Cyber-Wars!

Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, Iran's bizarre caricature of a President, now has a blog, where, according to people who can read Farsi, he talks about his impoverished childhood and invites readers to vote on whether or not America wants to start World War III. As if you needed more proof than my site that they'll let anybody blog these days. As an added bonus to visitors with Israeli IP addresses, Ahmadenijad offers a computer virus. Smart move there, Mr. President. Ask Hizbollah what Israel does when attacked...

When Did This Happen?

AmericaBlog has a thoughtful post about morality and war as it relates to the current fighting in Lebanon. What caught my interest though were the bizarre, rabid, over-the-top comments made by readers (one actually referred to Israelis as "Jewzis" and said "Hitler would be proud" of them). So, my question is, when did American liberals become so virulently anti-Israel? The founding of Israel in 1948 was widely supported by progressives all over the world (including the Queen Mother of American Liberalism, Eleanor Roosevelt); the original state was even fairly socialist in its economic organization. Israel's enemies are certainly not "liberal" by any definition--they are either secular, violent and corrupt (such as the Fatah Party in the Palestinian Authority) or theocratic and as contemptuous of Americans and Christians as they are of Israel (Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, etc.). In all other respects, the Left in America is extremely wary of using code-words for racism, yet their most overblown rhetoric against Israel comes close to (and sometimes pole-vaults over) the line into anti-Semitism. So what's the story? When did knee-jerk opposition to Israel (as opposed to legitimate complaints about specific areas of Israeli policy) become such as defining feature of the American (and European) Left?

Port Insecurity, Part IX

From Think Progress, Dubai Ports World is a participant in the Arab boycott of Israel. These guys just seem more and more like the kind of folks we want running 21 American ports, don't they?

Bad to Worse, Part II

The US is cutting off aid to the Palestinian Authority and demanding our money back, to keep it out of the mitts of Hamas. It had to be done, obviously; we can't bankroll a gang of admitted terrorists. A cutoff of foreign aid will hurt the fragile Palestinian economy; but if Israel closes its borders, the Authority's economy will disintegrate. Ironically, of course, a bad economy was part of what led to Hamas' victory in the first place, along with the endemic corruption and incompetence of the Fatah movement. In the past, Hamas (and other terrorist organizations) have been bankrolled by Saudi Arabia. In fact, it was Yasir Arafat's foolish decision to back Saddam Hussein in Gul War I that caused the Saudis to cut their funding to the PLO, bringing them to the negotiations that created the Palestinian Authority in the first place. Now, frankly, I have a hard time imagining a good ending to any of this. Israel is not going to negotiate with Hamas (and who can blame them?) and Hamas is loudly proclaiming that it will not negotiate with Israel. Sadly, it may well be that the best thing we can hope for is a rapid economic downturn that will lead to Hamas being thrown out of the office as quickly as possible.

Bad to Worse

Could the news from the Middle East possibly get any worse? Don't answer that! First, possibly the only two men (Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat) who might've hammered out a peace despite their shortcomings (in Arafat's case SERIOUS shortcomings, like being a crook, liar and terrorist) are gone; then, a total lunatic who was apparently one of the thugs that seized the US Embassy in 1979 becomes President of Iran; and now a terrorist organization has won contol of the Palestinian Authority legislature.
I have to disagree with the Salon article a little; yes, it was the Bush Administration's bright idea to force the Palestinians to give power to a prime minister, and yes that has come back to bite them in the ass, but it was necessary at the time to give Israel someone they could negotiate with instead of Arafat. Whatever else you can say about Arafat, he would NEVER, by hook or by crook, have allowed Hamas to win. A sad joke in the Middle East is that the Islamists believe in the principle of "one man, one vote, one time..."
This isn't a very profound observation, but I expect with a power vacuum in Israel AND the Palestinian Authority, things are likely to go downhill from here. I hope I'm wrong.