Mr Peres lied.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

11:55AM: I would bring out the flying pig, but someone from the Leftist Ha’aretz criticizing the Goldstone Report is already old news.

Nobody knows yet when the next war will break out. Maybe in a decade, maybe in a year, or maybe even next month. It is also not clear where the next war will erupt – perhaps on the Gaza border, perhaps the West Bank, or maybe in Jerusalem.

But it is already clear what the next war’s name will be – the Goldstone War. It will be the war brought upon us by the Goldstone report, Judge Goldstone and his Goldstoner followers.

It’s a simple story. In the absence of peace in the Middle East, deterrence prevents war. Israeli deterrence has been eroded considerably by two Lebanon wars, two intifadas and two unilateral withdrawals. Thus Israel is incessantly subjected to terror attacks.

To prevent the region’s deterioration into complete chaos, Israel must exercize force once every few years. These limited demonstrations of power do not achieve a decisive military victory or a breakthrough in the peace process.

Their entire purpose is to stabilize the violent relationship between Israelis and Arabs. Thus they create a temporary, strong-arm balance that subdues the conflict and ensures calm for a few years.

For better or worse, Operation Cast Lead created such a balance. It weakened Hamas and deterred it, at a terrible human cost. It strengthened the moderate Palestinians and enabled them to grow, at an intolerable moral cost.

Cast Lead granted Israel’s southern residents a rare time-out. Brutal as it was, the operation created an infrastructure of stability on which it was possible to build – layer by layer – a new, sober peace process.

However, in recent weeks the balance has been disrupted. Hamas is rearing its head while the Palestinian moderates are becoming more radical. A trickle of Qassam rocket fire has resumed in the south, while the embers on the Temple Mount are glowing red-hot.

This is no coincidence. The Goldstone report and the Goldstone spirit are causing a situation in which the deterrence that was achieved for such a high price at the beginning of the year could expire prematurely. They are bringing the next round of Israeli-Palestinian war closer.

More than enough has been written about Richard Goldstone’s double standard. However, today it is clear that Goldstone is not only guilty of a double standard (see Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka, Tibet…), but of a double political crime.

With one hand he pushed peace further away, by making it clear that even after Israel withdraws to the Green Line it is not permitted to defend its citizens and its sovereignty. With the other hand he brought war closer, by binding Israel in a straitjacket that prevents it from exercising its power in the future.

On the one hand Goldstone played into the Israeli right wing’s hands (by increasing the risks of withdrawal). On the other hand he inflamed Palestinian extremism (by burning Israel at the stake).

The Palestinians see Goldstone as a sort of Delilah, who found the Israeli Samson’s weakness and sheared off his tresses. This can lead to only one outcome – violence and more violence, more and more violence – up to war.

The problem isn’t just Goldstone. The problem is the Goldstoners. For decades the Goldstone bunch has been conducting an insane incitement campaign against Israel. Israel contributed its part to this campaign with the occupation, the settlements and its arrogance. But the Goldstoners are not driven by an honest attempt to divide the land, create peace and establish universal justice that would apply to all nations. They are driven by a deep need to isolate Israel, condemn it and destroy it.

Although some of the leading Goldstoners are Jews and Israelis, they don’t recognize Jewish history, the Jewish tragedy and the difficult circumstances in which the Jewish state is trying to survive. They treat Israel like a wicked, omnipotent power that is responsible for all the conflict’s sins and the region’s ills.

The Goldstone report would never have been written without the joint work, joint bias and joint Israel-hatred of all the Goldstoners. Thus the report reflects both the Goldstoners’ holy fury and their complete belief that the Palestinians can do no wrong.

That belief is now endangering not only Israel but calm and stability. In their fanaticism and extremism, Goldstone and the Goldstoners have brought us closer to bloodshed.

11:20AM: BREAKING NEWS: Barack Obama has won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize “”for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”

11:10AM: Yet another threat by Iran.

Iran  would “blow up the heart” of Israel  if it was attacked by the Jewish state or the United States, a Revolutionary Guards official was quoted on Friday as saying.

“Even if one American or Zionist missile hits our country, before the dust settles, Iranian missiles will blow up the heart of Israel,” the IRNA news agency quoted Mojtaba Zolnour as saying.

Notice how the threat has been made even in the event of  the US striking them.

