Joseph Finder at the Daily Beast has the scoop on Leon Panetta:

CIA Director Leon Panetta’s emergency testimony to Congress about an illegal assassination program has set off a crisis at the spy agency. The Daily Beast’s Joseph Finder exclusively reports that:

• The secret assassination “program” wasn’t much more than a PowerPoint presentation, a task force and a collection of schemes—it never got off the ground.

• Panetta’s three immediate predecessors—George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden—have spoken to him, and that he now sees that no laws were broken.

• Panetta has frantically tried to rectify his gaffe, but now faces increased Congressional oversight.

For those not previously convinced of Panetta’s ineptitude, this story will completely undermine faith in the director of the CIA. And this is sad news.

Panetta came to the post after many years in government service, most notably as a long-time member of Congress and then as chief of staff for President Bill Clinton. But his tenure in government as a politician, and as the most senior aide to a very political president, indicated that he would carry his partisan ways to his current posting. It should also go without saying that Panetta’s lack of experience in the intelligence sector was deeply worrisome.

The sad irony is that the Obama administration needs strong intelligence agencies. Obama has cut defense spending and generally seems wary of the armed services. This leaves a wide gap, so to speak, for heavy reliance on wide-reaching, covert intelligence agencies.

Obama’s ill-chosen reliance on Leon Panetta speaks volumes about the slipshod way in which vital national-security issues are handled in this administration.

Jack Ross, now blogging at the American Conservative, writes:

This, of course, is sterling proof of the first rule of counter-terrorism — terrorists are sane, rational people, unlike the editors of Commentary magazine.

“Who is Jack Ross?” a friend rhetorically asks. “An old pal of American National Socialist Party leader Bill White and former columnist for neo-Nazi Willis Carto’s newspaper American Free Press.”

The news that CIA Director Leon Panetta has canceled a secret program that would have, if carried out properly, covertly killed top al Qaeda leaders, has dominated recent headlines. That’s right — not the lowly al-Qaeda operatives that American forces have been targeting in Afghanistan for the last eight years, but top leaders who have been elusively traversing the territories of Afghanistan and Pakistan, plotting terrorist attacks against the United States of America at home and abroad.

That a program of this nature exists should be a non-starter. If our intelligence community is not hunting down our enemies, then what exactly are they doing? The real story is that Panetta has not the stomach to implement this program fully. It’s helpful to recall the criticism levied at Obama and Panetta when the nomination for CIA director was announced:

The selection pairs a top military man with a quintessential Washington insider – but that combination appeared to irk some key Senate Democrats, who expressed concern that Panetta does not have an intelligence background. “My position has consistently been that I believe the agency is best-served by having an intelligence professional in charge at this time,” said California Sen. Diane Feinstein, who will oversee Panetta’s confirmation as chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence.

Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), the vice chairman of the committee, also questioned the choice of Panetta. “Job number one at the CIA is to track down and stop terrorists. In a post-9-11 world, intelligence experience would seem to be a prerequisite for the job of CIA Director. While I will reserve final judgment on President-elect Obama’s nomination for the leader of our terror-fighting agency, I will be looking hard at Panetta’s intelligence expertise and qualifications.”

And in a quintessential Washington-insider move, Panetta revealed the secret plans for this program soon after hearing about it. In this case, Senators Feinstein and Bond were exactly right: Leon Panetta is not the right man for the job.

Writing on the website of the American Prospect magazine, Matthew Yglesias writes:

Ahmadinejad is in most ways a classic right-winger, a demagogic nationalist and cultural conservative. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of a Sarah Palin, however, he clothes this right-wing politics in a language of class resentment, painting his more pragmatic and reformist opponents as decadent elites out of touch with ordinary people. Unlike the populists of the American right, however, he merges this rhetoric with something resembling an actual populist economic agenda. The main element has been the use of oil revenue to expand the state sector of the economy in an attempt to distribute wealth more broadly throughout the country. This approach has gained Ahmadinejad a loyal following among the rural poor and public employees, but Iran’s objective economic performance has been disappointing, even during the great oil boom years.

Yes, Yglesias is referring to the same Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who calls for Israel to be wiped off the map, who denies the existence of the Holocaust, who calls Jews (whoops, Zionists) the “true manifestation of Satan,” and so on. But the main distinction between Ahmadinejad from Palin? The former is in favor of redistributing the wealth, which automatically makes him better than Palin in Yglesias’s mind.

