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April 2002 Entries
A good article on Israel and the UN:
As disruptive as it was, the number of Jewish and Arab refugees pales in comparison to that created by the partition of India. There are today more than 100 million descendants of the original 15 million Indian and Pakistani refugees. The U.N. remained outside the conflict, and provided no political or economic incentive for refugees not to settle. Too bad the same restraint has not characterized the behavior of the U.N. and Arab states in the Middle East.

As it is, UNRWA and the Arab League hold Palestinian refugees in limbo. UNRWA operates 27 refugee camps in the West Bank and Gaza, and another 32 camps in neighboring Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. It counts nearly four million Palestinians as refugees, including those whose grandparents never saw Palestine. (If U.N. High Commission for Refugees criteria are applied, the figure is significantly lower.) In 2001 alone, UNRWA spent $310 million on the camps.

A friend recently asked me whose side the UN is on. It certainly doesn't seem to be the side of freedom and democracy. Or even truth and honesty.

posted @ Tuesday, April 30, 2002 3:01 PM | Feedback (0)
Three Armenian monks escaped from their captors at the Church of the Nativity. The tale they tell isn't suprising.
They told army officers the gunmen had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books, and had caused damage.

The three elderly monks were assisted by soldiers. One of them held a white cloth banner with the words "Please help."

One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: "They stole everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything... they stole our prayer books and four crosses... they didn't leave anything. Thank you for your help, we will never forget it."

Just a plain old fashioned stand-off with armed terrorists.
posted @ Wednesday, April 24, 2002 4:44 PM | Feedback (0)
The Jerusalem Post has an article that they say summarizes the opinion of many in Israel.
Given Israel's experience with the Palestinian leadership and external actors, it seems unlikely that more concessions, or even returning to some of the concessions already offered, is a solution. Before offering anything unilaterally Israel wants to know for sure what the other side is going to do in return.

It really focuses on the theory that Israel needs to negotiate from strength and that giving anything to Arafat is supporting terrorism. It's a pretty good read.

posted @ Wednesday, April 24, 2002 11:28 AM | Feedback (0)
Israel is being criticized for delaying the entry of the UN fact finding commission into Jenin. It probably has a little to do with the inclusion of Cornelio Sommaruga, the former president of the International Red Cross. This group allows such humanitarian countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq to join but won't allow Israel's Magen David Adom to join. They won't allow it because Israel uses a red Star of David for their logo. They allowed other countries to pick their own logo but not Israel. After Dr. Bernadine Healy criticized the Red Cross for this, Charles Krauthammer wrote in March 2000 ...
Particularly upset was Cornelio Sommaruga, then president of the ICRC. In a private meeting after her speech, and in the presence of several witnesses, he said to Healy: "If we're going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?"

Any wonder why Israel isn't excited about someone who compares the Star of David to a swastika serving on a fact finding mission?

posted @ Wednesday, April 24, 2002 11:15 AM | Feedback (0)
And a nice, little article from Israeli Insider disputing the PA description of events in Jenin. The doctor says ...
Tzengan said that he was shocked by the terrorists' cynical use of children in the camp. "We found a boy aged 6 in the camp with a backpack. When IDF soldiers approached him, he dumped the bag on the ground and ran away. After checking the contents of the bag we found three explosives. The cynical abuse of children is just unbelievable."
posted @ Monday, April 22, 2002 3:19 PM | Feedback (0)
Many of the people I talk to about the Middle East say the Palestinians just want a their own country. Let's not forget they were offered the West Bank and Gaza in September 2001 and turned it down. Brit Hume has an interview with Dennis Ross:
FRED BARNES, WEEKLY STANDARD: Now, Palestinian officials say to this day that Arafat said yes.

ROSS: Arafat came to the White House on January 2. Met with the president, and I was there in the Oval Office. He said yes, and then he added reservations that basically meant he rejected every single one of the things he was supposed to give.

HUME: What was he supposed to give?

ROSS: He supposed to give, on Jerusalem, the idea that there would be for the Israelis sovereignty over the Western Wall, which would cover the areas that are of religious significance to Israel. He rejected that.

HUME: He rejected their being able to have that?

ROSS: He rejected that.

