Monday briefs

They don’t even try to hide it: Why should they? The world never penalizes nations and terrorist groups that target Jews. But good old Chipmunk Cheeks Nasrallah, from his secure, undisclosed location (where he lives in constant fear of assassination by the IDF), bragged that the attack on Israeli troops on the Israel-Syria border was done by Hezbollah. He says it was to teach Israel a lesson. And oh, Israel learned it all right. They now pound any position that fires on Israelis.

That tired, old “cycle of violence”: Israel attacked terror sites in Gaza in response to rocket fire–again. And CNN is “picking up” the habit of using “scare quotes” from the Brits, I think.

Israeli warplanes struck five targets in Gaza on Saturday evening in “retaliation” for what a military spokesman called “terrorist aggression.”

Four of the “targeted … terror sites” were in northern Gaza while one was in southern Gaza, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, said the strikes were “precision” and “intelligence-based.”

Way to go, “news” reporting site.

This is why there will not be peace: Saab Erekat, who lies just about every time he opens his mouth, says that Hamas is not, and has not ever been, a terror group.

“I hereby declare, in the make of President Mahmoud Abbas and the directorate of Fatah, that Hamas is a Palestinian movement, and is not and never was a terror group,” Erekat added.

This is actually not a lie–for him. The Palestinians believe that what we call terror is their “resistance”–even to the murdering of children.

Which is why there will not be peace.

Posted in Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Lebanon, palestinian politics, Syria, Terrorism | Comments Off on Monday briefs

Late Caturday post

It’s been one of those times. So here’s a cat picture or three.

A selfie with Tig, while he jumped onto my lap for a hug. Yep, he’s heavy.

Tig and Meryl

Tig and Meimei. I was trying to get him to play with her by luring her next to him with her feather toy (a.k.a. “the birdie”). It’s fascinating how she plays with different toys differently. She grabs the feather end and shakes it, like she would a bird, then she chews on it. With the rabbit-fur strip on a stick, she grabs it and tries to eviscerate it.

Tig and Meimie

Last night, a little playtime before bed. I woke up to only one cat toy in my bed this morning. She’s been bringing them to me and dropping them in my bed, probably mewing at me to wake up. I haven’t been waking up.

Meimei and feather toy

Posted in Cats | 2 Comments

Thursday briefs

But hey, let’s concentrate on Israel: There are now one million Syrian refugees in Lebanon that have registered with the UN. The irony of the Lebanese Hezbollah being part of the reason they have fled Syria doesn’t appear to have been noted by anyone. But it’s okay, because it’s not Israelis killing Syrians. It’s Syrians and Lebanese. So the world can ignore it, and the human rights groups can issue reports but not care nearly as much as they do about Israel and the Palestinians. Becuase Israel.

Punching back, finally: Looks like pro-Israel groups are finally starting to wake up to the power they have to drive the anti-Israel Jewish groups out of Jewish community events. Screw inclusion. If they’re anti-Israel, they’re anti-Jewish–even if they’re Jewish. Let them fight from their own parades–which of course, nobody will come to. Which is the point.

BDS Pushback: Looks like people are learning two things: That voting for BDS violates their own anti-discrimination laws, and that minorities are using loopholes to push organizations into voting for BDS when the majority is uninterested in boycotting Israel. This keeps happening: King’s College in London overturned the vote for boycotting Israel. More and more organizations are refusing to join the BDS movement as they begin to realize the downside. The downside includes legal action that cuts their funding if they boycott Israel. It is illegal for a U.S. business to boycott Israel.

Posted in Israel, Israel Derangement Syndrome, Lebanon, Syria | Comments Off on Thursday briefs

Kerry’s pressure tactics?

Boy, did I call that wrong. John Kerry is colluding with the Palestinians to put pressure on Israel, not learning that the Palestinians don’t want peace. I forgot that you can’t teach a man something he refuses to hear.