7:45AM: Ha’aretz reports that Democratic congressmen close to Barack Obama told an Israeli source the Obama administration is furious over supposed Israeli incitement against the President, which includes attempting to portray Obama to the American public as an enemy of Israel.

And in other anger-related news, Hamas has declared today a “day of rage” for Al-Aqsa Mosque.

12:48AM: Here’s more on the Gaza donkey-zebra story I posted about yesterday.

If the zoo looked familiar to you, this is perhaps where you last saw it.

12:40AM: The National Post’s Jonathan Kay suggests opponents of Israel boycott protein.

For years, Canada’s anti-Israel activists, church groups and unions have been urging us to boycott every Israeli product under the sun — from wines, to academics, to fruit, to high-tech goods, to films.

It is time to take the campaign to the next level.

This week, the Nobel Prize for chemistry was awarded to three scientists — including a woman named Ada Yonath.
Yonath is not only the first woman to win a chemistry Nobel since 1964, she also happens to be a citizen of the Zionist entity — which means her research is a subject of concern to all social-justice-loving activists.

It turns out that Yonath won her award for her research on ribosome, a key component of the cellular machinery that translates DNA sequences into protein chains — the exact sort of protein chains that form the basis of human life in Israeli soldiers and settlers. Much like American F-16s, these protein chains are essential to the Israeli war machine.

In other words, the Nobel Prize committee is essentially rubber-stamping Israeli genocide.

Ribosomes build proteins from genetic instructions transmitted by messenger strands of Ribonucleic acid — much like the Zionist lobby in Washington carries out the wishes of its Israeli paymasters.

Interestingly. ribosomes were first observed in the 1950s — just a few years after the creation of the state of Israel. Coincidence?

Oh and here’s someone who isn’t producing any protein strands: Muhammad al-Durrah. I guess Ms. Yonath’s “humanitarian” research doesn’t apply to Palestinian kids.

At this point, you are thinking “What can I do?” The answer lies inside you — inside every cell, in fact.

Ironically, many of those who claim to support the Palestinian cause go about their day to day life without thinking about how their continuous use of ribosomes serves to essentially validate Ms. Yonath’s military research project.

Do you need all those trillions of proteins you’re producing? Do you even know what they do?

Didn’t think so.

Protein strands or social justice — which is it going to be?

I know what Muhammad al-Durrah would pick.

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The PA has been waging a diplomatic campaign against Israel for the past two weeks over what it terms “provocations” on the Temple Mount

According to reports that have reached Israel about Fayyad’s meeting with the ambassadors, the PA prime minister described last Sunday’s clashes as “an assault by extremist religious settlers on the Temple Mount compound” and said it was “a provocation planned in advance that was aimed at sabotaging the peace process and derailing [U.S.] President [Barack] Obama’s peace initiative.”

Warning that the situation on the mount was flammable and could swiftly deteriorate, he added, “I remind you that this is where the Al-Aqsa Intifada began, after [Ariel] Sharon’s visit” to the mount in September 2000. “The Palestinians’ popular response stems from the Israeli aggression, and we are liable to lose control over events.”

Sounds like a threat to me.

Of course, if there is another “intifada”, just know that it won’t be a spontaneous outpouring of emotion, but something very deliberate and planned.

Meanwhile, even the Left wing Ha’aretz knows where the blame for this recent violence lies.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

10:50PM: Israeli television has shown pictures proving the Islamic movement had prepared for the riots, hiding rocks inside Al-Aqsa Mosque, contrary to Arab claims that Israel started the confrontation by denying Arabs entry to the Temple Mount.

As the Jerusalem Post reported:

Earlier Monday, Jerusalem police explained their decision to allow only worshipers over the age of 50 into the Temple Mount, revealing that wheelbarrows filled with rocks had been discovered throughout the Aqsa Mosque compound on Sunday.

Palestinians had filled the wheelbarrows with stones and bricks in preparation for riots in the Old City, police assessed.

The discovery of the wheelbarrows, in addition to intelligence information and the call on Palestinians to “come and defend” Al-Aqsa, led the police to restrict entrance to the Temple Mount.

It’s 2000 all over again.

10:32PM: The PA continues to show its true colors, urging its people to “confront” Israel and imploring the world to stop us from worshiping our religion in Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority on Monday evening condemned Jerusalem’s decision to restrict entrance to the Aqsa Mosque compound, calling on Palestinians to confront Israel in light of the “Israeli aggression.”

