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s an odd and spirit-rebuilding counterpoint to the violence and totalitarianism going on in Iran, you can’t beat this: A handful of Gazan surfers loosely tied to their Israeli counterparts whom they’ve never seen, surfing for peace.

The story starts with Mohammed Abu Jayyab, 35, and Ahmed Abu Hasiera, 29, Gazan lifeguards who saw surfing on TV and managed to bring in a cheap surfboard from Israel during a lax moment in tensions. The Times (UK) picks up the story:

The two men shared their single beaten-up board for years as the siege tightened and Israel launched deadly raids into Gaza, fighting Hamas and other militant groups firing rockets into southern Israel. Then, two years ago, their story was picked up by an American newspaper and was spotted by an elderly American who had introduced surfing to Israel half a century ago.

Don Paskowitz, a surfer from California, moved to Tel Aviv in 1956 and introduced what was then the eight-year-old Jewish state to the art of riding the waves.

In 2007, aged 86, he was inspired to repeat his mission in the besieged, war-torn slums of Gaza. He took a dozen surfboards down to the huge checkpoint in the fence surrounding the tiny enclave. After a certain amount of haggling, he was allowed to hand over the boards to Mohammed and Ahmed, who had gone to the other side to meet him.

From that moment, a loose organisation called Surfing 4 Peace grew, although because of the strict travel restrictions in and out of Gaza, neither Ahmed or Mohammed has ever been able to meet any of the Israeli surfers involved.

A few years ago, there were only two surfers in Gaza. Now there are at least 20, bobbing out at sea as bemused Gazans look on, some of them sitting in deckchairs by the water’s edge, smoking waterpipes.

“In sports, there is no war,” says Ahmed. “Hamas guys do surf.” So did Fatah guys before they were ousted.

So they surf the fetid, sewage-rich waves off Gaza, hopeful that someday they’ll be able to compare notes with Israeli surfers, and maybe even see some of those California girls we wish they all could be – you know, the ones that go to the beach in bikinis, not burkhas.

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o you think you’ll hear much about this on the floor of the UN the next time the regularly scheduled Israel-bashing session comes up on the calendar?

A Palestinian attacker wielding an axe has killed an Israeli boy and wounded another in a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, police say.

The incident took place in the Bat Ayin settlement south of Bethlehem. The attacker is reported to have escaped.

Doctors said the fatality was a 13-year-old, while a seven-year-old boy was being treated for serious wounds.

The military wing of Islamic Jihad and Imad Mughniyeh Group said they carried out the attack, Israel Radio reports. (BBC)

Barbarians! 

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he UN is not the least bit happy with Israel. [Note from editor: Isn't that a bit too obvious for a first sentence, Laer?] This time, the UN is castigating the Israelis for getting in the way of its aid shipments, as detailed in this UN news release:

The number of trucks allowed by Israel to enter Gaza daily to deliver much-needed relief supplies remains insufficient, the United Nations reported today.

Further, the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (UNSCO) and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that only a limited array of items are being permitted to enter through the crossings.

Those scurrilous Israelis!  But wait … before the electrons dried on this UN release, BBC reported that Banki and his Boys might just be growling at the wrong enemy:

Hamas policemen have seized thousands of blankets and food parcels that were meant to be distributed to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, UN officials say.

A UN spokesman said policemen raided a UN warehouse on Tuesday after officials refused to hand over the aid to a Hamas-controlled ministry.

The UN said it was the first time its aid had been confiscated by Hamas.

It condemned the action and demanded the goods be immediately returned. There has been no comment by Hamas.

UN spokesman Christopher Gunness said Hamas police took 3,500 blankets and over 400 food parcels.

Too funny; too true.  The UN had barely stopped crying over the deaths of some of these Hamas “policemen” during the Israeli offensive, as if they were keepers of the peace, not Hamas enforcers, and now their surviving brothers in thuggery steal the UN’s blankets and food parcels!

It’s indicative of the UN approach to the Palestine issue, which can be summarized as entrenched, implacable anti-Israelism (and somewhat more subtly, anti-Zionism and antisemitism).  Here’s that UN news release’s summary of the current war:

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the military operation – launched by Israel with the stated aim of ending Hamas rocket attacks – killed 1,380 Palestinians, of whom 431 are children and 112 are women.