But in a surprise move on Tuesday, Abbas very publicly signed letters of accession to 15 international conventions, saying this was a response to Israel’s failure to release the last group of prisoners at the end of March.

Israel has not responded. Kerry canceled plans to return to the region on Wednesday, but also said it’s “completely premature” to write off the talks, while American officials hinted that the move was viewed as pressure tactic directed at Israel rather than the US.

There were some indications from Palestinian officials that Abbas’ unexpected step largely was intended as a pressure tactic. Keeping on good terms with the US and negotiating the terms of a Palestinian state with Israel remain pillars of Abbas’ political strategy.

I would not be at all surprised to learn that Kerry signed off on this action by Abbas, or at least, agrees with it because it puts added pressure on Israel.

Posted in Israel, palestinian politics | Comments Off on Kerry’s pressure tactics?

John Kerry’s teachable year

John Kerry has gotten his very own teachable moment. Of course, that moment has been an utter waste of, well, all the time he’s been Secretary of State. The U.S. is stepping back from trying to get the Palestinians to talk peace, because John Kerry has discovered that it’s impossible to have peace when at least one of the partners isn’t interested in actually achieving it. Of course, he blames Israel as much as the Palestinians. But let us review. Israel freed over a hundred convicted terrorists, including murderers. Israel froze settlement building for nine months. Israel has continuously come to the talks with the idea of compromising. In the meantime, Abbas has refused every single chance at compromise, insisted that Israel must retreat to the 1949 Armistice lines, release all Palestinians in Israeli jails, and allow Palestinian refugees to overwhelm Israel in any agreement. Oh, and since Israel refused to release the last group of murderers without a Palestinian promise to continue talking past the end of April, Abbas signed papers to get the PA into 15 UN organizations in yet another move to make an end run around talks to establish a Palestinian state.

John Kerry, and I presume Barack Obama, have finally learned what every president since Jimmy Carter has learned: The Palestinian leadership does not want peace. It wants all of Israel. And Kerry offered the worst deal ever: Jonathan Pollard goes free if Israel releases more terrorist murderers. How unprecedented is that, to offer to release an American prisoner in exchange for Palestinian prisoners? It just begs to encourage the Taliban to demand prisoners from the U.S. in exchange for our captive soldier.

Well, the peace talks are dead. I knew they wouldn’t succeed. You can’t have peace when only one side wants it.

Posted in Israel, palestinian politics, The One, United Nations | Comments Off on John Kerry’s teachable year

Yet another unfair deal for Israel

I don’t understand why Israel continues to make such one-sides deals. I’ve never been able to understand it. Now, in order to keep the peace talks going, Israel is going to release hundreds of convicted terrorists, freeze settlement construction again, and in return, they get the Palestinians to continue talking instead of trying to create a state by going around Israel and the U.S. via UN bodies.

Oh, and they’re freeing Jonathan Pollard. John Kerry really wants that Nobel Peace Prize.

Convicted spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard will be freed from a US jail before Passover, which begins April 14, a senior Israeli source familiar with ongoing peace negotiations with the Palestinians said Tuesday. The deal would also see hundreds of Palestinian prisoners released by Israel and the Palestinians agreeing to extend talks into 2015.

I just don’t know what to say anymore.

Posted in palestinian politics | 1 Comment

The UN climate change report says nothing new

The UN released another report on climate change. And as far as I’m concerned, the fact that it is a UN report discredits it immediately. We are all too familiar on this blog with the biased reports–written by people with publicly stated anti-Israel agendas–that come out of UN panels regarding Israel. So why should we believe their global warming report is any better?

I don’t.

Thousands of news articles went out today about the UN report insisting that global warming is destroying the world. You know what the articles don’t say? One of the people who worked on the report quit because he said it was too sensationalized.

Richard Tol told Reuters he disagreed with some findings of the summary to be issued in Japan on March 31.

“The drafts became too alarmist,” the Dutch professor of economics at Sussex University in England said by telephone from Yokohama, Japan, where governments and scientists are meeting to edit and approve the report.

