British Reveal Al Qaeda Links to Airline Bombing Plot

According to The Guardian:

A brother of two of the 24 suspects seized by detectives investigating a plot to bomb up to 12 planes was seized in Pakistan shortly before police launched their raids, it emerged last night.
The arrest of Rashid Rauf in the border area with Afghanistan was a trigger that led investigators to start an immediate pre-emptive operation with officers fearing the alleged cells were ready to strike.

Pakistani officials claimed last night that Mr Rauf had links with al-Qaida. "We arrested him from the border area and on his disclosure we shared the information with British authorities, which led to further arrests in Britain," said the interior minister, Aftab Khan Sherpao.

The foreign minister, Khursheed Kasuri, said Mr Rauf had been monitored for some time before his arrest.

Mr Rauf's uncle was murdered in Birmingham in April 2002 and as part of the murder hunt it is understood that Mr Rauf's home in St Margaret's Road in the city was searched.

Mr Rauf's arrest was one of seven made by Pakistani authorities in recent days, and is understood to have included one other Briton. Mr Rauf's two brothers were arrested in Birmingham on Thursday. There were reports last night that Mr Rauf provided the link between the plot's planners and the British Muslims alleged to have been preparing to carry out the attacks.

It also emerged yesterday that at least one suspect arrested in Walthamstow, east London, regularly attended camps run by Tablighi Jamaat, an organisation which the Americans believe has been used as a recruiting ground for al-Qaida. Martyrdom tapes and other items were found in the search of the 29 properties where arrests were made on Thursday.

Roger L. Simon: Rudy Giuliani, Now!

Andrew Sullivan on Israel & Lebanon

Andrew Sullivan quotes a letter from a Lebanese Christian praising Israelis and then adds this:

Our strongest weapons in this war are our values. Yes, military force is important and necessary. But our values are what will win in the long run — because they reflect a deeper truth about human dignity than the poisonous doctrines of distorted religious certitude and bigotry. That's why we must never — never — tolerate torture of prisoners; that's why we should never sacrifice the rule of law; that's why we should never give civilian politicians a "get-out-of-jail-free" card for war crimes. And that's why we should support Israel now, more than ever. She is not perfect. But her enemies are in a different category of morality. The difference between collateral civilian casualties and civilian casualties as the entire purpose of war is the difference between an embattled civilization and barbarism. Yes, there are grays in the Middle East. But this isn't one of them.

Have American Networks Shown This Footage?

I think it says it all about the horrible anti-Israel atrocity propaganda campaign. BTW, has the Red Cross done anything to discipline "Green Helmet" or its Lebanese affiliates for this? I just can't believe that official Red Cross guidelines allow manhandling corpses for PR like this video shows. WARNING: If you are squeamish, skip this video clip.(ht Michelle Malkin)

My Cousin Blogs From Israel...

At Savtadotty.

Andrew McCarthy: Bush's Democratization Project Abets Terrorism

Wonder how long he'll be able to keep his position with the Bush administration-friendly Foundation for the Defense of Democracies after publishing this in National Review Online?:

The administration, which initially refused even to acknowledge that what’s occurring is a war, now appears to have widened the lens a smidge. There is indeed a war. But, mind you, it only, only involves Israel and Hezbollah.

It certainly does not involve us — the enemy whom Hezbollah has sworn for a quarter century to defeat — because then we’d have to forfeit that Honest Broker title and all the gushing love from the fabled Arab Street that comes with it (between choruses of “Death to America”).

It certainly does not involve Iran and Syria, because then we’d have to do something about governments that facilitate terror organizations — and, by the way, since we lawyers are so fond of precedent, the marvelous track-record of this ostrich approach can be found by reviewing Clinton v. Taliban (1996-2001) and Clinton v. Palestinian Authority (1993-2001).

And, most of all, it certainly does not involve our dear friend, Lebanon, because then we’d have to admit that the Democracy Project — the utopian copestone of counterterrorism policy in the second Bush term — does not, in fact, counter terrorism. Over the long haul, its prospects are dubious. In the short term, it abets terrorism.

