Is someone feeling stupid?

This is what Israel got out of depleting its last stocks of sympathy in the civilized world? Suckers.

Hell is going to host the Winter Olympics before Hizbollah surrenders its weapons. Anyone demanding otherwise will be told what King Leonidas of the Spartans told the Persians at Thermopylae: “Come and get them.”

And if any external force — be it the Lebanese “army,” a beefed-up UNIFIL operation, or any combination thereof — is suicidal enough to attempt this on Israel’s behalf in a hardcore Shia region which Israel has just turned to dust for the second time, then Hell is going to host it, too.

As is painfully obvious to anyone who hasn’t swapped his brain for a FOX News antenna, this war was absurd even on its own terms. It started out as a quest to reclaim two prisoners of war, but the chosen means (strategic bombing of Beirut and South Lebanon) led Hizbollah to deploy its strategic deterrent. Then, by mission creep, the Israeli objective morphed into the supposedly “existential” one of removing the said deterrent while it was already being put to use in response to the Israeli campaign! How can a mere threat be intolerable whereas its actual realization, to the tune of 3,790 missiles, is just the cost of doing business?

Moreover, if the threat truly was “existential” — i.e. both intended to and capable of annihilating Israel — then how come only 41 Israeli civilians have been killed? That’s annihilation in the slow lane for you.

Yet these are still significant losses. When it now turns out that they were the price for weakening Israel’s mid-term and long-term security, one must conclude that the Israelis have played themselves for fools.

I’m sure those two captured soldiers, wherever they are, concur.

For the Arab side to declare victory after clashing with Israel is merely what ritual demands. What is new is that the Arab side really did score a strategic and historic victory this time. Here is an analysis from Strategic Forecasting (subscription):

Sometimes a tactical draw is enough for a strategic win. The mystique of Israeli power has been dispelled, and Israel, hellbent on “restoring” its “deterrent,” has undermined it instead. Meanwhile it has sown enough hate to fuel Islamist radicalism for generations.

Of course, it hasn’t escaped the Arab masses that it was a paramilitary, subnational movement that stood up to the bully, while the perfumed operette dictators stood idly by, as they did during the invasion of Iraq. This too bodes ill for the traditional power elite on which Usrael relies.

Nasser was beloved (and to some extent, still is) just for trying to take on Israel, even though he failed. Nasrallah has tried and succeeded. As to those in Lebanon who still do not love Hizbollah, there is the Machiavellian maxim that being feared is more desirable than being loved. Warned the Lebanese pundit Michael Young in the NYT back on August 4:

Uh-oh.

As far as I can see, this has been a disaster for Usrael and for long-term Western interests in general. But I’m sure the luminous minds of Bush and Olmert have got it all figured out.

The calculation behind the wasting of Lebanon was akin to supposing that, upon 9/11, Americans would turn on the US Government and demand the disarming of the US military.

While Israel, a rogue state, is reducing its northern neighbor to a failed state, Sudan already is both. The escalating disaster in the west of that giant country, larger than Western Europe, is being totally eclipsed by the Lebanon war:

It is not inconceivable that denizens of Darfur are less understanding.

Village torched by Janjaweed milita, Darfur.

Writes leading Darfur specialist, Eric Reeves:

The stumbling block is oil-thirsty China, whose intransigence on behalf of its rogue client state equals that of the US on Israel’s behalf. Yet there is an asymmetry: Whereas China threatens to veto any Chapter 7 resolution authorizing an international peacekeeping force in defiance of Khartoum, the US threatens to veto any resolution that does not authorize such a force in defiance of Beirut. In other words, China wields its veto power to buttress legal state sovereignty; the US wields its ditto in contradiction thereof. About the humanitarian dimension, neither really gives a damn.

The result may very well be that an international peacekeeping force with a robust mandate is sent to occupy south Lebanon on behalf of Israel as a reward for the latter’s willful and catastrophic escalation of a low-intensity border conflict, while millions of Darfurians continue to be starved, gang raped, shot, or hacked to death by genocidal Janjaweed, abetted by the bombs of the Sudanese Air Force.

Thus the rogue regimes of Khartoum and Tel Aviv will be equally pleased.

It’s a sobering prospect for anyone clinging to the hope that in A.D. 2006, power and basic decency can mix.

