start inventing conspiracy theories, but it does serve us well to remember that all news being released from Iran is heavily censored.

What happens when a terrorist organization decides to enter the political arena? Does it automatically become legitimate?

[ . . . ]

The truth is that terrorists by definition have entered the political arena from the start because terrorism is violence with a political agenda. Without the political context, bombing, kidnapping, and shooting are simply crimes. Terrorism, like war, is politics by other means, an extension of politics when negotiation or discussion break down – or never existed.

The questions also are misleading because we have discovered that the world’s commitment to morality and justice is relative: It varies depending on the players involved. Especially when it comes to the Middle East, the world’s moral clarity gets muddy, the moral compass goes haywire.

[ . . . ]

We cannot be fooled by [Hizbollah] or by Hamas. Terrorists in suits and ties remain cold-blooded killers.

Terrorist organizations have a history of trying to “go legit” while still maintaining their original violent purposes. But Gil Troy’s argument cuts both ways: if a terrorist in a suit and tie is just a terrorist, then how is a democratically-elected terrorist preferable to dictatorship? If a society gets the leadership it deserves, then shouldn’t we let democracy unfold?

That doesn’t mean, of course, that any other government – Israel included – should be forced to deal with them.

What about what’s happening in Egypt, where the first hints of democracy have yielded a corrupt election where there are no clear “good guys”, because the people being prevented from voting and running were associated with the ultra-fanatic Muslim Brotherhood? What is the preferable outcome – a fair and impartial election of terrorists, or an “election” of so-called moderates thanks to rigging and intimidation? As it happened, we had a rigged election of terrorists, so it’s almost the worst of both worlds. But how does that fit in with the theory that we ought to push for democratic reforms in the Middle East?

One thing is for certain: As long the world continues to reward terrorists by giving them legitimacy in political arenas, terrorism will continue to thrive.

Iran has begun processing a new batch of uranium despite Western pressure on it to halt sensitive atomic work, possibly harming attempts to defuse a standoff over its nuclear aims, a diplomat said on Wednesday.

[ . . . ]

Western countries suspect Iran of seeking nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian atomic program, which Tehran vehemently denies, saying it only wants to generate electricity.

Yeah, right. And hell is just a sauna.

Somehow I don’t think Iran is planning to wipe Israel off the map using mere electricity.

Gunmen killed a second defense lawyer acting in Saddam Hussein’s trial on Tuesday, renewing questions over whether the former president can get a fair trial amid Iraq’s daily violence.

Another defense lawyer was slightly wounded in the attack on their car in Baghdad, police and defense team sources said.

The shooting followed the murder of another defense lawyer who was shot the day after the televised start of proceedings on October 19.

Meanwhile in Germany, it turns out that Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel’s lawyer was disbarred and jailed for – what else? – inciting racial hatred:

Judge Ulrich Meinerzhagen ruled that Horst Mahler, a disbarred lawyer associated with the violent far-left Red Army Faction in the 1970s who has since become a supporter of far-right and anti-Semitic ideas, could not be part of the defense team.

He also dismissed Zuendel’s publicly appointed defender Sylvia Stolz on the grounds that Mahler’s ideas were reflected in her written submissions to the court.

Mahler, whose license to practice as a lawyer was withdrawn last year, was sentenced to nine months in prison in January for inciting racial hatred.

One of the cornerstones of a free and fair justice system is the right of everyone – including the most despicable excuses for human beings – to a fair trial and to a competent defense.

Now, Zundel made the decision himself to hire an incompetent defense lawyer, and his trial will surely continue once he has secured new representation. Germany’s legal system has provisions for this, and Zundel will be tried – and likely convicted and punished appropriately.

But Iraq is not Germany, and the notion of an impartial judiciary there is extremely shaky. Saddam’s trial was never going to be anything other than a political circus – but it was also supposed to have important symbolism to the people of Iraq that a judicial system can work. Unfortunately, that’s not working out so well.

“The only logical solution to solve the Palestinian issue is to hold free elections with the participation of Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories and a recognition of the nation’s legitimacy,” he said after a meeting with Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

When Iran uses the term “occupied territories” it usually means not only the West Bank and Gaza but the whole of Israel, whose right to exist Iran does not recognize.

Ahmadinejad appeared to be calling for full democratic representation for Palestinian refugees and migrs anywhere.

