Which means Salah might just be spotted with this expression on his face again, albeit for very different reasons than before.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

3:38PM: According to the London-based Arabic-language al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper, the US informed Israel of the ship carrying tons of weapons en route from Iran to Hizbullah, but vetoed Israel’s plans to bomb it out of the water.

1:08PM: Thanks to One Jerusalem, here is footage of yesterday’s Dore Gold-Richard Goldstone debate.

7:32AM: The UN General Assembly approved an Arab-backed resolution endorsing the Goldstone Report by a vote of 114-18.

The draft resolution includes a demand for the Israeli government to carry out an “independent and credible” internal investigation of its own conduct during Israel’s 3-week offensive in Gaza, which left over 1,000 Palestinians dead.

Hamas isn’t mentioned in the draft resolution. Instead, it calls on the “Palestinian side” to carry out an investigation into the Goldstone report findings that relate to Palestinians.

The draft resolution also includes a recommendation to convene the signatories of the fourth Geneva Convention treaty for an emergency session to discuss Israel’s violations of the treaty.

Apart from Israel and the United States, a number of European countries including Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic voted against the resolution. But the European Union was split, with others including Britain and France abstaining. Most developing countries voted in favor.

7:25AM: IAEA (Potato) Head Mohamed ElBaradei thinks Iran’s previously secret uranium enrichment site at Qom is “nothing to be worried about.

UN inspectors found “nothing to be worried about” in a first look at a previously secret uranium enrichment site in Iran last month, the International Atomic Energy chief said in remarks published on Thursday.

Mohamed ElBaradei also told the New York Times that he was examining possible compromises to unblock a draft nuclear cooperation deal between Iran and three major powers that has foundered over Iranian objections.

The nuclear site, which Iran revealed in September three years after diplomats said Western spies first detected it, added to Western fears of covert Iranian efforts to develop atom bombs. Iran says it is enriching uranium only for electricity.

ElBaradei was quoted in a New York Times interview as saying his inspectors’ initial findings at the fortified site beneath a desert mountain near the Shi’ite holy city of Qom were “nothing to be worried about”.

“The idea was to use it as a bunker under the mountain to protect things,” ElBaradei, alluding to Tehran’s references to the site as a fallback for its nuclear program in case its larger Natanz enrichment plant were bombed by a foe like Israel.

“It’s a hole in a mountain,” he said.

Oh, except for that whole “evidence of having experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design” thing.

12:15AM: It’s the Dore Gold vs Richard Goldstone cage match debate live from Brandeis University.

US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice responded to the Goldstone report.

“We have very serious concerns about many of the recommendations in the report,” US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said Thursday in response to the findings of a UN team that investigated the recent war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

—-

Rice told reporters following a Security Council session that the US “is reviewing very carefully what is a very lengthy document. We have long expressed our very serious concern with the mandate that was given (to Goldstone’s team) by the Human Rights Council prior to our joining the Council, which we viewed as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable.

“We will expect and believe that the appropriate venue for this report to be considered is the Human Rights Council (in Geneva) and that’s our strong view. And most importantly, our view is that we need to be focused on the future,” she said.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

5:30PM: Here is a nice rebuttal of some Goldstone report findings by a non-Jewish, Aussie blogger.

1:52PM: Yet another example of what miserable failures we are at ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Four Magen David Adom teams evacuated six Palestinians to the Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv and the Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in Zerifin after suffering serious burn wounds from a gas pipe explosion in a restaurant in Gaza on Thursday.

All six are members of the same family and four of them are children. They were transferred to Israel through Erez crossing.

1:35PM: Gorilla boy aka the poisonous midget has delivered his Rosh Hashanah message:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Friday the Holocaust was a “lie” and a pretext to create a Jewish state that Iranians had a religious duty to confront.

“The pretext (Holocaust) for the creation of the Zionist regime (Israel) is false … It is a lie based on an unprovable and mythical claim,” he told worshippers at Tehran University at the end of annual anti-Israel Quds Day rally.

“Confronting the Zionist regime is a national and religious duty,” the Iranian president said.

—-

“This regime [Israel] will not last long. Do not tie your fate to it?. This regime has no future. Its life has come to an end,” he said in the speech broadcasted live on state radio.

And..

“If the Holocaust was planned by the West, why won’t you allow any research on the Holocaust? The Holocaust has turned into a black box and they won’t let anyone open it and examine it… If this is such an important event, why won’t you let us reveal the reality to the entire world?”

Ahmadinejad reiterated his past “proposal”, to have the Jews immigrate to other country. “Why don’t they immigrate to Canada or the United States? They can go live in other countries. The Palestinian people don’t have to pay for your crime. What is the Palestinians’ sin?

“The Zionists are the greatest criminals in history. Resisting the Zionists is a national duty and a religious commandment and a human duty. The Zionist regime is a tree with rotten roots,” Ahmadinejad said.