For some background on the Darfur disaster, see my post from earlier this year: They sing when they rape.

So British police has foiled a major international terrorist plot.

Said plot aimed to blow up as much as ten commercial airliners en route from the UK to the US. Most of the around 21 suspects are British born Muslims. Not Saudi born. British born.

Does this ring a bell? The Iraq War and other misadventures of the War on Terror ™ are not merely irrelevant to the objective of quelling the international jihadi Salafist movement: they positively boost the latter. In particular they give rise to terrorism against the countries leading this perceived “War on the Ummah,” the terrorists frequently being alienated Muslim citizens of same.

For a while now, we have been reassured that al-Qaeda is finished off as a command-and-control structure, persisting solely on a “franchise” basis. The fresh mega-operation is the latest sign that the reality may be more complex. Last month I quoted one Bruce Hoffman at the Rand Corporation (not a hotbed of leftist pacifism) to the effect that a reassessment may be in order. Let’s have a fuller excerpt of that WaPo article:

Predictably, Bush called the plot a “stark reminder that this nation [the USA] is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.” But pace Chimpoleon, when such ploys are actually foiled in time, it’s due to police work, not preventive war.

In the aforementioned post from July I also quoted a certain Osama bin Laden’s own account of the formative experiences leading him to find his vocation. This, too, is worth a rerun:

I ask again: how many jihadi mass murderers will go into business after the unholy trinity of Bush, Blair, and Olmert are done grinding Lebanon back to dust? Could something possibly be learned from history over and above the hackneyed mantra of “Münich 1938″?

However much Israel’s war of choice is sold to its Jewish majority as a war of necessity, this doesn’t work with Arabs. Least of all with Israel’s own 1.3 million Arab citizens, many of whom are also victims of the increasingly savage missile attacks, and nearly all of whom watch Arabic TV stations.

These Israeli Arabs, or Palestinians, were disenchanted with the “Jewish state” of Israel at the outset. This is due not only to solidarity with their kin in the occupied areas. Nor is it only due to the apartheid-like law reserving 94 percent of land for Jewish purchase only; nor to the one excluding Muslims from serving in the military (thus limiting their eligibility for social benefits) as well as in the police, the security services, and the prisons (though not as inmates); nor to a host of discriminatory statutes ranging from a 2003 “emergency regulation” restricting the right of Arabs to naturalize their families, to lower children’s allowances for non-Jews. It is due to the sum of all these, and more generally, to systematically occupying the lowest rung of the socioeconomic ladder:

These data are from 2000, but things are hardly better now. For further reading, see this book entitled The Other Side of Israel, written by an Israeli Jew who, as it happens, grew up in apartheid South Africa.

On top of this one now has the simmering resentment over the brutal, meaningless destruction of Lebanon, with its consequent missile rain over Arab and Jew alike.

It’s common in Israel to talk about an ‘Arab population bomb’; indeed, several of the aforementioned discriminatory practices are justified in terms of such. But unless a constructive ‘Operation Change of Direction’ be launched, and soon, some Arab Israelis may well find themselves at their wit’s end. That could involve far uglier bombs than childbirth.

Olmert applies avant garde logic to the Kosovo conflict in order to defend his pointless atrocities:

Never mind that Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon wasn’t prompted by rocket attacks either. What stands out is that Serbia’s brutal counter-insurgency cum ethnic cleansing and the NATO effort to put an end to this — about which much can be said, but to which Olmert himself does not object — are both filed under “European attacks on Kosovo”! Fantastic!

Jostein Gaarder, the author of the global literary phenomenon Sophie’s World (printed in 26m copies in 53 languages), launches a scorching attack on Israel in Aftenposten, Norway’s paper of record. Gaarder, a historian of ideas, describes himself as a friend of the Jewish people but doubts whether Israel truly is the same. Suffice it to say that this will not appear in the New York Times anytime soon.

The form of Gaarder’s condemnation is inspired by Amos, the first Judaic prophet whose message is preserved in scroll (ca. 750 B.C.). Quoting Wikipedia: “The central idea of the book of Amos according to most scholars is that Yahweh puts his people on the same level as the nations that surround it — Yahweh expects the same morality of them all.”

Please note: the below is an unofficial translation with no connection to Jostein Gaarder. Any errors are mine alone. On the other hand, I do not endorse all the views expressed: see my postscript.

