Bad Rachel

What Do "Palestinian" Women Want?

2012-01-30T16:22:00.000-05:00

Why are they not spilling out into the streets every day bythe hundreds of thousands to denounce the persistent, repugnant glorification of murder andchild sacrifice by their men and, even worse, their sisters? Why do theycountenance in virtual silence the chilling, wicked sight of “Palestinian” women congratulatingtheir sons and daughters for the murder of other people’s children? Why is the almost more abhorrent spectacle of mothers celebratingthe “martyrdom” of their own children as suicide bombers acceptable to them? Why are these things not cause for amassive rebellion—an Arab Women’s Spring—demanding the complete liberation from an ancient brutality that threatens to sink them,with the complicity of their “presidents” and “prime ministers”and “religious authorities,” and the torpid indifference of the rest of the world, into a Boschian hell?

It’s not possible that that is what they want. Is it?

Animal Crackers: The State of the Union

2012-01-25T17:47:00.000-05:00

ChuckSchumer, paragon of abrasiveness, on the Republican response to the State of the Union: “Wethink we’re in great shape.”

Chico Marx, comedian nonpareil, on his semantic sparring partner Groucho in Animal Crackers:“Heh, heh, he thinks I look alike.”

Nexus of Evil

2012-01-04T19:36:00.000-05:00

In the Jerusalem summer of my youth I rambled from Abu Tordown to the Jaffa Gate into the Old City, to the left through the Arab shouk, tothe right onto a little street whose name I now can’t conjure that took me pastthe magnificent Dome of the Rock, and then down again to the Wailing Wall, liberatednot so long before from the hands of the vicious little Jordanian king.

I took the bus from Kiryat haYovel on Mount Herzl, where mysister lived, with its flimsy apartment buildings thrown up hurriedly in the1950s to provide shelter for some of the hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing themurderous pogroms and expulsion campaigns that had erupted against them acrossthe nominally post-Nazi Arab world with the declaration of the Jewish State,down to Rehavia, to the fantastic, book-laden, haute-kulturni apartment of Gershomand Fania Scholem—in exchange for the cakes and tea with which Fania plied me,I supplied gossip, which she collected, as she collected young people, andwhich Scholem, as they both called him, inhaled with all the ardor of aboundless genius and the world’s greatest scholar of Kabbalah and mysticism(sorry, red-stringed Hollywood dupes)—and from there to the old station where Icaught the train to Haifa and shared a car with a raucous family of Indian Jews(I hadn’t even known there wereIndian Jews, such was my ignorance).

From the shaded, flowered loveliness of the King David Hotel,whose very walls and air crackled (and do so still) with the life story of thetiny great country (for good and ill), I walked to the packed, filthy old centralbus station, whence I was carried, in a fabulous, mad, crush of impatient,disorderly Israelis, onto the bus for Tel Aviv, then tumbled out with them all intothat seaside city—with its anti-Biblical facades eroded by sea air and sand anddiesel fuel, and pock-marked by bullet-holes put there by Arab snipers andtheir infatuated British defenders in their 1948 siege—then rushed, and crushed,back again to the glorious, sun-bleached, ancient Jerusalemite stones.

I wandered all these places, by bus and on foot, loving thefine dust collecting like mist in my hair, in the crooks of my arms, on my eyelashes,in my ears, in the wrinkles of my blouse, on the straps of my sandals. It wasJerusalem dust, and if I knew embarrassingly little about Judaism, the religionof my people, I knew plenty about Zionism, the religion of my family, and Irejoiced to be covered in its dust.

But all that innocent joy in dust and Zion was marred by thelooming, leering, familiarity of vendors in the Arab shouk—all of them male—inchingever closer, closer—because I wasn’t covered—if I stopped to look at theirwares, or staring at me if I didn’t, until I flinched away, and the sounds of theirshouts “Yallah! Hamoudi! Come back please, baby!” followed me down the narrowalleyways that stank of the dead, fly-covered sheep swinging from hooks in thefood stalls; and marred, too, less frighteningly but more shockingly, by thegrotesque sight of Haredi men flinging themselves against buildings and throwingtheir hands over their eyes in order not to look at me as I passed in my summerdresses, and the repulsive experience of feeling those same creaturespressed up against me, clammy with intent, whenever a crowded bus gave them the chance.

