ninme

Times Online - Villagers flee during lull as Israeli anger grows over ‘U-turn’

Lebanese civilians today fled from battered villages near the Israeli border, taking advantage of a temporary halt to Israeli air strikes after yesterday’s mass killing in Qana.

Anyone else wondering why they’re only “fleeing” now? I mean, the word “flee” denotes some level of haste. And yet that title says Day XVIII. I mean, the Israelis in the corresponding towns on the other side managed to “flee” when it was still within the boundaries of the definition, hence the glaring lack of Israeli bodies being passed around which is enflaming the “Arab Street” so.

Update:

I thought we didn’t show dead bodies on our front pages.

Update II:

I know there’s an urgent need for UN reform, but somehow I don’t think this is what they mean.

FOXnews - Israeli Attack on Lebanese Village Kills Dozens, Sparks Angry Protests

Israel apologized for the deaths but blamed Hezbollah guerrillas, saying they had fired rockets into northern Israel from near the building.

LGF - Hizballah Human Shields

Hizballah continues to use Lebanese civilians as human shield…

Australia’s Herald Sun has obtained pictures of Hizballah using residential areas as launching zones for their terror attacks: Photos that damn Hezbollah.

LGF - Qana Propaganda Begins to Fall Apart

A very interesting bit of news about the Qana incident: IDF: Qana building fell hours after strike.

Infinitives Unsplit - The world’s a sea of “shit”

Translation [Of Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions] : if combatants of Party A set up in the middle of a village, are subsequently attacked by Party B and civilians die, PARTY A has contravened the protocol and is responsible for the death of those civilians. Military targets are always military targets. It is up to the combatants on each side to ensure that they do not put the civilians around them in danger.

Hezbollah sets up in the middle of villages. It hides amongst civilians. When it is attacked by the IDF, it is Hezbollah - NOT THE IDF - that is responsible for any civilian deaths.

FOXnews - Israel Agrees to Temporarily Suspend Airstrikes Against Southern Lebanon

Israel has agreed to a 48-hour halt in aerial activity over southern Lebanon, a U.S. official said Sunday amid widespread outrage over an Israeli airstrike that killed at least 56 Lebanese, mostly women and children, when it leveled a building where they had taken shelter.

In the immortal words of Bugs Bunny, I think someone forgot to make a right turn at Albuquerque.

(see comments)

FOXnews - Israeli Attack on Lebanese Village Kills at Least 56, Sparks Outrage

(”Sparks”? Not “continuously fuels” or “fans already hard to fan-much-more flames” or “impossibly, gets even more condemnation and outrage from the already incredibly busy world community”?)

At least 56 people, more than half children, were killed Sunday in an Israeli airstrike that crushed a building, the deadliest attack of the campaign against Hezbollah.

Skipping here a lot of talk about cease-fires.

Israel said guerrillas had fired rockets from near the building into northern Israel.

Sounds like the Lebanese side is really working towards a cease-fire, isn’t it.

Update:

I feel like The Times has been really good through this whole thing.

The Sunday Times - Focus: Brutal battle for uncertain peace
Ambushed in the Lebanese town of Bint Jbeil, Israeli troops found Hezbollah fighting hard. This special report on the battle and wider war shows why there is no easy end in sight

(I really take issue with the words “brutal” etc attached to this thing, you know. But I won’t get into that now.)

So there’s an account of the fighting in Bint Jbeil…

The battalion commander, Colonel Yaniv Ashor, realised his men would not be able to retreat with their dead and feared the Hezbollah forces would seize the bodies. Three Israelis with severe wounds also needed to be evacuated.

Fun, isn’t it, when you have to add that worry to your list of considerations.

The furious battle and its toll sent shock waves through Tel Aviv and revealed to the wider world that there was going to be no quick ending to this Middle Eastern conflict. Three weeks after Hezbollah ignited the violence by killing eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapping two others, the Israelis are still struggling to clear the militants and their rockets out of southern Lebanon.

Yesterday Hezbollah remained entrenched in Bint Jbeil; the death toll in Lebanon had reached more than 600, according to the Lebanese authorities, and hundreds of thousands had fled from their homes.

Yet some 80% of the Lebanese people, far from rejecting Hezbollah, were expressing their support for its actions, according to one opinion poll. In Iran radical Islamic students were setting off to join the battle. …

There was little sign that Hezbollah would, as Israel demands, withdraw its fighters and cede control in the south to the Lebanese army. Quite the opposite. Yesterday Hezbollah fired a Khaibar 1 rocket, with four times the range of its usual Katyusha rockets, at the Israeli town of Afula — its deepest attack so far.

Yes, there you go. And it’s not just Israel. The UN did “demand” this as well. But no one ever pays any attention to what the UN says or bothers to remember it later which just proves how useless it is.

WHILE Lebanon burnt last week, western diplomats fiddled in Rome. At a summit in the Italian capital, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, and Margaret Beckett, the foreign secretary, wrangled with the rest of the world over a single word: “immediate”. …

Amid the to-ing and fro-ing Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, made an impassioned plea: “The killing must end. Now! If a quarter of the populations of your countries was fleeing and had in hand only a suitcase with some clothes, what would you say? That’s how Lebanon is now. Are we the sons of a lesser God?“ Skilfully deflating the emotions spurred by Siniora’s words, Rice responded:

“Mr prime minister, we want a ceasefire, we want it to be immediate, we want it for yesterday! “We can leave here saying ‘immediate ceasefire’ but we want to leave here doing something more, building a real process which will bring a true, definitive peace for Lebanon and for this region.”

The summit limply concluded with a communiqué that called for a “determination to work immediately to reach . . . a ceasefire”. This toothless proclamation left Israeli officials crowing that they had effectively been given carte blanche to prosecute their war.

I’m not really sure yet, international-law-wise, how it’s any of our business. But I thought the language of that was interesting.

As reports reached Blair that some of his cabinet colleagues and backbench MPs were voicing concern over the failure to call for an immediate ceasefire, he hastily amended his planned speech [to executives of News Corp] while flying on from Washington to San Francisco.

He inserted a passage making his determination for a lasting solution clear: “We knew Hezbollah were going to be a problem with a licence to run a state within a state complete with their own military force in the south of Lebanon. That’s why we passed resolution 1559 following the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon. We called for the area to be put in the sole control of the Lebanese army (and) for all militias to be disbanded. It never happened; this time it must.”

Yeah. Insert weary comment about British politicians here.

The Sunday Times - Hezbollah: we’ve planned this for 6 years

Hezbollah leaders have agreed to join a Lebanese government peace proposal.