Michelle Malkin Says to Read This Book

Michelle Malkin says Annie Jacobsen predicted today's airport bomb scare. You can buy TERROR IN THE SKIES by clicking here:

Christopher Hitchens on the Failure of the Left

From The Atlantic:

It is perfectly true that most Americans were somewhat indifferent to the outside world as it was before September 11, and also highly ignorant of it—a point on which the self-blaming faction insists. While attention was elsewhere, a deadly and irreconcilable enemy was laying plans and training recruits. This enemy—unless we are to flatter him by crediting his own propaganda—cares no more for the wretched of the West Bank than did Saddam Hussein when he announced that the road to Palestine and Jerusalem led through Kuwait and Kurdistan. But a lethal and remorseless foe is a troubling thing in more than one way. Not only may he wish you harm; he may force you to think and to act. And these responsibilities—because thinking and acting are responsibilities—may be disconcerting. The ancient Greeks were so impressed and terrified by the Furies that they re-baptized them the Eumenides—"the Kindly Ones"—the better to adjust to them. Members of the left, along with the far larger number of squishy "progressives," have grossly failed to live up to their responsibility to think; rather, they are merely reacting, substituting tired slogans for thought. The majority of those "progressives" who take comfort from Stone and Chomsky are not committed, militant anti-imperialists or anti-capitalists. Nothing so muscular. They are of the sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

I believe I can prove this by means of a brief rhetorical experiment. It runs as follows. Very well, I will stipulate that September 11 was revenge for past American crimes. Specifically, and with supporting detail, I will agree that it was revenge for the crime of past indifference to, and collusion with, the Taliban. May we now agree to cancel this crime by removing from the Taliban the power of enslavement that it exerts over Afghans, and which it hopes to extend? Dead silence from progressives. Couldn't we talk about the ozone layer instead? In other words, all the learned and conscientious objections, as well as all the silly or sinister ones, boil down to this: Nothing will make us fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the same corner as our own government. (The words "our own" should of course be appropriately ironized, with the necessary quotation marks.) To do so would be a betrayal of the Cherokees.

Some part of this is at least intelligible. My daughter goes to school just across the river from the Pentagon; her good-hearted teachers proposed an "Amity Walk" for children of all nations, to culminate at the statue of Mahatma Gandhi on Massachusetts Avenue. The event would demonstrate that children had no quarrel with anybody. It would not stress the fact that a death squad had just hit a target a few hundred yards away, and would have liked to crash another planeload of hostages anywhere in downtown Washington, and was thwarted in this only by civilians willing to use desperate force. But I had my own reasons, which were no less internationalist, for opposing anything so dismal, and for keeping my child away from anything so inane. I didn't like General Westmoreland or Colonel North or General Pinochet, and I have said more about this than some people. (I did not, like Oliver Stone, become rich or famous by romancing Camelot or by making an unwatchable three-hour movie showing Nixon's and Kissinger's human and vulnerable sides.) I detest General Sharon, and have done so for many years. My face is set against religious and racial demagogues. I believe I know an enemy when I see one. My chief concern when faced with such an antagonist is not that there will be "over-reaction" on the part of those who will fight the adversary—which seems to be the only thing about the recent attacks and the civilized world's response to them that makes the left anxious.

At his best, Noam Chomsky used to insist that there was a distinction to be drawn between state crimes and insurgent crimes, or between the violence of the emperor and the violence of the pirate. The Taliban-bin Laden alliance is a horrific and novel blend of the two. It employs the methods of the anarchist and the rebel in one declension, being surreptitious and covert and relying on the drama of the individual "martyr." But it also draws on the support of police and military and financial systems, and on the base indulgence of certain established and well-funded religious and theocratic leaderships. It throws acid in the faces of unveiled women. It destroys and burns museums and libraries. (Do we need to submit to our own guilt to "understand" this?) It is an elemental challenge, still terrifying even when one appreciates the appalling fact that its program of medieval stultification cannot actually be realized but will nevertheless be fought for. How contemptible it is, and how lowering to the spirit, that America's liberals should have cried so loudly before they had even been hurt, and that they should have been able to be so stoic only when ignoring the cries of others.

Incident at Dulles

This morning, at around 7am, we received a call from a friend at Dulles Airport checking-in for his BA flight to London. What is going on? he wanted to know. There was pandemonium, rumors, and he had to turn in all his shaving cream, toothpaste, gels, lotions, and so forth. It cost me $80! he complained. (He's so well-groomed that he sometimes gets upgraded to Business Class for free). No one had told him what it was about, other than a terrorist threat. So we turned on the TV. And we called him back to explain. Meanwhile, he'd been videotaped by the local TV news dumping his personal care products.