I was no feminist; I laughed with pleasure at the catcallsthat to the bawling ladies of the women’s movement were so odious—the barbed poisonarrows of the patriarchal master-class of rapists, or whatever it was they called men—and felt scorn for those same sobbing chicks when they preached thesuperiority of primitive cultures—the ones in which the men did in fact harm and enslave their women.And I’d learned, as every New York girl must do, how to stomp on the feet ofthe pervs on the subway, and how to hurt them with my umbrella.

But those Arab men scared me, and those Haredi men disgustedme, and they do so still today: Unlike the appreciative, hooting constructionworkers and neighborhood winos who were beaten so tragically into cowering submissionby the tribe of women’s-movement Amazons that took over and defenestrated most ofWestern civ, some of these men seem to have sprung directly from a pre-Abrahamictribalism that sees women as sinning temptresses, to be avoided, blamed,maligned, attacked, spat upon, raped, and, in the case of the Arabs, anyway,destroyed in the acts of child sacrifice that are politely known as “honor killings.”

In the post-Intifada, post-disengagement, post-Arafat, post-Cast-Lead,post-Obamic-settlement-freeze-obsession, post-hopeless-“peace-process” periodof Islamofascist ascendancy, the Arab Quarter shimmers with hostility, and the wordsechoing in the alleyways are as likely to be “Go to hell, Amriki Jew!”—if anyAmriki Jew venture there—as “Wait, hammoudi, for you, only $10!” But the qualityof the woman-hatred of some is unchanged.

And all these years later some Haredim traverse the city intheir own buses, with the men sitting in front and the women sitting in back,lest someone be tempted to look in someone else’s direction and something . . .explosive . . . happen.

The effort to avoid the legion snares of secularism andmodernity have driven these two groups even further into a primitivism that looksworrisomely interchangeable; like their counterparts on the “Palestinian” side,young Haredi men are already hurling stones at Israeli soldiers. How longbefore the nexus is complete, and Haredi women are strapping bombs to thetorsos of their sons and sending them off to martyr themselves at IDF checkpointsor sidewalk cafes or pizza parlors?

Grateful Rachel, For A Change

2011-12-30T17:13:00.001-05:00

Psalm 30, King James Version

I will extol thee, O LORD, for Thou hastraised me up, and hast not suffered mine enemies to rejoice over me.

O LORD my God, I cried unto Thee, and Thoudidst heal me;
O LORD, Thou broughtest up my soul from the nether-world; Thoudidst keep me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.
Sing praise unto the LORD, O ye His godly ones, and give thanksto His holy name.
For His anger is but for a moment, His favor is for a life-time; weepingmay tarry for the night, but joy cometh in the morning.
Now I had said in my security: “I shall never be moved.”
Thou hadst established, O LORD, in Thy favor my mountain as astronghold
Thou didst hide Thy face; I was affrighted.
Unto Thee, O LORD, did I call, and unto the LORD I madesupplication:
“What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to the pit?
Shall the dust praise Thee? shall it declare Thy truth?
Hear, O LORD, and be gracious unto me; LORD, be Thou my helper.”
Thou didst turn for me mymourning into dancing; Thou didst loose my sackcloth, and gird me withgladness;
So that my glory may sing praise to Thee, and not be silent;

O LORD my God, I will give thanks unto Theeforever.

Maybe Someone's Mother Was A Saint

2011-12-30T16:35:00.000-05:00

“Yes, she will have no books written about her, but she wasa saint”—RichardNixon, (“extemporaneous”) Farewell Address, discussing his mother.

Or maybe someone was just a saintlylittle boy who can still wax tearful over those (bad old/good old?) days when his mother made him sing in the choir?

In the spirit of the season: Sniff.

Kim Jong Il, Faminist

2011-12-19T14:37:00.000-05:00

Days of wine and roses: “Dear Leader” and Madeleine Albright share a laugh in North Korea

Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, foundhim “smart” and “well-informed,” though perhaps somewhat “cruel”; hegave Ms. Albright’s counselor, Wendy Sherman, alittle tingle: “He was smart, engaged, knowledgeable, self-confident, sortof the master-director of all he surveyed . . . he didn’t know the answers toevery question, but he knew a lot more than most leaders would—and he was aconceptual thinker”; George Bush’s hapless representative to the never-ending,always-failing Six-PartyTalksto de-nuke the Norks, Christopher “Patient But Firm” Hill—opining that even top-down dictatorships “have politics” (would that be like havingmeasles or herpes, or more like having erectile dysfunction?)—sensed “a commitment totrying to move this process” along; and Barack Obama’s own Six-Partyman, Stephen Bosworth, undaunted by a little missilemusic, promised he’d be “working very closely with our partners to ensurethat after the dust from the missiles has settled a bit . . . we get back tothe longer term priority” of engagement.