The plan does not include a new multinational force favoured by Tony Blair and President George W Bush. Instead, it calls for beefing up the existing, but ineffective, 2,000 member United Nations force already in place in the south.

Yeah I bet. Those guys have done wonders for Hezbollah in the past.

Update II:

The Sunday Times - If this is the third world war, we’re losing, by Martin Ivens
There are lessons in the cold war for those who fear the rise of Islamo-fascism

It is one thing to posit a titanic struggle for existence with a deadly foe. But how does that explain our dilatory, penny-pinching response? A world war implies the mobilisation of vast resources, of entire societies, to one end. Yet our latter day Roosevelts and Churchills have mobilised if not exactly diddly-squat, hardly the resources that produced the Normandy landings in 1944.

Hm.

LGF - Four Syrian Trucks Bombed

Syria is still apparently attempting to resupply Hizballah with weapons.

Syria continues to try to expand its resupplying effort of Hezbollah. Four Syrian trucks crossing the border into Lebanon were attacked by air Wednesday night.

I wonder if they had Syrian plates.

Update:

WaPo - ‘Disproportionate’ in What Moral Universe? By Charles Krauthammer

To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is “disproportionate,” as in the universally decried “disproportionate Israeli response.”

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel “proportionate” attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.

Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right — legal and moral — to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one’s security again. That’s what it took with Japan.

Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the Blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with “proportionate” aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest air campaign and land invasion in history, which flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.

The perversity of today’s international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

Okay I’m going to be a bit insensitive, here, but are the civillians really that innocent? If you shack up with a mobster and lie to the police and his “business” associates for him, are the rest of us supposed to be shocked, shocked! and appalled if something untoward happens to you or your collection of china kittens when the enforcers come around and blow out the front of your house like something out of a Dick Tracy comic?

Update II:

RC2 takes Krauthammer’s parallel universe apart a bit:

Wheat & Weeds - Wormhole To Krauthammer’s Alternate Universe

I’m a bit off the subject at the moment. According to what I heard on Brit Hume tonight, no one’s planning on winning anymore. No one thinks, not even the Israeli spin-meisters, that Hezbollah will be disarmed or even very damaged. So everything’s going to go back to how it was and the only good that will have come of any of this will maybe be showing the world again that Israel is the good guy in this but the world has seen that about a billion times already and it never makes any difference. So good, fantastic, so glad we could do this.

The Times - When in Rome, don’t forget the bombs of 1983, by Kevin Toolis (a terrorism expert. His documentary series Cult of the Suicide Bomber II will be shown on Channel 4 in September
If anyone believes a multilateral force will sort Hezbollah out, the story of Ahmed Qassir will dissuade them

IN THE VILLAGE of Deir al- Nahr in the foothills above the southern Lebanese city of Tyre is a little shrine that all those advocating the deployment of a new “robust” multi-national force in Lebanon should visit before so willingly offering up the blood of their soldiers.

Pride of place among the fluttering yellow Kalashnikov-symbolled Hezbollah flags, captured Israeli guns and gallery of suicide bombers is a painting of Ahmed Qassir. Qassir, known locally as the “prince of martyrs”, has been largely forgotten by the outside world but not by the Lebanese.

And as a new generation of our leaders, and fools, gathers in Rome to chart out on what terms another outside force can be sent to intervene in the Lebanon, it’s worth remembering Qassir’s contribution to the history of the Middle East, indeed the history of the world.

Hmmm. Read this.

Update:

Telegraph - How to achieve the ‘new Middle East’ By Patrick Bishop

All the latest fighting will do is prove the impossibility of achieving real peace and stability through bloodshed…

Says the man writing from a peaceful Europe…

Update II (finally… bloody servers…):

LGF - Hizballah Attacked UNIFIL Twice This Week

Neither the mainstream media nor Kofi Annan have mentioned it, but Hizballah has attacked UNIFIL observers twice this week. (Hat tip: Larry.)

From the UN’s own press releases:

24 July 2006:

One unarmed UN military observer, a member of the Observer Group Lebanon (OGL), was seriously wounded by small arms fire in the patrol base in the Marun Al Ras area yesterday afternoon. According to preliminary reports, the fire originated from the Hezbollah side during an exchange with the IDF. He was evacuated by the UN to the Israeli side, from where he was taken by an IDF ambulance helicopter to a hospital in Haifa. He was operated on, and his condition is now reported as stable.

Notice: in this instance, the UN observer was injured badly enough to be evacuated to an Israeli hospital. Where they saved his life.

Not a word of condemnation from Kofi Annan for Hizballah. And not a word of gratitude for Israel, for saving a UN peacekeeper’s life.

25 July 2006:

This morning, Hezbollah opened small arms fire at a UNIFIL convoy consisting of two armored personnel carriers (APC) on the road between Kunin and Bint Jubayl. There was some damage to the APCs, but no casualties, and the convoy was obliged to return to Kunin.

Emphasis his.

Yesterday’s Best of the Web:

In fairness to al-Maliki, we should note that he didn’t say all these things. Only the first and third quotes are from him; the second and fourth are from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. We’ll agree with Reid, Schumer and Durbin, then, that al-Maliki is as bad as Annan, and we look forward to their condemnation of Annan.

Still, cervine blogger Marshall Wittmann offers some useful perspective:

A recent Iraqi leader launched real, deadly missiles against Israel. An earlier ruler of Iraq paid the families of suicide bombers a princely sum after their relatives strapped explosives to their bodies and killed and mutilated Israelis. Perhaps, these Congressmen who lament the words of the new Iraqi leader, will now celebrate the fact that Saddam is behind bars instead of issuing verbal orders to kill Israelis and slaughter his own people.

The Moose harbors no illusions about a dramatic transformation of Muslim attitudes toward the Jewish state. But, it is a dramatic improvement when words cannot kill.

Wittmann might have added that Saddam provided a haven to anti-Israel terrorists like Abu Nidal.

Anyway, one of the three signatories of the letter, Durbin, in 2002 voted to leave Saddam in power. So did Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who according to the Associated Press “hinted she . . . would boycott the speech.” Now, all of a sudden, they’re standing with Israel–but they’re willing to wage war only on words.

Bloody hypocrites.

But you know what I think? I think this says something about the American Jewish community. Especially those in Blue States. Erh-hem-ahem.

And today’s Best of the Web:

According to the BBC “the prisoner Hezbollah wants most” is Samir Qantar. On April 22, 1979, Qantar murdered 28-year-old Danny Haran and his 4-year-old daughter and caused the death of another Haran daughter, age 2. Haran’s widow, Smadar Haran Kaiser, describes the crime (she transliterates the murderer’s name as “Kuntar”):

It had been a peaceful Sabbath day. My husband, Danny, and I had picnicked with our little girls, Einat, 4, and Yael, 2, on the beach not far from our home in Nahariya, a city on the northern coast of Israel, about six miles south of the Lebanese border.