UNICEF stressed that children, who had nowhere to hide, were severely psychologically affected by the conflict. As a result, child protection – including mine-risk education, psychosocial support and recreational opportunities to create a sense of normalcy – must be a priority in Gaza, it said.

Hmmm.  No mention of the safety of Israeli children under the hail of Hamas rockets.  No mention of Hamas missile batteries in residential neighborhoods and weapons stockpiles in the basements of apartment buildings.  And definitely no mention of Hamas military forces firing from UN facilities crowded with Palestinian children.

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gnore the Stars of David and this is a very funny piece of Photoshop art – politicians laughing their butts off that the American public would go for the idea that change would ever really happen in Washington.

But the Stars of David on Lieberman’s and Obama’s ties and Obama’s lapel pin make it just more pro-Palestinian, pro-terror, anti-democracy in the Middle East, anti-Israel leftist spittle.  David Dees does some quite fantastic political satire illustrations, but he is oh, so wrong on Israel.

Too bad, because it is one heck of a fine piece of Photoshopping.

hat-tip: Incredible Daughter #1

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he news reports this morning drip with barely masked contempt for Israel; how dare those Jews shell the UN compound in Gaza?

Israeli forces shelled the United Nations headquarters in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, setting fire to the compound filled with hundreds of refugees as U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon was in the area on a mission to end Israel’s devastating offensive against the territory’s Hamas rulers. (AP)

Israeli forces shelled areas deep inside Gaza City on Thursday, hitting the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and injuring at least three people in the compound, according to witnesses and United Nations officials.

A spokesman for the agency, Christopher Gunness, said that hundreds of Palestinians were sheltering in the compound at the time of the shelling and that there were five fully laden fuel vehicles at the site. (NYT)

Israel shelled the United Nations headquarters in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, engulfing the compound and the main warehouse in fire and destroying thousands of pounds of food and humanitarian supplies intended for Palestinian refugees. (ABC News)

The headquarters of the UN refugee agency was on fire today after coming under attack as Israeli forces pushed deeper into Gaza City, unleashing the heaviest shelling of densely packed neighbourhoods since the military operation began nearly three weeks ago. (UK Guardian)

The media are covering for Hamas by starting with the assumption that the UN is neutral in this matter and is not either actively or passively providing support and shelter to Hamas fighters.  To believe that, one has to ignore Hamas’ bragging about its use of human shields.  If Hamas is willing to kill its own children to manufacture press outrage, why wouldn’t they use the UN for the same purpose?

When confronted with a united anti-Israel front in the western media, I turn to the Israeli media for a different perspective.  And true to form, the Israeli media are reporting on the incident with the same accuracy as the IDF’s radar-guided bombs:

Gunshots and an anti-tank missile were fired at IDF troops near the UN compound that was attacked by the IDF on Thursday, senior defense official told The Jerusalem Post.

Accordng to the officials, the IDF responded by firing artillery shells at the location of the gunmen and that the shells caused damage to the UN installations. (JPost)

Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon on Thursday that Israeli troops shelled the UN headquarters in Gaza after coming under fire from Palestinian militants within the building.

Olmert described the incident as “very sad and I am sorry about this.”

“We don’t want this event to happen again,” he told Ban, “and I don’t know if you know but Hamas attacked from within the UNRWA compound during the humanitarian cease-fire.”(Haaretz)

The AP story on the incident (linked above) described the Israeli apology without referencing the report that Hamas had been firing from the UN compound shortly before it was hit:

Ban expressed “outrage” over the bombing. He said Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak told him there had been a “grave mistake” and promised to pay extra attention to protecting U.N. installations.

Banki should know by now that the grave mistake is giving cover to Hamas fighters, and that any extra attention that should be paid should be to making sure Hamas isn’t coopting UN buildings, ambulances, schools and other facilties.  If there’s one message in Israel’s offense it is that Hamas has no cover, and the human shield or UN shield defense won’t fly.  Call first to warn them, then do what has to be done to erradicate the Hamas blight.

By now, the media’s response to incidents like this should be first to verify the facts regarding the incident – what building was hit, how many casualties – and then immediately inquire about Hamas activities at the target at the time of the attack.  This is not rocket science; it’s not even Qassam science.