Have the British caught all the plotters? or are some still at large, possibly in the USA?

Despite reassurances from Homeland Security Michael Chertoff and Company this morning, we are not completely reassured...

(More background on this story at MichelleMalkin.com and DebbieSchlussel.com.)

America Must Fight Harder

Says Steven M. Warshawsky in The American Thinker, responding to the National Review's Stanley Kurtz:

The truth is, to date, we have not made any effort to destroy the forces of militant Islam. We have only engaged in limited conventional actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and (supposedly) covert ops worldwide. That’s it. We haven’t mobilized the American people for war. We haven’t destroyed Iran and Syria. We haven’t closed radical mosques or shut down the jihadist propaganda networks. We haven’t conducted targeted assassinations of jihadi leaders across the globe. We haven’t made it clear to the terrorists and their supporters that they cannot win and that they will die.

How can Kurtz be so sure the enemy cannot be defeated? We haven’t even tried.

Yes, Kurtz is right in that a much broader war will be required to defeat militant Islam. And, yes, Kurtz would have been right to question whether the United States and Europe have the political will to engage in this fight. I have my own doubts on this score. But to believe that militant Islam “cannot be defeated” is ridiculous—and only weakens whatever resolve we still have to kill them before they kill us.

The ugly truth about existential warfare—and that is what we are engaged in with militant Islam—is that the only way to win an existential conflict is to kill as many of the enemy population as possible and to destroy as much of its society as possible.

This is precisely what we (and our allies) did to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during World War Two. The reason these two enemies were defeated and pacified is because literally millions of their young men were killed, and their societies were brutally battered into physical and psychological submission. Just because we no longer have the stomach for this type of warfare, for bloodletting on this massive scale, doesn’t mean it is not an effective strategy for winning wars. Indeed, it is the only strategy. It certainly is the jihadists’ strategy, only limited by their lack of military capability.

How quickly we have forgotten 9/11. How blithely we assume that an even more devastating attack could never happen. A nuclear bomb in New York City or one of our other great metropolitan areas could inflict more casualties than we suffered in World War Two. This is what we should be fighting to prevent. We should not be fighting for elections in Iraq.

Today, our excessive compunction about killing the enemy, and about having our own soldiers die in combat, is the real reason the gloomy scenario described by Kurtz may come to pass. For “peace” is not an option. Even if we do not fight the jihadists, they will keep attacking us, and keep trying to kill as many Americans, Jews, and westerners as possible. Kurtz surely is right on that point. But the answer is to fight harder, not resign ourselves to an even deadlier future.

Night Watch

In order not to be subjected to the anti-Israel atrocity propaganda that fills the nightly airwaves here, I've been watching a lot of movies lately. Finally got around to seeing Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor), Timur Bekmambetov's strikingly energetic adaptation of Sergey Lukyanenko's science-fiction thriller about the struggle to keep one's humanity during battle.

The battle in this case is an eternal struggle between the forces of Light and Darkness, represented respectively by a Soviet-style city electric company bureaucrat and his team on one side, and some "cool" private-sector types--videogame, pop-music, butchers in a marketplace--on the other. They fight for the souls of the "Others"--people with special gifts. Oh yes, the Dark ones are vampires. And there is a Truce which gets violated all the time, too. Day Watch and Night Watch patrol the truce. Think Checkpoint Charlie with vampires.

At first, I thought the picture seemed too crude and noisy, just a videogame imitation Hollywood blockbuster. But it stuck with me, I thought about it a lot--with all the talk of the truce in Lebanon making it seem relevant. In the end, it seemed to me there was a symbolic level that the picture was operating on that made it the super-blockbuster of the year in Moscow. It has something to do with the collapse of Communism--because the revolution, in Leninist terminology, devoured its children.

The Vampirism is a trope, symbol, that goes deeper than Buffy the Vampire Slayer (seen on a TV clip). It has something to do with the famous Russian Character and Russian Soul--maybe even Gogol's dead souls. The Day Watch and Night Watch are symbolic too.

But of what? The Cold War? The Clash of Civilizations? Stay tuned, since part two of the trilogy has been completed in Russia, and will soon be coming to a theatre or DVD store near you...