He rejected the idea on the refugees. He said we need a whole new formula, as if what we had presented was non-existent.

Ross was the Middle East envoy for Clinton. He also mentions that Arafat denied that Jerusalem was the location of the Jewish Temple. Just amazing.

posted @ Monday, April 22, 2002 2:11 PM | Feedback (0)
The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs published aerial photos of the combat area in Jenin. The detail is pretty amazing. I'm also suprised at how little of Jenin was affected by this. But the areas there were affected were hit pretty hard. I'm still waiting for the U.N to explain how one of their refugee camps turned into a bomb factory.
posted @ Monday, April 22, 2002 2:07 PM | Feedback (0)
Here's an interesting interview with a Palestinian bomb-maker. It was published in the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly Online.
Omar and other 'engineers' made hundreds of explosive devices and carefully chose their locations.

'We had more than 50 houses booby-trapped around the camp. We chose old and empty buildings and the houses of men who were wanted by Israel because we knew the soldiers would search for them,' he said.

Not quite the picture of a bunch of innocent people being abused by the Israelis.

posted @ Friday, April 19, 2002 9:55 AM | Feedback (0)
I just dug up an old Daniel Pipes article titled If I Forget Thee: Does Jerusalem Really Matter to Islam? It was written in 1997 just as a series conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis were heating up. The article examines the importance of Jerusalem, a city never mentioned in the Koran, to Islam. And also to the Palestinians.
Perhaps most remarkable is that the Palestinian Liberation Organization's founding document, the Palestinian National Covenant of 1964, does not even once mention Jerusalem.

All this abruptly changed after June 1967, when the Old City came under Israeli control. As in the British period, Palestinians again made Jerusalem the centerpiece of their political program. Pictures of the Dome of the Rock turned up everywhere, from Yasir Arafat's office to the corner grocery. The PLO's 1968 Constitution described Jerusalem as "the seat of the Palestine Liberation Organization."

posted @ Wednesday, April 17, 2002 5:06 PM | Feedback (0)
Remember all the Palestinians claiming the Israelis were massacring civilians in Jenin. Turns out they were wrong -- or lying.
On Monday, journalists entered Jenin. And what they found put the lie to Yasser Arafat's outrageous propaganda.
...
About 40 bodies were discovered, all but three of them men - ammunition belts strapped to their bodies - who quite clearly were engaged in armed combat with the Israelis.
...
Arafat's henchmen, confronted by the evidence, now claim that the Israelis secretly spirited away hundreds of bodies under cover of night. Right.

But we should believe everything else the Palestinians say. Does your browser support sarcasm tags?

posted @ Wednesday, April 17, 2002 3:12 PM | Feedback (0)
Six European Union countries yesterday endorsed a United Nations document that condones violence as a way to achieve Palestinian statehood.

They were voting as members of the UN Human Rights Commission on a resolution that accuses Israel of a long list of human rights violations, but makes no mention of suicide bombings of Israeli civilians.

The rest of the article is at the National Post. Dis-gusting!

posted @ Tuesday, April 16, 2002 3:42 PM | Feedback (0)
Here's a very interesting interview with Daniel Pipes, an expert on "Militant Islam"...
DP: Militant Islam is a radical utopian ideology along the lines of fascism and Marxism-Leninism. Although the details differ, as with those ideologies, militant Islam seeks to use totalitarian means to overthrow governments, transform human beings and dominate the world. It is a formula that is all too familiar. If one knows anything about the barbarism of fascism or communism, one readily recognizes the same general threat from militant Islam.

He makes some suprising predictions about the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also has some good stuff about how it got started. Kind of a different take than what I've seen before.

posted @ Tuesday, April 16, 2002 3:39 PM | Feedback (0)
This is choice. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) conducted a poll on their site asking whether Sharon should be tried for war crimes. The poll got posted on a few pro-Israeli sites and a few folks voted. When I voted at the pro-Palestinian site over 90% of the 11,000+ votes opposed trying Sharon. A few hours later CAIR had "fixed" their poll so it showed 90%+ in favor of trying Sharon -- but with only 2,000 votes. Now the poll has been removed from their web site. CAIR claimed "several nefarious attempts by users trying to manipulate the votes." From Polling for Islam in the Weekly Standard...
In fact CAIR has an entire section of their website devoted to "Action Alerts" where they inform their viewers to mass e-mail people who say things they find objectionable. They give out e-mail addresses and telephone numbers and encourage people to swamp elected officials and members of the media.