Around midnight, we were asleep in our apartment when four terrorists, sent by Abu Abbas from Lebanon, landed in a rubber boat on the beach two blocks away. Gunfire and exploding grenades awakened us as the terrorists burst into our building. They had already killed a police officer.

As they charged up to the floor above ours, I opened the door to our apartment. In the moment before the hall light went off, they turned and saw me. As they moved on, our neighbor from the upper floor came running down the stairs. I grabbed her and pushed her inside our apartment and slammed the door.

Outside, we could hear the men storming about. Desperately, we sought to hide. Danny helped our neighbor climb into a crawl space above our bedroom; I went in behind her with Yael in my arms. Then Danny grabbed Einat and was dashing out the front door to take refuge in an underground shelter when the terrorists came crashing into our flat.

They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. “This is just like what happened to my mother,” I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl’s skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.

The BBC gives a rather more sanitized account of the crime: “Qantar . . . attacked a block of flats in Nahariha in 1979, killing a father and his daughter.”

If that doesn’t make you sick to your stomach, well.

And, though I’d rather leave it rather heavily on that note, the P-G’s been shaking things upside-down again:

Infinitives Unsplit - Mathematics, Sociology, Israel, Lebanon and the outright Manipulation of the MSM

With illustrations.

In The Times:

President Chirac of France told Le Monde that his country could play a major role in an international force, though disarming Hezbollah should not be part of its mandate. He said that Nato should not be involved in the force because “like it or not, it is perceived in the region as the armed wing of the West”.

Well, that’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?

Update:

Telegraph - Worldstage By Con Coughlin

France is the only other major Nato power with the capability to head an expeditionary force in such a challenging environment, but Paris’s undisguised hostility towards Israel, not to mention France’s colonial ties to Beirut, has not endeared it to Jerusalem, which would oppose a French-led deployment.

Even though Nato will struggle to put together the 20,000 troops necessary to enforce a ceasefire, there still remains considerable enthusiasm among the participants in today’s conference for the creation of such a force, particularly as Israel has abandoned its long-standing objections to international interference in its borders and said it would welcome the deployment of a multinational force, so long as it had “a combat capability”.

Yeah I bet they would.

This is, no doubt, a barbed reference to the current UN force in southern Lebanon, which has been so ineffectual in preventing and containing the latest eruption of hostilities.

In fact, the 2,500-strong United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil), which comprises contingents of Irish, Fijian, Ghanaian and Polish troops, was first established in 1978 to prevent Palestinian terrorists firing rockets into northern Israel and to help Beirut restore its authority over the troubled region. But despite having 28 years’ operational experience, during which time Unifil has suffered 257 fatalities, it has failed to prevent the south becoming a safe haven for terror groups.

That many casualties, eh? Poor Kofi must be incandescent with rage. Because I’m sure they were all deliberate.

Nor is Unifil the only multinational force to have failed in Lebanon in recent years. In 1982, following Israel’s controversial siege of Beirut, Reagan co-ordinated the establishment of the Multinational Force in Lebanon (MFL) to oversee the withdrawal of Arafat’s PLO from Lebanon and help the Lebanese government re-establish its authority. Four nations - America, France, Italy and Britain - contributed to the force, whose effectiveness was severely undermined after Hizbollah-backed terrorists detonated massive truck bombs at the US Embassy and Marine compound in Beirut, killing more than 300.

The, um, tagline to this on the front opinion page says:

Con Coughlin says ‘ask the US Marines what happens to troops in Lebanon’

The Times - Seeking a ceasefire
Any plan for Lebanon must be durable and involve all sides

Few would disagree with Tony Blair’s assessment that what is happening in Lebanon is a catastrophe. Few do not, like him, “deeply regret” the deaths of innocent civilians — in Lebanon as in Israel. He called yesterday for an “immediate cessation of hostilities”. Virtually everyone in the world wants that. But, unlike the Prime Minister, not everyone has added the vital phrase “on both sides”.

Yeah, how many rockets fell from Gaza during that “ceasefire”. Funny things, these mid-east ceasefires. Unlike everywhere else in the world, they seem to only apply to one party. Imagine a “ceasefire” in Northern Ireland if the Loyalist “militants” were taking morning pot shots at little kids in Catholic school uniforms.

One country, however, could be persuasive: Syria. Damascus has made clear that it is seeking a role in a settlement, and is ready to “facilitate communication” with Hezbollah, although insisting that it could not speak for the group. There is clearly a powerful faction in the Syrian capital concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism; a faction that could be of assistance in the present crisis. Dr Rice needs an intermediary, even if the message must go first through Cairo or Riyadh.

The Syrians, of course, see opportunities for themselves in all this. They hope that in any fallout they can push their claim for the return of the Golan Heights. More immediately, they are seeking a renewed role in Lebanon and a way out of the international isolation that followed the assassination of Rafik Hariri. Syria must atone for its past in Lebanon, but the country now has a remarkable opportunity to come in from the cold.

Yeah, I saw that movie, I know how that turns out.

Update:

Wheat & Weeds - What Do The Lebanese Want?

Depends on whether or not the camera’s rolling.

Sunni Muslims, Christians and the Druze have no desire to pay for the martial vanity of the Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Nor will they take kindly to his transforming the devastation into a political victory.

Some even welcome Israel’s intervention. As one Lebanese politician said to me in private (but would never dare say in public) Israel must not stop now. It sounds cynical, he said, but ‘for things to get better in Lebanon, Nasrallah must be weakened further.’

And:

Even some Shiites are beginning to have doubts about Nasrallah. If interviewed on television they will praise Hezbollah, but when the cameras are off, there are those who will suddenly become more critical.

Imagine that. Doesn’t stop the press from quoting them though, I imagine.

Update II:

Ron Liddle in the Spectator, continued from above:

There was, for example, the breathtakingly cretinous girl who explained that she’d just come to Beirut to ‘do some deejaying, like’ and was appalled that the British embassy hadn’t got its act together and flown her home when the first bombs landed. I have the feeling we will see her again soon enough, looking bemused standing with her rucksack by a landing strip in Quetta or Khandahar, other places where her ‘deejaying’ sojourn runs into a spot of bother. There were people angry that their ‘beach holiday’ hadn’t turned out as they’d expected, what with the heavy ordnance and everything. Now, I don’t wish to be callous, but don’t phrases like ‘on your head be it’ and ‘you made your bed’ etc., spring to mind here? A beach holiday, in Beirut? Didn’t they wonder why it was so cheap? Might they not have guessed that Beirut would be a little different from Biarritz?