Tol says the report ignores any positives from the warming of the globe. (Note that the Reuters article does not expand on the opportunities listed those eight times.)

Tol said the IPCC emphasized the risks of climate change far more than the opportunities to adapt. A Reuters count shows the final draft has 139 mentions of “risk” and 8 of “opportunity”.

Tol said farmers, for instance, could grow new crops if the climate in their region became hotter, wetter or drier. “They will adapt. Farmers are not stupid,” he said.

But don’t worry, the UN took Dr. Tol’s name off the report. Because that’s what you do in “science” now–you disappear the people who disagree with you.

You know what else the news reports don’t focus on? There’s nothing new in this report. It’s basically the same stuff they said seven years ago re-issued as if something has changed. This is paragraph ten in the USA Today/AP report:

There is no new science in this report, which assesses recent science since the previous IPCC report in 2007.

And of course, our awesome president is on the job! Expect a new executive order costing billions any day now.

If the world doesn’t cut pollution of heat-trapping gases, the already noticeable harms of global warming could spiral “out of control,” the head of a United Nations scientific panel warned Monday.

And he’s not alone. The Obama White House says it is taking this new report as a call for action, with Secretary of State John Kerry saying “the costs of inaction are catastrophic.”

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that issued the 32-volume, 2,610-page report here early Monday, told The Associated Press: “it is a call for action.” Without reductions in emissions, he said, impacts from warming “could get out of control.”

Please note, the report has absolutely no new science and does not address the many questions raised since the last one, including the manipulation of data to prove that the globe is warming (cf: hockey stick).

Can’t wait to see what Anthony Watts has to say about the full report.

Posted in The One, United Nations, World | Comments Off on The UN climate change report says nothing new

Take that, Mad Mahmoud

Holocaust deniers are perhaps the sleaziest of all anti-Semites. This won’t make them any less sleazy, but it is a nice big thumb in the eye for all the assholes who deny the millions of pieces of evidence that the Holocaust happened.

Because now they’ve got proof of Treblinka’s gas chambers.

In the series “One is Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine” Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist from Staffordshire University in the UK, uncovers new scientific evidence on the existence and mechanism of the death camp.

Why has it taken so long? Because the Germans, who knew what they were doing was so horribly wrong, tried desperately to cover up evidence of the death camps as the war came to an end.

SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s men destroyed all structures, filled in and leveled the earth above, and even installed a Ukrainian “farmer” in a newly built farmhouse. Viewed from the ground and from the air, Treblinka appeared as peaceful farmland and forest, without barracks or gas chambers and marked later only be a stone monument.

Oh, I don’t think that this will convince the anti-Semitic assholes like Khameini, Mad Mahmoud, and the Davids Duke and Irving. But it’s one more piece of evidence to throw in the faces of the deniers, and watch them stammer and hem and haw and explain how a death camp was not a death camp.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Holocaust | Comments Off on Take that, Mad Mahmoud

Caturday

This is how you get cat hair on your dress clothes.

Tig and Meimei in the closet

Posted in Cats | 1 Comment

Briefs

The irony, it is huge: Iranians are telling their leaders to be more like Israel. Yes, really. Pakistani terrorists murdered a kidnapped Iranian border guard when Iran refused to release hundreds of Sunni prisoners in Iranian jails. Iranians point out that Israel freed 1,027 terrorists in return for Gilad Shalit. Yes, but as Jews, we love life. Islamic terrorists proclaim they love death. There’s the difference in a nutshell, although, let’s face it: Israel isn’t run by nutty jihadis. That’s why Gilad Shalit is free and that poor border guard is dead.

Oh, that will stop them: Amnesty thinks it has some kind of power over how Israel deals with violent protestors. It’s warning Israel. Yes, really. The exact wording? “Israel must not use violence to quash Land Day demonstrations on Sunday.” It should totally be peaceful.