And from InstaPundit...

Several readers email that it's rather disingenuous of CAIR to jigger their poll this way when they're always encouraging their members to flood other people's online polls, and to bombard selected columnists (wasn't Jonah Goldberg one?) with angry emails.

And of course someone grabbed screen shots: before ... and after. You be the judge.

posted @ Tuesday, April 16, 2002 3:18 PM | Feedback (0)
I never thought I see a good article about the Middle East on Jerry Pournelle's site. I was wrong. He's actually publishing letters between a couple of people. They are well thought out and reasonable. Certainly less pro-Israeli than most of what I publish. But very good.
How far back in history do you want to go? All that area was part of the Roman Empire at one time: does this mean it ought to belong to Italy? After the Prophet it was all swept into Caliphates but to this day Sunni and Shiites fight it out as who who was the real Caliph, and who is the proper successor to the Prophet, and whether the Hidden Imam has appeared, and the rest. Incidentally, repression works pretty well: the Turks so thoroughly dealt with the Old Man Of The Mountain, the original Assassins who intimidated Saladin and Lionheart alike, that what's left of them is a pacifist sect...
posted @ Monday, April 15, 2002 2:18 PM | Feedback (0)
Dr. William J. Daugherty reminds us in Remembering the many American victims of Arafat's terrorist network that it's import to remember all the Americans and Europeans the Palestinians have killed.
The first American to be murdered by a PLO-sponsored group was Shirley Anderson on June 17, 1969. Since then, PLO groups have murdered more than 60 American citizens and wounded at least as many. Among the dead were two ambassadors, an Olympic athlete, tourists, business persons and students.
posted @ Sunday, April 14, 2002 5:34 PM | Feedback (0)
From Let Israel fight its way to peace in the Boston Globe:
The United States did not spend eight years negotiating with Mullah Omar and the Taliban. President Bush gave them one chance to cooperate and hand over Osama bin Laden; when they refused, they were destroyed. Arafat and his lieutenants, by contrast, have been given chance after chance to prove their peaceful bona fides. What they have proven instead is that they are liars and conscienceless killers. If America after Sept. 11 had the right to obliterate the Taliban, Israel has the right to obliterate the Palestinian Authority.

The history of this conflict can seem complicated, but its moral dimensions now are clear-cut.

One side deploys suicide bombers to wipe out guests at bat mitzvahs. The other side wants to wipe out the suicide bombers.

One side publishes maps showing how Israel and a Palestinian state can coexist. The other side publishes maps on which Israel doesn't exist.

One side apologizes when its explosives kill the wives and children of the killers it targeted. The other side targets wives and children.

One side was grief-stricken on Sept. 11 and declared a national day of mourning. The other side danced in the streets and distributed candies in celebration.

One side has never deployed a suicide bomber in its 54 years of existence. The other side has deployed more than 40 in the past 12 months alone.

One side developed a mandatory ''peace curriculum'' to prepare its children to live in peace next to a Palestinian state. The other side steeps its children in hate, extolling suicide bombers as ''martyrs'' they should emulate and operating summer camps to train them for jihad.

One side is an unshakable ally of the United States and fully backs our war against global terrorism. The other side is armed and financed by Iraq, Iran, and Syria, three of the world's most notorious terrorist states.

posted @ Sunday, April 14, 2002 5:30 PM | Feedback (0)
A vital region aflame and on the march. Unresolved disputes over old imperial boundaries breeding terrible violence. A fanatical belief system stitched together from religious traditions, romantic cults of violence, and modern ideologies, then fanned by fire-breathing, charismatic leaders and propped up by timid plutocrats terrified of the masses. Genuinely well-intentioned progressives finding themselves the unwitting supporters of murderous fanatics. America and the Jews savagely attacked as the hated representatives of all that is wrong with the modern world.

No doubt about it, Europe was a frightening place in the 1930s and '40s.

