GRAY LADY WHISTLES DIXIE

Lo and behold! A miracle has occurred in our midst. The daunted Gray Lady of Big Time Journalism has swept aside the cobwebs, and is now reporting the unvarished truth about what is happening in Gaza. This is a wonderful day, folks. Mark it on your calendars. Verily, I tell you, The New York Times has stepped up to the plate on this one. I'm not sure I can even believe my own eyes. Is the tide finally changing on these ruthless thugs who fight under the pernicious flag of Mohammed the Horrible?

Now if only those folks at the desk will admit that this has ALWAYS been the case, that with each subtle and not so subtle encroachment, each lob of a Iranian-suppled missile, each cry of forlorn victimhood from these very same so-called "Palestinian" pan-Arab rebels, it has not been Israel who has been the instigator, the culprit, the cold blooded murderer of civilians but the rebels themselves who wear this badge of disgrace.

But after all, that's how Mohammed taught his followers to make war. It's right there, word for word, in their book. And for fourteen hundred years Mohammedans of every stripe have agreed that war is deceit, and that old adage all is fair is love and war, is as Islamic-sounding as it is old school Western (before we went all soft, weak, and multiculturalist). Except, of course, as many commentators have mentioned, the Qur'an does not mention the noble word "love" even once in all its ferocious pages.

This reportage does beg the question of why this leftist newspaper has suddenly shifted its tone. I'm figuring it has less to do with clarity of thought at the editor's desk or in Israel and thus America finally having its fill of stop gap measures. No. It appears that all it took was the election of the Chosen One, Barack Obama, to the office of presidency, for the leftist media to draw different conclusions on the same batch of details. Mustn't let the messiah fail is the order of the day, and since Obama's hands are pretty much tied at this point, the shift of perspective had to come in the reportage of the facts. Pin this one on dirty playing Hamas. Must keep the messiah clean.

That works for me in this case. But it does show to what lengths the leftist media will go to protect its own.

So, to that end, the NYT has reported that the most important strategic decision the Israelis have made so far, according to senior military officers and analysts, is to approach their incursion as a war, not a police operation. Civilians are warned by leaflets, loudspeakers and telephone calls to evacuate battle areas. But troops are instructed to protect themselves first and civilians second.

JERUSALEM—The grinding urban battle unfolding in the densely populated Gaza Strip is a war of new tactics, quick adaptation and lethal tricks.

Hamas, with training from Iran and Hezbollah, has used the last two years to turn Gaza into a deadly maze of tunnels, booby traps and sophisticated roadside bombs. Weapons are hidden in mosques, schoolyards and civilian houses, and the leadership’s war room is a bunker beneath Gaza’s largest hospital, Israeli intelligence officials say.

Unwilling to take Israel’s bait and come into the open, Hamas militants are fighting in civilian clothes; even the police have been ordered to take off their uniforms. The militants emerge from tunnels to shoot automatic weapons or antitank missiles, then disappear back inside, hoping to lure the Israeli soldiers with their fire.

In one apartment building in Zeitoun, in northern Gaza, Hamas set an inventive, deadly trap. According to an Israeli journalist embedded with Israeli troops, the militants placed a mannequin in a hallway off the building’s main entrance. They hoped to draw fire from Israeli soldiers who might, through the blur of night vision goggles and split-second decisions, mistake the figure for a fighter. The mannequin was rigged to explode and bring down the building.

Read it all.

US GOVERNMENT LOSING ITS MARBLES

Is this for real? As news breaks hat the Bush administration continues to sell America to our enemies, Hugh Fitzgerald, clarifies the issues at hand. Read his article, and shudder at the sheer audacity of our government to wink & nod every time the Saudis feign a cough:

The Bush Administration announces in the same breath that "over ten years" Israel will receive "$30 billion in weapons," and that Saudi Arabia will get "$20 billion" in weapons to stave off Iran (over what time period? 10 years, like the Israelis? Or more like a year or two?). And it announces also that, furthermore, a country that is in every way hostile to us, Egypt, will receive "$13 billion" in weapons as a gift.

What shall we say about this? Israel is not only a temporary ally but a permanent ally. It is a permanent part of the West and central to the West's history, at this point, and must be kept alive not only for our own moral sanity, but also because its disappearance, or reduction to dhimmitudinous despair and reliance on Arab Muslim willingness to allow it to survive would whet, not sate, Arab and Muslim appetites. But this weapons transfer, billed as "$30 billion," in fact is misleading. Over ten years that amounts to $3 billion a year in weapons aid, which is only one-quarter over the amount now given, and gratefully received. (And need one point out how many advances, in aerospace technology, and in everything from unmanned aircraft to explosives-resistant vehicles that ought to have been, but were not bought, by the Pentagon for use in Iraq, are developed by the Israelis for their, and of course our, use?)

Saudi Arabia, per contra, is our enemy. A permanent enemy, because it is a country whose people are suffused with the most uncompromising, violent, and malevolent—for Infidels—version of Islam. For in Saudi Arabia they take their Islam very, very seriously. Saudi Arabia is not worried about an invasion by Iran. Such fears are phony. The whole hysteria, coordinated with Egypt and Jordan, about the "Shi'a crescent" is merely designed to get the Americans to focus only on Iran (and its current accomplice, Syria) and to ignore the much larger threat, outside the local business in Iraq, that Sunni Islam poses to Infidels. It is designed to get them to ignore also that above all other states, Saudi Arabia is the world's Muslims’ chief financier, paying for mosques, madrasas, propaganda, campaigns of Da'wa, and the buying up of Western hirelings who in the capitals of the West—and certainly in Washington—work to do the Saudi bidding. They work to prevent intelligent understanding of the menace of Jihad and of Islam to our legal and political institutions and to our physical security.