There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.

We do not believe in the notion of God’s chosen people. We laugh at this people’s fancies and weep over its misdeeds. To act as God’s chosen people is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

Limits to tolerance

There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the God of flora, fauna, and galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it funny stone tablets, burning bushes, and a license to kill.

We call child murderers ‘child murderers’ and will never accept that such have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We say but this: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing, shame on every terrorist strike against civilians, be it carried out by Hamas, Hizballah, or the state of Israel!

Unscrupulous art of war

We acknowledge and pay heed to Europe’s deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms, and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for Jews to get their own home. However, the state of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flouted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions, and it can no longer expect protection from same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The time of trouble shall soon be over. The state of Israel has seen its Soweto.

We are now at the watershed. There is no turning back. The state of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms.

Without defense, without skin

May spirit and word sweep away the apartheid walls of Israel. The state of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy on the civilian population. For it is not civilian individuals at whom our doomsaying is directed.

We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but well, but we reserve the right not to eat Jaffa oranges as long as they taste foul and are poisonous. It was endurable to live some years without the blue grapes of apartheid.

They celebrate their triumphs

We do not believe that Israel mourns forty killed Lebanese children more than it for over three thousand years has lamented forty years in the desert. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs like they once cheered the scourges of the Lord as “fitting punishment” for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord, God of Israel, appears as an insatiable sadist.) We query whether most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.

For we have seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs to be dropped on the civilian population of Lebanon and Palestine. Little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at death and torment across the fronts.

The retribution of blood vengeance

We do not recognize the rhetoric of the state of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution of the blood vengeance with “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” We do not recognize the principle of one or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population-wide diets as political weapons. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

He said: “Do to others as you would have them do to you.” We do not recognize a state founded on antihumanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and war religion. Or as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: “Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.”

Compassion and forgiveness

We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David, but that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness.

Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.

Israel does not listen

For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel does not listen. It was not the Pharisee that helped the man who lay by the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan; today we would say, a Palestinian. For we are human first of all — then Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. Or as the Jewish rabbi said: “And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?” We do not accept the abduction of soldiers. But nor do we accept the deportation of whole populations or the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers.

We recognize the state of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the state of Israel that fails to recognize, respect, or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more; more water and more villages. To obtain this, there are those who want, with God’s assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. The Palestinians have so many other countries, certain Israeli politicians have argued; we have only one.

The USA or the world?

Or as the highest protector of the state of Israel puts it: “May God continue to bless America.” A little child took note of that. She turned to her mother, saying: “Why does the President always end his speeches with ‘God bless America’? Why not, ‘God bless the world’?”

Then there was a Norwegian poet who let out this childlike sigh of the heart: “Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?” It was he that wrote so beautifully of the Jew and the Jewess. But he rejected the notion of God’s chosen people. He personally liked to call himself a Muhammedan.

Calm and mercy

We do not recognize the state of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath. If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population have to flee the occupied areas into another diaspora, then we say: May the surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is forever a crime without mitigation to lay hand on refugees and stateless people.

Peace and free passage for the evacuating civilian population no longer protected by a state. Fire not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now like snails without shells, vulnerable like slow caravans of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless like women and children and the old in Qana, Gaza, Sabra, and Chatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter, give them milk and honey!

Let not one Israeli child be deprived of life. Far too many children and civilians have already been murdered.

Postscript by Sirocco: I am quite ambivalent about this piece because of how it seems to lay the crimes of Israel at the feet of Judaism, implying that the Jewish religion has failed to absorb the humanism and universalism of Christianity. I think a more apt perspective is the following.

Yet its blind patronage may not last forever. And without it, Israel will reap the whirlwind.

Update: Here is my translation of Gaarder’s follow-up article, wherein he clarifies his stance.

A new report by HRW confirms what has been evident for the last three weeks.

Unsurprisingly, most in the Haaretz talkback section take a different tack (I don’t even want to know what they are saying in the rightwing rags). Here is one characteristic uttering by one Shmuel Goldstein:

Yeah, why don’t you go do that. Give Dr. Karadžić my regards.