From Fascism to Jihadism is a neat article. It draws some amazing similarities between pre-WWII Europe and the Middle East of today. He goes on to list them in detail. For example ...

Legitimate grievances left unanswered and protests deflected by cynical elites. John Maynard Keynes rightly predicted the disasters of the punitive peace of Versailles. The Russians and Slavs groaned first under the czars and then the commissars--and, boy, were they angry. Since the end of the Ottoman Empire, the people of the Middle East have largely been ruled by a succession of autocrats who have delivered neither freedom nor prosperity (the Gulf petrocracy aside) and have worked mightily to deflect their peoples' understandable rage elsewhere. The Palestinians and their interests have been cynically neglected by the Arab states, steadily sold out by their leaders, and treated unjustly by Israel.

His conclusion is almost predictable.

So how can understanding these parallels help us forge a successful policy in the Middle East? To begin with, while it is episodes of terror that have focused our attention on jihadism, it is not an episodic phenomenon. The Arab Middle East has brought forth a movement whose full-fledged worldview seeks the destruction of Western society, beginning with its foremost representative in the Middle East. The fact that this worldview draws much of its rhetoric and symbolism from a hallowed religious tradition--and that it has numerous points of contact with legitimate concerns and grievances--is what makes it more than mere crime and gives it traction, and even suasion, in broader communities (emphasis added).

It's a very good article. I certainly hadn't thought of the similarities between these time periods. I wonder how often this has happened in history?

posted @ Friday, April 12, 2002 3:39 PM | Feedback (0)
This is great. The NY Times seems to side with the Palestinians as much I side with the Israelis. The Idler lists all the times the NYT has called for Arafat to end the terrorism since September 11th. I counted 12. That's roughly twice a month. I guess Arafat ignores the Times too. I keep waiting for the headline, "Ok, we give up. Arafat IS a terrorist". Hold your breath waiting for that one. The Idler also has some other good articles such as Arafat's Secret Weapon: Media Gullibility which says ...
Having launched his terrorist war on September 28, 2000(Rosh Hashanah) with ramped-up suicide bombing, Arafat knew Israel would be likely to respond sooner or later. He knew that even after turning the cities gifted to him into fortresses and using the refugee camps as military training camps, the Palestinian terrorists would lose to Israeli forces.

Therefore, the next phase in his 'intifada' was to draw in Americans and Europeans to act as enforcers of what he wanted.

This is now a work in progress as the Arab nations pressured Bush-Cheney-Powell to demand Israel's withdrawal from the fortress cities where terrorists trained and weapons were stored.

posted @ Thursday, April 11, 2002 11:03 PM | Feedback (0)
A great article from Fred Barnes called Lost in the Shuffle. It highlights a few important facts we shouldn't forget.
Forgotten item two: To listen to Israel's critics and the press, you'd think the issue at stake today is the Palestinians' quest for statehood and the Israelis' refusal to grant it. Au contraire. At Camp David in July 2000 and in later discussions that year, Arafat was offered a Palestinian state that would include 97 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, 3 percent of what's now Israel, and a land-and-bridge connection between the West Bank and Gaza. On top of that, the Palestinians would get half of Jerusalem. Arafat turned the offer down without making a counteroffer. Instead, he responded with a new intifada that quickly changed from rock-throwing to terrorism to suicide bombers who target innocent civilians in Israel. If Arafat wants a Palestinian state, all he has to do is say yes--and stop terrorist attacks on Israel.

This should be standard reading for anyone that expresses sympathy with Arafat or the Palestinians. They turned down a state.

posted @ Thursday, April 11, 2002 10:59 PM | Feedback (0)
America had a problem with Islamic religious extremists. Israel has a problem with Islamic religious extremists (the Palestinians). Egypt had a problem with Islamic religious extremists. Egypt? It's interesting to see how Egypt handled their problem.
posted @ Thursday, April 11, 2002 10:53 PM | Feedback (0)
The Atlantic Monthly has an intereseting article titled Seeing Around Corners. They describe it as ...
The new science of artificial societies suggests that real ones are both more predictable and more surprising than we thought. Growing long-vanished civilizations and modern-day genocides on computers will probably never enable us to foresee the future in detail--but we might learn to anticipate the kinds of events that lie ahead, and where to look for interventions that might work

Thy have a great discussion of how a simple set of rules for living together can appear to make everyone racist. The writer is describing a simple model or red and blue agents with simple rules for living together. In the model all the blues ended up together and all the reds ended up together.

