“We have no grand expectations out of one meeting,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs Monday, saying only that it would be an important way to continue “the hard work, day-to-day diplomacy that has to be done to seek a lasting peace.”

Meanwhile, Israeli sources say the meeting will just be a photo opportunity.

“The meeting will not inaugurate [renewed] negotiations and will not involve any significant details,” the sources said. “The differences on the issue of the settlements and the framework of the talks remain deep.”

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

10:48PM: Here is something I didn’t notice when I originally posted about the Toronto Film festival protest and counter protest.

Left, right or center, there’s two things nearly everybody in Hollywood agrees on: There’s no disease that can’t be cured by raising enough money and the state of Israel deserves unabashed support.

These days, sympathy for Israel puts the American entertainment industry at odds with much of the European film and academic communities. In those circles, vehement criticism of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians and boycotts of Israeli scholars and artists have become almost fashionable. (In cinematic London, Hamas militants are the new baby seals.) Hollywood has mostly shrugged all this off, until this week, when it decided that an outbreak of anti-Israeli agitation in Toronto was bringing things a little too close to home.

Canadian documentary filmmaker John Greyson pulled his latest movie from this week’s Toronto International Film Festival because he said the event’s sister-city relationship with Tel Aviv was an implicit endorsement of “the smiling face of Israeli apartheid.”

A variety of entertainers — including David Byrne, Julie Christie, Ken Loach, Jane Fonda, Viggo Mortensen and Wallace Shawn — published a letter alleging that Toronto had become an agent of the “Israeli propaganda machine.”

Some people in Hollywood took these initiatives not as a disagreement with Israeli government policies but as an attempt to isolate and ostracize the Jewish state’s vibrant, diverse and independent film community. (If there really is a dirty word in Hollywood, it’s “blacklist.”)

So former CAA agent Dan Adler, acting under the sponsorship of Los Angeles’ Jewish Federation and United Jewish Appeal of Toronto, put together a counter ad that denounced the boycott demands in Thursday’s trades.

“We all spent a lot of time talking about the original protest letter, in the sense that it seemed to be going after the wrong target by attacking Israel and its film artists,” Adler told The Times’ Patrick Goldstein on Wednesday night. “When I sat down at my computer and started asking for people to sign on, all I got was passion and enthusiasm. Everyone said, ‘I’m in,’ and then, even better, added, ‘Can I get you someone else?’ ”

The signatories do read like a who’s who of Hollywood’s elite with a cast that runs from the executive suites to the sound stages and cuts across generations. Among those who signed on are Jerry Seinfeld, Seth Rogen, Robert Duvall, Halle Berry, Sacha Baron Cohen, Lisa Kudrow, Lenny Kravitz, Ed Zwick, Jason Alexander, Chazz Palminteri and David Cronenberg, as well as A-list producers and executives Ron Meyer, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Sherry Lansing, Neal Moritz, Jonathan Glickman, Nina Jacobson, Darren Star, Nathan Kahane and Gail Berman.

(There’s even a precedent-setting credit for writer-director Michael Tolkin, who “polished” the ad’s text. Now, there’s something the Writers Guild would like to see catch on.)

In a phone interview, former Paramount head Lansing said she and her husband, director William Friedkin, were upset that the Israeli filmmakers had been singled out for retribution, especially as the community starts the Jewish new year and High Holy Days.

“These are independent filmmakers who are not working as the propaganda machine of the state of Israel,” Lansing said. “It’s dangerous to — in any way — turn the film festival into a political event. We do not want to return to the days of blacklisting.”

Media mogul Haim Saban was blunt in his assessment. “The world always had anti-Semites,” he said in an e-mail exchange. “It has now and always will, but the people of Israel always have, and always will live and prosper. Sorry Jew haters. You lose.”

Halle Berry? Wow, talk about repentance.

8:25PM: Picture of the day, Happy Campers edition

Obama: Now shake hands, even if it kills you!

8:18PM: Regarding the Israeli Arab who tried to run a checkpoint and then run over a soldier, his family is predictably blaming the targets of their son’s actions.

