Olmert Announces Resignation

I can’t believe that I am writing this! Olmert will be resigning! You have no idea how happy I am. This fool, this idiot shit for brains is finally going to be out. Israel may have been weakened during his rule through mistakes such as prematurely withdrawing from the Israeli-Hezbollah war and that recent disastrous prisoner swap with Hezbollah. At least he won’t have time for another prisoner swap with Hamas (although I am still not counting my eggs yet…).

“Prime Minister Ehud Olmert intends to hand his resignation letter to President Shimon Peres the day after the September 17 Kadima primary and ask him to entrust the new party leader with forming a new government, Olmert’s associates said Wednesday night.”

Olmert leaves the podium upon concluding his statement, Wednesday. Photo: Alex Kolomoisky

Now having read that, you may be wondering why I am so happy, Kadima will still be in power at least until the Spring of 2009 (Autumn here). We all know that Kadima is filled with bumbling idiots and fools and yet I haven’t even started on the individual ministers (MK’s) yet. The point that I am trying to make is that Olmert was the worst, there is no one that could do even more damage then him.

There has been much said about why Olmert has decided to step down. To be honest I’m not really that interested, the guy was a great politician, but a terrible leader of a nation.

“He didn’t want to humiliate himself by waiting until the last minute as some people thought he would,” an Olmert associate said. “He is the most realistic person in the world. He didn’t want to look like he cared only about himself by staying as long as possible. He decided he wanted to play the responsible adult.”

Why couldn’t he have played the ‘responsible adult’ when the results of the Winograd Commission came in, eh? It would have saved us all a lot of pain. Of course with Olmert stepping down at the time of the Kadima primaries, this begs another question, who will replace him? Most people are saying either Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni or Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz. I’ll be honest and say I prefer Livni only because I actually know her and her portfolio would better equip her to lead a country like Israel rather then having a portfolio like Mofaz.

Does Someone Smell A Jerusalem Rat?

Yes guys it that time of the year when the PA decide to run another vilification of the Jews. As you know, (if you have been following Palestinian Media Watch PMW), this is nothing knew. In fact you can see examples of Jew vilification here and here. Now here’s the new one from the PA, according to them, Israel is using a special genetically altered kind of rat to drive out Arab families from the Old City of Jerusalem. In fact:

‘According to the PA papers, the Israeli-Jerusalem rat is:
1. Immune to rat poison
2. Aggressive and larger than usual
3. Unafraid of cats and able to scare them away
4. Highly fertile, with females giving birth to 140 young rats a year, four times the normal average
5. Highly selective, as Jewish residents of Jerusalem apparently are not affected by these rats’

Bear in mind that this isn’t coming from some fringe media source or anything like that. It’s coming from Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (you can get google to translate the paper) which is controlled by the PA. In other words these paper prints what the PA wants it to, I’m sure you can see just how serious the PA is with negotiating with Israel. I’m sure you can see the stupidity of Olmert and Bush in trying to make a peace agreement with these so-called moderates. In fact I met the ambassador of the PA to Australia earlier on in the year, you can see a synopsis of that meeting here.

PA’s Super Rat

This is just another lame attempt by the PA to alter the image of Israel and Jews in general. It should be pretty obvious to most that this is complete crap, but still its funny nonetheless.

“And we’ll be waiting for you”

This was the piece of graffiti scrawled beneath a sign reading “We’ll be back” written by a retreating terrorist (liberal speak: militant) from Basra, Iraq. This is just another sign that the city is finally shaking off its unwanted terrorists and embracing the new Iraq. Hat tip to Tim Blair.

The Shia militias, the Jaish al- Mahdi, who controlled large parts of Basra until March this year, has now gone and instead the city is firmly under the grip of Iraq’s new security forces, in whom the coalition has invested so much training. They re-established control in April, in an operation romantically named “The Charge of the Knights”, systematically clearing the city with British and American support, confiscating illegal weapons and arresting the violent gangs whose combination of criminality and vicious extremism was making life a misery for so many of Basra’s people.

Iraqi Police in Basrah

Just as important as this is the fact that Basra has the potential to do well. Indeed:

‘…as one Basrawi businessman put it to me this week, to be a “Dubai, not a Mogadishu”. What they want and need now are international partners.’

The city itself has the resources, they have both oil and natural gas. As well as this, they have a great location situated on the Shatt al-Arab waterway near the Persian Gulf.