Yes! Exactly! And that goes as well for the Americans who were whining about being evacuated! I don’t think one who goes to a country, where a known and brazen terrorist organization funded by a variety of foreign countries is represented in parliament, not at the behest of this government should be removed from that country by this government, as if they had no inkling what could happen.

There was not the slightest gratitude to the embassy, or the navy, or the British government, that we’d hauled them out of a pit they had dug for themselves. They wanted the rights which are traditionally afforded British citizens — the right to be removed from the presence of excitable, swarthy foreigners as soon as the first gunshot is heard — but also the right to pledge their political allegiance to the country from which they were determinedly fleeing.

Hah!

People who expect the rest of the world to treat them rather as they are treated in Wilmslow or Wokingham and somehow find it possible to blame the British government when they are treated somewhat differently. For many of the British citizens fleeing Lebanon, there was nothing in the way of a mumbled admission that perhaps, all things considered, Magaluf might have been a better bet this year. Nor, from those domiciled in Beirut, the careless shrug, a heigh-ho and ‘well, that’s what you expect if you live in a country which allows extremists to shell its closest neighbour’. Instead, just a fugue of concerted whining and spite directed, bizarrely, at the very people who were helping them. Travel may have got them nearly killed, but it certainly didn’t broaden their minds.

Yes.

The P-G (after a regrettably long absence) has turned the Geneva Conventions upside down and given it a good shake:

Infinitives Unsplit - The world’s a sea of “shit”

The most interesting part:

6. Attacks against the civilian population or civilians by way of reprisals are prohibited.

Fairly self explanatory. To be honest this is covered by Para 2 anyway.

7. The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations.

Translation: if combatants of Party A set up in the middle of a village, are subsequently attacked by Party B and civilians die, PARTY A has contravened the protocol and is responsible for the death of those civilians. Military targets are always military targets. It is up to the combatants on each side to ensure that they do not put the civilians around them in danger.

Hezbollah sets up in the middle of villages. It hides amongst civilians. When it is attacked by the IDF, it is Hezbollah - NOT THE IDF - that is responsible for any civilian deaths.

So these people in the media, politicians and the like, have they ever read the Geneva Conventions?

Or is it like a case of high school gossip (”He said she said that he said that she said that Israel isn’t allowed to do that and Gitmo is an illegal detainment of prisoners of war”)?

Times Online - Rice says ceasefire ‘urgent’ as Blair hints at peace plan

Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, paid a surprise visit to bombed-out Beirut today to kick off a diplomatic mission to resolve the crisis in the Middle East.

But even as she landed in Lebanon, en route to Jerusalem, Israeli armoured units were embroiled in their fiercest clashes yet with Hezbollah guerrillas along the country’s southern borders. …

But it was far from clear what her trip was expected to achieve given that Israel has said that it could not accept any cessation of hostilities until its military objectives are satisfied, including clearing Hezbollah positions in southern Lebanon.

A senior commander on Israel’s northern front, Brigadier-General Alon Friedman, said that the ground operation would continue for up to ten days. “The scope continues to grow in recent days,” he told Israel Army Radio. “We are advancing.”

Dr Rice told reporters on her flight from Washington that although the United States considered a ceasefire to be an urgent priority, any agreement had to remove the long-term threat posed by Hezbollah to Israel.

“It is very important to establish conditions under which a ceasefire can take place. We believe that a ceasefire is urgent,” she said. “It is important to have conditions that will make it also sustainable.”

Clever lass.

In London, Tony Blair said that some kind of plan to end the conflict, based on the return of two abducted Israeli soldiers and the deployment of an international force in a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, might emerge in the next few days.

Another international force? Not one but two? So it can fail twice as badly? I think it’s a bit dishonest to keep introducing this idea without mentioning that there already was one and what it accomplished.

Mr Egeland –

Of “stingy” fame

– yesterday toured the rubble of Beirut’s bombed-out southern suburbs, a once teeming Shia Muslim district where Hezbollah had its headquarters.

He condemned civilian casualties on both sides but called Israel’s offensive “disproportionate” and “a violation of international humanitarian law”.

What international law is that? And does fighting a terrorist war against civilians happen to fall under it in any way?

Stupid twit.

Update:

You know, this really is quite amazing, when you think about it.

LGF - Cox and Forkum: Signs of the Times

I mean, you always had the morons at Berkeley with the Yasser Arafat scarves on and the high schoolers everywhere else with the Che tee-shirts on, but this… and it’s not exactly beyond living memory for people my age. Which reminds me, I wanted to link to the photos themselves:

LGF - Terror Supporters in New York City

LGF - Terror Supporters in Montreal

LGF - Thousands of Terror Supporters in Sydney

LGF - Terror Supporters in Los Angeles

LGF - Terror Supporters in Chicago

LGF - London Muslims: “We Are All Hizballah”

And just to reinforce what he believes in:

LGF - Breaking: Galloway Praises Hizballah in London

Update II:

I wish I were the sort of person that could affect international oil markets just by stepping into a country.

AP - Oil Prices Fall As Rice Arrives in Mideast

Update III:

Go thunderer:

The Times - The BBC, marred by Hezbollah. By Stephen Pollard

Right at the beginning it was clear how the BBC would cover the operation, when a film on Newsnight concluded with the reporter, Peter Marshall, remarking across a picture of a blown-up bridge: “All this destruction. And still more threatened” — as if the Israelis are on some kind of wilful destruction spree, dropping bombs for the sheer hell of it, rather than taking action to destroy Hezbollah’s capacity to murder any more Israelis.

On Saturday the BBC’s website helpfully carried full details of the assembly points for that day’s anti-Israel march. Nowhere did it give the same detail for yesterday’s rally in support of Israel.

We are forced to pay for such propaganda. The only option is to take action ourselves. BBC News’s annual budget is £350 million — 8.75 per cent of the corporation’s entire budget. From now on, let’s pay only £120 of the £131.50 licence fee.

Update IV:

Hello, the BBC.

BBC - Testing time for Haifa’s Arabs. By Raffi Berg

The rockets do not discriminate and a number of Haifa’s Israeli Arabs have been wounded in the attacks.

Would it be better if they did discriminate?

“I blame Hezbollah,” said Rabeh Halloun, a 23-year-old welder, sitting on the steps of his uncle’s supermarket.

“They started this and they are responsible for destroying Lebanon,” he said.

“There are some Arabs here who say they like what [Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan] Nasrallah’s doing. I don’t support what Israel is doing but I hope they get rid of Hezbollah.”