Jeff Jacoby’s sober analysis in today’s Boston Globe:

The consensus, it would seem, is overwhelming. As Henri Guaino, a senior adviser to French President Nicolas Sarkozy, put it on Sunday: “Everyone wants peace. The whole world wants a Palestinian state.”

It isn’t going to happen.

International consensus or no, the two-state solution is a chimera. Peace will not be achieved by granting sovereignty to the Palestinians, because Palestinian sovereignty has never been the Arabs’ goal. Time and time again, a two-state solution has been proposed. Time and time again, the Arabs have turned it down.

The entire piece can be read here.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood displays an . . . uncommon degree of modesty:

Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation, is not one to toot his own horn over how much he knows about planes, trains and automobile bailouts. On the contrary.

“I don’t think they picked me because they thought I’d be that great a transportation person,” Mr. LaHood says with refreshing indifference as to how this admission might play if, say, he were ever to bungle a bridge collapse.

[ . . .]

Mr. LaHood posits a theory. “They picked me because of the bipartisan thing,” he explained, “and the Congressional thing, and the friendship thing.”

Competence, it seems, is not the main qualifier for a job in the Obama Administration.

Writing about the most recent developments in the case against two AIPAC lobbyists suspected of espionage, James Kirchick asks: “Will Steve Rosen’s attackers apologize?” He goes on to cite bloggers who have recently attacked Steve Rosen, one of the former-AIPAC lobbyists who will not be prosecuted by the government because he did nothing wrong. I think Kirchick knows very well that most of these bloggers would never do a shameful thing like apologize for accusing an innocent man of being guilty of the crime he did not commit (save Spencer Ackerman’s “tendentious” apology).

But I did not think the response would be this. Matthew Yglesias, one of the original finger pointers, makes his position abundantly clear:

This is almost certainly the right decision. I enjoyed AIPAC getting a black eye, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing if their dealings got somewhat more scrutiny, but the particulars of this case seem an awful lot like an effort to establish a dangerous precedent that can be used in the future against all manner of journalists.

Hmm. He’s right to think that a prosecution of this nature would have had dangerous implications for all journalists — himself included — yet he boasts that he “enjoyed” the injustice while it lasted and hopes for “somewhat more scrutiny” of the wronged party.

The two lobbyists did not break the law and it has been widely speculated that “the whole point of the exercise was obviously an attempt on the part of some people in the FBI to embarrass the pro-Israel lobby.” Simply because they worked for AIPAC, an organization that Yglesias does not like, they deserved a government-administered black eye?

It’s one thing to attack one’s political foe on merit. It’s quite another to relish an injustice. The day has come: a lefty blogger sides with a J. Edgar Hoover-like move by the FBI. One can only speculate that his reasons are as ignoble as the FBI’s.

The discussion featuring John Podhoretz, Bill Kristol and Jonah Goldberg on the future of conservatism and conservative magazines, sponsored by COMMENTARY, has now been posted online.

Time magazine has a photo essay titled “Basra’s Back in Business.” In a collection of 11 photographs, Abbie Trayler-Smith captures a welcome normalcy in the Iraq province. It is a beautiful collection that implicitly — the editors don’t explicitly give credit where it’s due — praises the allied efforts in Basra. A photo essay depicting normalcy in the lives of Iraqi citizens is a welcome sign — and a sign of progress that the media will be more likely to celebrate now that President Bush has left office.

Abe, ANSWER is a shell organization that acts to promote its own socialist agenda. Immediately after September 11, 2001, ANSWER was the first organization to hold an anti-war rally. It saw an opening, a way to capitalize on the defensive measures that would surely follow. Here’s the organization’s national coordinator Brian Becker in a 2007 interview:

“It is about radicalizing people,” Mr. Becker said in an interview. “You hook into a movement that exists — in this case the antiwar movement — and channel people who care about that movement and bring them into political life, the life of political activism.”

With Obama indicating his own commitment to America’s success in Afghanistan, the radical socialist movement will have to find new tactics.

According to the New York Times’s Editorial Board, Benjamin Netanyahu “is serious about being a partner for peace” only if he agrees to and implements their plan of action:

If Mr. Netanyahu is serious about being a partner for peace, he will not get in the way of the militant group Hamas entering a Palestinian unity government with the rival Fatah faction — as long as that government is committed to preventing terrorism and accepts past agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. He will recognize that the United States has its own interests in diplomacy with Syria, Iran and the Palestinians — and allow the Obama administration the freedom to pursue them. He also will not start a preventive war with Iran.