This is just another variation of the “one-state solution” that people seeking Israel’s destruction call for. Their idea is to turn the Jews into a minority among voters, thus ensuring that a Palestinian government is elected in Israel that will create an Islamic state in the place of Israel and relegate the Jews to second-class citizenship.

But of course, “democracy for all” sounds so much more palatable. And this will surely give the EU, Russia, and other countries the “out” they’re looking for to avoid pressing for action against Iran.

Same sentiment, different words. But watch the reaction.

European Union leaders and Russia joined the United States and Canada in condemning the comments attributed to Ahmadinejad and Iranian envoys in capitals across Europe, including Russia, were summoned to explain the remarks.

“Calls for violence, and for the destruction of any state, are manifestly inconsistent with any claim to be a mature and responsible member of the international community,” EU leaders said in a statement issued at a one-day summit outside London.

“Such comments will cause concern about Iran’s role in the region, and its future intentions,” they said.

Does that mean that Russia will stop selling uranium to Iran? Or that the EU will stop legitimatizing Hamas and stop funding the Palestinian Authority’s terrorism slush fund?

No? Well, until then, this condemnation is nothing but empty rhetoric.

“Israel must be wiped off the map,” Ahmadinejad told a conference called “The World without Zionism,” attended by some 3,000 conservative students who chanted “Death to Israel” and “Death to America.”

[ . . . ]

“The Islamic world will not let its historic enemy live in its heartland,” he said.

Ahmadinejad, who took office in August, said Israel would be destroyed by a new wave of Palestinian attacks.

“Surely the new wave of (attacks) in Palestine … will erase this stigma from the Islamic world,” he said.

Tehran denies accusations it trains and arms Palestinian militant groups, saying it only offers moral support.

“Moral” support. Sure. What exactly is “moral” about advocating the murder and slaughter of over 6 million Jews? Maybe we ought to ask Hitler about that one.

What I wonder is what exactly people thought would be going on at a conference entitled “The World Without Zionism”? Chants of Kumbaya around the campfire?

Damian figures that Iran’s nuclear ambitions have a specific purpose. I wonder if Iran would call launching nukes at Tel Aviv “moral support” as well?

But there’s no guarantee of success. Many Arab blogs and Internet chat sessions have become consumed with how unfunny “Al Shamshoon” is. “They’ve ruined it! Oh yes they have, sob. … Why? Why, why oh why?!!!!” wrote a blogger, “Noors,” from Oman.

Some longtime “Simpson” fans who are Arabs are incensed over the Arabized version. “This is just beyond the pale,” wrote As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor at California State University, Stanislaus, whose blog, angryarab blogspot, often touches on politics and the media. After viewing a promotional segment of “Al Shamshoon,” Prof. AbuKhalil wrote, “It was just painful. … The guy who played Homer Simpson was one of the most unfunny people I ever watched. Just drop the project, and air reruns of Tony Danza’s show instead.”

Few shows have more obsessed fans than “The Simpsons,” and their vast online community is worried about whether classic Simpsons dialogue can even be translated. One blogger wrote, “‘Hi-diddly-ho, neighbors!’ How the h — are they going to translate that? Or this great quote: Mr Burns: Oooh, so Mother Nature needs a favor?! Well maybe she should have thought of that when she was besetting us with droughts and floods and poison monkeys! Nature started the fight for survival, and now she wants to quit because she’s losing. Well I say, hard cheese.”

I honestly don’t know how the satire, cultural references, guest stars, or much of anything in the Simpsons could ever be translated. Never mind the beer-is-now-soda thing… without the laughs, what’s the point?

Well, it seems the US has forgotten all about it:

“Our views on Hamas are well known. Hamas is a terrorist organization. We will not deal with a terrorist organization. However, we believe that it’s up to the Palestinians to determine who will participate in their election,” the senior administration official said.

Their explanation is equally winning:

U.S. officials and diplomats have said that any shift in policy was pragmatic: Hamas-funded social services are popular with many Palestinians; it is winning local races and could make a strong showing in the parliamentary elections. Some Hamas-backed politicians and affiliates are seen as moderates.

European allies, including Britain and France, have been pushing behind the scenes for Washington to drop its call to dismantle Hamas completely.

Anyone who thought that the EU would be a helpful or neutral party in the peace process should pretty much end that notion with the last statement.

High-ranking Syrian and Lebanese officials were involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, with suspicion cast even on President Emile Lahoud, a U.N. investigation said on Thursday.