Tawil’s family members admonished what they called the IDF’s “trigger-happy” conduct on the part of Israeli security forces when Arabs are involved.

The real problem was Tawil’s “accelerator-happy” conduct.

Meanwhile, Reuters has released a number of pictures of Tawil’s grieving family. Needless to say, there are no pictures of the injured soldier.

7:50PM: I always enjoy listening to former Israeli ambassador to the UN Dan Gillerman. Here he is talking about a possible strike on Iran.

7:28PM: According to the Washington Times, a number of North African and Persian Gulf states have promised to give Israeli airliners flyover rights in their airspace, as well as other concessions, if Israel freezes “settlement” construction.

And while the Jerusalem Post report mentions commercial airliners and is accompanied by a picture of an El Al plane, I’m guessing this is related to a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Which means the Arab states are offering to allow us to protect them if we stop building Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria.

5:28PM: Interesting Newsweek profile of Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat.

4:50PM: Here is Goldstone’s wholly unsatisfying response to an email in which he was asked why he did not invite Colonel Richard Kemp to give evidence.

From: “rjgoldstone…
To: “maurice@…” <maurice@…>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:34:49 +0200
Subject: RE: Shana Tova

..I have been under huge pressure with regard not only to the reportbut my teaching and other commitments. I am not in a position to respond in detail to the many e-mails I have been receiving. I would say, however that I will make inquries and support all the submissions to the Fact Finding Mission being accessible on the web. I would also mention that there was no reliance on Col. Kemp mainly because in our Report we did not deal with the issues he raised regarding the problems of conducting military operations in civilian areas and second-guessing decisions made by soldiers and their commanding officers “in the fog of war”. We avoided having to do so in the incidents we decided to investigate.
Warm regards,
Richard Goldstone

4:35PM: Honest Reporting takes on Liam Bartlett’s biased 60 Minutes story, as I did yesterday.

4:28PM: Here is Richard Goldstone at his obstinate best during an interview with Channel 2’s Yonit Levy (who, I had never realized before, has great English).

What was interesting to me was how even Levy seemed to be gunning for Goldstone, given she was accused of emphathizing with the enemy during Operation Cast Lead. In any event, she missed a good opportunity to ask the real questions of Goldstone, and not just the standard ones to which he already had boilerplate answers. For instance, I would love to have seen her take a few specific examples from the report and then bring the video and photographic evidence rebutting them – such as the report’s statement that “The Mission found no evidence that members of Palestinian armed groups engaged in combat in civilian dress” (493).

1:18PM: Fossil fool Jimmy Carter has used his winning of an award to attack Israel for “settlement” building.

“As [US] President Barack Obama has made clear, the key factor that prevents peace is the continuing building of Israeli settlements in Palestine, driven by a determined minority of Israelis who desire to occupy and colonize east Jerusalem and the West Bank,” Carter said.

Carter, a Nobel Peace laureate, spoke to a crowd of 6,500 as he and former first lady Rosalynn Carter received an award from James Madison University’s Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence.

Carter said he is convinced that withdrawal of Israeli forces from Arab territories will dramatically reduce any threats to Israel.

“All 22 Arab countries have offered diplomatic recognition and full trade and commerce if Israel will withdraw from occupied territories,” he said.

And withdrawal is necessary, Carter said.

“The alternative to two states is one nation in the same area, within which Arabs will soon comprise a clear majority,” he said. “This will mean the end of a Jewish state or else an apartheid system within which Palestinians are dominated and deprived of equal rights.”

Observations:

• How ironic that Carter should receive an award from James Madison University’s Mahatma Gandhi Center for Global Nonviolence, while he is in bed with the likes of Hamas and does not even mention terrorism as the key factor that prevents peace (instead focusing on “settlements”)
• If Carter is so convinced that our withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories we captured in the Six Day War “will dramatically reduce any threats to Israel” since “All 22 Arab countries have offered diplomatic recognition and full trade and commerce if Israel will withdraw from occupied territories,” how does he explain all the times before we captured this territory that the Arab states tried to destroy us? How does he explain Iran’s insistence that they will wipe us off the map? What about the Hamas charter?
• Withdrawal was necessary…a few seconds before Carter was conceived.