He added, “It’s clear that this fake regime was established for colonialist goals, and there is no logic behind its establishment.” The crowd responded by chanting, “Death to Israel.”

And a happy new year to you too, big little guy.

1:25PM: Amir Mizroch of the Jerusalem Post:

During his investigations into possible war crimes committed by Israel and Hamas during Operation Cast Lead, Judge Richard Goldstone asked a group of prominent South African expatriates living in Israel to persuade government officials here to cooperate with his commission.

Goldstone told them the commission’s findings and recommendations would be more balanced if Israel made its case.

The expats traveled to Jerusalem with the message, but after a relatively short briefing with Israeli experts, the delegation did a complete about-face and supported Israel’s position of having nothing to do with the UN fact-finding mission.

The trick: Israeli officials briefed the visitors on what Goldstone’s commission was already doing in Gaza, on the makeup of the UN Human Rights Council and on the rancid history of the HRC’s deliberate targeting of Israel.

Officials in Jerusalem say the decision not to cooperate with Goldstone has been vindicated, because the commission largely ignored, or twisted, the information already made available to it to suit its needs.

12:28PM: Here’s some women you don’t want to mess with.

10:30AM: The latest Jerusalem Post caption blooper could actually work well as a slip of the Freudian kind.

I mean, they both don’t seem to be taking the Iranian threat seriously.

10:05AM: One of the ploys used by opponents of Israel is to point to the relatively low number of Israeli casualty figures. For example, we just saw Richard Goldstone mentioning the number of Israelis killed by rockets compared to the number of palestinians killed.

But what about those who were lucky enough to survive terror attacks, yet were still injured? This next heartbreaking video should give you an idea as to the devastating impact of palestinian terror attacks, which reaches far beyond the official casualty figures.

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.

Outgoing IAEA (potato) head Mohamed ElBaradei called the Iranian threat “hyped,” saying there is no proof the Islamic republic will soon have nuclear weapons.

“In many ways, I think the threat has been hyped,” ElBaradei told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in an interview released Tuesday.

“Yes, there’s concern about Iran’s future intentions and Iran needs to be more transparent with the IAEA and international community,” he told the Chicago-based magazine. “But the idea that we’ll wake up tomorrow and Iran will have a nuclear weapon is an idea that isn’t supported by the facts as we have seen them so far.”

“About Iran, I’ve been told, ‘Mind your own business; you’re a technician.’ And yet, at other times, on other matters, I have been told that I’m the custodian of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – sometimes by the very people who tell me to mind my own business when it comes to Iran,” he continued.

“I don’t put much stock in either designation.

I have another designation for him, but since I try to keep this a relatively family friendly site, I won’t mention it here.

Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)

11:08PM: More on today’s meeting between Israeli Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Regional Cooperation Silvan Shalom and PA Economics Minister Bassim Khoury (bonus: Seth Green lookalike news anchor).

10:22PM: The Jerusalem Post displaying more of the patented brilliance that sees them head the list of popular Jewish news sites in the US.

In other words, we don’t actually have a photo of an Iranian nuclear site, so here’s a photo of some other site instead. But we’ll still refer to it as an Iranian nuclear site.

8:24PM: Sky News reports that palestinians are not happy that Madonna said all those nice things about Israel and draped herself with the Israeli flag at the end of her concert last night (see video). Like, d’uh.

8:12PM: From the Department of Apparently Superfluous Adjectives:

‘Shi’ite Bernard Madoff’ held in custody in Lebanon

Actually, it’s not referring to the..err..real deal (if I can call him that).

6:28PM: Here’s footage taken of Madonna saying those nice things about Israel at last night’s concert.

6:18PM: Israeli Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Regional Cooperation Silvan Shalom and PA Economics Minister Bassim Khoury have met to discuss how to improve the lives of palestinians.

This is all well and good, but I would also like to hear of Israel and PA officials meeting to discuss how to improve the lives of Israelis, like those in Sderot and other communities in the firing line.

1:58PM: The Jerusalem Post is reportedly the most popular Jewish news website in the US.

A recent study – not commissioned by The Jerusalem Post – has revealed that of all Jewish news Web sites, Jpost.com is the clear leader in the United States, garnering more than twice as many readers as its closest competitor, and almost twice as many readers as all American Jewish news Web sites combined.

Although the Post was unaware of the study until after it was published, the newspaper welcomed the data as a sign that it was maintaining a critical lead in the cutthroat world of Internet news.

In mid-August, 4Wall, which operates the JInsider site, conducted what it called “the Jewish Internet Metric Study,” borrowing from the practices of McKinsey & Company to analyze Internet use and its business implications and applications.

The study found that Jpost.com hosted 1,454,649 unique visitors per month, while competitor Haaretz.com lagged far behind, with 691,467.

All of the American Jewish news sources combined – including the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The Jewish Journal, New York’s The Jewish Week, the Forward, Philadelphia’s The Jewish Exponent and The Jewish Press – received barely half of Jpost.com’s traffic figures, with 808,516 unique visitors.