The inquiry led by veteran German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis into the February 14 killing of Hariri established “that many leads point directly toward Syrian security officials as being involved with the assassination,” said the investigative report submitted to the U.N. Security Council.

It was therefore now incumbent on Syria “to clarify a considerable part of the unresolved questions” facing investigators, the report said.

Harsh language. I bet the Syrian dictatorship is shaking in its boots happily ignoring the report because it knows how toothless the U.N. is to actually do anything about it.

Prediction: Next week’s U.N. report will find a way to pin Hariri’s death on Israel.

Iraqis vote on their constitution tomorrow, as they struggle to implement democracy despite increasing attacks and sabotage.

And, with rookie Yann Danis in nets for the first time, the Habs shut out Carolina on Wednesday. Next, they’ll take on the Leafs at home… and I’ll be happily cheering them on from the reds!

Have a good weekend, everyone.

A suicide car bomber blew himself up outside a Shi’ite mosque north of Baghdad on Friday, killing 11 and wounding 24, the latest attack in a three-day surge of violence that has killed more than 200 people.

The blast came two days after Iraq’s al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, declared an all-out war on the country’s Shi’ite Muslim majority.

Iraqi police Captain Saed Ahmed said the bomb went off outside the Great Prophet mosque in Tuz Khurmatu, a mixed Sunni and Shi’ite town 160 km (100 miles) north of the capital, as worshippers were emerging from prayers on the Muslim holy day.

He said a Saudi wearing an explosives-laden belt, who was apparently working with the bomber, was arrested soon after.

Militants have frequently attacked Shi’ite mosques over the past 18 months in an apparent attempt to goad Iraq’s Shi’ite majority into retaliation and spark a sectarian civil war with the Sunni Arab minority, once dominant under Saddam Hussein.

The mass hysteria caused at the mere suggestion that a Jewish person dares to even set foot near a Muslim holy spot is enough to cause war. And yet, the terrorists frequently stockpile weapons in mosques, attack mosques of their enemies, and destory holy places belonging to pretty much every religion. Why is it that nobody even blinked at the torching of synagogues in former Gaza settlements by Palestinians… and yet could you even fathom the world’s outcry if a Jewish person so much as dropped a speck of dirt in a mosque?

The Israeli parliament on Wednesday approved a deal to hand control of a buffer zone along the Gaza-Egypt border to Egyptian security forces after Israel completes its pullout from the territory.

The agreement, sanctioning the deployment of 750 Egyptian border police on the Egyptian side of the Gaza frontier to replace Israeli troops stationed in the volatile “Philadelphi Corridor,” passed by a vote of 53-28, the Knesset said.

This deal has been in place for about a month, and you can bet that the Islamic Jihad and Hamas have been busily recruiting, threatening or bribing Egyptian officials in preparation for the opening of the floodgates.

The question is, who is left to stop the nuclear ambitions of one of the most dangerous theocratic thuggeries in the Mideast? Not the UN, which has never had the ability to do anything. Not the EU, which will hold an emergency session to see if they broke an agreement that was impossible to enforce in the first place. Not the US or, which after Iran have no political capital left to do anything even if they wanted to. Even Israel, which everyone is secretly hoping will play bad guy and repeat Osarik and then get chewed out by the world, can’t take that kind of risk to its security this time around.

North Korea’s already nuclear; it’s too late there. Iran is steadily marching toward that point of no return… and there’s nobody left to stop them. I fear that future generations of humanity will be paying the price for our spineless world for a long time.

Still, as long as Muslims live in pretense, we will be affirming that we have something to hide. It’s not enough for us to protest that radicals are exploiting Islam as a sword. Of course they are. Now, moderate Muslims must stop exploiting Islam as a shield – one that protects us from authentic introspection and our neighbours from genuine understanding.

Manji has risked an awful lot to publish her besteselling book and a series of essays, give speeches, and become a visible force for change that has been too easily silenced through extremist intimidation. The least we can do is read what she has to say.

(Via Debbye).

Bush and Abdullah may be bosom buddies, and to some people this is fine and dandy because Bin Laden and Al Quaeda are fighting against the Saudi regime.

But this is a deal with the devil – always has been, always will be (as long as it continues). It’s time for Bush to recognize that sometimes the guy fighting the bad guys isn’t a good guy: he’s another kind of bad guy. And the enemy of my enemy, in this case, is not my friend.