Of course, engagement by any other name—appeasement, say—shames us just the same.

But never mind. All that’s passed now, along with Mr. Il himself: Nolonger “master”of “£350,000 of cognac a year,” all the “lobster, caviar and sushi” his little elevator-shod body could contain, or the “fleet of Mercedes Benz luxury cars” he imported; and no longer “director”of the starvation that took the lives of three million of his acorn-eating countrymen, “DearLeader” has taken his conceptual-thinking faminism and gone to meet his maker.

Thank You, O Masters of the Obamic Universe

2011-12-17T17:53:00.000-05:00

5,000 Syrians have been massacred by Bashar Assad since March, including 300 children. How are those sanctions workin’ out, Mr. Obama?

99 Percent Felonious

2011-12-16T23:36:00.000-05:00

“We are here because our economic system is broken, and manyof us are suffering,” Occupy DC’s website declares, and you can say that again:They may have pitched their geodesicREI tents in Washington’s McPherson Square “to stand up to massivefinancial inequalities” (the squalid unsanitary sordidness “24/7/365” is abonus), but the Occupiers have some financial inequalities of their own to dealwith right now. A sticky-fingered comradewith access to their $20,000 credit-union account robbed them of $5,500 the otherday. (To each according to his needs).

(Wait. They have a $20,000 credit-union account? Just how much are antibiotics going for thesedays?)

But no worries! Though“they feel they’ve been taken advantage of,” they’re not going to call the copson him. Because propertyis theft. Or theft as a forcible violation of propertypresupposes the existence of property. Or something. It’s definitely one of them. It depends who paid for yourtent.

Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T23:16:00.002-05:00

Requiescat in Pace. Or, as we Jews put it, Alav ha Shalom.

Hitchens v. Cancer

2011-12-09T15:52:00.001-05:00

Whatever else may be objectionable about him—and there’s been not a little to appallover the years—Christopher Hitchens’s latest essayon the barbaric invader that’s laid siege to his body and refuses to bedefeated will knock the breath right out of you with its bare fortitude and luminous, dazzling, incomparableprose. No need to be on a first-name basis with that cell-multiplying monster to appreciate this great piece of writing.

For There Is Nothing Either Good Or Bad, But Thinking Makes It So

2011-12-03T17:08:00.001-05:00

A double-standard advocacy journalist masquerades as the Washington Post’s ombudsman

Mr. Patrick Pexton, the fastidious ombudsman of the Washington Post, not long ago was pushedto the very (narrow) limits of his tolerance when his colleague Jennifer Rubin approvinglyre-Tweeted a postby this blogger concerning the captors of Gilad Shalit. Mr. Pexton was horrifiedby my post—though, like the scrum of semi-literate leftist commentators whoseheads exploded all over the internet about it, he was not quite up to its formulation;clauses within clauses are just more, apparently, than they are able to decode—reactingwith disgust to “its ghoulishness, its odd sexual undertone and itspreoccupation with violence.” (Odd sexualundertone? Really? Well, seek, and ye shall find, I suppose). In short, hefound the post “reprehensible,” and was outraged by Mrs. Rubin’s endorsement of my sentiment.

The Abrams brand of incendiaryrhetoric has gained too much purchase on the landscape of American politics. Itpollutes our discourse and erodes the soil on which reasonable solutions andcompromises can be built, whether at home or in the Middle East. It seems to bepreoccupied with violence rather than weary of it. That a Post employee wouldretweet it is a huge disappointment to me.

He’s right: I ampreoccupied with violence—the violence of those “Palestinians” who choose to pollutediscourse and erode soil by committing acts of bloody terror against innocent Israelichildren, women, and men. And so is Jennifer Rubin.

If, as he says, “the Post needs conservative voices tobalance its many liberal ones,” it’s only in small doses he seems willing to swallowany actual non-liberal output: He devoted an astounding 1,300 words toexcoriating me and berating her.