12:10PM: An Israeli Arab has been killed after refusing to stop his vehicle for inspection at a checkpoint, and then hitting a soldier with his vehicle.

An initial investigation into the incident revealed that the man, who arrived at the checkpoint at around 6 am, did not stop his vehicle when he was ordered by the soldiers to do so. The Arab-Israeli continued through the checkpoint, and an IDF jeep chased him to a nearby gas station. A soldier then stepped out of the jeep and was hit by the vehicle while attempting to approach the driver. Another soldier fired warning shots in the air and then opened fire at the driver.

The Arab League and Hamas both said that Arabs should not normalize ties with Israel as long as we don’t implement a ” settlement freeze.”

“It is impossible to speak of normalization when Israel rejects any significant measure,” Arab League chief Amr Moussa said at a joint news conference in Cairo with Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal.

“Israel persists in its intransigent position and rejects every significant measure” concerning a freeze in settlement constructions, he said.

In case you hadn’t noticed, this is the first time the Arabs have spoken about a “settlement freeze,” and it certainly wasn’t included in any of the no’s of the the Khartoum Resolution. I also didn’t quite catch it in the Hamas charter.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

9:50PM: Biased caption of the day:

Israelis soldiers stand in formation in front of a torch during a ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of the 1929 riots in the West bank city of Hebron, Monday, Sept. 7, 2009. Jews lived and worshipped in Hebron for centuries but fled in 1929 after the city’s Arabs, angered by the increased Zionist presence in British-controlled Palestine, killed 67 Jews. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

Well done AP, on trying to explain away the massacre of 67 Jews at the hands of Arab mobs, by portraying the Jews as occupiers. Reading this caption, it seems one is supposed to almost feel the Arab frustration.

If you want to know what really happened that fateful day 80 years ago, see here and here.

9:10PM: NGO Monitor has released “the first systematic study” on Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) activities in the Middle East over the past several years.

Publication coincides with the anticipated publication of the Goldstone committee’s Gaza report, and UN Human Rights Commissioner Pillay’s threat of  International Criminal Court (ICC) action. The Goldstone process closely echoes HRW’s agenda and faulty methodology, which are examined in NGO Monitor’s report.

NGO Monitor’s report of HRW’s Middle East activities from 2001 to 2009, with over 80 pages of case studies and analyses of HRW’s publications related to Israel, includes:

• Profiles of HRW’s Middle East division staff, led by ideologues with a history of pro-Palestinian activism, rather than human rights experts.  The division is headed by Sarah Leah Whitson (who actively supported the “Caterpillar” Israel boycott campaign, and led the HRW fundraising trip to Saudi Arabia). Similarly, deputy director Joe Stork, spent 20 years as a founder and editor of the radical anti-Zionist Middle East Report (MERIP), including participation in a “Zionism and Racism” conference in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, before joining HRW. Other in-depth profiles analyze the professional qualifications and biases of Executive Director Kenneth Roth, Reed Brody, Darryl Li, Nadia Barhoum and Lucy Mair.
• Methodological failures: HRW’s publications related to Israel, including the 2002 Jenin reports, the 2006 Lebanon war, and the flood of publications on Gaza, rely largely on claims from unreliable eyewitnesses, and local NGOs with limited or no credibility.  These reports consistently confuse speculation with fact, distort international law and omit evidence that does not support the predetermined conclusions. (In many cases, HRW ignored videos showing Hamas and Hezbollah use of human shields.) These practices systematically violate the NGO fact-finding guidelines of the International Bar Association.
• Comparative data showing the disproportionate emphasis on Israel:  This highlights HRW bias, and also diverts resources that should be focused on the oppressive regimes and absence of basic freedoms in other Middle East countries. Analysis of 2008 publications using a weighted quantitative methodology again shows HRW focused more attention on Israel than on Iran, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and others.
• HRW reports on Israel are focused on very narrow and artificial issues that strip the context of the conflict, and indict Israel from the beginning. This is demonstrated in HRW post-Gaza reports on white phosphorous, drones, and white flags, all based on unsupported Palestinian claims and speculation, while using terms like “war crimes” repeatedly.