When I first looked at it, I thought I must be seeing a model of a community full of racists. I assumed, that is, that each agent wanted to live only among neighbors of its own color. I was wrong. In the simulation I've just described, each agent seeks only two neighbors of its own color. That is, these "people" would all be perfectly happy in an integrated neighborhood, half red, half blue. If they were real, they might well swear that they valued diversity. The realization that their individual preferences lead to a collective outcome indistinguishable from thoroughgoing racism might surprise them no less than it surprised me and, many years ago, Thomas Schelling.

There is also a section on genocide and a model of how it could occur.

I don't think I'm alone in finding this artificial genocide eerie. The outcome, of course, is chilling; but what is at least as spooky is that such complicated--to say nothing of familiar--social patterns can be produced by mindless packets of data following a few almost ridiculously simple rules.

There is also a near simulation of corruption and suggestions for what law enforcement agencies can do to attack it. The simulation involved corruption but could be applied to any crime. And you can always go play the game of Life.

posted @ Thursday, April 11, 2002 1:01 PM | Feedback (0)
Some interesting comments by someone who saw Netanyahu speak recently.
posted @ Thursday, April 11, 2002 10:05 AM | Feedback (0)
I keep reading that if Israel just meets the Palestinian demands then there will be peace. Israel heard the same arguements about Lebanon. Just leave Lebanon and there won't be any more problems. Charles Krauthammer writes...
Yet for two decades, Israel was hectored to comply with U.N. resolutions demanding Israel's withdrawal. In May 2000, it complied. To ensure that there could be no possible residual territorial dispute, Israel asked the United Nations to draw the line demarcating the true Israeli-Lebanese border -- the so-called Blue Line -- then pulled back behind it.

Israel's reward?

Hezbollah was not mollified. While its ostensible mission was the liberation of Lebanese territory, it did not disband. On the contrary. It occupied south Lebanon, imported huge new supplies of weapons from Iran and began sporadic cross-border attacks on Israel.

Hezbollah has killed Israeli soldiers situated in Israeli territory. It kidnapped three soldiers who have never been seen since. Just one month ago, infiltrators from the Hezbollah territory shot and killed seven Israelis on a road in northern Israel. And now, since the end of March, Hezbollah has embarked on a serious and deadly escalation, firing rockets into Israel.

Giving in to terrorists rarely works. The same people that killed Daniel Pearl were released as per terrorists demands when a plane was highjacked to Afghanistan. Israel gave in to world pressure and left Lebanon. Did it help them? Is the world rallying to their support?

posted @ Wednesday, April 10, 2002 11:06 PM | Feedback (0)
WARNING: Non-Middle East post to follow. I can't remember the last time I've posted something that didn't relate to the Middle East. Senator Hollings (D-Disney) introduced a bill that would have made it illegal to sell technology that could be used to copy a copyrighted work. So things like CPUs and hard drives would have been required to have copy protection built into them. Not suprisingly people rebelled ...
The Senate Judiciary Committee, which has also held hearings on the issue, has received more than 3,500 comments criticizing the bill, a spokeswoman said.

"We haven't received one e-mail in support of the Hollings bill," said Judiciary Committee spokeswoman Mimi Devlin. "It seems like there's a groundswell of support from regular users."

People want technology to record television and watch it later. People want technology to make compilation CDs. Technology should make it easier to use music and video, not harder. You can visit DigitalConsumer.org for more information on the bill and the Consumer Technology Bill of Rights.