“I don’t agree with what they are doing, but I agree with what they are doing.” So, shall we mark this up to tribal sympathies or discuss the state of the Israeli educational system.

Update V:

The Times - This time, even Jews can agree, by David Rowan
Hezbollah has achieved the near impossible — it has united British Jewry behind Israel

ON FRIDAY I was harangued on live television as personally culpable for Israeli “genocide”. On Saturday I was assailed by e-mail missiles for daring to suggest that every civilian death was a human tragedy, when my only concern, apparently, should have been “the spillage of Jewish blood by Arab scum”. Yesterday it was the Jewish anti-Zionists’ turn to launch rhetorical rockets over their presumption that my newspaper considers Israel to have a pre-Messianic right to exist. It hasn’t proved the easiest of weeks to be the new Editor of The Jewish Chronicle.

Since my call-up to the British-Jewish front lines two months ago from the tranquil olive groves of The Times it has become clearer to me than a Maimonidean precept that there is no such thing as a “British Jewish community”. How a group of just 300,000 or so people can agree so determinedly to diverge on all significant matters communal, ecumenical and political would take a Talmudic genius as yet unborn to unravel.

I thought that was pretty funny. So anyway:

That, to most British Jews, is the ultimate terror: a fear that, even after 350 years as a resettled population here in Britain, the psychological safe haven that is Israel will one day no longer be able to provide that “right of return”. The fact that yesterday’s main “solidarity rally” in support of Israel took place in a Jewish secondary school in suburban London, rather than anywhere more public, speaks volumes about current levels of anxiety.

Every bomb and mortar fired into Lebanon is echoing painfully in Jewish homes across the UK. Only opportunist propagandists could suggest that this is a fight that Israel and her diaspora friends sought.

So this morning I got an email from The Jerusalem Post (it’s the only newspaper I ever registered with that still sends me ads):

Aish.com - In Every Generation

They’re certainly a singular people, these Joooos.

Chicago Sun-Times - Failure to solve Palestinian question empowers Iran. BY MARK STEYN

Suppose this were true — that terrorists blew up Oz honeymooners and Scandinavian stoners in Balinese nightclubs because of “the Palestinian question.” Doesn’t this suggest that these people are, at a certain level, nuts? After all, there are plenty of IRA sympathizers around the world (try making the Ulster Unionist case in a Boston bar) and yet they never thought to protest British rule in Northern Ireland by blowing up, say, German tourists in Thailand. Yet the more the thin skein of Palestinian grievance was stretched to justify atrocities halfway around the world, the more the Arab League big-shot emirs and European Union foreign ministers looked down from their windows and cooed, “See my parade passing!”

They’ve now belatedly realized they’re at that stage in the creature feature where the monster has mutated into something bigger and crazier. Until the remarkably kinda-robust statement by the G-8 and the unprecedented denunciation of Hezbollah by the Arab League, the rule in any conflict in which Israel is involved — Israel vs. PLO, Israel vs. Lebanon, Israel vs. [Your Team Here] is that the Jews are to blame.

But Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian opportunism on Palestine has caught up with them: It’s finally dawned on them that a strategy of consciously avoiding resolution of the “Palestinian question” has helped deliver Gaza, and Lebanon and Syria, into the hands of a regime that’s a far bigger threat to the Arab world than the Zionist Entity. Cairo and Co. grew so accustomed to whining about the Palestinian pseudo-crisis decade in decade out that it never occurred to them that they might face a real crisis one day: a Middle East dominated by an apocalyptic Iran and its local enforcers, in which Arab self-rule turns out to have been a mere interlude between the Ottoman sultans and the eternal eclipse of a Persian nuclear umbrella. The Zionists got out of Gaza and it’s now Talibanistan redux. The Zionists got out of Lebanon and the most powerful force in the country (with an ever-growing demographic advantage) are Iran’s Shia enforcers. There haven’t been any Zionists anywhere near Damascus in 60 years and Syria is in effect Iran’s first Sunni Arab prison bitch. For the other regimes in the region, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria are dead states that have risen as vampires.

Meanwhile, Kofi Annan in a remarkable display of urgency (at least when compared with Sudan, Rwanda, Congo et al.) is proposing apropos Israel and Hezbollah that U.N. peacekeepers go in, not to keep the “peace” between two sovereign states but rather between a sovereign state and a usurper terrorist gang. Contemptible as he is, the secretary-general shows a shrewd understanding of the way the world is heading: Already “non-state actors” have more sophisticated rocketry than many EU nations; if Iran has its way, its proxies will be implied nuclear powers. Maybe we should put them on the U.N. Security Council.

So what is in reality Israel’s first non-Arab war is a glimpse of the world the day after tomorrow: The EU and Arab League won’t quite spell it out, but, to modify that Le Monde headline, they are all Jews now.

Curtsy: LGF, who also lined to:

The Ouwet Front (Personal Views and Opinions of Lebanese Forces Members) - Hizbullah s Filthy Methods

We ve seen Israel for example hitting a factory for tissues in a small village in the South. It appeared that Hizbullah guys operate using trucks, meaning they move around with a missile in a truck, park nearby a factory for ex and shoot the rocket and flee.

The origin of the rocket being the factory, Israelies respond by hitting it.

A witness for a similar action urged on TV the Hizbullah fighters to stop coming into his village to shoot rockets and then run away since the village is being destroyed.

Update:

Wheat & Weeds - Israel Can’t Win. Lose. Take Your Pick. and Look Who’s Talking “Root Causes” Now

She also links to:

NRO - A Strange War: Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists. by Victor Davis Hanson

So after 9/11, the London bombings, the Madrid murders, the French riots, the Beslan atrocities, the killings in India, the Danish cartoon debacle, Theo Van Gogh, and the daily arrests of Islamic terrorists trying to blow up, behead, or shoot innocent people around the globe, the world is sick of the jihadist ilk. And for all the efforts of the BBC, Reuters, Western academics, and the horde of appeasers and apologists that usually bail these terrorist killers out when their rhetoric finally outruns their muscle, this time they can’t.

Instead, a disgusted world secretly wants these terrorists to get what they deserve. And who knows: This time they just might.

I’d say that about covers how I feel about it, and heck I’m not in any of those groups.

Update II:

National Post - Neutral stance rejected; Opposition criticizes Harper’s tough talk

Mr. Harper repeated his defence of Israel’s right to live peacefully, condemning the violence of Hezbollah terrorists and speaking out against the suffering of innocent people in Lebanon and Gaza — responsibility for which he laid squarely at the feet of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas, the terrorist organization that forms the government of the Palestinian Authority.