These major flaws in HRW’s focus on Israel are also reflected in the activities of the Goldstone fact-finding mission on Gaza. Although Goldstone resigned as a Human Rights Watch board member after NGO Monitor noted a conflict of interest, his statements have strongly echoed and defended HRW’s bias, particularly in relation to the 2006 Lebanon War and over Gaza.

In parallel, HRW officials such as Kenneth Roth, have staunchly supported Goldstone, attacked the investigation’s critics, called for broad support of the investigation and reproached President Obama for neglecting to mention the commission in his Cairo address.

NGO Monitor’s President Prof Gerald Steinberg said “As shown by NGO Monitor’s unique in-depth analysis, HRW repeatedly applies unprofessional methodology in support of an anti-Israel bias.  Human rights values and research standards have been replaced by ideology. The evidence shows that the Middle East division of this powerful organization needs a full and systemic overhaul, to recover its moral foundation and relevance in promoting human rights, particularly in repressive regimes.

Furthermore, the UN human rights structure and the NGO community work in close coordination, and are mutually reinforcing.  Goldstone’s strong identification with Human Rights Watch forms the political foundation for his biased inquiry, while Pillay’s statement pushes the process further towards implementing HRW’s agenda”.

The study is available here.

Meanwhile, one-time Israellycool contributor Elder of Ziyon analyzes the pattern of bias in HRW’s “Precisely Wrong” report.

8:12PM: Palestine Today reports (auto-translated):

Gaza: Palestinian doctor out a pencil from the top baby rare, marathon surgery

Enable the surgeon nerves in the Shifa Hospital in Gaza, a doctor determined Kahil and his team of its doctors, anesthesia technicians, and nurses from a rare surgery in the infant Bakr Ghazal year-old son.

The baby deer was severely injured due to head into a pencil in the head, resulting in a deterioration in the degree of awareness and expand in the right eye pupil admitted to the intensive care unit and underwent the process successful.

This is disturbing all round: the idea of having a pencil lodged in your head, the quality of the auto-translation, and the picture accompanying the report:

That’s some one-year old.

7:20PM: Roseanne Barr continues to demonstrate the unfunny side of mental illness:

Did someone neglect to tell Madonna

that Netanyahu is a fascist and a war criminal, and that lighting shabbat candles with him would turn the stomachs of all jews who are interested in peace in israel and palestine??!!!!

Did someone neglect to tell Barr that she doesn’t know the first thing about what turns people stomachs, because if she did she wouldn’t be subjecting people to her offensiveness?

5:08PM: Separated at Birth? IAEA (potato) head Mohamed ElBaradei = fail

3:50PM: Quote of the day:

“Netanyahu’s policies are the policies of a small-time politician…The decision isn’t on the question of [settlement] construction. The decision is whether or not there will be two states here for two peoples, things that Kadima has already declared its support for..It’s not just that he doesn’t make fateful decisions, he doesn’t want to make them. He makes do with speeches and photo-ops.”

Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, who clearly hates photo-ops.

12:06PM: Jane Fonda responds to claims she supports the destruction of Israel.

So– I wake up this morning to a barrage of emails giving me a link to a web posting that has been widely picked up. It says that Rabbi Hier at the Simon Wiesenthal Center (he and I were friends—I thought) claims I support the destruction of Israel because I signed (along with many other artists, historians, including eight Israelis, mostly filmmakers) a petition protesting the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to feature a celebratory “spotlight” on Tel Aviv. We understand that by doing this the festival has become, whether knowingly or not,  a participant in a cynical PR campaign to improve Israel’s image, make her appear less war-like. The Israeli Consul General said a year ago that Toronto would be the launch site of an extensive “Brand Israel” campaign. Artists and others of us who love Israel do not want art to be used to whitewash the tragedies committed against Palestinians, most recently in last winter’s terrible war in Gaza (1400 Palestinians dead, mostly civilians, many more wounded, and there are documented human rights violations) and the ongoing blockade of Gaza that is deepening a serious humanitarian crisis, wreaking havoc on the lives of innocent people, and preventing reconstruction in the aftermath of the attack.
The letter we signed did not —repeat: DID NOT–call for a boycott of any part of the Toronto Film Festival. In fact, many of the people who signed the letter are showing films there and many of the Israeli filmmakers that go to the festival show films critical of Israel. We protest the use of Tel Aviv to rebrand Israel. We are standing up for integrity of art, not censoring anyone. The letter certainly did not call for the destruction of Israel or call into question the legitimacy of Tel Aviv as a city. But In the year when Gaza happened there shouldn’t be a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv.