In all the talk of proportionality and disproportionality, we should address proportional outrage.  The world should be offended that Hamas would put the UN mission in jeopardy by firing from it, that the UN allowed its mission to be used by Hamas for such purposes, and only then in a distant third, that Israel responded by bombing the compound.  But we have a disproportionate response from the media again.

Until the media can show that it can be proportional, media opinions about the disproportionality of Israel’s offensive can rightly be ignored.

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P tells us that “militants” in Lebanon have fired rockets into northern Israel, which most will see as an effort to open a second front in the current middle east war. With Hezbollah the dominant political party in Lebanon, I wonder who exactly the militants being militant against.

Militancy is typically a domestic matter. Militants fight a factory closing or the construction of an airport or the election of a dictator that opposes their candidate for dictator. An exception is the global militancy of anti-globalism, in which militants break windows and turn over cars every time there’s a major G8 economic summit. They are militant against the existence of capitalism so I suppose the militants in Lebanon are militants against the existence of Jews.

Otherwise AP would just call them terrorists or Hezbollah soldiers.

As AP tells the story, it meanders through reporting the rockets and Hezbollah’s “It ain’t me, Bro!” response, then meanders through the latest from Gaza, including:

U.N. spokesman Adnan Abu Hasna said the U.N. coordinated the delivery with Israel, and the vehicle was marked with a U.N. flag and insignia when it was shot in northern Gaza. The Israeli army said it was investigating.

The allegation was sure to raise tensions with the United Nations, which has already demanded an investigation into Israel’s shelling of a U.N. school in Gaza that killed nearly 40 people. At the time, Israel said it opened fire after militants hiding in the crowd shot mortar shells at Israeli troops.

I’m with the Israelis on that, and after seeing video of Hamas fighters using U.N. ambulances as troop transports, I wouldn’t consider any vehicle flying U.N. flags in Gaza as necessarily innocent. But AP didn’t mention the ambulances.

The propoganda arm of Hamas AP finally gets around to talking about what the Hezbollah rockets did in paragraph 14, having chummed the water with enough anti-Israeli patter by then:

One of the Lebanese rockets went through the roof of a retirement home in Nahariya, about five miles from the border, and exploded in the kitchen as some 25 residents were eating breakfast in the adjacent dining hall. One resident suffered a broken leg, another bruises, apparently from slipping on the floor after emergency sprinklers came on.

“The rocket entered through the roof, hurling the water heaters into the air. It went through bedrooms upstairs and then into the kitchen. There was a serious blast,” said Henry Carmelli, the home’s manager.

When Israel hit a school that had mortar rounds flying out of it, it was the headline and the top of the story, and the story has continued for days.  When Hezbollah hits an old folks home that’s just serving breakfast to its residents, it’s paragraph 14.

Meanwhile, if you put “Lebanon rockets hit Israel” into YouTube, you’ll find the pro-terror forces are out-uploading the supporters of Israel pretty handily – at least as of 7:30 a.m. Pacific time.  A typical example is “Hizbollah hits Israel with rockets – yeah!” subtitled “Brave knights of Allah are sending rockets into Israel from behind a civilian building:”

This could well be fake.  It’s shot with some sort of night vision, but the rockets hit the old folks home during breakfast service.  But if you do believe it, you can count the rockets coming out of the yard of what is reported by the video to be “a three-story residential building” – there are seven in all, fired in rapid succession.  Ynet reports only two rocket hits in northern Israel.

Apparently the lesson Hezbollah learned from its war with Israel is that it should continue to fire on Israel from civilian locations, increasing the opportunity for casualties among the civilian population, and trumped up global outrage against Israel.

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midst all the global finger-pointing at Israel for standing up to defend itself against the bloodthirsty savages who are Hamas, there are moments of clarity … even among the Gaza Palestinians, as the Muslims Against Sharia blog relays:

At least some of them know the identity of their tormentors. A New York Times dispatch captured an excruciating moment that took place in a hospital morgue, where a mother had just found half of the body of her 17-year-old daughter.

“May God exterminate Hamas!” screamed the woman in crystal-clear understanding that the terrorist band’s reckless, inhuman actions had brought death to her child.