“We all want to encourage not just a ceasefire, but a resolution. And a resolution will only be achieved when everyone gets to the table and everyone admits that recognition of each other,” Mr. Harper said, in a pointed reference to the refusal of Hezbollah and Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

“But I have to say this. I read in some papers somewhere that someone involved in this said, ‘Well, Hezbollah will protect, Hezbollah will take care of us,’ ” the Prime Minister said.

“Hezbollah’s objective is violence. Hezbollah believes that through violence it can create, it can bring about the destruction of Israel. Violence will not bring about the destruction of Israel … and inevitably the result of the violence will be the deaths primarily of innocent people.”

Mr. Harper brushed off suggestions his tough new language on the Middle East has compromised Canada’s ability to be seen as a neutral, honest broker in the search for Middle East peace, a criticism repeated yesterday by NDP leader Jack Layton, who said Canada should be pushing for an immediate ceasefire and the presence of an international peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

So, apparently it’s better to stay neutral in the face of injustice than it is to do the right thing?

And (as Bubblehead would say): Break — New topic.

But the emotion of an earlier scene was unmistakable.

Earlier in the morning, Mr. Harper’s wife, Laureen, broke into tears as she visited the grave of her great uncle in the small northern French town of Barlin. She had never visited the final resting place of Private James Teskey, who was killed on June 11, 1917, in the Battle of Arras.

He was 19.

The Prime Minister gently placed his arm around his wife as the two knelt next to the grave in the picturesque French countryside.

Sniffle

(Okay, mini-update 2.1:

The caption to this photo says “Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II greets Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at Buckingham Palace in central London July 14, 2006″. Now, couldn’t they have said, given the context, “Canada’s Queen Elizabeth”? Otherwise it reads just like he happened to be in Britain so he went along to say hi to Britain’s head of state.

And the ad at the bottom of the page is Hebrew National. That’s very funny.)

Update III:

The Sunday Times - God’s army has plans to run the whole Middle East
Hezbollah, the group at the heart of the Lebanese conflict, is the spearhead of Iran’s ambitions to be a superpower, says Iranian commentator Amir Taheri

Why has Tehran decided to play its Lebanese card now? Part of the answer lies in Washington’s decision last May to reverse its policy towards Iran by offering large concessions on its nuclear programme. Tehran interpreted that as a sign of weakness. Ahmadinejad believes that his strategy to drive the “infidel” out of the Islamic heartland cannot succeed unless Arabs accept Iran’s leadership.

The problem is that since the Iranian regime is Shi’ite it would not be easy to sell it to most Arabs, who are Sunni. To overcome that hurdle, it is necessary to persuade the Arabs that only Iran is sincere in its desire and capacity to wipe Israel off the map. Once that claim is sold to the Arabs, so Ahmadinejad hopes, they would rally behind his vision of the Middle East instead of the “American vision”.

Oh good. I’m glad we listened again to the people who said that diplomacy was the best way to go about. Because they’re the same people who have been proved right so endlessly in every other global or domestic conflict or political question.

Update IV:

So, reading this:

The Sunday Times - The bloody truth is that Israel’s war is our war, by Michael Portillo

And getting all the way to the last two paragraphs:

America, Britain and Israel have all committed big policy errors. Perhaps they have made things worse and maybe they have stimulated recruitment to the enemy. But the present Israeli government was elected to make peace and did not depart from that course of its own volition. Its struggle against Hezbollah fits into a complex global jigsaw of battles against terror.

The death toll in Lebanon is repugnant. But if the kneejerk response of western public opinion is an upsurge in anti-Israeli and anti-American feeling then we misunderstand our interests and the threat to them from terror. For us to turn against Israel and America would be perverse and potentially suicidal.

Before he said anything interesting, I am reminded yet again how many of what has been written about the current Israeli/Lebanese/Iranian/Syrian/Palestinian/Jooooo/Muslim conflict has included tons and tons of background. Just about every single thing I have read in any of the papers I check all spend reams and reams of time on background, history, context. Which is, I think, in-credibly telling, no?

Update V:

The editors at the Telegraph have been reading Mark Steyn since they threw him overboard.

The Sunday Telegraph - Teheran must be dealt with too

Why Buenos Aires? What possible strategic interest did Iran have in murdering 100 people at an Argentinian Jewish community centre in 1994? The answer, surely, is that it was flaunting its global reach.

For the defining characteristic of the Islamic Revolution is its refusal to recognise national borders.

The very first act of the revolutionary regime after 1979 was to seize the US embassy, thereby signalling its contempt for the notion of territorial jurisdiction. That act alone should have told us everything we needed to know.

Unfortunately, the international community - or, more particularly, the EU, which assumed responsibility for dealing with the mullahs - spent a decade cosying up to them, hoping that “constructive engagement” would dissuade the ayatollahs from their nuclear ambitions.

The policy of appeasement has failed; it is time to try coercion.

This does not necessarily mean the direct use of military force: there are many intermediate steps, including targeted sanctions, the seizure of assets and the sponsoring of opposition movements. But leaving Teheran unmolested will mean more Hezbollahs, more terrorism and, ultimately, more wars.

Right so get on with it. Good lord.

The Times - The race to destroy Hezbollah before the world calls for peace. Report by Times correspondents
The Lebanese bodies are piling up and Israeli civilians are cowering in their bunkers, but the two enemies will stop at nothing

What began as a reprisal for the abduction of Israeli soldiers was yesterday explicitly defined as a mission to recast the region. The Israeli offensive “was not, as in the past, a response to a particular incident”, Israel told Vijay Nambiar, leader of the UN mediation team in the Middle East, “but a definitive response to an unacceptable strategic threat by Hezbollah, and a message to Iran and Syria that threats by proxies would no longer be tolerated.”

Boo-yah.

Just as Atlanticism was returning to diplomatic fashion, most of Western Europe and the UN are once again at odds with Washington. President Chirac of France and Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, have called for a ceasefire at all costs. Tony Blair, improvising in St Petersburg and since, is trying to hold the West together.

The US will now lead efforts to find a diplomatic solution. But by implicitly encouraging Israel’s onslaught on Hezbollah so far it has, not for the first time, risked global condemnation for the sake of fundamental change in the Middle East and a quantum leap forward in its War on Terror. What is the point, Washington’s UN Ambassador asked bluntly, of negotiating with “a bunch of terrorists”?

God somebody send John Bolton a dozen roses.

Update:

Amazing. And exactly what I’ve been quietly grumbling for years now.