I have been to Israel many times. The first was in the early 1980s and it was love at first sight…for the country and for its people. I stayed in a Kibbutz with the great Israeli novelist, Amos Oz, and his family. I raised money for a senior center in Haifa, for a girl’s shelter in Jerusalem. I have spoken at the Hebrew University. I traveled into Lebanon with the Israeli army in 1981. I went deep into Russia in the  80s to secretly meet with Soviet Refusenik, Ida Nudel, after which I a national speaking tour in the U. S. to build support for letting Ida go to Israel where she now lives. In other words, I have been intimately involved with Israel over 3 decades. On almost every visit I also went into the West Bank, met with Palestinian artists, visited Palestinian refugee camps, drove through the Israeli settlements that encroach increasingly into Palestinian territory. I have seen suffering on both sides. It is out of love for Israel and all that it promised to be that I protest the use of art (which is meant to search for truth) in this branding campaign. The greatest “re-branding” of Israel would be to celebrate that country’s robust peace movement by allowing aid to be delivered to Gaza and stopping expansion of the settlements. That’s the way to show Israel’s commitment to peace, not a PR campaign. There will be no two-state solution unless this happens.

My response to Ms Fonda.

1. If Israel appears “war-like”, it is because she has constantly been defending herself since her inception in 1948. You are old enough to remember what happened in 1967, including the Arab statements threatening Israel with annihilation. But in case you were too busy protesting the Vietnam War at the time, I suggest you pick up any reputable history book and read for yourself. You may also learn that the Arabs attacked Israel on the eve of her independence, after having rejected the 1947 UN Partition Plan, which would have seen the two-state solution you claim to support.
2. You stated as fact that 1400 Palestinians were killed in Operation Cast Lead, and these were “mostly civilians.” Where did you get this information? According to an IDF investigation, 1,166 palestinians were killed, with 709 belonging to terrorist organizations. And even if you are not willing to accept these figures, do you not accept the fact that Hamas terrorists were deliberately operating out of civilian areas?
3. You mention visiting palestinian refugee camps. Have you even questioned why these camps still exist? Why is it that Israel has absorbed Jewish people from all around the world,  yet the Arab world does not take in the palestinians for which they claim to care so much?
4. If “expansion of the settlements” is really the big issue, why did the Arab states attack Israel prior to the 1967 war, in which Israel captured these lands? Why was the PLO formed in 1964, three years earlier? Have you ever read the Hamas charter? The issue is, and has always been, the Arab refusal to accept Israel’s very existence.
5. Why is it that you question Israel’s commitment to peace, and not the palestinians, despite the fact the latter have met Israeli peace overtures with terrorism? Why do you question Israel’s commitment to peace and not the palestinians after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was met by palestinian rocket fire into Israeli population centers?

10:06AM: Over 73 aid trucks and 440,000 liters of fuel and gas are scheduled to cross into Gaza today.

We still haven’t quite mastered that whole genocide thing.

6:08AM: The leader of Gaza’s al Qaeda-inspired palestinian terrorist group Jaljalat revealed his men recently tried to assassinate former Jimmy Carter and Tony Blair.

Elder of Moron and ex US President Jimmy Carter has once again blasted Israel, this time in a Washington Post editorial, claiming that the goal of Israeli leaders “who insist on colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem” is “one state.”

This coming from the guy who believes Hamas – which has made no secret of their desire for a one-state solution – is a trustworthy potential peace partner.

Meanwhile, I think the key to being spared Carter’s evil rhetoric is also a one-state solution – vegetative.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

7:10PM: Here is a Hamashole on Hamas TV accusing Israel of trafficking in the organs of palestinians.