From the Angry Arab. I don’t know whether this is true, but it wouldn’t surprise me:

This calls to mind a little known story which Steven Spielberg left out in his movie Munich: The only act of international terrorism ever committed in my country, Norway, was done by Mossad in 1973, when their hit team murdered Ahmed Bouchiki, an innocent Moroccan waiter whom they mistook for a Black September leader. The mix-up was mind-numbingly stupid, as was their attempt to get away, although some of them did escape.

Being experienced at terrorism doesn’t necessarily mean you get it right.

At 11:21 this morning, Olmert announced that Hezbollah infrastructure had been “completely destroyed.”

At 11:27, Hezbollah announced that 200 missiles will be launched at Israel today; 150 180 over 200 and counting have arrived so far.

The only way this could have been more comical would be if Olmert had made his boast dressed in a flyboy suit.

As vicious as the onslaught against Lebanon is, we might as well recall that in Iraq there is the equivalent of nearly two Qana massacres on average every day.

Nonetheless the US President has the audacity to present Iraq as a model of democracy which Russia should strive to emulate, to Vladimir Putin’s face, in front of press.

How come this monster’s approval ratings are not in single digits? One reason is that a majority of Americans are blitheringly ignorant imbeciles of the kind that thinks the sun orbits the earth, or more ludicrously still, that “history will give the US credit for bringing freedom and democracy” to Iraq. However, I suspect there is an even more egregious reason as well.

Most Americans simply do not care about non-Americans. They couldn’t care less about what goes on in Iraq insofar as it doesn’t affect Americans, especially themselves. If you doubt this, consider the runup to the 2000 Presidential election, where it was a commonplace that one couldn’t find two Americans in a row that cared about foreign policy. Otherwise, a man whose experience with the world abroad was pretty much limited to Mexican hookers would never have come within a bloodless coup d’état’s reach of the Oval Office. Even the rediscovery of the outer world on the morning of September 11 2001 had nothing to do with an interest in the welfare of same and everything to do with restoring, by whichever means, the illusion of living on a planet of one’s own, shielded by the seas, a ferocious military, and Star Wars from the rest of the pale blue dot.

That’s why the ad hoc, ex post facto justification for illegally invading Iraq — “spreading freedom and democracy” — would have been ridiculous even without the civil war. The American people would never have given a used kleenex for “spreading freedom and democracy” to a country which, after four years of continuous coverage, two thirds of young adults cannot find on the map.

Not only do the vast majority of Americans not know that their so-called great nation has sponsored the worst of the worst war criminals and murderous despots to walk the earth since World War II, including but not limited to Mobutu Sese-Seko, Pol Pot (after the genocide!), Mohammad Suharto, the Shah of Persia, Jonas Savimbi, Augusto Pinochet, Gulbuddin Hekmatayar, Fulgencio Batista, Rafael Trujillo, Manuel Noriega, Hissène Habré, Carlos Castillo Armas, Antonio Somoza, and Saddam Hussein. They also wouldn’t care if told.

A nation’s thoughts and dreams and priorities are reflected in its movies. I honestly cannot think of a single Hollywood movie, apart from cheesy “historical” dramas like Ben Hur, wherein the world outside “America” appears as anything but a scary place for Americans to be at risk. In the ongoing movie cycle called Iraqi Freedom, US soldiers and Marines are at risk from ungrateful savages; and to the limited extent that there is a movement to call off the operation, it has precious little to do with any wish of the Iraqis. It has to do with the wish of Americans for a happy ending, wherein their heroes helicopter off to safety as the $1-2 trillion set explodes in the background. Titles.

While we are all preoccuped with Lebanon’s death by thousand cuts, the Israeli destruction of Gaza threatens “total breakdown of the fabric of society,” reports the Independent.

How grotesquely appropriate to name it “Samson’s Pillars.” Here’s what Samson, according to myth, accomplished in Gaza:

Sounds like terrorism, no? Now, what pathological condition might have engendered such behavior?

Well, when it comes to the government of Israel, some of us do.

An op-ed by the Norwegian novelist Torgrim Eggen, readworthy especially for its historical point of view.

Now they are bombing Beirut again. That’s what it’s like to have the world’s worst neighbor.