NewsBusters - Bill Maher Actually Says Something Nice About President Bush

I have to say, watching George Bush talk about Israel the last week has reminded me of a feeling that I hadn’t felt in so long I forgot what it felt like: the feeling of pride when your president says what you want your president to say, especially in a matter that chokes you up a bit. I surrender my credentials as Bush exposer - from the very beginning - to no man, but on Israel, I love it that a U.S. president doesn’t pretend Arab-Israeli conflict is an even-steven proposition. …

Lots of ethnic peoples, probably most, have at one time or another lost some territory; nobody’s ever completely happy with their borders; people move and get moved, which is why the 20th century saw the movement of tens if not hundreds of millions of refugees in countries around the world. There was no entity of Arabs called “Palestine” before Israel made the desert bloom. If those 600,000 original Palestinian refugees had been handled with maturity by their Arab brethren, who had nothing but space to put them, they could have moved on — the way Germans, Czechs, Poles, Chinese and everybody else has, including, of course, the Jews.

And it’s true, for crying out loud.

There’s our Mr Eloquent again:

Times Online - Mic picks up Bush: ‘get Hezbollah to stop this s***’

Hehehe. Partial:

Blair: I don’t know what you guys have talked about, but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral.
Bush: I think Condi is going to go pretty soon.
Blair: But that’s, that’s, that’s all that matters. But if you… you see it will take some time to get that together.
Bush: Yeah, yeah.
Blair: But at least it gives people…
Bush: It’s a process, I agree. I told her your offer to…
Blair: Well…it’s only if I mean… you know. If she’s got a…, or if she needs the ground prepared as it were… Because obviously if she goes out, she’s got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.
Bush: You see, the … thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it’s over.
Blair: [INAUDIBLE]
Bush: [INADUBILE]
Blair: Syria.
Bush: Why?
Blair: Because I think this is all part of the same thing.
Bush: Yeah.
Blair: What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way…
Bush: Yeah, yeah, he is sweet.
Blair: He is honey. And that’s what the whole thing is about. It’s the same with Iraq.
Bush: I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen.
Blair: Yeah.
Bush: [INAUDIBLE]
Blair:[INAUDIBLE]
Bush: We are not blaming the Lebanese government.
Blair: Is this…? (at this point Blair taps the microphone in front of him and the sound is cut.)

Hrmmmmm.

Update: I liked this:

Okay, so, here’s the “international” situation, as I see it. A bit over a year ago, after a Very Serious Event (assassination of someone who didn’t happen to be Jewish, you could say) the International Community demands that the bad guys leave Lebanon and disarm. They sort of leave but they don’t disarm, and right now they’re basically going “Nyah nyah we’re still armed and committing blatant acts of war on camera!”. So what the International Community feels it needs to do is not actually make sure they finally disarm, but send in a “peace keeping force” to keep them armed.

And I’m listening to Rush (first day back) doing a montage of everyone in the media “asking” if this has happened because Bush is “bogged down” in Iraq and “took his eye off” the Palestinian situation. Because everything that happens to the world happens because we, Americans, touch it. Nothing happens without our Expert (if there are Democrats involved) and Powerful Intervention. Allll the little brown people all sit around peacefully waiting for us to “get involved”.

God they’re arrogant. And yet the Republican side of things gets the reputation of arrogance.

Update II:

Here we are again:

BBC - ‘Ten die’ as Israel hits vehicles

So, did I sleep through it again?

Update III:

The Telegraph - The ayatollahs are the real enemies of Israel

It is worth remembering who started it. In both Gaza and Lebanon, the proximate cause of the current violence was a terrorist attack on a legally constituted state army. Yes, Israel is over-reacting.

Who says?

Yes, it is causing collateral damage to the guiltless. But this is precisely what the paramilitaries intended.

Hamas and Hizbollah knew that Israel would retaliate in strength against the kidnapping of its servicemen. They were relying on such a reaction to turn international opinion against Tel Aviv and strengthen their ascendancy within their communities.

From an Israeli point of view, things look rather different. Israel withdrew unilaterally from southern Lebanon and the Gaza strip. In both cases, the one thing it asked in return was that the territory it vacated would not be used as a launch pad for cross-border attacks. On both fronts, it was let down. Having sought a “land-for-peace” deal, Tel Aviv found that it had surrendered the land but not been granted the peace. Accordingly, it set out to secure its own borders.

If the Palestinian Authority and the Lebanese government were unwilling or unable to stop freelance incursions into Israeli territory, Israel would do it for them. The attacks of the past week are not a random lashing-out; they are intended to degrade the infrastructure on which the gunmen rely.

So, not an overreaction?

But Israel cannot in perpetuity police adjacent territories remotely. Its eventual aim must be to have viable neighbours with which to deal. “Viable”, in this context, does not mean that they should be well disposed to the Jewish state. It means, rather, that they should control their own jurisdictions.

Israel’s frontier with Syria is relatively stable and secure, despite Syria’s undisguised loathing for its neighbour. Why? Because Syria, as a sovereign state, will not tolerate uncontrolled militias within its borders. This places it in a different category from the Palestinian and Lebanese administrations, whose writ does not run throughout their own territories.

Or their own cabinets. Or their own offices.

A parallel can be drawn with the first government of the Irish Free State, which acted more brutally against the IRA than Britain has ever done. It did so not out of love for Britain, or enthusiasm for the existence of Northern Ireland, but because it was determined that there should be only one legitimate army in the state.

And quoting Mark Steyn:

This is the challenge facing the concert of powers gathered at the G8 summit in St Petersburg. The ayatollahs have made clear that they do not recognise international law. Indeed, the first act of the revolutionary regime after 1978 - its violation of the diplomatic sanctity of the US embassy - was designed to signal its contempt for territorial jurisdiction.

Update IV:

It’s my main man! Gillermania! On Bill O’Reilly.

Update V:

The pigs, they’re flying in droves. Droves.

LGF - Arab World Fed Up with Hizballah?

Update VI:

A little reading into the top story:

The Times - Bush’s open mike gaffe reveals truth of the special relationship. By Philip Webster in St Petersburg

Followed by:

Asked what Mr Bush said when told his comments were overheard, White House spokesman Tony Snow said: “His reaction first was ‘What did I say?’, so we showed him the transcript, then he rolled his eyes and laughed.”

Heh.

I am so bored with people constantly pointing out that Ehud Olmert is “untested” or “talks tough” but “not persuasively”. And these are bloggers, the ones who are supposed to know after the past five years how suspicious it is anyone claiming a person can’t fight a war unless he’s got John Kerry’s three Purple Hearts (he was, incidentally, wounded in combat, but that shouldn’t matter either), not the AFP.