But all that’s in the past. Mr. Pexton turnsnow to two Washington Post colleaguesof a less disappointing, more “liberal-voices” nature, and performs a mind-contortionin order to defend some very questionable behavior by them which, had conservativesengaged in it, would likely have given him a liberal aneurism.

There’s some dispute about whether one of those colleagues, Wonkroomblogger/reporter Ezra Klein, met with Senate Democrats to brief them on questionsrelating to the Supercommittee. Certain journalists sayhe did, and standby their story. Mr. Pexton chooses to see it otherwise, because Mr. Kleintold him his meeting with them was routine—“this was him cultivating sources,as all reporters do in this town”—and because he “has intelligent, insightfulthings to say about politics and policy,” and is

one of the most popular of all ofThe Post’s bloggers and a man with 110,000 Twitter followers. Klein is a hybridjournalist: he comments, he reports, he takes positions on issues of publicpolicy. He’s not on the editorial pages but in the news pages.

Not unlike Jen Rubin, in fact, though she’s on the editorial side, and therefore is not held to the same journalistic standards.

Mr. Pexton’s standards for her are much stricter.

Stricter, too, than they arefor reporter Aaron Blake, who was also apparently cultivating sources as all reportersdo in this town when he tweeted “HeyTweeps: Looking for outlandish/incorrect predictions and quotes from NewtGingrich’s past. Any ideas for me?”

“This,” Mr. Pexton avers, “is an example of a relatively new reporting technique calledcrowdsourcing—using social media to contact as many people as possible whomight have particular knowledge of a subject the reporter is working on.

The Right calls this biased digging up dirt. I call it a reporter’s inartfuland early foray into crowdsourcing.

Icall this commentary a liberal’s inartful and essential foray into double-standard advocacyjournalism. Ombudsman, heal thyself.

Are You On the Masculine Side of the Gender Spectrum, Or Are You a Mouse?

2011-11-29T18:02:00.001-05:00

A band of men formerly known as women now calling themselves Schmekel (link here for translation fromYiddish) want to know. Well, they don’t really want to know, especially notband member Simcha Halpert-Hanson, who, according to the New York Times, “prefers not to be identified with genderedhonorifics or pronouns.” These “klezmer-corepunk band” artists are on the frontlines of absolutely everything, so theyalready know all they’ll ever need to know. They’re “100% trans Jews” (not tobe confused with trannies);they’re New Jews; they’re Old Jewish; they’re “a sea-change in mainstream Judaism.”

As they finished their set at theJewish Community Center’s Halloweenshow, they made a smooth transition from an original song, “Surgical Drains,”to “Hava Nagila.” As one, the crowd joined hands and began to dance the hora.Androgynous individuals in butterfly costumes and women in traditional Orthodoxdress whirled joyfully through the auditorium, a perfect vision of the world asseen through Schmekel’s eyes. . . .

They are not fractious rebelsstorming the castle of traditional faith, though they are fierce critics ofhomophobia, transphobia and misogyny in organized Jewish life. They seethemselves as grounded in a strong Judaic tradition, even if the rest of theworld doesn’t—yet. But they are reaching out, and the mainstream is reachingback.

Apparently so. “What has become so particularly amazing now,”says the Jewish Community Center’s director of programs, “is all ofthe places you get to layer your identity” (which explains why they’re celebrating Halloween at the JCC). “The Venn diagram on musical, Yiddish and queerleads to a very small shaded area, but they live in it. . . . This is à lacarte Judaism. Or you could do a different frame, and it’s à la cartequeerdom.”

And if you can figure out what she means by that, you’re a better mousethan I.

Bomb Assad

2011-11-29T09:58:00.001-05:00

Brutality incarnate inSyria

The diffident president of the United States watched forfive months in virtual silence as Bashar al Assad carried out his campaign of rape,torture, and slaughter, until at last the Obama Doctrine of “calibrateddiplomacy” was deemed a failure and its author was forced to call upon the Butcher of Damascus to stepdown. Leaders of the Arab League, too, who three decades earlier had given apass to Assad the father after he slaughtered tens of thousands of subjugatedinnocents, waited eight months beforethey were officially shocked to find that the son, their brother Arab, waspresiding over atrocities against his own people, and sanctioned Syria out ofmembership. Even the notorious, sullied United Nations Human Rights Council,which refused for two years to condemn Iran’sgruesome human rights abuses against the Green Movement, and eventually managedto do so only over the objections of its most murderously fascist-totalitarianmembers, China, Russia, and Cuba, tooknotice of Syria (five months late) and denounced its brutality—withdemurrals by those same red-handed actors—and finally released a report(PDF) whose eyewitness accounts of barbaric acts by Syrian security forces chillthe soul.