“We call on the Palestinian public to confront Israel and its plans, that are intended to prevent the Palestinian people from fulfilling their aspirations of establishing a Palestinian state in the occupied territories,” read a statement issued by the government of PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayad in Ramallah.

The PA government publicly decried “Israel’s attempts to conduct Jewish prayer services in the Aqsa compound” and urged the world “to force Israel to halt is efforts to Jewify the city.”

Earlier Monday, Jerusalem police explained their decision to allow only worshipers over the age of 50 into the Temple Mount, revealing that wheelbarrows filled with rocks had been discovered throughout the Aqsa Mosque compound on Sunday.

There is no chance of peace with a people who deny our thousands-year connection to the land of Israel and the holy city of Jerusalem, and will resort to violence at the drop of a hat.

3:50PM:

Palestinian women take part in a protest in Gaza City calling for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails October 5, 2009. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (GAZA POLITICS CONFLICT)

Palestinian women take part in a protest in Gaza City calling for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails October 5, 2009. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem (GAZA POLITICS CONFLICT)

I’m thinking of conducting my own protest….calling for the release of palestinians from really bad photograph poses.

10:25AM: The latest Richard Goldstone interview with CNN.

Pay special attention to the following:

• Goldstone stating “We didn’t look at whether Hamas is entitled to use military force to gain independence for the palestinian people. We looked at what methods Hamas used,” (1:06) the implication being his acceptance of the notion that Hamas’ aim is solely to gain independence for the palestinians, rather than being its stated aim to rid the land of the Jews.
• Goldstone’s claiming a lack of time did not allow his team to find that Hamas did, in fact, operate out of civilian areas  (1:20), despite the ease of accessing such evidence on YouTube.
• Goldstone stating definitively that the infrastructure to Gaza had no military justification, mentioning specifically the bulldozing of agricultural land (2:30). I am no military expert, but I can imagine military purposes such as establishing a buffer zone. Goldstone does not even entertain this prospect, and states his views as fact.
• Goldstone repeating the laughable idea that both sides (i.e. including Hamas) can now use the report as a roadmap for investigating themselves (5:55)

7:20AM: Our peace partners, the Jordanians, are doing the best to calm the situation on the Temple Mount.

By adopting the palestinian narrative of events, of course.

Jerusalem is a “red line” to Jordan, Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh said here on Sunday.

“UNSC permanent members are urged to act immediately and shoulder their responsibilities, so as to halt Israeli unending violations,” Judeh told reporters, adding that Israel must be pressured in order to actually commit to achieving peace and re-launching negotiations.

“Dangerous violations, such as allowing Jewish extremists to barge into courts of Al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as continuing excavations in Muslim holy places, destroying houses and displacing the Arab population in a bid to alter the demographic landscape in East Jerusalem are all condemned and rejected,” Judeh stressed.

Earlier today, Judeh, in a meeting with EU Middle East representative Marc Otte, warned against the Israeli escalation and violations in occupied East Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa mosque.

In a related development, the Jordanian foreign ministry summoned the Israeli ambassador in Amman and handed him an objection note over unremitting violations on Muslim and Christian holy places in East Jerusalem.

“All Israeli procedures are illegal, as they signify a breach to Israel’s commitments in its capacity as an occupying force in the West Bank,” a ministry statement said.

Such procedures, the statement carried on to say, represented a major obstacle before efforts to launch serious negotiations that would result in achieving the two-state solution, and eventually, inclusive peace.

Damascus-based Hamashole Khaled Mashaal admitted his group produces and smuggles weapons despite Israel’s “blockade” on Gaza.

“Your brothers in Palestine, despite the blockade and the closing of border passages … despite the fleets from east and west, despite all of this, we buy arms, we manage to produce arms and we smuggle arms,” AFP quoted Masshal as saying in a recording of a speech to young members of Sudan’s ruling party

Meanwhile, the leader of the country hosting Mashaal is reportedly optimistic about restarting peace talks with Israel

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

10:55PM: And I thought only Israel officials had big mouths.

A senior Kremlin official confirmed Wednesday to the Russian paper Kommersant that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did indeed make a clandestine trip to Russia on Monday.

Commenting on the visit, the official said that “this kind of development could only be related to new and threatening information on Iran’s nuclear program.”