posted @ Wednesday, April 10, 2002 5:28 PM | Feedback (0)
From Eristic ...
Saving Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia did nothing for the U.S. in the eyes of the Arab and Islamic world. Saving Kuwait with the blood of our men and women did nothing for the U.S. in the eyes of the Arab and Islamic world. Trying to feed people in Somalia got our people killed for their trouble, so what did the eyes of the Arab and Islamic world think about that? I never saw or heard any thank-yous. So my conclusion is that that the eyes of the Arab and Islamic world are blind and will never see the facts.
posted @ Wednesday, April 10, 2002 5:16 PM | Feedback (0)
This is what passes for a political cartoon in ArabNews.com, self-described as "Saudi Arabia's First English Language Daily"
posted @ Wednesday, April 10, 2002 5:14 PM | Feedback (0)
The Warped Saudi Initiative has an interesting take on the "Saudi Peace Plan." I place it in quotes because it's really everything the Palestinians have been asking for.
However, the communique issued by Syria showed that it also had another condition - implementing the right of return. This exemplified the internal contradiction that was built into the continuation of the Saudi move: in order to obtain the support of the rest of the Arab world, the simplistic formula had to be waived and restrictive conditions added.

The right of return still continues to be the big sticking point. Israel already offered 90% of the West Bank to the Palestinians and they turned it down.

posted @ Tuesday, April 09, 2002 4:18 PM | Feedback (0)
Here's an interesting new web site: HonestReporting.com. The describe themselves as:
HonestReporting is a fast-action website dedicated to ensuring that Israel receives fair media coverage. We scrutinize the media for anti-Israel bias, and then mobilize subscribers to complain directly to the news agency concerned.

I'm not sure about the fast-action part but the rest sounds good. The have some great articles including...

  • April Fools. Five Palestinians are shot in a Ramallah office building. How did it happen? I remember this story. They kept showing the pictures of the five dead Palestinians. Guess the media got this one wrong.
  • More Ambulance Obfuscation. Reporters criticize Israel for inspecting Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances, while obfuscating evidence of Palestinian impropriety.
  • Broadcasting the Big Lie. In the face of documented facts, CNN and other media allow Palestinian spokesmen to fabricate lies. Another good article with quite a few examples of ridiculous Palestinian claims.

Overall a very good site. I'll be back to this one regularly.

posted @ Tuesday, April 09, 2002 4:07 PM | Feedback (0)
As many of you know my cousin has been called up from the IDF reserves. I received an email from my aunt saying he was going to be stationed in Jenin in the West Bank. Previously he was in Ramallah. I thought that can't be worse than Ramallah where Arafat's headquarters are. She specifically said he was going "into the Jenin refugee camp to search for booby-traps, explosives, and bodies." And later in the day I see a headine that 13 IDF reserves were killed in Jenin by a booby-trap. Not good. CNN has an article on it.
"An IDF patrol by reserve soldiers was ambushed during operations in the [Jenin] refugee camp," an IDF statement said. "The ambush included the use of explosive devices that were detonated against them, as well as gunfire directed against the soldiers from the rooftops of the surrounding buildings."

So an email from my aunt was a welcome relief a few minutes ago. The subject was "Michael OK - again." Nice. My uncle spoke with him on the phone and asked him if he was staying out of trouble. He replied "No, we go in to make trouble. We're going on "violence patrols" frequently. We go in in an armored vehicle and draw fire so we know where they are. I've had a couple of grenades lobbed at me, but we're in the armored vehicle." Here's hoping they get all the terrorists arrested soon!

posted @ Tuesday, April 09, 2002 2:06 PM | Feedback (0)
A funny thing, though--everybody was so busy talking about the futility of the Israeli operation that nobody has noticed its one, unambiguous success: a sharp decline in the suicide bombings.

From an article titled It Works. This is a darn good article. There's a great paragraph near the bottom, go read it!

posted @ Monday, April 08, 2002 11:29 PM | Feedback (0)
Freedom of speech is a precious right in America. Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't give that right to their citizens. So it's especially ironic to see Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan use the Washington Post to spew his pro-terrorist propoganda. He wrote a piece titled Why Israel Must Stop The Terror that has some great quotes.
I acknowledge that the Palestinians' greatest crime is their insistence on resisting the military occupation of their country. This strange principle of resistance to military occupation of one's country seems to be difficult for many American political, intellectual and media elite to comprehend -- even though it has been practiced by others in the past, such as Nelson Mandela in South Africa under apartheid and Gen. George Washington during British colonial rule, and even Menachem Begin during the British Mandate of Palestine.