Portrait of Jennie

This is a wonderful film about the relationship between art and life. Joseph Cotten plays an unsuccessful painter, whose commercial landscapes just don't sell. While visiting galleries, one of the owners encourages him to paint portraits. On the way home, he runs into "Jennie" in Central Park. She's his muse, his inspiration, and his love. His imaginary friend encourages him to take greater and greater chances, eventually resulting in a masterpiece that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Cotten character passes through three stages of artistic development--commercial, political, and personal. Each phase is more difficult, but as he progresses he confronts and overcomes his fears. His talent makes the imaginary real.

Ethel Barrymore is the elderly art dealer who shares the secret of artistry with him. Holden's performance is terrific. Jennifer Jones plays the muse.

The 1948 film was directed by William Dieterle, and it is extremely arty, as well as psychological. Almost an artistic film noir.

I give it five stars--for art lovers. If you are not interested in art, or the interior struggles of artistic souls, you may not like it at all...

The Foreigner's Gift by Fouad Ajami

Just read a good review in the Washington Post Book World of Fouad Ajami's latest book, about the American war in Iraq.

It reminded me that I read the book as soon as a friend in New York mentioned that it had been published. Thanks to Amazon's free shipping promotion, it came in 2 days and I read it in another couple of days. It's pretty sobering. And he knows what he's talking about.

I sat in on a few seminars from Professor Ajami at SAIS, and found him to be fascinating as well as very outspoken. A real intellectual, of the old school. Very cultured. Also, not doctrinaire in the least. He's brilliant and open-minded. He's consulted with Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and President Chirac of France. So the charges of neo-conservatism ought to be taken in context. I think of him as a brilliant and independent thinker, representing the best of Levantine civilization.

Unfortunately, he asked me not to quote what he said in class, saying that he works very hard to write very carefully. So, I respected that request...Too bad. He actually has some very strong opinions, and states them bluntly. But not on paper, it appears.

This new book is as allusive and elliptical as one might have expected from a writer who chooses his words with exceptional care. Call it a Shi'ite caution, I think I learned that cultural characteristic in his seminar.

Still, if you are willing to read carefully between the lines, Ajami has a clear message: America gave Iraq a gift with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But how Iraq takes that gift, especially given a history of sectarian tensions, in a state previously ruled by a strongman with a whip and a bag of money (from oil revenues), is up for grabs.

The best part of this book are protraits of various Iraqi personalities. They really come alive as fully rounded human beings, not the cardboard cutouts of so many reports. These colorful and enigmatic characters--including Ahmad Chalabi, among others--reminded me a little of Gogol's Dead Souls.

In sum, Ajami has performed a great service by humanizing a conflict that is often portrayed in terms of dry political rhetoric.

Read it carefully--at least twice...

Anti-Semites for Ned Lamont

That's the bottom-line of this Lanny Davis op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong. The far right does not have a monopoly on bigotry and hatred and sanctimony. Here are just a few examples (there are many, many more anyone with a search engine can find) of the type of thing the liberal blog sites have been posting about Joe Lieberman:

• "Ned Lamont and his supporters need to [g]et real busy. Ned needs to beat Lieberman to a pulp in the debate and define what it means to be an AMerican who is NOT beholden to the Israeli Lobby" (by "rim," posted on Huffington Post, July 6, 2006).

• "Joe's on the Senate floor now and he's growing a beard. He has about a weeks growth on his face. . . . I hope he dyes his beard Blood red. It would be so appropriate" (by "ctkeith," posted on Daily Kos, July 11 and 12, 2005).

• On "Lieberman vs. Murtha": "as everybody knows, jews ONLY care about the welfare of other jews; thanks ever so much for reminding everyone of this most salient fact, so that we might better ignore all that jewish propaganda [by Lieberman] about participating in the civil rights movement of the 60s and so on" (by "tomjones," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).

• "Good men, Daniel Webster and Faust would attest, sell their souls to the Devil. Is selling your soul to a god any worse? Leiberman cannot escape the religious bond he represents. Hell, his wife's name is Haggadah or Muffeletta or Diaspora or something you eat at Passover" (by "gerrylong," posted on the Huffington Post, July 8, 2006).

• "Joe Lieberman is a racist and a religious bigot" (by "greenskeeper," posted on Daily Kos, Dec. 7, 2005).

And these are some of the nicer examples.

Given Ned Lamont's former membership in an apparently restricted Greenwich country club, his endorsement by Al Sharpton, and the "blackface" mockery of Lieberman, it's not surprising that Lanny Davis has finally noticed something very disturbing about some Ned Lamont supporters...

