Pigs airborne? EU chief declares Hamas to blame for the war

Yesterday I was discussing the never-ending wails over Israel’s use of white phosphorus, while those same people ignored how Israel used it.

From a longtime favorite Hamasi concubine:

Controversial as it is, white phosphorus is not illegal, at least in an open battlefield setting, where it is used to mask troop movements, or set on fire areas of high brush that need clearing.

But the international convention on the use of incendiary weapons says it should not be used where there is a possibility of hitting civilians.

It’s interesting to note how selectively they cite International Humanitarian Law when it assumes the shape of a square peg in their round hole. Courtesy Jawa Report, what the BBC left out:

The presence or movements of the civilian population or individual civilians shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations. The Parties to the conflict shall not direct the movement of the civilian population or individual civilians in order to attempt to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield military operations.

So imagine my surprise when I read this from the same BBC:

Humanitarian aid chief Louis Michel called the destruction left by Israel’s offensive “abominable”, but said Hamas bore “overwhelming responsibility“.

He said there would be no dialogue with with the “terrorist” movement until it gave up violence and recognised Israel.

“It is abominable, indescribable,” Mr Michel told reporters after touring some of the worst-hit places of Israel’s 22-day assault which killed about 1,300 Palestinians, including 400 children. Thirteen Israelis were also killed in the conflict.

“At this time we have to also recall the overwhelming responsibility of Hamas,” he said.

“I intentionally say this here – Hamas is a terrorist movement and it has to be denounced as such.”

The former Belgian foreign minister insisted there would be no dialogue with Hamas, and its use of terrorism against Israeli civilians meant it was not a legitimate resistance movement.

I wonder how long until Michel gets reassigned?

Winter power outage

Just when I was contemplating the undesirable need to wake up my small son for school–I had a late education class last night and we practically dove into bed right after we came home–I got a phone call reporting slick roads and school closures. I was kind of glad because it allowed me to escape having to wake up a tired boy who tends to need a lot of sleep…but I also felt a strange sense of awe. As in, “How odd.”

Alaska doesn’t seem to get many “snow days.” I know Washington, D.C. shuts down if there’s more than an inch of snow on the ground, but in here if we shut down schools or operations for bad weather we’d lose a functioning city. That said, “bad weather” is relative. To us, it just doesn’t happen all that often. Recently it was “quite cold” (we had minus 20 for an extended period of time) and as soon as it warmed up (true to Alaska fashion shooting up to the other end of the extreme as opposed to day by day warming) the first thing everybody knew to expect was a bunch of snow. I guess we didn’t expect it to be rainy, at least not yet, rainy enough to make driving conditions quite dangerous.

Well, the rest of the nation must expect it of us as well, as I never hear on the news of “mounds of snow in Alaska,” as opposed to places like Minnesota, where it somehow qualifies as news.

As I was musing the odds of this situation, the power went out. My newfangled phone, the cordless type with the digital answering machine attached to the main base (with two other smaller base locations around the house), went dead. After the initial, “Whoa,” I admit I got a bit serious because I thought about the woman whose story made the news recently. She had shot a would-be repeat rapist who returned to her home, this time cutting the power in her house. Between the pitch dark of winter mornings in Alaska and the loss of even the light from my laptop, it struck me how dark it really is with absolutely no light. And then I realised how handicapped I was because even though I’m equipped with plenty of candles and a couple of flashlights, the candles and matches are in my kitchen, flashlight in my laundry room.

Eventually I turned the laptop back on, since only the Internet was out, and used the light from it to make my way to the kitchen for candles to find my flashlight. (I couldn’t see what I was doing in the laundry room.) Once I had myself set up back in my room, little Walkman radio plugged into my ears, I thought, “What now?” I listened for awhile to news of brownouts through the city and thinning traffic slowed to a crawl.

About ten minutes later the power returned; my son had slept through all the “excitement.” Pity, I had been hoping to occupy some of our time with a few rounds of “Trouble,” a game he got for Christmas and one which even I find slightly addicting.

So what to do with our day? Well, I’ll probably do much of the same I had planned for myself: lots of classwork and a bit of cleaning up around the house–with slight alterations to account for the presence of my boy. As for the little guy, well, he sleeps still as I type this. But, given how cold it was over Christmas vacation (even too cold for us, who kept our children indoors much of the time) and how warm it is now, I hear the snowpants crinkling already.

Finally: IDF launches own blog

Hopefully the Israel Defense Forces won’t have to deal with anything that seeks to shut this down. They still maintain a YouTube account, and provide a link to it in their “About” section; it can also be accessed via a short pathway from the top of the page. A day or so ago word was making the rounds that YouTube had deleted at least one of their videos, citing its graphic content as a poor excuse. Perhaps the negative publicity has made YouTube more wary of their blatant discriminatory practices?