That's slick isn't it? He acknowleges that their greatest crime is "resisting the military occupation of their country". I guess killing innocent women and children with suicide bombs must be their second greatest crime. And comparing Arafat to Mandela, Washington and Begin is brilliant. I'm suprised he didn't compare him to Ghandi. Slate published a response to the George Washington comparison titled Yasser Arafat and George Washington: How To Tell Them Apart.

Washington fought his war against the army of Britain. There were no murders of British children in London by Americans. I think one telling point in the Slate article is that America fought for increased freedom while the Palestinians are fighting to create a dictatorship, or even worse, a theocratic-dictatorship. The Palestinians aren't fighting for their homeland. The West Bank was part of Jordan prior to 1967 and I don't recall any protests demanding a Palestinian state until after 1967.

The rest of the article is full of similar lies and half-truths. It's good to read this and remember that this man is holding himself out as a neutral person just trying to bring about peace.

posted @ Monday, April 08, 2002 1:05 PM | Feedback (0)
The Jerusalem Post has an article about Bernard Lewis and the Middle East titled Domino Democracy. He has some suprising comments.
Further, Lewis rates as "possible" that a post-Saddam Iraq would make peace with Israel, and "probable" that a post-theocracy Iran would do so.

It's a very interesting read about what might happen if the US were serious about removing the dictatorships in the Middle East.

posted @ Monday, April 08, 2002 12:49 PM | Feedback (0)
Israel Insider has an article about the fighting in Jenin.
During the course of the battles in Jenin, IDF soldiers encountered a huge number of explosive devices. During the first four days of fighting in the camp and in Nablus, some 5 tons of explosives were deployed against Israeli troops, Yediot Aharonot reported. Army sources said a number of the houses in Jenin and Nablus had been booby-trapped against Israeli troops.

"During the present operations, the terrorists in Jenin prepared themselves well," commented Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Shaul Mofaz on Sunday. "On the main access road into the camp, four cars laden with explosives were deployed, and in the city itself they planted some 100 explosive charges."

These people are pretty well armed. And unfortunately that's where my cousin is right now.

posted @ Monday, April 08, 2002 12:45 PM | Feedback (0)
Please continue to read Little Green Footballs. I have no idea where that weird name came from but he links to all kinds of Israel related content.
posted @ Monday, April 08, 2002 12:41 PM | Feedback (0)
Israel Insider has an article about an Israeli "settlement" and an Arab village living at peace with each other. Until the Palestinian terrorists find out...
As a matter of policy, the Chief Rabbi of Efrat, Shlomo Riskin, raised substantial funds from liberal Jews for medical clinics and schools in these nearby Arab villages. It was a policy that earned the wrath of Arafat's Palestinian Authority.

The Jewish settlers built schools and medical clinics for Palestinians because the PA couldn't. And their reward was a suicide bomber. Bombing a medical clinic. The article is a good read.

posted @ Saturday, April 06, 2002 11:01 AM | Feedback (0)
No suicide bombs in Israel since the reoccupation of the West Bank.
posted @ Friday, April 05, 2002 3:49 PM | Feedback (0)
Sweet tea and dreams of butchery. Ya gotta love the tabloid headlines.
Dr. Zahar promised only a temporary halt to the bombings if Israel halts its incursion and begins withdrawing to its 1967 borders. The most he could offer was a "ceasefire," not a permanent settlement, he said, adding ominously that "we will leave other issues to the next generation."

Dr. Zahar is a leader in Hamas, one of the terrorist groups Israel is fighting.

posted @ Friday, April 05, 2002 3:48 PM | Feedback (0)
Thank you for signing our petition to Take Back The Prize.
You are the 214,588th signer.

Bet you for forgot that Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. You can sign a petition to have the prize revoked. Maybe we can send a message to the Europeans.

posted @ Friday, April 05, 2002 3:34 PM | Feedback (0)
Wow! I don't know who Mark Steyn is but he wrote a great article. It's called Say goodbye, Yasser Arafat and discusses all the reasons why the US has to help stop the Palestinian terrorists.
So, after almost a decade under his administration, the big career opportunities in the Palestinian Authority lie in strapping on one of those Yasser souvenir belts, filling it with Semtex, wandering into a shopping mall and blowing the legs off Jews. That's the way to set your family up for life, especially now that Saddam has upped the martyr jackpot to 25,000 bucks per successful self-detonation. The 'plight of the Palestinian people' is that, after a quarter-century of living under Israeli occupation, they were transferred to living under Arafat occupation, and he wasn't up to the job.