Last year protesters around the country numbered in the thousands with many carrying Palestinian flags and chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “with blood and fire, we will liberate al-Aksa,” among other chants.

In other words, Amnesty has already written the report and will be filling in the blanks where the names and incidents should be.

Gee, no way this goes wrong: Israel is working with Turkey to hammer out a deal to enable building materials into Gaza for a hospital. Because it’s not like terrorists from Turkey don’t work with Hamas, or anthing (Mavi Marvara, anyone?). And it’s not like Hamas is building giant tunnels that would enable a squad of terrorists to rush into Israel and murder civilians and kidnap soldiers, or anything.

Posted in Gaza, Hamas, Iran, Israel Derangement Syndrome, Terrorism | Comments Off on Briefs

This is why you should never believe Hamas wants peace

Another Hamas spokesliar was quoted in another news article saying that Hamas would accept a peace treaty with Israel if it were passed by a referendum. I called bullshit on it.

This is why.

“The tunnels we are inaugurating today are the new Hamas strategy in the war against Israel—the strategy of the tunnels,” Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya announced on Sunday at a rally marking the ten-year anniversary of Israel’s assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin.”From below ground and above ground, you, the Occupiers, will be dismissed. You have no place in the land of Palestine… What the resistance forces are preparing secretly for the next confrontation with Israel is beyond imagination for Israel.”

Hamas is preparing for war, not peace. And they are, of course, committing war crimes even in the planning.

The official says the tunnel typically starts a few hundred meters from the fence, inside a house or chicken coop owned by Hamas supporters, who give their consent and receive compensation. (The Israeli military located a tunnel originating in the side room of a mosque, apparently on the assumption that Israeli forces would not attack a holy place.) The depth at the entrance runs to a depth of 18 to 20 meters. As the diggers proceed, engineers follow pouring concrete to reinforce the walls and the ceiling. The electricians follow later, installing lights, and ventilation. Communication lines are also spread along side the tunnel in order to enable communication between the various parts of the tunnel, in the absence of a cellular reception, which at any rate, would be vulnerable to interception by Israeli’s signal-intelligence services.

If the digging goes well, without cave-ins from the sandy soil or flooding from groundwater, a 1,500 meter (nine-tenths of a mile) tunnel can be dug in nine to ten months. That said, the Israeli sources noted that one of the tunnels discovered was dug over two years. The final third, perhaps 500 meters, extends into Israel, but stops several meters short of the surface, in order to be breached when the order is given for offensive action.

I think I’m going to hope for some localized earthquakes on the Gaza-Israel border. That would take care of the tunnels.

Posted in Gaza, Hamas, Israel | 1 Comment

No Jewish state for you!

The Arab League has categorically denied that Jews belong in the Middle East, history notwithstanding. (And someone at the AP is going to get fired over the truth in this headline.)

Arab League rejects Israel as Jewish homeland
Arab leaders said Wednesday they will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, blaming it for a lack of progress in the Mideast peace process.

The statement, which came at the end of a two-summit in Kuwait, also rejected what the Arab League described as the continuation of Jewish settlement building in the West Bank and the “Judaization” of Jerusalem.

The League’s announcement that it will not recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people rejects a key demand of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Mideast peace talks.

This is not exactly news. The Arab world has never accepted Israel as a state within its midst, and will probably never do so. Remember the “Three No’s of Khartoum” after Israel won the Six-Day War? No negotiation, no recognition, and no peace with Israel. What’s different now? They pretend to negotiate, and they pretend they want peace. The reality is they want one state called “Palestine”, and they don’t want any Jews in it. Pundits fantasize that it was different, but it had never been any better. They are aided by the anti-Israel media, which passes along the lies of Mahmoud Abbas, who says the Israelis aren’t negotiating in good faith, while in the same breath refusing to negotiate at all.