THE INTERNET is quite a tool. I am sitting here with Google Earth looking at satellite images of Beirut. I think I have found Khraibeh Street, where I lived in the fall of 1993.
     Khraibeh Street is situated in the hillside in Hadeth east of the airport, and from my roof terrace adorned with pictoresque bullet holes I enjoyed a panorama view of western Beirut. Nearest was the ghetto Hay al-Sellum, which US Marines called “Hooterville” when they served as a peacekeeping force in Beirut from 1982 to 1984. Hay al-Sellum is Hizbollahstan. The area was dangerous, claimed my Christian hosts, so when we ventured there it was on the condition that I was “Swiss.” This, of course, was thanks to the Oslo Accords.

NORTH OF “Hooterville,” in good view of my terrace, was the Palestinian refugee camp of Bourj al-Barajneh. Or rather, what was left of it. North-west of this, in turn, are Sabra and Shatila, the scene of perhaps the blackest chapter of Israeli and Lebanese history.
     I recall people asking: — What are you doing in Beirut day after day? Why don’t you head up to see the Roman ruins at Baalbek, or the ruins of Byblos? My reply: — Don’t you think I see enough ruins from the terrace? There was, as it were, nothing else.

AND NOW THEY are at it bombing Beirut again. What wrong have these people done?
     It would be unfair to blame all of Lebanon’s misery on its southern neighbor. Let us say Israel is merely responsible for ninety percent. It is shocking what brutality the Israelis display when Lebanon is the target. The current Chief of Staff is Dan Halutz, and the acts of war had barely begun when he declared that they would “bomb Lebanon 20 years back in time.” This week he reportedly said that Israel “will bomb ten housing blocks in Beirut for every missile hitting Haifa.” To avoid the commonplace accusations of “anti-Semitism” I shall not mention what this is reminiscent of. According to the Jerusalem Post, Halutz was misquoted. In any case, this is a man who is staying the course toward the Hague. His former boss Ariel Sharon, now in coma, should have been charged there as well.

IN THE WAR OF 1982, Israel managed to commit just about every war crime in the book. Bombing of hospitals. Terror bombing of residential quarters. Use of phosphorous and cluster bombs against civilians. Summary executions of prisoners. You name it. Israel was even able to bomb Beirut’s sole remaining synagogue. All this and more can be read in Pity the Nation: Lebanon and War by Robert Fisk, hereby recommended. This is the book that will make you laugh out loud the next time you hear the term ’surgical strikes’.

SO WHY dwell at length on a war 24 years past? Because that was when Israel invented Hizbollah. It was an accomplishment making the expression ‘to shoot oneself in the leg’ sound tame.
     When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 to weed out the PLO, the poor Shia minority in southern Lebanon were relatively impartial. The conflict lacked the religous resonances it has today, and besides, the majority of the PLO, Fatah, et cetera were Sunnis. The problem was that the Shias were in the way. The savagery and brutality with which Israel proceeded, first against southern villages and then against the quarters of Beirut to which the villagers fled (those who weren’t mowed down by Israeli aircraft underway), led to radicalization. The Shias became militant, and there was inspiration (as well as finances) on offer in Iran.
     On November 11 1982 it said boom. Israel’s military headquarters in Tyre went up in smoke; 75 Israelis died. A previously unknown group that called itself Islamic Jihad took responsibility for what was in fact the first suicide operation in the Middle East. Islamic Jihad is believed to have been a branch of “the Party of God.”

CAN I TEMPT with an interesting moral dilemma? A “terrorist organization” stations a SAM site on a hospital roof in violation of the Geneva Conventions. A martial power bombs the hospital and kills everyone inside — doctors, nurses, and civilian patients. Is it possible to talk about ‘degrees’ of responsibility here? I think it is. The “terrorists” put civilian lives in danger. The martial power executes them. Much of today’s Lebanon conflict is about such things, about “living shields” and “collateral damage.”
     The above example is once again from Israel’s invasion in 1982. To be fair, they also bombed hospitals on which the “terrorists” had stationed nothing whatsoever. At Bourj al-Barajneh it appeared that the Israeli pilot had used the Red Cross-symbol on the roof to aim. After all, there could be “terrorists” in the hospital beds. This year it seems that shooting at ambulances is the sport in vogue. Or was it UN observers?

