The odd but occasionally amusing Nation of Pearls blogzine has dug up a cartoon that shows bright red Palestinians undermining nice green IDF troops along the Gaza border. No prizes for guessing who the baddies are here.
Mind you, one wonders how the truck on the left, the one marked with the huge skull and cross bones, is managing to avoid detection, or for that matter falling in the massive hole that has been dug a meter and a half from the border fence.
Make what you will of the commentary.
JERUSALEM – Jordanian King Abdullah II has complained of bovine odors coming from the Israeli side of the frontier along the countries’ shared southern border, Israel’s environment minister said Monday.
Speaking to Israel Radio, Gideon Ezra said the smells, from a livestock quarantine facility, were blown across the frontier toward the king’s palace in the town of Aqaba, on the Red Sea next to the Israeli town of Eilat. Jordanian officials contacted Israel last week and requested the odors be neutralized, Ezra said.
That’s King PS2 for you: never complains about Israeli policies, but gets indignant when an unsavory smell drifts over into his palace. It probably distracts him when he’s playing Grand Theft Auto III.
Jack Rose, from the CanStage board — while admitting he has neither read nor seen the script — said that “my view was it would provoke a negative reaction in the Jewish community.”
And philanthropist Bluma Appel, after whom CanStage’s flagship theater is named, concurred. “I told them I would react very badly to a play that was offensive to Jews.”
I saw the play in New York — where it had been moved from the original theater it was scheduled to play to the Mineta Lane Theater — and don’t see what was deemed offensive about it aside from that it brings attention to the plight of Palestinians and the murder of a pro-Palestinian activist.
But of course the power of the “lobby” is a figment of anti-Semitic imaginations.
Hizballah’s tenacity in the villages was, to this observer, the biggest surprise of the war. As has been mentioned already, the vast majority of the fighters who defended villages such as Ayta ash Shab, Bint Jbeil, and Maroun al-Ras were not, in fact, regular Hizballah fighters and in some cases were not even members of Hizballah. But they were men, in the words of one Lebanese observer, who were “defending their country in the most tangible sense—their shops, their homes, even their trees.”
All the same, the performance of the village units was exceptional. Their job—to slow and to bleed the IDF as much as possible—was carried out with both determination and skill. In Maroun al-Ras, nearby Bint Jbiel, and other villages, Hizballah made the IDF pay for every inch of ground that it took. At the same time, crucially, Hizballah dictated the rules of how the war was to be fought. Or as one observer put it, “This was a very good lesson in asymmetric warfare. This was not Israel imposing its battle on Hizballah but Hizballah imposing its battle on Israel.” The narrow village streets of southern Lebanon do not lend themselves to tank maneuver, so the IDF would have to fight with infantry supported by armor, artillery, and air power. This kind of fight negated many of the IDF’s natural advantages and forced the IDF ground forces to fight a very different kind of battle than the one for which they had trained.
So the heroes of this war were ordinary people — although probably with some past military/guerrilla experience — defending their villages. Elsewhere in the report Andrew posits that the most experienced Hizbullah fighters, further up country, did not even see that much action. In my mind this makes the Lebanese Army’s inaction even more shameful: once again, ordinary villagers in the south were abandoned into the hands of foreign invaders.
A secret meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora took place in Egypt last October, the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency reported.
The report quoted a “well-informed Arab source” who spoke about the meeting, which was said to take place during the Muslim festival ‘Eid Al-Fitr, following the month-long fighting between Israel and Hizbullah on the Israeli-Lebanese border.
The meeting took place in a discreet part of the Sharm A-Sheikh resort.
As well as the Israeli and Lebanese premiers, it was attended by top Egyptian political advisor Osama El-Baz and Saudi Prince Bandar Bin ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz, who heads the Saudi National Security Council, the source said.
The meeting was said to last for five hours, during which participants discussed cooperation between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and allied forces in Lebanon, in contesting the common threat from Tehran and Damascus, as well as from Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
According to the source, Olmert told Siniora that the extensive international presence in Lebanon and the American support for Lebanon’s allies created an unprecedented opportunity to relieve Lebanon of Iranian-Syrian influence.
All this Shia vs. Sunni talk going on right now is extremely alarming…
Also available as Word document:
haniyehspeech.DOC
JERUSALEM, Dec. 18 — The call for early elections by Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian Authority president, is part of a Western-backed effort to revive the Middle East peace process in hopes of driving the radical Hamas party, which favors Israel’s destruction, out of power.
I am not disputing that Hamas has advocated Israel’s destruction in the past, Zio-trolls (but then again so has Fatah.) But can any reasonable person continue reading this article after that kind of opening? In one sentence it implies that Mahmoud Abbas is some kind of “moderate,” event though that word has no meaning any longer since people like the al-Sauds are considered “moderate,” creates the idea that there is a strong desire by the West to revive the peace process, even though the West abandoned it when the Bush administration came into power and never showed much interest in enforcing the Oslo process when Israel was flouting it, and finally finishes with the equivalent of “Hamas, which advocates the drowning of kittens and puppies.”
It’s a real shame the article opens that way, because even if I don’t agree with its conclusions (including the idea, implicit in the piece that Hamas is a mere Iranian-Syrian puppet) there’s some interesting stuff in it, such as:
Mouin Rabbani, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, an independent research group on foreign policy, argues against supporting one Palestinian faction against another. He says that progress will be possible based only on political consensus, even if the West doesn’t love the result.
“Palestinians will remain unable to take significant decisions, or implement them, unless they’re based on a broad consensus that includes at least Fatah and Hamas,” he said. “The international community may have preferences, but this practice of trying to make progress on the basis of divisions in the Palestinian national movement has backfired spectacularly.”
(Mouin Rabbani does fantastic work, by the way, and for an organization that is very much an establishment player while challenging establishment thinking — you’ll see very little of that in Washington, DC.)
Perhaps he still doesn’t want to recognize Israel, but frankly I can’t blame him after what that country did to his. At the end of the day, he is offering peace and negotiations.
Kudos to al-Jazeera English for showing it all (I happened upon it by chance, perhaps other channels did too.)