It is absurd to think that the Saudis will master this equipment, but not absurd to think that such weaponry could fall into the hands of Arabs and other Muslims who can master some of it. In any case, the mere possession of such weapons would have to be taken into account by Israeli military planners, and will make their own task even more hellishly difficult, and they don't deserve to have that outcome. When the United States protested about a sale of aerospace technology, developed by the Israelis, to China, Israel, at great cost to its own fledgling aerospace dreams, promptly cancelled the sale -- thereby angering China and permanently damaging any hope of future sales to such a market. But Israel listened and heeded our desires. We, however, or at least this and other American administrations, have not ever heeded Israel's pleas on the same score.

And what is also bad is the signal to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia should be read the riot act. Saudi Arabia should be told it is not "our ally," and if it wishes to be defended, it will obviously have to rely, in the end, on us -- not on weapons that could fall into hands even more malevolent than the Al-Saud (just as the weapons we sold the Shah, that "pillar of stability" in the Persian Gulf, fell into the clutches of the Islamic Republic of Iran). Thus if these weapons are delivered, we would have to be ready to intervene in order to make sure those weapons were not seized, or transferred, to others. Saudi Arabia was a loyal supporter of the Taliban (and one of only two countries to recognize the Taliban government, besides Pakistan). Saudi Arabia must be forced to stop funding mosques and madrasas, stop funding the hate literature against Infidels that have been found in those mosques and those madrasas, stop funding those campaigns of Da'wa that target prisoners, that target all the psychically and economically marginal.

The Saudis do not now do, and never have done, the United States any favors. We buy their oil at the market price. They have fooled successive American policymakers, who wanted to be fooled. They were helped along in being fooled by so many who, directly or indirectly, at the time or soon after, have been paid off by the Saudis, the government, or its institutions, or rich individuals.

The way to "protect" the Al-Saud and the oilfields is quite different. It is to sell Saudi Arabia an insurance policy. We will guarantee the safety of the rulers and of the oil. It will cost: let's say $50-100 billion annually. Too much, you say? Well, since Saudi Arabia takes in about one billion dollars a day, and since the rich Saudis have invested a lot overseas, have perhaps a trillion or more socked away, they can certainly afford $50-$100 billion. Okay, how about a little souk-haggling, in that case? Let's give them a deal—$75 billion a year. How's that? As long as you agree with the concept, we can at a later date decide just how much we intend to recoup, for the Iraq calamity and squandering of $880 billion, from the fabulous rich Saudis.

And what about Egypt? Can it seriously be maintained that Egypt needs those weapons because the army of Shi'a Iran may march right across northern Iraq, and Jordan, and Israel, and march right into Egypt? Really? Or is it possible that Egypt needs those weapons because Iranian troops will be coming up from the Sudan? Or that somehow the Sunnis of Egypt, who are deeply distrustful and intensely dislike the Iranian Shi'a for being non-Arabs and for being Shi'a, would somehow be converted by Shi'a missionaries? And if that were the case, why would giving Egypt the most advanced weaponry help in stopping those missionary efforts?

Egypt has fought four major wars with Israel, and has been responsible for nearly 20,000 separate fedayin attacks in the period 1949-1956 on Israel. It has been, and remains, the most dangerous neighbor Israel has. Egypt does not go to war not because its people have reconciled themselves to Israel's existence—if anything, they have become since the Sinai handover even more virulent in their officially-sanctioned and officially-promoted hatred of Israel and Zionists and "Jews." Yet the Administration thinks that giving weapons to Egypt, a country whose poor will not benefit one whit from the airplanes and missiles Egypt will receive, will somehow be accepted by the American people and by Congress, that we will all be unable to see right through this.

The lumped announcement of the one legitimate arms delivery planned—that to our ally and friend Israel—at the same time, in the same breath, with the announcement of the gift of advanced weaponry to Israel's constant threat Egypt, and the sale of advanced weaponry to the funder of the worldwide Jihad, Saudi Arabia, shows an Administration that is terminally exhausted. It cannot think straight about Islam. It cannot begin to start to think straight about the dangers it is creating for an ally, and for the larger Infidel world. It can't begin to get a grip and think in terms of the Camp of Infidels and the Camp of Islam, and how to do whatever it takes to weaken the latter and strengthen the former.

Instead, it has swallowed the Sunni Arab line about the need for countering the Shi'a threat (as if there were not, for Infidels, a greater Sunni threat), which means the threat to the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, and to Bahrain, and among the Shi'a agitating in Lebanon, or those Shi'a minorities in Yemen and Kuwait. And of course they also mean the threat in Iraq, if the Shi'a are permitted to keep their new gains, and the Sunnis to be forced to accept the new order. That is why, just as the Shi'a exiles were the ones who helped inveigle the Bush Administration to go into Iraq, it is now the turn of the Sunnis, to inveigle us—against our own best interests—to stay.

The Administration keeps amazing us with its ignorance and inability to see the whole picture.

And in its list of recipients of the arms, the Bush Administration puts one in mind of the scene in a Woody Allen film, in which he is in at a kiosk in New York telling the newsdealer that "I'd like a copy of The Times Literary Supplement, and The New York Review Books, and The Hudson Review and also Partisan Review and, oh, could you just throw in a copy of Slut."