The Sunday Times - Cool customer proving himself as Middle East starts to burn
PROFILE Ehud Olmert

The rise of Israel’s 61-year-old leader has been meteoric. An uncharismatic technocrat thrust to prominence after Ariel Sharon’s stroke in January, Olmert went on to win the general election with a plan to withdraw unilaterally from parts of the West Bank and usher in regional security.

His honeymoon ended when a young Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinian militants three weeks ago. Rather than planning for peace, Olmert is waging war on two fronts, in Gaza and Lebanon, in an effort to bring Israel’s enemies to their knees. The West has looked on in dismay as the stakes ratchet up and hostilities take on a momentum of their own.

A momentum of their own, eh? How conveniently passive for all parties concerned. Not a matter of a couple of fiendish terrorists providing their own momentum, or anything like that.

Olmert’s worst critics are his own family, where he counts himself “in a minority of one”.

I love these few paragraphs. They’re just hilarious.

He was born in 1945 near Binyamina in the final years of British rule in Palestine. His father Mordechai, a pioneer of Israel’s land settlement, grew up in the Chinese city of Harbin, where Olmert’s grandfather had settled after fleeing Russia after the first world war. “When he died at the age of 88, he spoke his last words in Chinese,” Olmert recalled.

Who here remembers a couple years ago, maybe, there was a flutter in the blogs about something to do with the Shanghai Ghetto? I can’t remember what sparked that. But so interesting.

The Sunday Times - Leading article: Road map to nowhere

There are those who say that Israel is too easily provoked; that the deaths of dozens of civilians is too big a price to pay for the uncertain fate of three captured soldiers. They would argue that by responding with military might it is playing into the hands of its enemies. On this view, its enemies can never hope to defeat Israel militarily, but by provoking a sufficiently violent response they can whip up an Arab storm. Iran, whose eccentric president has called for the destruction of the state of Israel, arms Hezbollah. Syria, which has ambitions to dominate Lebanon, provides a haven for the military leadership of Hamas.

If Hezbollah’s aim was to test whether Mr Olmert has the military mettle of Ariel Sharon, his predecessor, it has had its answer in spades. The images of destruction this weekend in Lebanon — the destroyed roads, shattered bridges and peppered airport — have been condemned by some commentators and politicians as disproportionate. But they are a reminder of an enduring truth: Israel will not be pushed around. Put bluntly, Israelis will judge their government’s response by its ability to defend them.

Hmm.

Update:

Now, maybe it’s just my time zone, but why is it that every time I open the news pages, the headlines are always similar to:

BBC - More die in fresh Lebanon strikes

Now, it could be that I sleep through the first headlines and wake up for the second ones, so I always miss the sort of:

More die in fresh Israel strikes

headlines. Or maybe those stories aren’t headlines-worthy. Which gets rather tedious after a few, oh, years.

Update II:

LGF - Disproportionate Response

Yes indeedy. Yes indeedy do. And, speaking of which:

Instapundit -

READER STEPHEN CLARK has a question:

A simple question asked in the context of recent events and prior discussions of the Geneva Accords: Why hasn’t the International Committee of the Red Cross demanded access to the Israeli soldiers taken in Gaza and in northern Israel?

Ah, no one in the world cares what happens to the Joooos.

Uh oh.

FOXnews - Israeli Airstrikes Target Central Beirut for First Time in 4-Day Offensive

Witnesses said Israeli aircraft attacked central Beirut Saturday for the first time in a four-day offensive, striking a lighthouse and the capital’s seaport.

In Lebanon’s northernmost city, Tripoli, witnesses said Israeli helicopters carried out the deepest strike yet into Lebanon, firing four missiles into the city’s port area and hitting grain silos.

I’m sure the UN is going to get right on this, since it’s not only violating but stepping back Resolution 1559:

The deadly barrages came as Israel charged that Iran, the main sponsor of Hezbollah militants, has 100 troops in Lebanon providing Hezbollah key support — including helping fire a missile Friday that badly damaged an Israeli warship. Hezbollah denied it.

They would, wouldn’t they.

President Bush, on a trip to Russia, said it was up to Hezbollah “to lay down its arms and to stop attacking.” Arab foreign ministers gathered in Cairo but fell into squabbling after moderate states, led by Saudi Arabia, denounced Hezbollah for starting the fight.

My god. They’re actually holding their point.

So after seeing the Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, yesterday on Brit Hume’s show shouting down the guy from Lebanon, well. I’m a fan. Can’t find an article on it, though.

Update:

Love this headline:

BBC - Israel kills Lebanese civilians

Apparently that was what they were discussing with Olmert, when the military leaders met with him last night. “What next, gentlemen?” “Well, tomorrow we’re going to go kill some Lebanese civillians.” “Sounds strategic. Get on with it, gentlemen.”

Update II:

YNet News - Report: Israel gives Syria ultimatum

London-based Arabic language newspaper Al-Hayat says Israel gave Syria 72 hours to stop Hizbullah’s activity, bring about release of kidnapped IDF troops. ‘Israel will not end military activity until new situation created that will prevent Syria, Iran from using terror organizations to threaten its security,’ newspaper quotes Pentagon official as saying

Update III:

What fun.

Telegraph - HMS Illustrious sent to Lebanon as Britons told: get ready to flee

The Government has ordered the aircraft carrier Illustrious to sail to the Middle East ready for the possible evacuation of thousands of British nationals trapped inside Lebanon.

Sure it’s a very serious situation and evacuations like this are always a bad thing, but still. Awfully exciting.

FOXnews - Israel Strikes Beirut; Hezbollah Barrages N. Israel With Rockets

Israel took its Lebanon offensive to south Beirut on Friday, with warplanes targeting Hezbollah’s headquarters and road links throughout residential neighborhoods. Israeli airstrikes destroyed the highway to Damascus and exploded fuel tanks at Beirut’s airport, sending trails of smoke over the capital.

Hezbollah guerrillas retaliated for the airstrikes by launching a continuous barrage of Katyusha rockets across the border, causing damage in five towns in northern Israel and wounding six people.

Does it count as retaliation if you do the same thing that you did to spark the attack? You’d think retaliation would be something a bit more novel…

U.S. President George W. Bush called Lebanon’s prime minister, promising to press Israel to halt its attacks on Lebanon.

“President Bush affirmed his readiness to put pressure on Israel to limit the damage to Lebanon as a result of the current military action, and to spare civilians from harm,” Fuad Saniora Saniora said in a statement. There was no immediate U.S. confirmation of the promise. Bush also spoke with Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak.

Hmm.

FOXnews - Reporter’s Notebook: Kidnapping the Hope for Peace by Jennifer Griffin