This is what happens when the Coalition stays the course. This is why I don’t understand why previously everybody’s favourite “Obamessiah”, decided that even with the benefit of hindsight, he wound not support the surge strategy back when it was still in debate.

Q: If you had to do it over again, knowing what you know now, would you support the surge?

A: No, because, keep in mind that…

Q: You wouldn’t?

And then have the nerve to continue flip-flopping on the issue. Stay the course!

Second “Copycat” Terrorist Attack In Jerusalem

In just two weeks Jerusalem has faced two terrorist attacks each following an identical style of attack from men who are both citizens of Jerusalem (specifically the largely Arab eastern section).

For the second time in three weeks, an Arab bulldozer driver from east Jerusalem rammed his construction vehicle into a city bus and several cars on a central thoroughfare in the capital on Tuesday, wounding 16 people before being shot dead by a Druse border police officer and a civilian passerby.

Firstly a congratulations is in order for police officer Amal Janam and Yaki Asa-El who was the one that actually shot the terrorist, Ghassan Abu Tir dead.

The border policeman who shot the terrorist in Tuesday’s bulldozer attack, Amal Ghanem, speaks to the press. Photo: Channel 2

In a previous article, I mentioned that:

Hopefully, next time Israel will do a better job in not letting these people get citizenship. I really think that a citizenship test should be given to every Israeli citizen. Of course this begs another questions, why are we issuing Israeli ID cards to a possible fith element anyway?

In this particular attack, no one was killed but 16 people were wounded. However, this is not the point. The point is this, Israel has a very real fifth element which can actively organise itself into a new terrorist group which will be able to strike quite easily within Jerusalem. The official view is that these attacks were not coordinated with the bigger terrorist groups.

Like on July 2, security officials said Tuesday’s attacker apparently acted on his own, underscoring what police said could be a series of attacks by “lone attackers” in the short-term.

Some of the solutions to combat this fifth element include the destruction of the terrorist’s home and the expulsion of those who helped them from the city of Jerusalem. These are not new suggestions, and were in place during the second Intifada before eventually being dropped because of pressure from such groups as B’Tselem. As well as this,

He [Public Security Minister Avi Dichter] also proposed carrying out background checks on Arab employees who work with heavy construction equipment, but noted that Israel faced “not simple” legal obstacles to carrying out such moves.

I personally think that Israel should go further with that suggestion and do background checks on anyone from the West Bank who works in Jerusalem or even the rest of Israel for that matter. However, I will save the best for last.

The attack was condemned by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who was meeting with President Shimon Peres at Beit Hanassi several blocks away. “I condemn the attack and as always I wholeheartedly oppose all acts of terror,” Abbas said.

Uh huh, yes, good work Abbas, you showed what a caring person you are. No really just ignore what you said and did one week ago.

Palestinian Presiden Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday welcomed the execution of the prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hizbullah. Abbas congratulated the family of released Lebanese murderer Samir Kuntar and sent his condolences to the Lebanese families receiving their loved ones’ bodies as part of the deal.

Such a moderate people, lets give them a state!

Israel Then and Now: Hostages

I found this aboslutely awesome article by Naomi Ragen about the Israel of 1976 and the Israel of today. The differences between the two would make you think that it is a completely different country, unbelievable!

Thousands of people gathered at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on 4 July 1976 to welcome the hostages home from Entebbe.

I was a new oleh when the PFLP and two Germans hijacked a plane full of Israelis to Entebbe. I remember well those nail-biting days, the moral dilemma of freeing dangerous terrorists for live hostages; the idea that negotiations would just lead to more hijackings. But what other choice did we have? After all, they were in Uganda, so far away.
We found a way.

I will never forget the morning of July 4, 1976, waking up to the news. Our soldiers had gone in, at great personal risk. They had saved almost everyone, and killed the terrorists. We were not helpless victims anymore, the Jews. No, we were clever, and resourceful and courageous. We showed the world how to behave. We led the way.
I wake up this morning of July 16, 2008 with quite another feeling. Our soldiers, kidnapped on our own land, not across any international border, are brought back to us in caskets after two years of sadistic playfulness with the hearts of their families by Hezbollah terrorists, who led us to believe they were alive. And in exchange for dead bodies, we turn over a despicable baby-killer, Sami Kuntar.