If the Arab League’s sanctions have the sharpest sting—and thegreatest shock value—for Assad, they nevertheless share one thing with censuresby the U.S., Europe, and the UN—they’re gestures only; they do no more thandemand an end to his barbarity; and they’ve all gotten the same answer: “Thehell you say. We do as we please here.”

But where’s the world’s “responsibilityto protect” the thousands of Syrians who even at this moment are enduring Assad’ssavagery in bloodied streets and interrogation rooms across their country? How many more little boys must be tortured, raped, and slaughtered beforereal action is taken against him? Heis brutality incarnate. Monsters like him can’t be contained—not by tepiddemands, too little, too late, for their letters of resignation; and not bycondemnation by sullied states with not a little blood on their own hands. Monsters like him proliferate.Only bombs can do them justice. Ask the survivors.

Porn By Any Other Name

2011-11-25T11:58:00.001-05:00

Not all that long ago the New York Times was studying eugenics at the feet of some very high-tonedtwin-cullers-in-utero, and peddling its horrific findings with the flat, clinical dispassionof a Nazi record-keeper. Now the magazine has sent oneof the glut of Joan-Didion-wannabes who weekly scrawl on its creamy pages with “values-neutral”dreariness to a fancy Main-Line Philadelphia Quaker school to investigate the purveyingof porn—or, as the editors would have it, “TeachingGood Sex”—to high school students.

Of course, values-neutrality lies in one direction only atthe Times: Liberal orthodoxy, expressedhere in the cheerleading author’s flat description of the screening by a sex-edteacher of “a medical research video . .. [showing] a woman ejaculating . . . and a couple of dozen up-closephotographs of vulvas and penises” for his mixed class of seventeen-year-olds, withthe full approbation of their parents, is NEUTRAL (GOOD), because, as he seesit, “It’s really a process of desensitizing them to what real genitals looklike so they’ll be less freaked out by their own and, one day, theirpartner’s.”

Heterodoxy, as in the narrow-minded resistance to the sexualizationof students in the classroom, is NON-NEUTRAL (BAD):

It’s axiomatic . . . that parentswho support richer sex education don’t make the same ruckus with schoolofficials as those who oppose it. . . . “Thecampaign for abstinence in the schools and communities may seemtrivial, an ideological nuisance,” Michelle Fine and Sara McClelland wrote in a2006 study in The Harvard Educational Review,“but at its core it is . . . a betrayal of our next generation, which isdesperately in need of knowledge, conversation and resources to negotiate thedelicious and treacherous terrain of sexuality in the 21st century.”

These now genitally desensitized, and apparently unsupervised,children, ready or not, are going to be Just Doing It (but Just Looking at ItFirst) anyway—fraught though the whole thing may be for their not-yet-fully-developedbodies and their extremely vulnerable souls—so isn’t it their right to learnhow to get some pleasure out of it?

Thus, Al Vernacchio, the sex-ed teacher in question, who is“nothing so much as a mensch . . . lectures with plainspoken authority whilealso conveying a deep curiosity about his subject—the consummate sex scholar.”

Vernacchio said that he portrayssex in all its glory and complications. “As much as I say, ‘This is how orgasmswork, and they’re really cool.’ I say there’s a lot of work to being in arelationship and having sex. I don’t think I have the power to make sex soundso enticing that kids are going to break through their self-esteem issues orbody stuff or parental pressures or whatever to just go do it.” And anyway,Vernacchio went on, “I don’t necessarily see the decision to become sexuallyactive when you’re 17 as an unhealthy one.”

“If kids are starting to use their bodies sexually,” he avers,“they should know about their potentialities.”

Maybe so. But perhaps they should be learning about those potentialities from someone other than a man who’s showing them ejaculation films, telling them how orgasms work, and handing out “a worksheet with the five senses printed along the top and ask[ing] the students to try and list sexual activities that optimize each. (There were examples to prod their thinking: under hearing, for instance, was ‘listening to your partner read an erotic story’).”