But their suggestions — surely satisfactory to the so-called “pro-Israel, pro-peace movement”— are asinine, and would be destructive to both Israelis and Palestinians if faithfully implemented.

They argue Hamas should be allowed to enter into a “unity government” with Fatah, as long as “that government is committed to preventing terrorism and accepts past agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.”

The problem is, of course, Hamas is a terrorist group. To call Hamas a “militant group,” as the Times does, is to ponder an alternative universe. So, in order for the suggestion to be implemented, Hamas would have to change its own mission and goal — the destruction of the Jewish State — to what the Times supposes its mission to be.

There’s another problem: Hamas and Fatah are engaged in a violent—but under-reported—civil war. And yet another: neither Hamas nor Fatah recognizes the state of Israel.

The Times should untangle its own analytic knots before prescribing a plan for Middle East peace.

UPDATE: Commenting on this same editorial, Carl in Jerusalem uncovers something even more disturbing:

But the Times’ most hideous demand is the penultimate one. The Times calls on Netanyahu to “recognize that the United States has its own interests in diplomacy with Syria, Iran and the Palestinians — and allow the Obama administration the freedom to pursue them.” For anyone who missed it, the implication is that Israel, via the mysterious and powerful ‘Israel Lobby,’ controls the United States and can prevent the Obama administration from pursuing its own interests in diplomacy with Syria, Iran and the ‘Palestinians.’ Does the Times really believe that? If so, American Jewry had better start packing its bags.

A tip of the hit to commenter FinanceDoc.

In a New York Times article about CNBC, the authors write:

The network’s journalists have been encouraged to speak their minds, making the line between reporter and commentator almost indistinguishable at times.

You don’t say.

I happened to be in Jerusalem last July when a terrorist first utilized a bulldozer to attack civilians. In reaction, I wrote on this blog,

with 3 dead and 57 wounded, a silver lining is difficult to find. But if there’s one, it must be that this attack was not more severe. The terrorist’s means seem to have been limited. Jabr Duwait, the attacker, used a Caterpillar, meant to be used for construction projects, as his murder weapon. This suggests that the Israeli Defense Force is successfully limiting the influx of violent, more deadly, armament–e.g. guns and bombs.

Yesterday, another attack of this kind occurred: a bulldozer indiscriminately targeting anyone in its path was driven down a  Jerusalem street. The police and other security personnel were prepared and thus able to neutralize the threat before anyone could be murdered. Only two people were injured, which sounds miraculous considering the driver rammed his bulldozer into a bus filled with school children. The attack was, as the Jerusalem Post notes, “the fourth of its kind in the capital in eight months.”

The best news — if it can even be called that — is what has not happened in the last eight months. There have been neither homicide bombings nor any shooting rampages in Israel’s capital.

Hamas continues to launch rockets into southern Israel, and the necessity of future Gaza operations remains an open question, but one may find some solace in the fact that Israel’s domestic terrorists have been left with little more than construction equipment for weapons.

On January 4, 2007, Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker of House of Representatives, whereupon she delivered these words:

I accept this gavel in the spirit of partnership, not partisanship, and I look forward to working with you Mr. Boehner and the Republicans in the Congress on behalf of the American people.

[…]

And the American people told us they expected us to work together for fiscal responsibility, with the highest ethical standards and with civility and bipartisanship.

After years of historic deficits, this 110th Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: pay as you go, no new deficit spending. Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt.

But that was then;  Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post brings us Nancy Pelosi now:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has a message for House Republicans who think they weren’t given enough time to debate or amend the stimulus package that moved through Congress over an eight-day period earlier this session: You could have had much less.

[…]

Republican objections that they were not included and didn’t approve of the process through which the stimulus was passed, said Pelosi, only mask ideological differences that they had with the bill. “We gave them the regular order,” said Pelosi. “We were not going to go backward and adopt their economic failed policies and that’s what they’re upset about.”

No word on whether she’s giving the gavel back.

Abe, you are right to point out the Obama Administration’s shortcomings in dealing with, well, just about every foreign government so far. But there is another aspect of this secretive Russia deal that seems typical, at least for those of us who followed the election campaign closely. Here’s the Washington Post’s report:

Medvedev’s spokeswoman, Natalya Timakova, said the letter from Obama “contained an assessment of the situation, but there were no concrete proposals about any mutually binding decisions,” Reuters reported.