The Libyan cease-fire resolution written for the Arab League does not even mention Hamas, and here’s the Palestinian U.N. observer commenting on the resolution:

Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian U.N. observer, said Arab nations would be working “day and night” to get council approval of a binding resolution “that would condemn the crimes committed by Israel and stop the military aggression, and provide protection for the Palestinians and lift the siege.”

“We face a very dangerous crossroads in the Middle East as a direct consequence of this Israeli aggression … (which) is threatening the life and prosperity of 1.5 million Palestinian and also threatens to undermine the peace efforts,” he said.

Who’s got the clarity here?  The victim or the perpetrator?

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obert Kaplan at Atlantic calls the current offensive a war against the new Iranian empire. That’s a scary thought and and rings true to me it’s a worthy read:

Israel has just embarked on a land invasion of the Gaza Strip after a week of aerial bombing. Gaza is bordered by Egypt, and was under Egyptian military control from 1949 through 1967. And yet in a startling rebuke to geography and recent history—and in testimony to the sheer power of audacity and of ideas—the mullahs in Teheran hold more sway in Gaza today than does the tired, Brezhnevite regime of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Gaza constitutes the western edge of Iran’s veritable new empire, cartographically akin to the ancient Persian one, that now stretches all the way to western Afghanistan, where Kabul holds no sway and which is under Iranian economic domination.

If you read that carefully, particularly the “all the way to western Afghanistan” line, then we fighting on the other front of this war.

It seems to me the most effective tactic in this campaign is to do all we can to keep the price of oil down. A few more years of economic crumbling in Tehran must might spell the end for the Mullahs and the collapse of the naescent and nasty empire.

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ews reports on Israel’s successful action against Nizar Rayyan (center, spelled Rayan in AP reports and  Wikipedia), a prominent Hamas leader and Hamas’ liaison with its military wing, give us an insight into the nature of the Palestinian beast and the Israeli action against it.

Most Hamas leaders have gone into hiding since the Israeli offensive began, but not Rayyan, who was seen speaking at his local mosque and adamantly refused to leave his apartment.  Says Ynet:

Prior to striking Rayyan’s house the IDF tried to warn his family about the imminent attack and urged them to evacuate the place, but they refused to do so.

Israel has been using leaflets and even phone calls to give nearby civilians warnings of strikes on known military targets illegally hidden amidst the civilian population.  Showing evil to Israel’s good, Rayyan willingly allowed his family to die.  This is true to Palestinian standards and true to Rayyan, who was a strong advocate of continuing the campaign of suicide attacks against Israel.  He had previously sent one of his own sons out as a suicide bomber in a rather inept attack that resulted in the deaths of only two of the hated Jews.  (Oh, the shame the Rayyan family must have felt!)

The suicide bombings have done nothing to advance the Palestinian agenda, yet Rayyan advocated them still, just as he continued to believe Allah would see Palestine victorious, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary – failure, defeat, corruption, powerlessness, squalor, sin, disrespect.

And suicide bombs were just the start of Rayyan’s commitment to terrorism and the destruction of Jews. Wikipedia’s write-up seems to have a bias of support bubbling just beneath the surface, but it is worth the read nonetheless:

An influential preacher at what is known in Jabalia as the “Mosque of martyrs”, Rayan mentored suicide bombers. …

When the Israeli military killed Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 2004, Rayan came to be considered Hamas’ top clerical authority. Rayan directed and financed the Ashdod Port attack, which killed ten people.

Rayan was one of the architects behind the 2007 Battle of Gaza, in which 400 Palestinian Fatah party members were killed and dozens more Palestinians were tortured and maimed. According to an Hamas spokesperson, it’s possible that the Palestinian National Authority asked Israel to kill Rayan due to his role in the Hamas-Fatah clashes. He added that Rayan was one of the main reasons why many of Mahmoud Abbas’s men “did not sleep well at night.”

Rayan was fundamentally opposed to the state of Israel. He proclaimed, “True Islam would ever allow a Jewish state to survive in the Muslim Middle East. Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God.”

Rayan believed that Jews are a “cursed people” and some were transformed into pigs and apes by Allah. He also believed that Jews must pay for murdering prophets of Islam and “closing [their] your ears to the Messenger of Allah.”

