Feel the Frog anger

The AFP is so pissed off that Israeli officials won’t leak secret information, it practically leaps off the monitor.

JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israeli officials Sunday maintained an uncharacteristic veil of silence over Syrian reports that Israeli warplanes violated its airspace.

For the third day in a row, Israel made no official comments about statements by Damascus that Syria’s air defences opened fire on Israeli warplanes for violating Syrian airspace at dawn on Thursday, ratcheting up the tension between the neighbouring foes still officially at war.

In a country notorious for leaks, the Israeli media was left grasping at straws as not one senior official broke with reported instructions not to make any comments on the incident.

For the first time in many reporters’ memories, journalists covering the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday were led directly into the meeting room, instead of being allowed to loiter in the hallway and talk to individual ministers.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert “specifically instructed ministers not to alk about the incident related to Syria at all,” was all that one senior government official would say on the matter.

For the journalists eager for any hint of an official comment, Olmert offered only one cryptic phrase at the beginning of the cabinet meeting.

Now the Ynet version:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert praised the IDF for its “courageous” and “unusual” operations at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, but did not directly refer to the reported overflights in Syrian airspace or to the capture, according to Palestinian sources, of a top Hamas official in the Gaza Strip.

“I want to express my appreciation of the security forces’s courageous and unusual operations that are aimed at impeding the activities of terror groups,” he said.
“These are operations whose nature we cannot always reveal to the public, naturally. There were numerous operations that Israel carried out against leaders of terror groups, and these operations will continue without hesitation. Anyone who sends terrorists will be targeted wherever he is,” Olmert said.

Gee. I can’t understand why Israeli officials would try to stop the leaking of extremely top-secret and sensitive information. Why, you’d think they had the right to secrecy or something.

And you gotta love this paragraph:

Peace talks between Israel and Syria collapsed in 2000 over disagreements about the Golan Heights, the strategic plateau the Jewish state seized from Damascus during the 1967 Six-Day War and unilaterally annexed in 1981.

How can annexation be anything but unilateral? Since when do nations ask for permission to annex territory? That’s yet another example of the anti-Israel media bias. Must pound Israel at every opportunity, even if it means pretending that other states always ask permission before annexing territory taken in a war—even territory that was used to regularly bomb civilians.

Reading crap like that is what gives me a happy feeling all over thinking about how pissed off the AFP is that they can’t find an anonymous source to leak government secrets.

Sucks to be them.