Please don’t attack the country we’re selling weapons to: The French stopped Israel from launching a large-scale attack to teach Lebanon that there is a price to pay for ambushing and murdering Israeli soldiers. Oh, and the Obama administration sent Hillary to up the pressure. Result: The Lebanese army now thinks it can get away with ambushing the IDF. And France says it has to keep arming them, because it has contracts it can’t break. Money is far more important to the French than, say, Jewish lives.
UN betrays Israel, and Bibi is surprised? Please. He cannot possibly be naive enough to think that any UN-Israel cooperation would actually be rewarded. Of course Ban Ki-Moon says there was no agreement not to interrogate Israeli soldiers. Israel gets screwed by the UN, always. That’s written into its charter, I think. Like I said last week: No way this ends well.
Even the Lebanese aren’t buying Nasrallah’s “Israel did it!” excuse: Now this is interesting. Lebanese politicians are mocking Chipmunk Cheeks’ “evidence” that Israel assassinated Rafik Hariri. Maybe they haven’t all been terrorized, after all.
Now we’re paying Rauf to fundraise: The State Department is sending the imam behind the World Trade Islamic center to the middle east on a “religious outreach” trip. Good to know that our State Department thinks that the Constitution calls for paying clerics to talk to coreligionists. That’s not an issue about the separation of church and state and all. And gee, while he’s there, watch him knock around funding issues for the Cordoba initiative.
If the goal of the attack was to foment a war as a distraction from the Hariri case, isn’t it sensible for Israel not to attack now?
I don’t put much credibility in that report, given the source. I think it’s more likely a warning to Lebanon that a second incident will have “disproportionate” consequences.
And according to Totten/Commentary, the US is now witholding $100M of aid to Lebanon’s army.
Interesting – in 1968 the French government had no problems canceling a contract it made with Israel to sell her a number of warships. This occurred after the French had already been paid, incidentally, not that they bothered paying back the money. The result was Israeli commandos sneaking aboard the ship at harbor in the middle of the night and simply sailing them away. If only we had that kind of spirit today.
Yannai, the story is an amazing one, and the Wikipedia story had me laughing out loud at the hoodwinking of the French. Here’s Wikipedia’s version, and here’s the Jewish Virtual Library‘s.
There is an interesting book, entitled “The Boats of Cherbourg” by Abraham Rabinovich, about that operation and the role of the IDF’s “Sea Corps” in the subsequent 1973 war.