Just kidding. That was PA Advisor on National Affairs Omar Al-Ghoul on PA TV.

You know, our “peace partners.”

3:40PM: Transparent lie of the day: Swedish officials have denied that Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt canceled his planned trip to Israel because of Israeli anger at his government’s refusal to condemn the blood libel.

The stated reason?

“It has been delayed until after the General Assembly in New York, when there might be more substance in the process,” Brodin said.

As if there isn’t currently enough to talk about.

3:18PM: Following on from this, yet more proof that the so-called “settlements” are anything but an obstacle to peace.

Palestinian labourers work at a construction site in the Israeli settlement of Givat Zeev on August 26. Israel has stuck to plans to boost settlement construction before considering a Washington-demanded lull, despite widespread criticism that the move risks endangering a revival of peace talks. (AFP/File/Menahem Kahana)

12:55PM: According to a classified report by the Military Intelligence committee, captured IAF navigator Ron Arad died in captivity in the mid 1990s.

10:15AM: Today’s flying pig is brought to you courtesy of the left-wing Ha’aretz.

One of the axioms of the “peace process” is that the settlements are “an obstacle to peace,” as if removing them would instantly bring peace on earth. It’s well known, however, that before 1967 there were no settlements, and no peace – unless, of course, you consider the communities within Israel “settlements,” since the Arabs considered them occupied territory. The greatest contribution of the settlements, then, is that they took the place of Israeli towns as occupied territory, except perhaps for Hamas and considerable parts of the Arab world. Therefore, the formula that removing settlements equals peace is laughable and baseless.

The Arabs’ total-denial approach to Israel never depended on settlement on a particular parcel of land. They are bothered by Jewish settlement in Israel in general. It’s enough to browse through the books of the “moderate” Palestinian Authority to see that Haifa, Jaffa and even Tel Aviv are considered Palestinian cities, while Hamas believes the Wakf land of all Palestine should be expropriated from the Jewish state, which doesn’t have the right to land on either side of the Green Line.

In 2000, Yasser Arafat was offered an Israeli withdrawal from 95% of the territories in exchange for agreeing to end the conflict. He refused, because he didn’t consider this a full withdrawal from Palestinian land. Although Israel made yet another step in leaving the Gaza Strip, not only freezing construction there but evicting the settlers, all it got in return was more war and destruction, a far cry from the peace that removing this “obstacle” was supposed to create. In other words, not only did the Arabs not consider Israel’s older settlements different from the new ones that “endanger peace,” but the eviction of the latter drove them to begin attacking the former.

We know now that one thing that motivated Anwar Sadat to come to Jerusalem was his fear that unless settlements in the Rafah area and Sinai were uprooted, they would grow into large cities that no peace agreement could remove.

The Syrians and Palestinians, on the other hand, believed they had nothing to lose if they maintained their refusal to negotiate, since their land would wait for them, frozen in time, until they could graciously take it back from Israel and then attack again from these positions. They can’t comprehend that they have lost their lands because of their aggression, and that it is immoral to return to an aggressor the positions from which he might renew his aggression, since letting him escape without harm only encourages him to attack again. There can be deterrence only once the aggressor has paid a price that dissuades him from attacking at whim. This is what happened to Germany.

So until there is a permanent status agreement, only Jewish settlement activity can be enough of an incentive to make the Arabs, like Sadat, hurry up and seek peace, because their losses will multiply the longer they wait. We know from the Gaza example that the Arabs’ goal was not to remove Israel from precious land, but to uproot Jews and fight them from the land they left. It is better, then, to keep with the peace-building construction in communities beyond our borders, and only when we see genuine signs of a culture of peace and good neighborliness next door to talk about evacuation – with due consideration to the new reality on the ground, which will change all the more if the Arabs don’t rush toward an agreement.

9:10AM: Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has canceled his planned trip to Israel this week, in the aftermath of the Swedish blood libel and the Swedish government’s refusal to speak out against it.

In contrast, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos said yesterday in Stockholm that he regretted the Spanish newspaper El Mundo’s decision to run an interview with Holocaust denier David Irving.