Yet – no surprise here – Rayyan was a hero to the Palestinians. And despite all he knew as a senior Hamas leader, he still promoted his gang of ruthless brothers:

Wednesday saw Rayyan speak at a Gaza mosque and call on Muslims everywhere to pray for the Palestinians in the Strip. “We do not need money or weapons, we only need your prayers. We can handle the enemy ourselves.”

Well, it turns out that Rayyan handled Israel right into his grave.  Despite Rayyan’s arrogance, Hamas certainly needs money; Gaza survives only because of money received from others.  Of course they need weapons, including rockets and roadside explosives made in Iran and China.  It’s fine politicking for Rayyan to grandstand like this, because none of the Arab states are rushing to physically defend Hamas, which is seen as an Iranian puppet and a potential spawning ground of Islamist action against their own corrupt regimes.

And, it turns out, Rayyan did need their prayers – but prayers have done little to help the Palestinians, and they didn’t help him or his family.  Perhaps they are being prayed to the wrong god, a god that endorses cruelty and violence.

We learn from AP that the Israeli strike killed two of his four wives and four of his twelve children, so we see that Rayyan is a polygamist and a hyper-procreator, responsible for his little part of the gross over-population of Gaza and the resulting poverty.  Presumably, the four children were his younger offspring, murdered by their father, who refused to allow them to leave for Tehran or other safe havens available to Hamas leaders. [Update: Subsequent reports reveal that all four of Rayyan's wives and about a dozen of his progeny died in the attack - more evidence (as if we need it) of the culture of death that consumes the Palestinians.]

Knowing his actions would lead to these innocents’ deaths was OK with Rayyan since he was a professor of Islamic law – you know, cut off their hands or their heads, stone them, whip them, die for Allah.  He knew his personal behavior was right with his personal god, cruel god that the Muslim’s Allah is.

We also learn that the one-ton bomb dropped on his house killed a man who “was respected in Gaza for donning combat fatigues and personally participating in clashes against Israeli forces.”  Not a mamby-pamby negotiator for peace, this Rayyan.

Finally, AP tells us that secondary explosions were witness after the initial strike on Rayyan’s building, so we know that he was storing Hamas munitions in a civilian building, putting his own family at risk in violation of international law – and that probably makes him a hero to Palestinians as much as donning combat fatigues.

The death of Nizar Rayyan,  his wives and  his children is a morality play of the highest order.  We see in Rayyan all that is evil:  arrogance, hatred, the murder of wives and children, terrorism.  We see in Israel a highly moral attempt to protect the innocent while destroying the evil.

And we know that in Gaza, Rayyan will be mourned as a hero. What does that say about Gaza, Hamas, the Palestinians and Islam?  And what does it say about the U.N., international media and much of the international community that all stand by Hamas at times like this?

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s I type this, it’s four minutes before midnight in Israel and an ugly 2008 is ready to pass over to what looks like it will be an even uglier 2009.  As the new year dawns, we see everywhere more evidence of Islamic/Palestinian refusal to shun hatred and act like a civilized nation (and if they act like a civilized nation, maybe they’ll become one).

From the front:

[Shin Bet Chief Yuval] Diskin also noted that large numbers of Hamas operatives are hiding in hospitals and that some are posing as medical staff. “Some are also hiding in mosques and some of those have been turned into headquarters, since they assumed Israel won’t attack them there. Their weapons’ labs have been completely destroyed and their tunnel system has been severely damaged.

The IAF reported Tuesday of several sightings of cells operating in densely populated areas and attempting to use Palestinian civilians as human shields.

Cells have been detected in neighborhoods in Gaza City, Jabalya, Khan Younis and Rafah. (YNET)

Anyone for following the rules of the Geneva Convention?

From Beersheba:

The army official said the rocket that struck the school in Beersheba was manufactured in China, is heavier than the Qassam and can “potentially cause much greater damage.” He said the rocket contains metal pallets that can spread out across a radius of up to 100 meters (about 328 feet) from the point of impact. (YNET)

From Denmark:

A gunman wounded two Israelis working at a packed central Denmark shopping mall Wednesday, Danish police said.

