Pat Oliphant

I call him Netanyahoo because of that thing about Beelzebub. Mel Ott was the real Lord of the Flies.

Odd numbers

Yesterday, there were exactly the same number of people on the Mall in Washington, D.C. as used to live in Gaza. Today there's somewhat fewer.

Twenty five, another odd number — Ramon Mercado, at the Cyclone Go Club at Iowa State University, told me everything I need to know about breaking out of the 20 kyu levels. His advice was to memorize the first 25 moves of Shusaku's games. He also said it only takes a year to get to 9 kyu. "A game of golf takes two hours..."

Gazing at Gaza

So far, my favorite bullshit excuse for killing Palestinians was Ariel Sharon's dog-in-the-manger moment at Al-Aqsa, which followed Yasser Arafat's jubilation aboard the fishing boat Jandelay (September 27, 2000) when an offshore natural gas well went online in Gaza territorial waters. Thus British Gas reaped the heady rewards of pouring venture capital into Palestine.

For some reason that bit of history reminds me of Barbary Macaques at Gibraltar. Or the opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Mene mene tekel upharsin Redux

The handwriting on the wall... Israel's slim chances depend on avoiding global economic recession, right? Since that's unlikely, expensive military adventures in Gaza — and the cheap temporary halo-polishing about West Bank settlements which invariably precedes IDF actions somewhere — mean Israel falls into economic Götterdammerung.

Guns and butter, right? Found wanting in the scales of common sense, world justice, strategy and tactics, the result can only be political ruin, national collapse when the Palestinian-controlled Knesset dissolves the state of Israel, and absorption into Iran by intense regional indifference. (Nobody really wants the Palestinians, remember?)

Heck, even if Bernie Madow were a secret agent of AIPAC siphoning billions of American dollars to Tel Aviv and nobly taking the rap as a lovable scamp scam artist, there aren't enough legitimate cash flows connecting Israel to the world to keep the Zionist golem alive. So Gaza is a gamble, and Hamas, like Hezbollah, like Osama bin Laden is simply waiting for the inevitable last twitch.

Bin Laden's nuts. He tells you what his strategy is, and expects your arrogance to ignore the input.

Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository

Al Jazeera has video anyone can use.

The Israeli Children's Crusade in Gaza

A few days ago, below the fold in the local newspaper, there was a picture of a Palestinian boy crying at some relative's funeral. It didn't seem very much like the heartwrenching images that prompt me to sympathy with Palestine; those are usually, but not always, girls, deeply stoic and blood-streaked. Then I realized where the discordant note was coming from.

These propaganda photos have many fathers. Some, the most affecting because they show the truth, come from Al Jazeerah and its ilk. Others, like the boy, come from the disengenuous, the liars and the mockers, for whom that kid in the paper was just a crybaby Palestinian brat being taught a well-deserved lesson by the sternly even-handed IDF.

Maybe my cynicism has become tinged with prejudice? I tried to find the picture of that boy on the Internet, but I couldn't. Instead, and this stuff can't be faked, I saw photographs of dead children with missing bits of skull and brains slopped out of their natural containers onto the ground. You don't see brains much these days — it's not a popular variety meat at the butcher's counter. But once you've seen the brawn laid out on butcher's paper, you know what that stuff leaking out of children's heads is.

It's not news, of course. Only obscene.

Sowing the Wind