“The foreign minister, while maintaining the most absolute respect for freedom of expression, regrets that space was given to a historian who denies one of the biggest tragedies for humanity in modern history,” a spokesman for Moratinos said. “These types of statements deeply hurt the Jewish people.”

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post’s picture-caption thing-a-me-bob has screwed up yet again, yet the result makes sense in a strange way.

6:18AM: Introducing our latest weapon: Zionist Death Snake.^TM

Eyewitnesses said a snake at least one meter long bit a woman on farmland near Salfit. The woman was transferred to the National Hospital in Nablus for anti-venom treatment.

The woman, from Farkha village 20kms north of Ramallah, was farming in the Al-Matwi valley north of the village. The area is known for poor soil quality due to proximity to the Israeli settlement of Ariel, which dumps waste in the adjacent Palestinian farmland.

Locals, who have often accused Ariel settlers of releasing wild boars into villages and farmland, said the snake was likely released from the nearby settlement, noting it escaped after the attack toward the confiscated land.

You have to admire how the Zionist Death Snake^TM knows to attack and then flee to its Zionist owners. That makes it smarter than the average snake, but this is what you should come to expect from us sneaky Zionists.

Click on picture to enlarge.

(Based on this)

The Lebanese army has reportedly arrested an Israeli man with psychological problems after he crossed into Lebanon yesterday.

No word yet on whether he is a member of any far leftist group.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

8:25AM: Question: What’s wrinkled and emits foul sounds?

Answer:

8:15AM: According to a Smith Research poll, only 4% of Israelis see US President Barack Obama’s policies as pro-Israel, and 50% of Jewish Israelis do not support freezing settlement construction for a year as part of an American-brokered deal (compared to 41% in favor).

8:o2AM: Elder of Moron Desmond “the owl” Tutu on the lesson Israel should learn from the Holocaust:

“The lesson that Israel must learn from the Holocaust is that it can never get security through fences, walls and guns,” Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu of South Africa told Haaretz Thursday.

Actually, I would have thought it was the need to defend ourselves against people who make clear their intentions to murder us. But I do tend to read too much into things.

“But who pays the penance? The penance is being paid by the Arabs, by the Palestinians. I once met a German ambassador who said Germany is guilty of two wrongs. One was what they did to the Jews. And now the suffering of the Palestinians.”

He also slammed Jewish organizations in the United States, saying they intimidate anyone who criticizes the occupation and rush to accuse these critics of anti-Semitism. Tutu recalled how such organizations pressured U.S. universities to cancel his appearances on their campuses.

“That is unfortunate, because my own positions are actually derived from the Torah. You know God created you in God’s image. And we have a God who is always biased in favor of the oppressed.”

He said the West was consumed with guilt and regret toward Israel because of the Holocaust, “as it should be.”

Yes, this is a man who can act as an honest broker to bring about peace. Cut in the same mold as fellow (Elder of) Moron Jimmy Carter.

His point was to make Hamas terrorists seem more like Westerners, to show how much we have in common and to downplay the extremist Islamic aspects of the group – in other words, to deny their very raison d’etre in an attempt to legitimize them to his Western audience. The implication is that anyone who stresses the Islamic extremist nature of Hamas is somehow a bigoted Islamophobe.

To Western audiences, of course, Hamas will downplay their religious component as well. Carter is perhaps the most prominent of their useful idiots but hardly the only one – the entire Free Gaza movement and the ISM all firmly fall into the same category.

Which makes this morning’s story from Al Hayat all the more interesting. As YNet reports:

Hamas has recently passed a radical Islamic bill ushering whipping, dismembering and execution as standard punitive action into the Gaza penal code, the London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat reported Wednesday.

The bill is made up of 214 subsections. Section 59 states that “any Palestinian found guilty of raising a weapon against Palestine in favor of the enemy; countering Palestine’s interests in a negotiation with a foreign government; and placing Palestine’s existence in danger by committing an act of aggression against a foreign country… will be sentenced to death.”

A similar fate awaits anyone found guilty of the following: “Joining a foreign army fighting Palestine or facilitating such action; demoralizing the Palestinian people to any of its resistance movements; spying on Palestine or engaging in espionage during wartime.”