Not only did Jpost.com leave other sites far behind, but the study also found visitors spent “significantly more time per visit” on the two Israel-based sites, and that “many more of those visitors are ‘regulars’ [people who visit more than once per month] and addicts [people who visit more than 30 times per month.]”

“I think that our success can be attributed to a combination of great original content, a never-ending pace of news flow, the power of the brand name and the fact that every day at 3:30 p.m. Jerusalem time, as far as we’re concerned, we enter US time,” explained Jpost.com Managing Editor Shani Rosenfelder. “We look at our North American audience in terms of what stories should be highlighted and what issues take center stage in those readers’ eyes.”

Color me surprised. Of the three main English news sites in Israel, I consider the Post to be the worst. It frequently borrows from other sites, and is often slow on stories. And regular Israellycool readers would already be aware of their buggy picture caption generator thing-a-me-bob, which provides constant grist for my mill.

Aussie Dave’s guilty confession: I prefer the Ha’aretz site. Sure, the op-eds annoy the daylights out of me, but the site is way more up-to-date than the others, and I find the site layout to be easier to follow.

I’m hoping Israellycool is on the list next year. Help me get there by telling your family and friends about it, and sending them posts of mine that you like.

10:50AM: The EU’s rapporteur on piracy (apparently a real job title), Admiral Tarmo Kouts (apparently his real name), has told TIME that Israel was likely behind the July hijacking of a Russian-manned ship en route to Algeria.

“There is the idea that there were missiles aboard, and one can’t explain this situation in any other way,” he told the magazine, becoming the highest-ranking official to date to support the theory. “As a sailor with years of experience, I can tell you that the official versions are not realistic.”

Meanwhile, it looks like everyone is a comedian, whether it be the Jerusalem Post..

Until today, no government official of any kind has gone on the record to accuse Israel as being behind the hijacking, but many have admitted that the story – or at least the official version – does not appear to hold water

..or former Israeli deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh:

“There is something fishy about this whole story, no doubt about it,” former Israeli deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh told The Media Line. “But I can’t comment further on this.”

6:04AM: Pop star and FoTz (Friend of Tzipi) Madonna played in front of 50,000 fans last night, showing her love for Israel in the procees.

“I shouldn’t have stayed so long away,” she told the adoring crowd midway through the show, as she broke away from the script to express her affection for the country.

“Every time I come here, I get so supercharged with energy,” she said. “I truly believe that Israel is the energy center of the world. And I also believe that if we can all live together in harmony in this place, then we can live in peace all over the world.”

Meanwhile, judging by the pictures, I would say she also showed a whole lot more. Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu was not available for comment.

5:54AM: Guess who’s coming to dinner? Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren yesterday attended a White House Ramadan dinner.

The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog said Monday the agency needs more transparency from Syria and other nations to determine whether traces of uranium found at a site reportedly bombed by IAF planes indicate Damascus was building a nuclear reactor there.

International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed that the radioactive material was found at the site, but said the source was inconclusive.

—-

ElBaradei made the comments during and after a speech to business leaders in Dubai, just days before the IAEA is expected to circulate a confidential report to board members outlining the status of his agency’s investigation.

“We still have a lot of work to do. We haven’t yet reached a conclusion whether that was a reactor or not a reactor,” ElBaradei said.

Diplomats told the AP earlier this month that soil samples collected at the bombed site revealed minute traces of processed uranium.

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said last week that the leaks to the media about the uranium were meant to put pressure on the country, which has denied any wrongdoing.

The IAEA chief called specifically for more cooperation from Damascus, saying it needs “a lot of transparency on the part of Syria.” He said he was hopeful that Syria would allow inspectors back into the country to carry out further tests.

But he also said Israel needs to provide more information to address Syrian allegations that the uranium may have come from Israeli bombs allegedly dropped on the site during the September 2007 raid.

Why do I get the feeling the only evidence ElBaradei will accept as proof of a Syrian or Iranian nuclear reactor is this?

A military strike on Iran would turn the Middle East “into a ball of fire,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog agency.

ElBaradei made the remarks in an interview aired on Saturday by Al Arabiya TV. The interview comes a day after reports emerged that Israel conducted a large-scale military exercise that the United States believes is in part a message to Iran that Israel has the capability to attack its nuclear program.

“In my opinion, any military strike — as I mentioned — is the worst thing that can happen now,” said ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“It will make the Middle East turn into a ball of fire. It is a lot worse than having sanctions. A military strike will lead Iran, even if it plans today to manufacture a nuclear weapon, to establish a crash course to speed the process to have the weapon with the blessing of all Iranians, even those living in the West.”

He should stick to Bros.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei says he will step down if major powers launch a military strike against Iran over its nuclear program, PressTV reported.

That’s what I call a win-win situation.