The two wounded men are Israelis in their 20s, police spokesman Lars Thede said. He said it was too early to speculate on whether they were targeted because of their nationality.

One of the wounded was shot in the arm and the other in the leg, police said. Their condition is unclear. …

The men, who were selling hair-care products, had been harassed by a group of youths in recent days, Denmark’s Ritzau news agency said.

According to the B.T. newspaper’s Web site, a man shouted something in another language and opened fire. Another Israeli inside the hairdressing shop threw a chair at the gunman, the newspaper said.

The shooter escaped in a dark vehicle.

The Foreign Ministry believes that the attack was related to anger over Israel’s offensive on the Gaza Strip. (Haaretz)

Something in a foreign language … harassed by a “group of youths” earlier … related to anger over the situation in Gaza … Gwarsh, do you think they just might be Palestinians or other radical Islamists?

From Tehran:

Thousands of Iranians, joined by high-ranking Iranian officials and military commanders, shouted “Down With USA” and “Down With Israel” in Tehran on Monday. Many carried banners reading “Israel must be wiped off the face of the earth” and “We should all rise and destroy Israel.”

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Sunday urged Muslim states to punish Israel. (AFP)

And finally, from Ft. Lauderdale:

It was pandemonium. Muslims dress in full jihad garb juiced with …. hate.It looked like Halloween in Gaza. Throngs of young Muslims drunk with ….. hate. It was madness in America. You had to see it to believe it (watch video for the feel)

Across the street was an anemic counter protest. Where were the Jewish kids? NOWHERE. Jewish leadership and the diaspora have failed miserably in the education of our youth. The entire Muslim rally was young, wild — frenetic. Itchy fingers on hair triggers.

Jewish lay leadership should be thrown out on the dhimmi asses. They have failed an entire generation of slackers. (Atlas Shrugs)

And this video from Tom Trento, aslo of the Fort Lauderdale Palestinian demonstration.  Check out the woman with the “Nuke Israel” sign at 1:55 and ask yourself, “Fort Lauderdale?!”

Meanwhile, the (London) Times buys the Palestinian line:

Who or what is Hamas, the movement that Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, would like to wipe out as though it were a virus? Why did it win the Palestinian elections and why does it allow rockets to be fired into Israel? The story of Hamas over the past three years reveals how the Israeli, US and UK governments’ misunderstanding of this Islamist movement has led us to the brutal and desperate situation that we are in now.

The story begins nearly three years ago when Change and Reform – Hamas’s political party – unexpectedly won the first free and fair elections in the Arab world, on a platform of ending endemic corruption and improving the almost non-existent public services in Gaza and the West Bank. Against a divided opposition this ostensibly religious party impressed the predominantly secular community to win with 42 per cent of the vote.

Palestinians did not vote for Hamas because it was dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel or because it had been responsible for waves of suicide bombings that had killed Israeli citizens. They voted for Hamas because they thought that Fatah, the party of the rejected Government, had failed them. Despite renouncing violence and recognising the state of Israel Fatah had not achieved a Palestinian state. It is crucial to know this to understand the supposed rejectionist position of Hamas. It won’t recognise Israel or renounce the right to resist until it is sure of the world’s commitment to a just solution to the Palestinian issue.

This somehow makes ceaseless rocket attacks – with ever more sophisiticated, foreign-purchased rockets, somehow legitimate?  Elections are “fair and free” if Hamas orders the wholesale slaughter of Fatah members in the weeks leading up to the election?

And the fact that Palestinians voted for Hamas does not take away the fact that it is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and is responsible for countless terrorist attacks on innocent civilians.  How can we ignore all this and treat Hamas as if it doesn’t deserve to be retaliated against?

I have little optimism that 2009 – YOTO 1 (Year Of The One 1) – will make things better.  My wife shoveled aside her considerable knowledge of Obama today and said she hoped he just might be a Lightworker of some kind, able through the power of his personality to accomplish things others can’t.  To which I, regrettably, answered “hooey.”

The hatreds and history of the Middle East are too deep, the teachings of radical Islam too full of jihad, for mere mortals, even ones as charming as Obama, to overcome, so I’m afraid that 2009 will merely serve to teach us that we elected a man, not a demigod, and that we’re in for another hateful year.

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