As one young man of my acquaintance notes, “Agrown man who is talking to kids about sex this way is usually called apedophile. He’s giving them aninduction ceremony, not an education. What would happen to that same group ofstudents if they were caught looking at Mr. Vernacchio’s film on the internet inthe school library?” Damn good question.

Veterans Day 2011

2011-11-11T00:21:00.001-05:00

God bless you and keep you safe, wherever you are. With admiration and gratitude for your courage and your sacrifice.

Arab Spring

2011-11-10T18:56:00.001-05:00

These are women demonstrating in Egypt—rounded up, lassoed like horses, and pulled along the street by a man who must be on his guard lest by some horrific accident they catch the eye of a passing male and “mix.”

A nation that treats its mothers, sisters, and daughters as if they were unclean temptresses is not civilized.

H/T RaymondIbrahim

It's Fourteen-Thirty; Do You Know Where Your Ministry Of Truth Is?

2011-11-10T13:08:00.001-05:00

It’s right here,“confronting sexual violence” at Occupy Wall Street:

We live in a culture of violence inwhich sexual assault is often ignored, condoned, excused and even encouraged.We note that it is particularly difficult for survivors of assault at OWS tofeel confident in reporting crimes to the NYPD – the NYPD’s unjustifiablyaggressive and abusive policing of OWS has undermined trust in the police forceamongst protesters.

Right. Parsing, as WinstonSmith might be doing, if he were keeping his diary today: We at OWS employelision, because we need it (as some of us may douse our unwashed selves with patchoulioil); and yet, ladies (make that WOMEN!), and even a couple of men (but theyprobably deserve it) are being raped (if that is what we mean by sexualassault), not by the abusive policewhom we are forced to call when someone steals our I-pads and our laptops andloots our collective cash reserves (though property is theft), but by actually aggressive and abusive men entering the rain- and urine-soaked tents that sully the once-lovelypublic spaces in the Clockwork-Orange dystopia of filthy-displaced-personscamps we have lately created all over America, and into which we nightly crawl. Goodthink fail.

We are redoubling our efforts toraise awareness about sexual violence. This includes taking preventativemeasures such as encouraging healthy relationship dynamics and consentpractices that can help to limit harm.

What is a “healthy relationship dynamic?” And what is a “healthyconsent practice?” Is a “healthy relationshipdynamic” when your boyfriend, whose Big Macs you’ve been buying becausehe’s run out of cash, tells you he’d like you (meaning himself) to be free to “see”other people (see “property is theft,” above) in your tent, and you agree? Is an “unhealthy relationship dynamic” when you are occupying the open air while you wait for him to finish “seeing” someone else in your tent, andyou become, suddenly and unaccountably, enraged? Does a “healthy consent practice” havesomething to do with what it is you mean, exactly, when you’re saying the word “yes?” Couldan “unhealthy consent practice” be related to your having to say the word “yes” to the police when a rapist comes into your tent? Do we on the OWS Sexual Violence Squad reconcilethese terms? Or, for that matter, even define them? “No” means “no.” Because Wall Street is raping the land, Jewsare running the world (or vice versa, we can never get that straight), we are the 99 percent, and our parents told us we never have to do anything we don’t feel like doing. Doublethink fail.

We are creating and sharingstrategies that educate and transform our community into a culture of consent,safety, and well-being. At OWS, these strategies currently include supportcircles, counseling, consent trainings, safer sleeping spaces, self-defensetrainings, community watch, awareness campaigns, and other evolvingcommunity-based processes to address harm.

But what about drum circles? Newspeak fail.

Move Along, Folks, There's Nothing to See Here But Mohamed El Baradei

2011-11-09T11:51:00.002-05:00

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s November reportindicating the Persian bomb has developed apace is eliciting horrifiedresponses from the mental Lilliputians who stand athwart the civilized world twistingtheir lacy undergarments against a rising tide: Frères Microphone-check Obamaand Sarkozy “could resort to tough new sanctions,” after careful study; top EU foreign-policy dog LadyCatherine Ashton is all, this “seriously aggravates existing concerns on thenature of the Iranian nuclear programme”; and the Russians, who’ve beensupplying the mullahs with parts, are “gravely disappointed and bewildered” to learn what they’ve been doing withthem. “We are shocked! Shocked to find there are warheads going on here!”