The State of Russian-Israeli Relations

An analysis by Robert O. Freedman, from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs

Russia has a number of interests in Israel. First, on the economic front, there is extensive trade which crossed the $500 million mark in 1995 (although it would later dip because of Russia's 1998 economic crisis), making Israel Russia's second leading trade partner in the Middle East after Turkey. Second, on the diplomatic front, a close relationship with Israel enables Russia to play, or appear to play, a major role in the Arab-Israeli peace process. Third, with almost 1,000,000 Russian-speaking Jews now living in Israel, Israel has the largest Russian-speaking diaspora outside the former Soviet Union, and this has led to very significant ties in the areas of cultural exchange and tourism. The fourth major interest is a military-technical one as the Russian military-industrial complex has expressed increasing interest in co-producing military aircraft with Israel, especially since many of the workers in Israel's aircraft industry are former citizens of the Soviet Union with experience in the Soviet military-industrial complex.

From the Israeli point of view, there are four central interests in relations with Russia. The first is to maintain the steady flow of immigration, which has provided Israel with a large number of scientists and engineers. The second is to prevent the export of nuclear weapons or nuclear materials to Israel's Middle East enemies, including Libya, Iran, and Iraq. The third goal is to develop trade relations with Russia, which supplies Israel with such products as uncut diamonds, metals, and timber. Russia is also the site of numerous joint enterprises begun by Israelis who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union. Finally, Israel hopes for at least an even-handed Russian diplomatic position in the Middle East and, if possible, Russian influence on its erstwhile ally, Syria, to be more flexible in reaching a peace agreement with Israel.

Several months after Barak's election, Putin became Russia's prime minister and quickly became deeply involved in the war against Chechnya -- a development that was to positively affect Russian-Israeli relations. While Putin was not to be responsive on the issue of arms to Iran, he was far more forthcoming in denouncing anti-Semitism than Yeltsin was (although he did not go as far as some Russian Jewish leaders wanted).

The issue of greatest importance to the relationship, at least from the Russian point of view, was Israeli support for Russian actions in Chechnya, with one Russian official stating that "Israel helps us break the Western information blockade of Russia over Chechnya." Israel also helped Russia by sending medical supplies to the victims of the Moscow apartment house bombings, claimed by Putin to have been perpetrated by the Chechens, and also gave medical treatment to wounded Russian soldiers.

Israeli help to Moscow over Chechnya was to pay diplomatic dividends when the Al-Aksa intifada broke out in late September 2000, when Putin took a very different position than did Primakov during similar crises in the 1996-1999 period. Unlike the Russian position under Primakov, Putin's Russia was not only evenhanded, he even seemed to tilt toward Israel as the crisis developed. Thus, then Secretary of the Russian Security Council Sergei Ivanov, who was later promoted to defense minister, linked the violence on the West Bank and Gaza to the Taliban's increased activities in Afghanistan and Central Asia, and to extremist activity in Chechnya, a position also espoused by Putin's adviser, Sergei Yastrzhembsky. The Russian Duma, unlike its anti-Israel and anti-Semitic predecessor that went out of office in December 1999, voted to blame not Israel but "extremist forces" for the escalation of the conflict.

Despite Putin's shift to an evenhanded position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and Russia's important diplomatic, economic, and military ties with Israel, there are countervailing pressures in Moscow preventing too close a Russian-Israeli alignment. These include:

Pro-Arab elements in Russia's Foreign Ministry and in the increasingly influential secret police who hope to restore the close ties Moscow had in the Arab world in Soviet times.

Anti-Semitic forces who are also anti-Israel. They are primarily found in Russia's communist party and among Russia's ultra-nationalist politicians.

Russia's arms sales agency, Rosoboronoexport. The new arms sales agency has been given a high priority in Putin's efforts to revitalize the Russian economy. Indeed, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov has stated that the proceeds from the arms sales are to be invested in the development of new technologies for the economy. What makes this problematic for Israel is that Russian arms sales to Iran, an enemy of Israel, are already a matter of major concern. Should these be followed by arms sales to Syria (assuming Saudi Arabia is willing to pay for the arms -- a possibility if the intifada escalates and draws in Syrian forces), a deterioration in Russian-Israeli relations could well result. The situation would worsen even more if the UN sanctions on Iraq were lifted, or if Russia decided to break them unilaterally (both unlikely prospects at the current time), because in the past Moscow had been a major weapons supplier to Baghdad.