This is, of course, reminiscent of Obama’s campaign — with its vague and non-committal proposals for win-win situations. If this is how the administration is dealing with the Russians, I shudder to think of  his appeals to the Iranians.

The State Department has announced Ambassador Stephen Bosworth as the Administration’s Special Representative for North Korea Policy. Bosworth is currently dean of the Fletcher School, and according to the school’s website, despite his governmental appointment, he will keep his day job:

The Fletcher School is proud to announce that Dean Stephen W. Bosworth has been named the United States’ special envoy on North Korea. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton officially announced Bosworth’s appointment at a press conference in Seoul on February 20th, following a meeting with South Korean Foreign Minister Yu Myung Hwanduring.

Bosworth brings decades of foreign policy experience to the position—one that he will hold while continuing his role as Dean of The Fletcher School.

Pardon my ignorance, but since when was the position of Special Representative to North Korea relegated to only a part-time job? Considering the ever growing threat North Korea poses to world stability, the calls claiming that the State Department’s North Korean policy is naïve should only grow louder.

One outlet that’s particularly keen on holding President Obama to his pledge to withdraw troops from Iraq within his first sixteen months is the Iranian-government backed Press TV. In an article published on its website, Press TV lambastes the newly sworn in president for meeting with Pentagon officials and not imploring the Department of Defense to stick with his campaign pledge:

During Obama’s first meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon last week, he did not mention a 16-month timeline, according to officials who were present.

Well, this is reassuring. Here’s a general rule for the Obama administration: When the tyrants agree with you, be alarmed. But as long as they continue to worry about the presence of American troops, and America’s commitment to a fledgling democracy, you’re on the right side of things.

Successful elections were held today in many Iraqi provinces. Instead of succumbing to the pressures of radical Islamist forces, all signs indicate that today’s voters swarmed the polls despite the known threat of terrorist attacks on polling stations and on voters. The outcomes are not yet known, but I am cautiously optimistic that today signals a strong step in the right direction.

The British Telegraph reports:

The last time Iraqis voted the city was an al-Qaeda stronghold and its mosques issued bloodcurdling warnings to stay away from the polls. On Saturday clerics were using the loudspeakers once again, but this time urging the town’s population to vote.

As a result, turnout seemed as high in Fallujah as elsewhere in the country as many of Iraq’s 15 million voters took part in local elections held in 14 of the country’s 18 provinces – everywhere except Kurdistan and the city of Kirkuk. More than 14,000 candidates stood for 440 seats in what could prove to be a turning point in Iraq’s recent bloody history.

The Campaigning was peaceful by recent Iraqi standards, and the Iraqi police and army forces provided all the security without calling on Coalition backup.

The election, then, appears not only to have been a sign of democratic success, but also a signal that Iraqi security forces are able to maintain peace. All this is preliminary, since the election ended only a few hours ago, but it is surely worth noting.

The Telegraph article, however, buries the lede in the penultimate paragraph: “Jobs and housing were the main issues in the election.”

A turn to domestic politics, away from the dominant focus on security, is without a doubt the best news of all.

The inimitable David Frum closes his “Diary” at National Review Online and opens his new website, NewMajority.com, with these words:

In the months ahead, conservatives and Republicans will face the most adverse political environment since the middle 1960s. At the same time, the current economic crisis raises some of the most searching intellectual problems conservatives have faced since their rise as a coherent intellectual movement. How did we get into this mess? How do we get out? And perhaps above all: Why did American incomes stagnate so dismally on our watch, even before the crisis struck?

The work ahead is difficult. As ever, it is difficulty that brings out the best in individuals and in political movements. I look forward eagerly to working through those difficulties together with you, our readers and (I hope) future commenters – and with the brilliant band of colleagues and associates who will be posting at NewMajority.com

NewMajority will surely be a daily read for me, and I encourage everyone to check it out.

The JTA reports that “a rudimentary explosive device” failed to detonate at its intended target: “the entrance of the Chabad House in Florence.” At this point, it is unclear who targeted the Florence Chabad House — a crazy individual or a coordinated group. Either way, Israel’s defensive incursion into Gaza may have exposed a sentiment shared by many around the world.

