Song for the Eurozone

All we are saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaying... is give Greece to France!

Dark Gray Dawn in Libya

The killing of Colonel Qaddafi is well deserved, a balm to the souls of this horrible dictator's many victims and their relatives, and was absolutely essential to end the civil war he dragged his country into. But in the celebrations we run the risk of overlooking the fact that the prospects for building a decent society in Libya are pretty grim. The recent attempt by the Libyan-born Jew David Gerbi to reopen a synagogue in Tripoli, which nearly ended with his lynching, is a harbinger of how the new regime and the corrupted society Qaddafi left behind are likely to deal with other ethnic and religious minorities. For that matter, the death of Qaddafi itself, however well deserved, bears a certain ugly resemblance to the fate of Nicolae Ceauşescu of late unlamented memory. That is, the successor regime in Libya, as in 1989 Romania, is dominated by rats from the ancien regime who jumped ship when they saw it was sinking, and doubtless wanted the dictator silenced so he could not take them down with him by exposing their own crimes in his service. The night of Qaddafi’s evil is over, but the dawn is a very gray one indeed.

PA President Abbas Condemns Israel's Existence

Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, has just given a speech in Ramallah confirming that he intends to create yet another unnecessary crisis that will be a disaster above all for his people by going to the UN Security Council to demand unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state (and never mind that this is also a violation of the Oslo Accords leading to the creation of the Palestinian Authority itself). Note that Abbas talked about "63 years living under the occupation." That is, for him "the occupation" began in 1948, when Israel was created, and not in 1967, when Israel took over the West Bank in the war caused by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's threats of a war of extermination against the Jewish State. Even for the leader of the so-called Palestinian moderates, the real problem is Israel's existence and not the disposition of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The fact that Abbas also pretended to accept Israel's legitmacy in the same speech merely shows that he is a master of double-talk.

Lying for Peace

At about 2 p.m. EDT on September 14, the headline on the lead story of the "left-wing" Israeli daily Haaretz's online edition read, "PLO official: Palestinian state to be free of Jews." This was based on an earlier USA Today article with an almost identical headline: "PLO ambassador says Palestinian state should be free of Jews." By 4 p.m., Haaretz had evidently decided to protect its readers from the unpleasant truth, changing the headline to read: "PLO official: Palestinians, Israelis must be totally separated."

Question for the editorial board of Haaretz, which recently saw fit to write about the detention and intrusive body searches of Israelis arriving in Istanbul aboard Turkish Airlines, "Perhaps Israelis need humiliation to respect others:" Do you really think your lies will bring peace?

Mel Gibson: Just Call Him Jew-Dah Maccabee!