Russia's Muslim community. Approximately 20 percent of the Russian population, they are still rather quiescent politically. Nonetheless, the Russian leadership must take their views into consideration, given the dangers of radical Islam not only in Chechnya and elsewhere in the North Caucasus and the Russian Federation, but also in Central Asia.

Little Green Footballs 1, Reuters Less Than Zero

Congratulations to Little Green Footballs on exposing Reuters' anti-Israel photo fraud.This episode raises a question for investors and businesspeople: If you can't trust their mideast coverage, can you trust Reuters' financial reporting?

WSJ: Who are the Real War Criminals?

Orde F. Kittrie, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that under international law Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria are clearly guilty of war crimes--not Israel:

At Qana, Israeli aircraft fired toward a building to stop Hezbollah from shooting rockets at its cities. The aircraft did not deliberately target civilians; but Hezbollah rockets are targeted at civilians, a clear war crime. U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland last week called on Hezbollah to stop its "cowardly blending" among women and children: "I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this." If Hezbollah used Lebanese civilians in Qana as "human shields," then Hezbollah, not Israel, is legally responsible for their deaths.

If Israel was mistaken and Hezbollah was not firing from or hiding amongst these civilians, the legality of its action is assessed by the proportionality test. Because the test is vague, there have been few, if any, cases since World War II in which a soldier, commander or country has been convicted of violating it. In the absence of guidance from the courts, determining whether Israel's military has failed the proportionality test depends on an assessment of what civilian casualties it expected, what its overall military goals are, the context in which the country is operating, and how the international community has in practice balanced civilian risk against military goals.

Israel did not expect civilian casualties; it warned civilians to leave Qana, and Israel's official investigation has concluded its military attacked based on "information that the building was not inhabited by civilians and was being used as a hiding place for terrorists." The law of war recognizes that mistakes are inevitable, and does not criminalize soldiers who seek in good faith seek to avoid them.

Israel's overall military goal is to survive attacks by enemies determined to annihilate it. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has stated: "Israel . . . is an aggressive, illegal and illegitimate entity, which has no future. . . . Its destiny is manifested in our motto: 'Death to Israel.' " Thus Israel is attempting to prevent Hezbollah from using its 10,000 remaining rockets, and to implement the requirement of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 that Hezbollah be disarmed.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah and Iran--which provides this terrorist group with arms, direction and over $100 million a year--are in continual violation of international law. Their calls for Israel's destruction violate the international genocide treaty's prohibition of "direct and public incitement to commit genocide." Iran's effort to develop a nuclear arsenal that could obliterate Israel, or deter its responses to future Hezbollah attacks, violates the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iranian (and Syrian) support for Hezbollah violates U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373, requiring states to "refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts." Hezbollah began the armed conflict with rocket attacks on Israeli towns and the abduction of Israeli soldiers: unprovoked acts of war violating an internationally recognized border.

Israel is acting in self-defense and avoided killing civilians, even giving advance notice by phone to the occupants of homes targeted for attack as Hezbollah hideouts. While Hezbollah deliberately maximizes harm to Israeli and Lebanese civilians, Israel puts its soldiers at risk to minimize Lebanese civilian casualties.

The track record of many of Israel's most powerful accusers--including China, Russia and the European Union--is not nearly as good at balancing civilian risk against military goals.

China killed hundreds of peaceful Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989. It has for five decades occupied Tibet, slaughtering tens of thousands; and it vows to invade Taiwan if it declares independence. Neither the Tiananmen protesters nor Tibet nor Taiwan has ever threatened to "wipe China off the map."

Russia has fought since 1994 to suppress Chechnya's independence movement. Out of a Chechen population of one million, as many as 200,000 have been killed as Russia has leveled the capital city of Grozny. Chechen rebels pose no threat to "wipe Russia off the map." All of the leading EU countries actively participated in NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. The military goal was to stop Yugoslavia from oppressing its Kosovar minority. NATO bombs and missiles hit Yugoslav bridges, power plants and a television station, killing hundreds of civilians. Yugoslavia posed no threat to the existence of any of the EU countries that bombed it.

Compared with how China, Russia, and the EU have dealt with non-existential threats--and despite the law-flouting behavior of Hezbollah, Iran and Syria--Israel's responses to the threats to its existence have been remarkably restrained rather than disproportionately violent.

