PDavidHornik

The lowdown from DEBKA

Here it is:

Unfortunately, say DEBKAfile's military sources, Israeli leaders appear to have fallen behind the alarming events rushing forward in Iran: In a single week, the UN nuclear watchdog reported Tehran had stocked enough enriched uranium to make its first A-Bomb, while US analysts expect the Iranian to be able to make three bombs by the end of 2009. The Kavosh-2 launch shows Iran may have already perfected the missile technology to deliver warheads. However, instead of addressing this peril, defense minister Ehud Barak is mired in a huge effort to hold back a military operation in the Gaza Strip, keep his Labor party from crumbling and battle the Hebron Jewish community.

It's a horror scenario as Israel is being led by a claque of flakes and crooks in a time of mounting existential peril. One can only hope the savagely cruel Mumbai attack will concentrate the mind of the U.S. president-elect and help him realize that it's not a matter of Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, but of the survival of civilization. Least of all is it time for infantile dreams of "change" and everyone learning to love everyone else.

Back in Pajamas

I publish regularly on Frontpage, less often in Pajamas Media so I link to it when I do. Here, on Syria's honoring of child-murderer Samir Kuntar and some implications.

Transparently bogus "peace" initiative

The Arab world has been recycling and refloating the "Arab Peace Initiative," concocted by the Saudis a few months after 9/11 when their image was on the ropes, at the same time that this same Arab world gears up for another Jew-bashing fest known as the Durban Review Conference set for Geneva in April 2009. As Gerald Steinberg notes in this excellent piece on the hypocrisy, the Palestinians are among the leaders of the lynch mob, their "representatives in Geneva...among the most vocal in the demonization [of Israel], at the same time as leaders such as Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei are participating in the US-sponsored peace talks in Jerusalem." The contradiction is direct and undeniable, even if Brent Scowcroft and Ehud Olmert will always act as if it isn't there.

Great news for once

I'm not one of the most cheerful commentators. I think that, while on the individual level there's a mix of kindness and cruelty, on the collective level manunkind is mostly cruel and even more so to Jews. But that doesn't mean that still, sometimes--even on the collective level--great things can't happen.

Bashar Assad, peace partner

Non-Israelis who can't get over the deranged idea of Israel giving the Golan Heights back to Syria are either short of understanding about the Middle East or against Israel. Israelis who can't get over that idea are sick of mind and soul. Here's the latest on Syrian president Bashar Assad:

Syrian President Bashar Assad has awarded former Lebanese prisoner Samir Kuntar the country's highest medal for spending nearly three decades in an Israeli jail.

The Syrian News Agency says Kuntar received the Syrian Order of Merit during a meeting with Assad in Damascus Monday.

Kuntar was the longest-held Lebanese prisoner in Israel. He was imprisoned in 1979 after he was convicted of one of the grisliest attacks in Israeli history - killing a man in front of his four-year-old daughter, and then killing the girl herself by crushing her skull.

Kuntar and four Hezbollah guerrillas were freed in July in exchange for the bodies of Ehud Goldwasswer and Eldad Regev, two Israel Defense Forces soldiers captured by the militant Hezbollah group in 2006. Their capture sparked a 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah.

U.S. academia molds the country it wants

Paul Kengor has this powerful account of the academic background to Obama's win: the molding of people for whom Joe McCarthy is vastly more villainous than Joseph Stalin.

Haaretz smears heroic brigade

See Israel's left-wing daily Haaretz do this hatchet job--in English, for the whole world--on the Israeli army's elite Kfir Brigade. These kids--and that's what they are, at least when they enlist--do some of the hardest policing work in the world to protect us from the terrorist threat in the West Bank. Not surprisingly there are incidents where, under the pressure, they overstep the bounds and these are dealt with through the proper legal channels--something to be proud of. Haaretz's defamatory message is, though, clear. On the other hand, it's a good sign: the Israeli Left sees a Center-Right electoral victory on the way and is running scared, desperate to try and drive us out of the West Bank, by any means, and hand it over to  terrorist organizations before it's too late.

Liberation at last

The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (based near Tel Aviv and with close links to the Israel Defense Forces) reports that Hamas in Gaza is drafting penal codes based on shari'ah law. These new penal codes will replace old ones dating back to the British Mandate in 1936 as well as Jordanian and Egyptian laws and Israeli military decrees. The center notes that "since the Hamas takeover of Gaza (June 2007), radical Islam has become the obligatory way of life, whose influence on the population's daily lives just keeps getting bigger." The new penal codes are "another step in the enforcement of... shari'ah..., bringing Gaza closer to becoming a radical Islamic entity." The center reminds us that the  "shari'ah-based penal codes include such punishments as execution, dismemberment, stoning, beheading, etc."

Yes, the grim old days of Israeli "occupation" are gone and the Gaza Palestinians have been "liberated," haven't they? It's also worth noting that in the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections encompassing both the West Bank and Gaza, the Palestinians voted in a totalitarian Hamas regime. (The Fatah regime that still partially rules in the West Bank is itself a vicious, corrupt dictatorship, but not religiously fanatic.) Naturally I saw this story only in one of the center's mailings and nowhere in the media. The media doesn't actually care about what happens to "Palestinians" and never did.

The settlements are entirely legal

And here, in her blog on The Spectator, the great British blogger and author Melanie Phillips tells why. (In an otherwise splendid post she unfortunately says "I would like [the settlers] to leave most of these territories, in Israel’s own interests"--I would like all of them to stay and more and more to join.) She also unmasks the growing post-Blair official British hostility to Israel and concludes:

It appears that the British government has now decided openly to side with the enemies of Israel – those enemies who really have been thwarting international law for six decades in their war of extermination.

Thus HMG is now marching in lockstep with its joyfully welcomed comrade across the pond -- who will shortly enter the White House and leave Israel abandoned, undermined, and under pressure to cut its own throat.

FREE JONATHAN POLLARD

A diverse (politically and otherwise) group of Israeli personalities have posted this urgent petition to PM Olmert to raise the matter of a pardon for Jonathan Pollard with outgoing President Bush. Pollard has been in prison for 23 years for an offense--spying for an ally--that normally gets a 2- to 4-year sentence. His continued imprisonment is a cruel and horrific injustice. I don't ordinarly pray that specific things should happen, but I pray that President Bush will do the right thing and free Jonathan Pollard.