“We want a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital based on the 1967 borders, that would be independent and have sovereignty of its own land, airspace, borders, water and resources, as well as a just and acceptable solution for the issue of the refugees,” he said.

The PA president said the Palestinians were waiting for American proposals that were in accordance with international law, as well as for a “defined timeframe that is not open for interpretations.”

As for sharing the Temple Mount? Yeah, forget about that.

Addressing the issue of the fight over the Temple Mount, Abbas said he objects to dividing visiting time and area on the Mount between Jews and Muslims, noting there is coordination with both Jordan and Morocco on the topic.

How this will be spun, of course, is that Benjamin Netanyahu is a hard-line right-winger who is deliberately setting up obstacles so there will be no peace. John Kerry and Barack Obama will happily repeat this lie, and the anti-Israel media begins its cycle anew.

Posted in Israeli Double Standard Time, Media Bias, palestinian politics | 1 Comment

Tuesday briefs

The 21st century No: The Arab League refuses to admit that Israel is a Jewish state, Israel was a Jewish state, and Israel will always be a Jewish state. Because admitting that Israel is a Jewish state means the end of their failed war against the Jews in their midst. Okay. Don’t say it. But dudes… it is, whether or not you admit it. And it’s going to stay that way.

No Jews allowed: Saudia Arabia denied a visa to the American Jewish reporter for the Jerusalem Post who wanted to cover Obama’s trip to the kingdom this week.

Wilner, a Jewish American, works for the Israeli English-language newspaper, but does not hold Israeli citizenship and has never lived in the Jewish state. Saudi Arabia has no official relationship with the government of Israel.

But it’s not anti-Semitism. It’s anti-Zionism. As for the Obama administration? Well, it expressed its “deep disappointment”. But you can’t expect Obama to stand up for press freedoms. Not when he’s being called this generation’s greatest enemy of press freedom.

Maybe, but it’s definitely pissing him off: Vladimir Putin says being kicked out of the G-8 is “counterproductive“. No it’s not. It got a reaction, didn’t it? Actually, the best reaction to Western response on the invasion of Crimea so far is the Russian stock market taking a nosedive. Here’s to much more of that, because it’s the only weapon Obama is willing to use against Russia, and only when he’s forced to by circumstance. Hurry, 2016. Please.

Suuuure they will: Hamas says it will accept a peace deal with Israel that passes a national referendum. Uh-huh. Right. Sure. Because it’s not like their charter calls for the end of the Jewish state. Oh. Wait.

Posted in Anti-Semitism, Hamas, Israel, Israel Derangement Syndrome, Middle East, The One, World | 1 Comment

The Useless UN

Once again, the UN Human Wrongs Council is ignoring what’s really wrong with the world and focusing on–you guessed it–Israel.

The United Nations Human Rights Council debated five anti-Israel resolutions — including one that calls for a business boycott of West Bank settlements and Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem — during its Monday meeting in Geneva.

During the UNHRC’s entire 25th session this month, it is voting on only one resolution on Syria even though over 120,000 people have been killed in its ongoing civil war. Similarly there was only one resolution against the regime in Tehran which has executed over 80 people this year.

There are also two reports being submitted on Israel’s settlements. Yes, two. One by Ban Ki Moon, one by disgusting Jew-hating Jew, Richard Falk, who is accusing Israel of “ethnically cleansing” the Palestinians. The fact that Syrian jihadis are literally murdering and forcibly converting Ethnically cleansing Syria’s Christians? Didn’t garner a mention.

Business as usual at the Human Wrongs Council. So glad that Obama got us back on it, because it made such a huge difference.

Posted in Israel, Israel Derangement Syndrome, Middle East, Religion, Syria, United Nations | Comments Off on The Useless UN

This has been a short day

Had a bit of a relapse with the cold I caught earlier this week. Slept late, did nothing but a load of laundry. And now I’m off to bed early, and up to NorVA tomorrow.

I need another few co-bloggers, I think.

Posted in Life | Comments Off on This has been a short day