Somehow, I doubt that we’ll hear any such speeches from Western leaders at King Fahd’s funeral, though.

Was it: a) George W. Bush b) Ariel Sharon? c) Tony Blair? d) Jacques Chirac?

Believe it or not, the answer is d: Jacques Chirac.

Yeah, I was shocked too. For about ten seconds. Then I read the whole article:

The situation in Lebanon and Syria was the focus of the Sharon-Chirac working lunch, which lasted two and a half hours. Sharon asked France to exert its influence in Lebanon, to prevent clashes along the northern border while the disengagement plan is underway. He warned that Iran may push Hezbollah to take action against Israel.

Pandering to a terrorist state trying to get nuclear weapons. Oh, right. That’s the Chirac we know.

And of course there’s more:

Chirac said that Resolution 1559 should be implemented to the letter, but disagreed with Sharon’s approach, saying that Hezbollah plays “a stabilizing role” in Lebanon today. Chirac spoke with pride about the central role France played in the build-up to the elections in Lebanon.

Same old Chirac. Pop quiz over. Regularly scheduled programming resumed.

At least 83 people were killed and 200 injured when car bombs ripped through shopping and hotel areas in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Saturday in the worst attack in Egypt since 1981.

Shaken European tourists spoke of mass panic and hysteria as people fled the carnage in the early hours, with bodies strewn across the roads, people screaming and sirens wailing.

The regional governor said two car bombs and possibly a suitcase bomb had rocked the resort, popular with divers and European holidaymakers, as well as diplomats who have convened world summits. Egypt has called it “the city of peace.”

One blast tore the front off the Ghazala Gardens Hotel in Naama Bay, the site of most of the resort’s luxury hotels. People were feared trapped in the rubble of the lobby.

A car broke into the hotel compound and exploded in front of the building, South Sinai Governor Mustafa Afifi said.

There are reports of “claims of responsibility” from an Al-Quaeda linked group. The stated motive/excuse was “retaliation for crimes against Muslims”.

This is truly sickening. But what I really can’t help but wonder is how long it will take for someone to blame even this on the U.S. and Israel, somehow.

An Iraqi bomb attack killed 98 people. We barely even blink anymore with the news of terrorist attacks in Iraq – maybe because they’re so commonplace, maybe because people assume it’s a country at war so for some reason these things are expected, maybe because some people even tacitly support them in their intense hatred for Bush and the Americans. I don’t know about any of that, but I do know that the 98 lives that were lost are just as tragic as 98 lives lost anyplace else, and that we need to stop taking terror for granted in Iraq.

In “what truce?”, part one zillion, five Israelis were wounded – 2 seriously – in mortar attacks on Neveh Dekalim, and the weekend saw over 10 Qassam rockets fired on Sderot. It is unclear which of the Palestinian factions is behind the attacks, though Hamas appears to be involved in the former. You know, the same Hamas that the Guardian thinks ain’t so bad despite its mandate to seek Israel’s destruction.

And the new Harry Potter book was released yesterday, to the delight of fans everywhere. I’ll wait to borrow someone’s copy, and hopefully nobody will spoil it for me before then.

Sickening.

Sure, because everyone knows the first thing we should do after being hit with a terrorist attack is give money to terrorists…

The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, responsible for many suicide attacks on Israelis, condemned the London bombings.

“Targeting civilians in their transport means and lives is denounced and rejected,” Moussa Abu Marzouk, deputy chief of the group’s political bureau told Reuters in Damascus by telephone.

Is that so? So all those bus bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Haifa and Beersheva were what if not attacks on “civilians in their transport means and lives”?

Excuse me, I think I’m going to be sick.

Foreign ministers of Muslim countries on Thursday pledged cooperation with Iraqi authorities to help end a bloody insurgency waged there by Iraqis and foreign Arabs.

Ministers of member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) meeting in Yemen agreed to help “rebuild Iraq and enabling the Iraqi government to maintain security and stability,” Yemeni Foreign Minister Abubakr al-Qirbi told reporters.

I don’t know, maybe because of this?

Strategy Page tracks about sixteen wars in the world today. Guess how many involve Muslim states?

We track sixteen as active (Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Sudan, Colombia, Kashmir, Pakistan, Ivory Coast, Congo, Somalia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Chechnya, Burundi and Thailand.), plus about a dozen that are really low level, just ended (and still liable to restart) or just dormant for the moment.

Yep, the Muslim states are clearly the experts on ending war and restoring calm.