David & Goliath: Antigua v USA

Paul Blustein reports for the Washington Post:

WASHINGTON - Locked in a federal prison in the Nevada desert, tortured by the distant lights of the Las Vegas Strip, Jay Cohen couldn't stop thinking about getting even with the government that had put him away - and his revenge fantasy had a unique twist.

U.S. prosecutors put Cohen behind bars in 2002 for running an Internet gambling site in the Caribbean country of Antigua and Barbuda. Not long before the prison gates clanged shut, he had learned that the federal crackdown on online betting might violate global trade rules.

So he got Antigua and Barbuda to instigate a complaint at the World Trade Organization. "It kind of helped keep my spirits up," he said.

Fast forward: Antigua and Barbuda, population 69,000, is winning. The case has become an embarrassment to Washington, one that could result in economic pain. It isn't quite over, but the world's only superpower may have to capitulate to a country whose entire population could easily fit into the Rose Bowl.

Never has such a tiny nation brought a WTO complaint against the United States, which is one reason the dispute has implications well beyond the issue of gambling.

Ha'aretz:Israel is Winning...

According to Shmuel Rosner:

During their meeting on Monday, Peres spent most of the time relaying the following message to the Secretary of State: We are winning. Peres gave Rice details of the numbers of rockets captured, launchers destroyed and Hezbollah fighters killed.

The Security Council is meant to meet today to discuss the makeup of the multinational force that will be deployed to the region, but a key state, one meant to lead the others, announced on Monday it intended to boycott the meeting - unless it has a last minute change of heart. France believes that a cease-fire must first be agreed to and only then a political arrangement can follow.

The U.S. would like to see the order reversed. Bush, sources in Washington say, would like to emerge from the Lebanon crisis a winner. In the absence of an unequivocal victory over Hezbollah, only a convincing political settlement, backed by tough conditions, can provide the goods.

If Israel's leadership is astounded by the Bush administration's support, the American public's backing is also impressive. In a Gallup Poll a few days ago, 80 percent of the respondents said that Israel's action in Lebanon was justified. Only one in 10 Americans thinks otherwise. These support figures are equal to those of the Israeli public.

Victor David Hanson on the Israel-Hezbollah War

From VDH Private Papers (ht LGF):

When I used to read about the 1930s — the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of fascism in Italy, Spain, and Germany, the appeasement in France and Britain, the murderous duplicity of the Soviet Union, and the racist Japanese murdering in China — I never could quite figure out why, during those bleak years, Western Europeans and those in the United States did not speak out and condemn the growing madness, if only to defend the millennia-long promise of Western liberalism.

Of course, the trauma of the Great War was all too fresh, and the utopian hopes for the League of Nations were not yet dashed. The Great Depression made the thought of rearmament seem absurd. The connivances of Stalin with Hitler — both satanic, yet sometimes in alliance, sometimes not — could confuse political judgments.

But nevertheless it is still surreal to reread the fantasies of Chamberlain, Daladier, and Pope Pius, or the stump speeches by Charles Lindbergh (“Their [the Jews’] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government”) or Father Coughlin (“Many people are beginning to wonder whom they should fear most — the Roosevelt-Churchill combination or the Hitler-Mussolini combination.”) — and it is even more baffling to consider that such men ever had any influence.

Not any longer.

Our present generation too is on the brink of moral insanity. That has never been more evident than in the last three weeks, as the West has proven utterly unable to distinguish between an attacked democracy that seeks to strike back at terrorist combatants, and terrorist aggressors who seek to kill civilians....

...It is now a cliché to rant about the spread of postmodernism, cultural relativism, utopian pacifism, and moral equivalence among the affluent and leisured societies of the West. But we are seeing the insidious wages of such pernicious theories as they filter down from our media, universities, and government — and never more so than in the general public’s nonchalance since Hezbollah attacked Israel .

These past few days the inability of millions of Westerners, both here and in Europe, to condemn fascist terrorists who start wars, spread racial hatred, and despise Western democracies is the real story, not the “quarter-ton” Israeli bombs that inadvertently hit civilians in Lebanon who live among rocket launchers that send missiles into Israeli cities and suburbs.

Yes, perhaps Israel should have hit more quickly, harder, and on the ground; yes, it has run an inept public relations campaign; yes, to these criticisms and more. But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

In short, if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around.