Section 84 stipulates that anyone found guilty of “drinking to making wine will be subjected to 40 lashes… drinking and harassing the public will be punishable by 40 lashes and three months in jail.”

The whip will be used on anyone “engaging in games of chance, offending religious beliefs and defaming others’ character,” as well.

The bill also calls for dismembering – mostly of the hands – of anyone convicted of theft.

Will Jimmy publicly criticize this? Of course not – that would be “Islamophobia” too!

Answer:

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V

This, despite the best damned display of tushy licking Peanut Boy could muster.

Officials from the radical Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah have refused to meet former US president Jimmy Carter, who is on a two-day visit to Lebanon, Carter’s spokesman Rick Jafculca said Wednesday. Carter requested the meeting with the Iran-backed movement, which is listed as a terrorist group by Washington, as part of a visit to Lebanon to assess whether his Carter Centre will monitor a legislative election next year.

The spokesman confirmed a meeting had been requested with Hezbollah, but added that the group “were not able to meet” Carter, Jafculca told Deutsche Presse-Agnetur dpa. Carter’s Lebanon visit, which started on Tuesday, will be followed by a trip to neighboring Syria. Carter’s talks in Syria include a meeting with President Bashar al- Assad, whose ties with the United States remain strained despite the fact that relations with other Western states like France and Britain have improved. Carter is also scheduled to meet with Palestinian Hamas officials in Damascus. Hezbollah enjoys wide backing by the Shiite community in Lebanon and is represented in Lebanon’s parliament and government. Lebanon is expected to hold a parliamentary election by May 2009.

It’s ok, Jimmy. I’m sure you will get a lot of time to speak with them in the not-too-distant future.

Say, eternity?

An Executive Committee secretary within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) accused Hamas of working toward the establishment of a Saudi-styled “Islamic emirate” in Gaza and, eventually, all of Palestine.

Secretary Yasser Abed Rabbo made the comments at a seminar organized by the Cultural Liberation Organization on Saturday in Ramallah, where he gave a lecture on the signing of the now 20-year-old Palestinian Independence document in Algiers.

The Hamas leadership “wants to return to the era of the PLO before Arafat’s rule,” according to the PLO leader, who went on to say that Hamas is willing to replace the national draft agreement with one that would “establish an Islamic emirate.”

“Yet they still won’t promote national issues,” he said.

Another member at the PLO Executive Committee, Abdul-Rahim Malluh, said that there is “a need to restore respect for the Independence document,” something both men said Hamas was unwilling to do.

Malluh noted that the first and last references in the declaration are in regard to the Palestinian people, themselves, which he claimed contained the legitimacy to go through with Fatah’s attempts to hold new elections in 2010, “as a way to resolve the division and solve the problems of Palestine.”

Of course, Fatah’s main issue with an Islamic emirate in all of “palestine” is the fact they promote a secular nationalist agenda.

A recent opinion poll conducted by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government found that 77 percent of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world.

The survey of 1,721 Israelis, both Arab and Jewish, also showed that 73 percent of the Jews and 94 percent of the Arabs want Israel to “be a society in which Arab and Jewish citizens have mutual respect and equal opportunities.”

The Kennedy School said in a statement that the poll produced a number of results it termed surprising, pointing to a higher level of co-existence than might have been anticipated.

Actually, the poll findings are only “interesting” and “surprising” given the fact the media and other assorted haters of Israel would like everyone to think that Israel is an apartheid state that makes its Arab citizens miserable.

And this is acknowledged – at least when it comes to the media’s role – by the lead researcher for the poll.

However, Professor Todd Pittinsky, research director of the Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership and lead researcher for the poll, said that the results pointed to a contrary phenomenon. Much media coverage focuses on the divisions between Jewish and Arab citizens in Israel, and not enough on the sincere and concerted efforts to coexist peacefully, Pittinsky said in a statement.

But those of us who live here, talk with many Israeli Arabs, see what is going on, and are intellectually honest, know that the Arabs here live more comfortably than anywhere else in the Middle East. Sure, there is room for improvement, but that doesn’t change the fact that Israel is anything but an apartheid state.

For us, the poll just confirms the bleeding obvious.