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15. august 2006
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Bill Roggio summarises the winners and the losers in the Lebanese conflict. Hezbollah, Iran, Syria and every Islamist terrorist organisation in the world won. Israel and the west lost, the people of Lebanon lost big. And the UN also managed to broker a deal that ironically may spell its future irrelevancy for all the wrong reasons:
Nation-States: A dire precedent has been set with the cease fire agreement between Hezbollah and Israel. Non-state actors and terrorist groups can usurp the power of a state, essentially declare war against a sovereign nation, and not pay the consequences for their actions. The behavior of the United Nations, which purportedly is interested in respecting the sovereignty of states, shows there was more interest in preserving Hezbollah and restoring peace at all costs than the legitimate security concerns of a nation-state. If a sovereign nation cannot be allowed to defend its territory against non-state actors, and in fact be vilified for doing so, terrorist groups will only be emboldened to take such actions in the future.
Welcome to the 21st century. Are we longing back to the cold war yet?
7:34:47 PM 
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A chief of staff in the Israeli army sold stocks just as the war broke out.
The chief of staff of the Israeli army, Dan Halutz, toodled off to his bank branch and sold an NIS 120,000 investment portfolio a few hours after two IDF soldiers were abducted by Hezbollah on the northern border, Ma'ariv reported on Monday.
Several hours after the abduction, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared war on Hezbollah and Israeli warplanes began bombing targets deep inside Lebanon.
But as the country's political and military echelons urgently met to discuss the possible declaration of war, Halutz went at 12.00 P.M. on July 12 to sell an investment portfolio.
It appears he was not very optimistic about the war from the start.
Halutz denies the sale of stocks worth around US$ 27 300 was in any way related to the war. His job is now in jeopardy, probably for a number of reasons.
7:28:22 PM
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Andrew Sullivan blogs from a parellell universe, where 9/11 never happened, Gore won in '04, the Republicans are undermining the president, and the Islamic terrorists had another five years to build up for an even more devastating attack on the west.
It is a quite scary, and interesting, scenario. However, I fear that it is not inconceivable that something like this could still happen in our future. 9/11 as a wakeup call only went so far. And in the war on terror, our only real progress may well have been finding many new ways of fighting terrorism that does not work.
6:54:47 PM
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Hezbollah will not disarm, it will just hide its weapons.
Hizbullah will not hand over its weapons to the Lebanese government but rather refrain from exhibiting them publicly, according to a new compromise that is reportedly brewing between Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Seniora and Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The UN cease-fire resolution specifically demands the demilitarization of the area south of the Litani river. The resolution was approved by the Lebanese cabinet.
What a joke.
Now we'll see if this blatant violation of a UN Security Council resolution gets any consequences.
6:32:57 PM
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Jewish comedian Jamie Glassman, who is a writer on the Ali G show, went to a comedy show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival, and was shocked. You'd imagine it takes a bit to be shocked considering what Ali G is about, and you'd be correct.
Stand-up comedy is as good a prism as any through which to look at the changing attitudes in our society. If my past few days are anything to go by then it is becoming increasingly acceptable to hate the Jews. Again.
I’ve seen two comics so far who have been happy to amuse their crowds with Holocaust gags. I’m not sure which to be the more concerned about.
One was a left-leaning angry Australian conspiracy theorist, Steve Hughes, whose show The Storm is an assault on all things Western. “I want to bash Condoleezza Rice’s brain to bits and kill that f****** Jew Richard Perle.” Hughes is the one at the Pleasance Courtyard while Perle is an adviser to George W. Bush as he was to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton on foreign affairs.
The second was a far more charming African-American comic who for much of the show was thoughtful, funny and even quite sweet. But he seemed to have a problem with Jews, too. [...]
But what is going on in Edinburgh now is no satire. For me, Hughes represents a growing trend among left-thinking people in this country and around the world to accept as dogma that those on the Left should hate Bush, Blair, American imperialism, Israel and, while we’re at it, the Jews. It is a cultural trend that I’ve found increasingly evident but never before has the Jew-hating element been so overt. This week has confirmed that my Jewish paranoia is not entirely unfounded. As the old saying goes: “Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me.”
This has been part of a trend long observed in Europe. Glassman is correct in observing that the first ladder on the long climb to anti-semitism is arguing that Jews are too sensitive to criticism, a preemptive strike where any objections will be used as evidence for that accusation. A step further up that ladder is arguing that the Israelis now are the Nazis of today, an accusation that so runs in the face of both the historical facts about Nazi atrocities and any fair comparison between Israel's policies compared to any other contemporary nation.
Just in the time I have been blogging I have seen a rapid rise of acceptance of anti-semitism in Europe, where each new "critic" climbs higher on the ladder towards pure, unrestrained racism. When the left fringe openly supports Hamas and Hezbollah and few are willing to protest, we certainly know that its lip support of feminism, gay rights, anti-racism and humanism has been nothing but a shell game. Fascism, including its most virulent strain Nazism, embraced both typical left- and right-wing ideas, yet the left has convinced itself it is immune to these ideas. Today's most potent form of fascism, at least in the western world, is not the asocial, confused losers who shave their heads and have a fetish for boots. It is certainly in the far left organisations that are spearheading the new anti-semitism with its massively disproportionate verbal attacks on Israel, and their uncritical support for Islamist fascism.
Link via Tim Blair.
3:33:38 PM
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Yael K writes that if you visit Iranian president Ahmadinejad's new blog site, and you are coming from Israel, the site will try to infect your computer with a virus.
I visited when I wrote about the blog, and I have anti-virus software installed that would have warned me if this had happened, and nothing did. Of course, I am from Norway.
Incredibly childish and silly.
4:29:38 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.09.2006; 05:00:11.
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