One can infer that those motivated to bomb a Chabad house in Italy because of Israel’s military actions are not acting on anti-Israel sentiment alone but on deeply felt  anti-Semitism, as the report suggests that the targeting of the Chabad house in Florence fits into an emerging pattern in Italy:

Tensions are high in Italy over Israel’s operation in Gaza. Last week, red paint was thrown at the façade of the synagogue in Pisa. On Saturday, thousands of people, many of them Muslim, staged a pro-Palestinian march in Rome. Some of the placards showed swastikas superimposed on the Star of David.

It is important, also, not to forget who Israel is targeting in Gaza: some of the greatest anti-Semites in the world. To side with Hamas, against Israel, is not a sign of dissent from Israel’s policies, but of something far deeper and far more troubling.

In an interesting report on Leon Panetta’s role in implementing President Bill Clinton’s extraordinary rendition program, Washington Times reporter Eli Lake brings to light a worrisome endorsement of Panetta for CIA Director:

Samuel R. Berger, who was deputy national security adviser in the first Clinton term and national security adviser in the second, also would not comment on Mr. Panetta’s role, apart from praising him as “someone with tremendous integrity who will have the confidence of the president” and who was “a consumer of intelligence at the highest level” when he served Mr. Clinton.

As one might recall, it would be entirely inappropriate to suggest that Berger himself is “someone with tremendous integrity.” This is the same man, after all, who was caught sneaking sensitive national security documents out of the National Archives. Berger’s endorsement of Panetta’s character hardly reassures those skeptical of Obama’s nominee.

Here is how Pennsylvania State University’s Daily Collegian described yesterday’s student protest of the war in Gaza:

Waving vibrant Palestinian flags and holding head-turning signs, students and community members gathered Wednesday at the Allen Street gates to protest the conflict in Gaza.

About 20 protesters braved frigid weather to brandish signs such as “You can’t bomb a resistance out of existence” and “Use tax $$$ for jobs, not bombs in Gaza.”

Chants of “Free, free Palestine” echoed in the street and protesters passed around a megaphone, loudly declaring their beliefs.

“We will not allow the media and government to brainwash people into believing that some lives are more important and valuable than others,” shouted a female demonstrator.

But on the social networking website Facebook.com, the event was advertised in a manner more revealing of the group’s true aims:

As many of you may already know, the people of Gaza are undergoing a massacre at the hands of their Israeli oppressors. For the past two weeks, Israel has been continuously attacking the strip in its insane attempt at annihilating Hamas, the beacon of the Palestinian resistance.

In the process of doing this, not only have they killed hundreds of our brothers in arms, but they also have indiscriminately massacred civilians. The death toll is already more than 700, dozens of whom are civilians, making it one of the bloodiest, most inhumane episodes in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

So, according to Students for Justice in Palestine — the sponsoring group — Hamas is “the beacon of the Palestinian resistance.” This student group, which pretends to “promote justice, human rights, liberation, and self-determination for the Palestinian people,” regards the terrorist group as its “brother in arms.”

This is nothing short of sickening.

The Guardian newspaper gives voice to Hamas’s minister of health, Basim Naim. It is, to say the least, the admittance of a particularly low-level of journalistic standards. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” But now we know — as if we did not already know — that the Guardian’s editors will provide a podium for representatives of murderous terrorist organizations to spread lies in the service of PR.

Here is one of Naim’s more fatuous assertions:

Now that their massacres of women and children and their destruction of schools and mosques have been exposed before the world, the Zionists’ propaganda machine is trying to discredit our liberation struggle more desperately than ever.

At what point is a building with desks and blackboards no longer considered a school? Perhaps when the same building  also hosts rocket launchers, and other war-related munitions, and is used as a base from which to fire indiscriminately at Israeli civilians. This is the well known strategy Hamas employs. By turning areas guaranteed to be filled with civilians into launching pads, the terrorist organization only hopes that Israel will fire back, kill women and children, and make it onto the front covers of newspapers around the world. And this is a struggle for liberation?

Last weekend, writing in the Los Angeles Times, Alan Dershowitz asked, when will Hamas be held accountable for its own war crimes? I second that question, and add one of my own. Firing rockets from schools, mosques, and hospitals imperils the Palestinian people. When will those who consider themselves to be pro-Palestinian stand up to Hamas, the force  most responsible for bringing havoc to the Palestinian people?

Here is another one of Naim’s lies:

And from the beginning of our struggle, Hamas has always insisted that its operations are restricted to the field of battle, Palestine itself.