Oh, you will hear the boosters of the Israeli government sigh. What can we do? We are civilized and they are not. We care about our soldiers and their families.
No, I’m afraid you do not. If you cared, then you would have a death penalty for people like Kuntar, so that they too can be released in caskets. And if you cared, you would be intelligent enough, seeing our soldiers brought back to us dead, to have put a bullet through Kuntar and then turned him over to his friends.

Civilized is a euphemism for weak and helpless. Civilized is not a moral value, because we all know what Western civilization is capable of. Concentration camps. Civilian round-ups, the gassing of children. All this under the banner of laws and policemen and governments. On the other hand, the moral thing to do to a triedand convicted murderer like Kuntar is to spill his blood, because he has spilled the blood of others. That may not fit in with current civilized niceties, but let no one say it is immoral.

When it comes to immoral, to release Kuntar to a hero’s welcome and the opportunity to murder others is on the top of the scale.

My government, the Israeli government, arranged this. They let it happen. They oversaw it and implemented it.

I am deeply ashamed to be an Israeli today. And I’m not very proud of being a Jew either, if this is how a Jewish country behaves. To lead the world in ever more despicable acts of appeasement is nothing to be proud of. The torch we always carried, the “light unto the nations” has been blown out by the hot-air of our politicians.

If we cared about our soldiers, we would not be showing our enemies that kidnapping and terrorism pay. We would not be setting the stage for the next murderous terrorist raid and hostage standoff. We would be passing laws with a mandatory death penalty for convicted terrorists with blood on their hands, as well as their accomplices. We would be making these laws retroactive. Then, we would be cutting off all water and electricity to Gaza until Gilad Shalit is released. If that didn’t work, we’d begin executions within one week, increasing the number of convicted terrorists facing firing squads with each passing day until Gilad is returned to us safe and sound. And if that didn’t work, we would begin daily bombings of Gaza, with the same number and frequency of attacks that our own city Sderot has suffered over the past three years from the Gazans. Not civilized? Perhaps. But moral. Extremely moral.

My fantasy is that Israelis will rise up and overturn the political system which has left them with the dregs of their nation as leaders- a bunch of self-serving crooks and syncophants who will do anything to stay in office; an electoral system in which a party like Kadima, with its collection of felons and moral imbeciles, who got only 23% of the vote, is allowed to rule us into the ground. We have Mr. Olmert, and Ms. Livni, and Mr. Peres, and Mr. Ramon (a convicted sex offender, who is now in line to take over from Olmert) and many, many others to thank, for creating this day of infamy.

May G-d redeem us from them.

Heavy Metal Monk

As you have probably realised, I really enjoy listening to heavy metal music. This has to be one of the strangest occurrences that I have ever seen happen in metal.

Brother Cesare is the lead singer in a heavy metal band which has just released its second album.

A former missionary in the Ivory Coast, he lives in a small friary in the Milan hinterland.

The 62-year-old monk’s love affair with heavy metal began when he attended a Metallica concert some 15 years ago.

“I was overwhelmed and amazed by the sheer energy of it” he says.

I would absolutely love to see this guy in concert, I think it would be very funny. Long hair and robes flying  everywhere while a 62 year old is head banging.

The Prisoner Exchange Of Samir Kuntar

Let me first start by saying that this move is absolutely disastrous both politically and morally. In effect what the Israeli government is doing is handing a political victory to Hezbollah, who, I have no doubt will be touting this as a victory over the evil Zionists, etc…

A man rolls a picture of Samir Kantar at a printing shop in the southern port city of Tyre, Lebanon, on Monday. Photo: AP

During February of this year, I stated that:

‘Israel would never let someone like Barghouti free, a person, as it says above, who killed that many people. If Israel where to ever do that, I would have lost faith in the justice system of Israel.’

I stand by what I said then and have now lost a lot of respect for the justice system and especially President Shimon Peres.

‘President Shimon Peres signed the pardon of Lebanese prisoner Samir Kuntar late Tuesday evening, less than twelve hours before the swap with Hizbullah that will bring back to Israel MIAs Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.’

Not only does this have consequences in terms of helping bolster the popularity of Hezbollah, but it also has consequences in terms of future decisions regarding hostages. What about the next time a hostage is taken? Do we give up more prisoners? These kinds of actions start a precedent in which it is very hard to escape. Imagine the plight of the parents the next time a solider is taken. What if the Israeli government refuses to negotiate this time? There would be mass protest and calls of government hypocrisy.