ISRAEL’S FORMER Prime Minister Menachem Begin once declared that “if Adolf Hitler were hiding in a housing block full of civilians, we would bomb it.” Now, there wasn’t any Israel at the time when Hitler frequented housing blocks. That is at the core of the problem, so to speak. Back when PLO was the main enemy, it was passable in the Israeli public sphere to compare Yassir Arafat to Hitler. This year the Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has the honor of being “Hitler.”
     But in that case it would surely suffice to bomb one house? As opposed to reducing a city of millions to rubble?
     This is where the Israeli logic fails, and it does so because it is the logic of terrorism. The logic of terrorism dictates that a hospital is a legitimate target if it may contain combatants.
     The logic is so bizarre that it values the life of one terrorist higher than other lives — if one kills twenty innocents to eliminate one Hizbollah stalwart, the operation is a success.
     Yes, I think Israel must have the right to exist and defend itself. I even find the idea of a “security zone” a good one. But then, in the name of decency, it should surely be located in Israel and not in Lebanon. After all, you don’t empty your garbage bin over the fence to your neighbor, right?

By Torgrim Eggen 2006. Translation by Sirocco.

More photos here.

So the noble, knightly warriors of the IDF carry out another massacre in Qana, killing at least 40 60 civilians including at least 23 37 children. Israel’s belated answer to Curtis LeMay assures us it was a regrettable accident:

Sure, maybe. Or maybe not:

And why, after all, should reprisals be confined to Beirut, when according to the Israeli government, “[a]ll those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way to Hezbollah”?

Time for a brief recap of just a few previous “slips” that come to mind:

1967. IDF conducts sustained air and naval attack at the USS Liberty flying US flag in int’l waters after 8 hours of aireal surveillance, killing 34 — accidental

1982. IDF allows massacre by ally in Lebanon refugee camps, killing 7-800 — accidental

1996. IDF massacre at UNIFIL compound at Qana, killing 106 refugees while two helicopters and drone are present — accidental

2003. IDF kills American activist Rachel Corrie with bulldozer — accidental

2006. IDF shells to death family on the beach in Gaza — accidental

2006. IDF attacks several Red Cross ambulances — accidental

2006. IDF shells UNIFIL compound over six hours, killing four — accidental

2006. IDF shells other UNIFIL compound, wounding two — accidental

2006. IDF attacks several press convoys — accidental

2006. IDF bombs several hospitals — accidental

2006. IDF attacks numerous refugee convoys — accidental

Surely this must be one of the world’s most incompetent militaries. Can it really be entrusted with more than 200 nuclear weapons?

Tony Bliar, having finally placed himself outside the scope of any possible human forgiveness, speaks the truth for once:

Damn right. We — that is, most of the world — are up against the mindset of murderous scum like you. In the words of former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski:

Update: At long last, Labour is getting enough. Bliar’s final exit is likely just a few months away.

BBC News:

No kidding. A convoy of international press, clearly marked and giving the IDF half-hourly updates on its position, was shelled on Friday on its way out of south-east Lebanon. Several cars with refugees had joined the convoy, mistakenly believing this would be safer. These refugees were hit, wounding several children.

The Norwegian TV2, which had a reporter in this convoy, interviewed terrified villagers trapped with their children in the area and running out of food. They either didn’t have a car or were afraid to be attacked if they left the house.

In the subsequent segment, the Killer Chimp filled the TV screen with his hideous grin, boasting that what is going on in Lebanon “is US policy.”

– We’ll get every last one of those turrrist children.

Update: Good news. A terrorist mother and her six terrorist children were killed when an Israeli F-16, paid for with American tax money, bombed the family’s house outside of Nabatiyeh. Another terrorist family member was also offed.

Unfortunately the terrorist family father, Adnan al-Kharakeh, survived as he was out working for the terrorist Lebanese Civil Defense, saving other terrorist bomb victims.

In other uplifting news on the fruits of US policy, six terrorist civilians were killed in an airstrike against several residential houses in the border village Ain Arab, and a further eight terrorist civilians were found killed on the deadly roads of southern Lebanon. Among the latter were a terrorist married couple and their three terrorist children, hit by an Israeli missile as they shamelessly tried to flee the Israeli self-defense.

Source: NTB/Aftenposten.

Meanwhile, Norwegian TV showed images of a terrorist woman, nine months pregnant, trying to walk the 30 kilometers to relative safety in the blistering heat with bombs literally raining around her. After a near-hit she squatted and cried in despair, as only a true, hardened terrorist would do.

Additionally, another terrorist UN observer post has been destroyed in an airstrike. Two terrorist unarmed UNIFIL observers were wounded.