Naim is, of course, referring to Israel, as there is no country called “Palestine.” Yet, this fact  obviously escaped the editors of the Guardian. Additionally, Hamas’s founding charter “commits the group to the destruction of Israel, the replacement of the PA with an Islamist state on the West Bank and Gaza, and to raising ‘the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine.’” With the publication of Naim’s opinion, the Guardian has demonstrated—at the very least—a frightening ambivalence toward the destructiveness of Hamas’s long-held agenda.

According to Jonathan Clarke, in an article appearing on the BBC’s website yesterday, the big loser in the 2008 election was neoconservatism. After finding friends in the Bush White House, including Vice-President Dick Cheney himself, Clarke asserts, neoconservatism’s allies have been voted out of Washington by the American electorate who now favor the realism on which President-Elect Barack Obama campaigned.

It would be presumptuous to access the staying power of neoconservatism among the American electorate at this time, but there is little question that since winning the election last November, the President-Elect has begun to see at least some of the wisdom in neoconservative thought.

Only yesterday, as Abe  noted on this blog, Vice-President Elect Joe Biden affirmed a continuation of Bush’s strategy in Iraq for at least the next three years. And, a major campaign talking point, and one that continues to dominate Obama’s foreign policy plan, is the commitment of more American troops to fight in Afghanistan.

Clarke notes that, “the epitaph of neoconservatism has been written before – prematurely, as it turned out, in the 1980s.”

Indeed. Hours after the article’s publication, President-Elect Barack Obama himself went some way toward shelving this most recent obituary by dining with several of America’s leading neoconservatives. The ideas of  Bill Kristol, David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer clearly carry enough weight to warrant a personal powwow with the President-elect.

Obama is not a neoconservative (nor was President George W. Bush or Vice-President Cheney, for that matter), but the apparent incorporation of neoconservative thought into his foreign policy prescriptions leaves Clarke’s thesis looking a little worse for the wear.

Many of Israel’s most vocal critics are big on pointing out that their criticism is not anti-Semitic, but anti-Israel. Oftentimes their disapproval of the Jewish state is matched in fervor only by their moral indignation at being labeled a Jew-hater. In yesterday’s OC Register, Mark Steyn offers a little survey of the anti-Israel goings on around the globe:

In Toronto, anti-Israel demonstrators yell “You are the brothers of pigs!,” and a protester complains to his interviewer that “Hitler didn’t do a good job.”

In Fort Lauderdale, Palestinian supporters sneer at Jews, “You need a big oven, that’s what you need!”

In Amsterdam, the crowd shouts, “Hamas, Hamas! Jews to the gas!”

In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year’s Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from Jan. 1, 2009, but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast “accidentally.”

In Toulouse, a synagogue is firebombed; in Bordeaux, two kosher butchers are attacked; at the Auber RER train station, a Jewish man is savagely assaulted by 20 youths taunting, “Palestine will kill the Jews”; in Villiers-le-Bel, a Jewish schoolgirl is brutally beaten by a gang jeering, “Jews must die.”

In Helsingborg, Sweden, the congregation at a synagogue takes shelter as a window is broken and burning cloths thrown in. in Odense, principal Olav Nielsen announces that he will no longer admit Jewish children to the local school after a Dane of Lebanese extraction goes to the shopping mall and shoots two men working at the Dead Sea Products store. in Brussels, a Molotov cocktail is hurled at a synagogue; in Antwerp, Netherlands, lit rags are pushed through the mail flap of a Jewish home; and, across the Channel in Britain, “youths” attempt to burn the Brondesbury Park Synagogue.

In London, the police advise British Jews to review their security procedures because of potential revenge attacks. The Sun reports “fears” that “Islamic extremists” are drawing up a “hit list” of prominent Jews, including the Foreign Secretary, Amy Winehouse’s record producer and the late Princess of Wales’ divorce lawyer. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that Islamic nonextremists from the British Muslim Forum, the Islamic Foundation and other impeccably respectable “moderate” groups have warned the government that the Israelis’ “disproportionate force” in Gaza risks inflaming British Muslims, “reviving extremist groups,” and provoking “UK terrorist attacks” – not against Amy Winehouse’s record producer and other sinister members of the International Jewish Conspiracy but against targets of, ah, more general interest.

In the days, weeks, and months to come, the Jewish people around the world are at risk because  Israel is defending its right to exist.