As well as this, actions like these may make solider loose faith in their government to the degree that some may not be willing to carry out missions reasoning that the government is going to let these killers go free anyway so why bother?

I fully emphasise with the families of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and their pain of not knowing what has happened to their sons; however, I can’t support this decision, especially since it involves scum like Samir Kuntar.

‘Kuntar burst into Haran’s apartment building in the dead of night, seizing Smadar Haran’s husband Danny and their daughter Einat, 4 years old. Desperate to save their two-year-old girl Yael, Smadar Haran huddled with her in a crawl space in the attic. “I will never forget the joy and the hatred in the voices [of Kuntar and his men] as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades,” she later recalled in the Washington Post.

“I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed,” she wrote in 2003. “So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. ‘This is just like what happened to my mother,’ I thought.”

Smadar Haran’s personal torture had only begun. She would later learn that Kuntar had dragged her husband Danny and older daughter to the beach nearby, where he shot Danny execution style, making sure that her father’s death would be the last sight her little girl would ever see. Kuntar then took the butt of his assault rifle and brought in down on Einat’s head, crushing it against a rock. Smadar Haran would later recall, “By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her.”

After reading this I hope the decision of whether to support this move morally should be made easier.

Iran Overcompensating For Something

Hezbollah’s done it, now their masters want a piece of the action as well. Iran has decided to visually alter a missile test photo.

The Photoshopped version for comparison:

Photos curtesy of LGF.

“There’s no doubt the photo was doctored,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the Non-Proliferation Program for the London-based International Institute For Strategic Studies. The image, posted yesterday on a website owned by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, showed four missiles moments after launch, leaving trails of glowing exhaust and clouds of billowing brown dust. The scene was described as part of military maneuvers in which nine missiles were test fired, including an enhanced version of the Shahab-3.

The most obvious reason, of course is that there was a misfire, something that most men try to cover up and not talk about.

There was no immediate comment from Iranian government officials on the photos. “The whole purpose of these launches was to demonstrate Iran’s capabilities and a photo showing one out of four rockets failing doesn’t have the intended impact,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.

Of course there is always consequences for such a failure to impress.

Total, the French energy group, said that it was freezing its role in a $US10 billion project to develop the South Pars fields in the Gulf, the world’s largest gas reserves. The decision was a big step in a US campaign to put pressure on Iran to stop enriching uranium.

Dr Rice, who was speaking in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, said that Iran’s missile tests justified US plans for an anti-missile shield with bases in Eastern Europe. Russia is strongly opposed to the plan.

However, maybe protection might not be needed against such a pathetic attempt to make an impact.

Heroes Season 3: Two Rare New Promos!

Hey all, rare new Heroes promo trailers have been revealed and they look amazing!! The coming season looks like it will be one very exciting ride. As Heroes creator Tim Kring said ‘your going to see a lot of bad guys’ and these two trailers give us some insight! Hope you enjoy the vid and keep looking back because more news is coming.

ENJOY!

shkoles

Peres: “It would be very hard to reach an agreement”

Yes this is your one-time burst of sanity from the Israeli government. Shimon Peres, the peacenik that everyone believes he is, actually said something that might be considered intelligent today. He decided that he agreed with ‘…a well-known “dovish” attorney, who said Israel had no chance of reaching an agreement with the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas’ leadership.’ How could this happen to the most famous of all Oslo participants? Maybe he is becoming a little more realistic in his political views?

Well you would be half-right if you believed that. Peres, however, ignores the elephant in the room once again and dismisses the Palestinian Authority National Charter, which believes that:

‘The Palestine National Council, in the name of God, and in the name of the Palestinian Arab people, hereby proclaims the establishment of the State of Palestine on our Palestinian territory with its capital Jerusalem (Al-Quds Ash-Sharif).’

And instead of bringing this up, Peres said ‘…Abbas had no support among his people, no power to carry out security agreements and that any agreement Israel and the PA made crumbled a day later due to the PA’s weakness.’ These reasons that are suggested are all true, but it would not be correct to say that they are the main stumbling blocks in the many negotiations that happen between the PA and Israel. What Peres is missing is the fundamental reason why these negotiations will fail. It is not because the PA has no security forces they can deploy in the West Bank or any other similar problems, this can be fixed. It is because their fundamental beliefs and ideals are against it.