The Russian newspaper quoted experts speculating that such a trip would only be justified under extraordinary circumstances, “for example, in the case of Israel planning to attack Iran.”

10:42PM: Did you know that September 9th (9/9) is the most requested wedding date in Israel?

Neither did I, but then again, I also didn’t know you could do this with toilet paper:

7:42PM: Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has stood up Israeli counterpart Avigdor Lieberman in order to meet Venezuelan President Hugo “Boofhead” Chavez.

5:15PM: More creepiness from senior HRW analyst and Nazi fetishist Mark Garlasco.

As you can tell, the “people with dreams” to which he is referring were not Jews butchered at the hands of the Nazis (hat tip: Elder of Ziyon)

2:42PM: Yet another singer has come out of the Jewish closet – Julio Iglesias.

Not only that, he’s the right kind of Jew and not the anti-Israel, shmekky kind.

Sitting on a bar stool between songs, Iglesias took several moments to share anecdotes about his personal connection to Israel. Quite surprising to the audience was his avowal that his mother was Jewish and that he himself was “Jewish from the waist up.” (too much information – ed.)

In regard to the conflict in the region, Iglesias warmly said that he “understands your feelings and your fight,” prompting a resounding round of applause from the audience. Iglesias also remarked on his past travels through the country and emphasized that Israel “is a part of my life” and that playing to an Israeli audience “is an honor.”

And it is an honor to host you too. Just please lay off the Viagra.

Indeed, Julio Iglesias has unmatched debonair credentials, and he lived up to his reputation as a man of passion. Despite his advice in between songs on the proper dosage of Viagra for sexual vitality and how he “makes love” with his songs on stage, it was actually more personally revealing to the attendees to hear of his Jewish mother’s ancestral roots.

2:15PM: Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy director Ron Dermer has weighed in on Marc Garlasco’s Nazi fetish.

Human Rights Watch’s employment of a man who trades and collects Nazi memorabilia as its “senior military expert” is a “new low” for the organization that frequently criticizes Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy director Ron Dermer said Wednesday.

“I thought that nothing could top a human rights organization trying to raise money in Saudi Arabia, but I was apparently wrong,” said Dermer, referring to HRW’s fundraising efforts in the kingdom earlier this year, using its reports against Israel as a sales pitch. “A war crimes investigator who is an avid collector and trader in Nazi memorabilia is perhaps a new low.”

Dermer was referring to reports, both in the blogosphere and the press, that Marc Garlasco, HRW’s senior military expert, who has written numerous reports condemning Israel, is an avid collector of Nazi memorabilia.

12:42PM: Ha’aretz has a report on Nazi aficionado and HRW analyst Marc Garlasco. In it, they refer to him as a former HRW analyst, so they are either having a Jerusalem Post moment, or it is their subtle way of reporting he has resigned.

The report also makes no mention of the fact that this revelation emanated from the blogs, instead referring to “media sources.”

Tisha B’Av will last forever,” promised Kamal al-Khatib, deputy head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, to thousands of cheering Muslims at the Temple Mount a few days ago. Even the hearts of Jews far from the mountain saddened. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas mocked us in the same spirit a few months ago when he said, “Call yourself the Hebrew Socialist Republic – it is none of my business.” He refused to accept Israel’s Jewish identity. We, who have drifted away from Tisha B’Av and the Temple Mount, should be grateful to both of them, because sometimes a nation needs its haters to discover its real face in the mirror again.

Why deny it? Only a few of us still feel real pain over the destruction of the Temple some 2,000 years ago. Fewer still are attached to the Temple of yore. Tisha B’Av is filled with events organized by Temple Mount movements and groups interested in negotiations and public discourse, but the general public is not part of all that.

It is doubtful whether legislation would help in this case. It may even be harmful when the public does not feel mere indifference to this day but alienation. Regrettably, many people ignore Tisha B’Av. They wonder what mourning the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple has to do with them, who are living in a sovereign Jewish state.
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But there’s another way that will put not only the loss of the Temple and its existence at the center of this day, but mainly the loss of Jewish sovereignty and freedom and the beginning of the long exile. Were it not for that exile, in which we were banished from our land, persecuted, oppressed and murdered, our history as a nation could have been very different.

Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson once said that “had Israel not mourned its destruction for generations … we wouldn’t have had Hess, Pinsker, Herzl or Nordau … Yehuda Halevy wouldn’t have been able to create ‘Zion, Won’t You Ask’ and Bialik couldn’t have written ‘Scroll of Fire.’” Chaim Arlosoroff, one of the most outstanding Labor Zionist leaders, defined Tisha B’Av at the beginning of the last century as “the nation’s greatest mourning day.”

The Kotzker Rabbi of Poland once repented in tears, telling his followers that as a boy of 10 he had been overpowered by arrogance. After his family’s house burned down and its property was lost, he comforted his weeping mother, promising that when he grew up he would write a new family tree beginning with himself, instead of the one the fire had consumed. Too many people see the Temple Mount much like little Menachem Mendel (later to become the Kotzker Rabbi) saw his family tree, believing they can skip the Temple Mount and rewrite the Jewish nation’s lineage without it.

Beside the Book of Lamentations and the traditional laments it is time to call, ‘Arise! Let us go up to Zion,” let us go to the Temple Mount. Within the limitations of halakha and of police directives, not as a provocation or demonstration.

A heritage trip to Morocco or Poland is all well and good, but going to the Temple Mount is the real heritage trip. A trip of consciousness and study, with maps and history books in the company of archaeologists, historians, rabbis, academics, educators and commanders. A trip intended to remind us where the Jewish people’s genealogical record is buried in Jerusalem. And no posters, demonstrations or ritual effects. This minimum, visiting the Temple Mount, is reserved by Israel’s laws to any Jew who wants it, even if he wears a skullcap. The police, despite their balking, must allow it.

Several years ago I went on a fascinating trip of this kind with archaeologist Dan Bahat, and I have returned many times since. Even today, Tisha B’Av, after some 30 years of writing for Haaretz, I will go there. Like many others I will look back knowing that the memory of the past and heritage is in many ways also the history of our present and future, and that only thus will we improve the chance that others, including our enemies, will recognize this continuity and affinity.

Of course, I only know this from the comments to the report (such as this). Ha’aretz apparently removed the offending “t” word, presumably so as not to offend their enlightened readers.

That it is not to say that Ha’aretz has an aversion to the word “terrorism.” They are quite fine using it when it suits their agenda.

More than 200 Jewish bloggers, most of them immigrants from North America, attended the First International Jewish Bloggers Convention in Jerusalem this past Wednesday. Attendees seemed as much if not more interested in meeting fellow bloggers than in panel discussions dedicated to the agenda of taking Jewish blogging to the next level. “Everybody knew already how to get traffic, so there was nothing new,” said German-born Miriam Woelke, publisher of several blogs about Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox communities in Israel.

“It’s kind of nice to see faces of people that I only read online,” David Abitbol, one of the panelists and founder of Jewlicious, told Haaretz. The anonymous author of Chardal, who moved from Los Angeles to Yad Binyamin last year, said that putting faces to names was indeed his main reason for attending the conference. “I have conversations with these people all the time, but they are faceless people. It’s nice to have a normal conversation.”

While all blogs represented at the conference dealt in some way or another with life in Israel, the spectrum ranged from immigration through carrying guns in Israel to discussions of Jewish law, board games and interior design. Another 1,300 bloggers followed a live Web cast of the event on their computer screens.

The keynote event of the half-day conference, which was organized by the pro-immigration group Nefesh B’Nefesh, was a speech by former prime minister and current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, which touched on his campaign more than blogging. The Foreign Ministry also made a presentation on branding Israel in a better way.

Nefesh B’Nefesh’s Danny Oberman announced the launch of a new Web 2.0 project called My Aliyah Idea, where users are encouraged to post and discuss ways to increase and improve immigration to Israel. While some bloggers said they write for purely recreational and not for any political reasons, many attendees and panelists were exploring ways in which their efforts could help the Jewish state.

“The blogosphere gives everyone a voice and there’s lots of great hasbara [public relations] we can do at a grassroots level,” said Texas-born Benji Lovitt, a 33-year-old comedian and author of What War Zone???, a blog that takes a humorous look on everyday life in Israel. “My approach is to try to show that Israel is more than you see on CNN. It’s actually not the scary, depressing place you think it might be but it’s a place of vibrancy and fun and blogging is a way to spread the word about that.”

I guess my Separated at Birth threat worked wonders.