A fresh NYT/CBS poll finds ample support for Israeli war crimes in the only demographic that matters:

And what is this “handling” of which only 27 percent disapprove? Apart from rush-delivering “precision-guided” ordnance to Israel, financed by 20 percent of US “development aid,” it amounts to vetoing a call for ceasefire by the UNSC and similarly torpedoing the summit in Rome:

At the Rome talks, Rice resisted pressure from allies for Washington to change its stance and call for an immediate halt to the violence.

Rice insisted any cease-fire must be “sustainable” and that there could be “no return to the status quo” — a reference to the U.S. and Israeli position that Hezbollah must first be pushed back from the border and the Lebanese army backed by international forces deployed in the south.

Israel takes the result of Rice’s sabotage as a pat on the back:

So heartened by the “world’s support,” the “justice” minister openly threatens a campaign of relentless war crimes:

Except the children; the elderly; those who lie wounded in their homes because you have bombed the ambulances and hospitals; and those who are trapped for want of a vehicle or because you have destroyed the roads and bridges and targeted convoys of refugees marked with white flags.

Is someone taking notes at the Hague? Oh, wait. At a previous conference in Rome, Israel was one of only seven countries rejecting the International Criminal Court. The others were China, Iraq (under Saddam Hussein), Libya, Yemen, Qatar, and the USA. As usual, the latter is in a class of its own: Congress has authorized the President to “use all means necessary and appropriate” to free US personnel (and certain allied personnel, including Israeli such) detained or imprisoned by the ICC. Presumably, the Hague has taken note of that.

However, might does not make right. Morally speaking, the USA stands to Israel as Serbia stood to the regime of Radovan Karadžić. It is, and I regret having to write these words, a blight on humanity.

What sort of country revels in murder and oppression but cries to high heavens about cartoons?

Saudi Arabia? Check. Syria? Check. Libya? Check. Iran? Check.

Israel? Check:

Here is the intolerable doodle in need of repression:

The allusion to Schindler’s List is clear. Now here’s another list:

1. Anwar Isma’el Atallah, 12 years old
2. Saleh Sleman Al Jemasi, 16 years old
3. Ruwan Fareed Hajjaj, 5 years old
4. Khalid Nidal Abed Al Karim Wahbeh, 1 year old
5. Mahfouth Farid Nasseer, 15 years old
6. Ahmad Ghaleb Abu Amshah, 16 years old
7. Ahmed Fathi Odah Shabat, 16 years old
8. Waleed Mahmoud Al Zinati, 12 years old
9. Salah Adeen Hammad Abu Maktuma, 17 years old
10. Ibrahim Ali Khatoush, 15 years old
11. Mahmoud Muhammad Al Asar, 15 years old
12. Ibrahim Ali Al Nabaheen, 15 years old
13. Ahmad Abdil Mina’m Abu Hajaj, 16 years old
14. Nasrallah Nabil Abu Selmieh, 5 years old
15. Aya Nabil Abu Selmieh, 7 years old
16. Iman Nabil Abu Selmieh, 11 years old
17. Yahya Nabil Abu Selmieh, 9 years old
18. Huda Nabil Abu Selmieh, 13 years old
19. Basma Nabil Abu Selmieh, 15 years old
20. Sumaia Nabil Abu Selmieh, 16 years old
21. Raji Omar Deif Alla, 16 years old
22. Muhanna Sa’ed Mesleh, 16 years old
23. Ahmad Rawhee Abdo, 13 years old
24. Ali Kamil Al Najar, 13 years old
25. Fadwa Faisel al ‘Urouqi, 13 years old
26. Mohammad Awad Muhra, 17 years old
27. Khitam Muhammad Tayeh, 11 years old
28. Nadee Habib Al Ataar, 11 years old
29. Saleh Ibrahim Nasser, 13 years old
30. Bashir Abdullah Awad Abu Thaher, 12 years old
31. Sabrine Naser Habib, 3 years old

The above are children killed by the IDF in Gaza alone since June 26, according to Defence for Children International.

Two questions come to mind: 1. How far off is the cartoon in light of this list? 2. To the extent that it misses the mark, which is more unacceptable? The cartoon, or the list?

A few more examples of Finn Graff’s fine penmanship in this previous post.