It is all extremely disappointing andbewildering, though more, perhaps, for some than for others:

“The findingspublished in the report were known to the intelligence communities for a longtime, but the significance of the report is that for the first time anindependent professional body gives it a seal of approval,” explained MiddleEast expert Dr. Motti Keidar of Bar Ilan University.

Indeed, known for a long time to the intelligencecommunities; but what about to Mr. Mohamed El Baradei, the director general of the IAEA from 1997 to 2009, whose tenure, as it happens, coincided with the building of the Iranian nuke? Alas for him, this report constitutes written proof, if any were needed, that until just about yesterday, the world’s nuclear-watchdog-in-chief was deep in the pockets, if notin the actual employ, of the very people he was meant to be monitoring—the butchers of Tehran—and lying about it with wonderful regularity.

Mr. El Baradei earned his Nobel PeacePrize the easy way. Will he be ready when the hard part comes, and the Devil shows up demanding his due?

Occupy le Microphone

2011-11-08T15:29:00.001-05:00

Nous sommes des hommes sensibles.

Mr. Netanyahu, il n’est pas un homme sensible.

Il fait mal à nos âmes sensibles pour lui parler.

Il est un spectacle d'horreur.

Le horror show! Vraiment!

Oh mon dieu! Le naqba!

Eh bien, maintenant nous allons manger un foi gras. Et aussiun poi.

Alors nous toasterons à notre propre santé avec lechampagne.

Mais nous ne toasterons pas à la santé de M. Netanyahu. Nousle détestons.

Toujours la résistance! Aloha!

“It Is a Good Feeling to Be Under Drone Attack”

2011-11-06T21:50:00.000-05:00

So saysAbu Ahmed, spokesman for the Al Quds Brigade, the “armed wing” of Islamic Jihadin Gaza—what is the “unarmed wing?”—discoursing theologically on the Israeliresponse to the massive post-prisoner-release rocket attack launched againsther out of Gaza last week.

It’s good to hear the Jihadis love the drone; surelythe Zionist Entity will take that under advisement.

Just as it must be forever aware that points of distinction amongthe sobriquets of “Palestinian” terror groups, exquisite as the blood-worshipers who run them are brutal, make not the smallest bit of difference. Whatever they’recalled—Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Palestine Liberation Organization,Fatah, Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade—and whatever noms de guerre the killers and wannabe-killersat their heads adopt—Abu Ammar (Yasser Araat), Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), Abu Ala(Ahmed Qurei), Abu Nidal (Sabri Khalil al Banna), Abu Ahmed above (given name?Who cares?)—there are no fine points of distinction in what they’re after. That isn’t Peace, or even the absence of war: Kill Jews, it is, destroy the Jewish State, “reclaim” the tiny spit of land that in feckless Arab hands was barely more than malarial swamp and uncultivated desert untilthe Jews returned from millennia of persecuted wandering in the diaspora to renderit by their fantastic courage and enterprise into a great nation once again.

If Arabs, too, are killed in the process? Well, tant mieux, apparently. “When we chose the path of resistance,” declares Mr. Ahmed, flicking his prayer beads, “we opted either for martyrdom orvictory. Martyrdom is the more desirable.”

Noted.

The Woman Who Mistook “Art” For “An Unsightly Mess”

2011-11-06T18:58:00.000-05:00

Caveat artifex! Ifyou’ve fashioned “atower of wooden slats under which a rubber trough [is] placed with a thin beigelayer of paint representing dried rain water,” and christened it “WhenIt Starts Dripping From the Ceiling,” a museum cleaning lady may beforgiven for seeing it as something other than a priceless work of genius and goingat it with a scrub brush until it gleams. The devil’sin the details.

Lingua Manca

2011-10-31T15:55:00.000-04:00

A linguistic calamity has befallen the terrorist-romancing anti-Zionistsof the fringy Left: Bend they have always done to the hive-mind that rules them, and contorted its vulgar tongue; now they’ve tossed their bitter prayerbook, with all its anesthetizing,stupefying,paralyzing, repetitiveness, into the liturgical smelting pit with the bent, contorted,ritual supplications of theIsrael-inimical anti-Semitic fringy Right, and lo, transmogrification! Is that Gleichschaltung we see filling its pages?

What a tragic little shame for them their litanizing arabesquesare utterly Buchananesque. Still, for the rest of us, it’s picaresque.