This is a great article. I actually copied out four other paragraphs to post. My blog got to be kind of long though.

It's very difficult to negotiate a 'two-state solution' when one side sees the two-state solution as an intermediate stage to a one-state solution: ending the 'Israeli occupation' of the West Bank is a tactical prelude to ending the Israeli occupation of Israel. The divide among the Palestinians isn't between those who want to make peace with Israel and those who want to destroy her, but between those who want to destroy Israel one suicide bomb at a time and those who want to destroy her through artful 'peace processes'. Ayat Mohammed al-Akhras, the straight-A high-school student who blew herself up in a supermarket last week, devoted her farewell video to castigating the Arab League big shots for pussying around with peace plans and leaving the real work to Palestinian schoolgirl bombers. Her view would appear, from the polls, to be the opinion of the overwhelming majority. It's useless to pretend there's anything to negotiate.

This is definitely an article to read.

posted @ Friday, April 05, 2002 3:21 PM | Feedback (0)
Is a picture worth a 1,000 words? Look what the IDF found in Araft's compound.
posted @ Friday, April 05, 2002 3:07 PM | Feedback (0)
Here's an interesting letter from 31 foreign policy experts to George Bush.
As Secretary of State Powell recently stated, the present crisis stems not from "the absence of a political way forward" but from "terrorism, . . . terrorism in its rawest form." That terrorism has been aided, abetted, harbored, and in many instances directed by Mr. Arafat and his top lieutenants. Mr. Arafat has demonstrated time and again that he cannot be part of the peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He demonstrated it in July 2000, when he rejected the most generous Israeli peace offer in history; he demonstrated it in September 2000, when he launched the new intifada against Israel; and he demonstrated it again these past two weeks when, despite the hand you offered him, through Vice President Cheney, he gave sanction to some of the worst terrorist violence against Israeli citizens.

I think that sums things up nicely. Never forget that Israel and the PA had a peace treaty on the table in July 2000 until the PA decided it wasn't generous enough and turned the terrorists loose.

posted @ Friday, April 05, 2002 3:00 PM | Feedback (0)
This is hilarious. Or at least it would be if it wasn't so sad. Here are the Talking Points for Palestinian Spokesmen. My favorite:
Make it clear that suicide bombings are not "terror." They are the understandable and forgivable expressions of an oppressed peoples rage. American interviewers will usually accept this at face value.

The US media does seem to give these people a pass on many occasions. I'm not entirely sure what Little Green Footballs is but it's been added to my reading list.

posted @ Friday, April 05, 2002 2:43 PM | Feedback (0)
Time magazine published an article titled Worst-Case Scenario about what a repeat of the 1967 war would look like. It's a pretty interesting read. They surmize that the war would be a loss for everybody including Israel.
posted @ Wednesday, April 03, 2002 5:45 PM | Feedback (0)
Here's a blog out of Israel. Go back and read it from the beginning. It's pretty enlightening how this guy thinks. Follow a few of his links to the articles. Especially the one where the Palestinian Authority let's a guy out of jail who later kills 3 and wounds 60 blowing himself up.
posted @ Wednesday, April 03, 2002 2:50 PM | Feedback (0)
I want Drew back for one more year. I want another shot at a national championship for KU. And I have a plan to get Drew his NBA millions and let him play for KU next year. This is another original piece I've written on way to keep student athletes in school but still get them their millions.
posted @ Wednesday, April 03, 2002 10:56 AM | Feedback (0)
Ever wondered what the Top 10 April Fool's Hoaxes of All Time are? I never really did either. But I fell for Sidd Finch back in the day :)
posted @ Monday, April 01, 2002 1:45 PM | Feedback (0)
It seems the Palestinian terrorists are also killing Arab-Israelis. And Palestinian mobs killed 11 supposed collaborators. Wouldn't it be nice if Arafat's police force was protecting their citizens from vigilantes? And guaranteeing them a fair trial?
posted @ Monday, April 01, 2002 10:09 AM | Feedback (0)
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