IRIS Blog

CNN viewership has dropped another 19% this year. The traditional explanation, that viewers are leaving because of expanding choice including the Internet, is easily disprovable. Fox News, which is indeed fair and balanced, is up 32% over the same period. There are three areas where leftists are refusing to adapt despite failure: news, politics (cf. Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic party) and movies. Michael Medved's 1992 thesis in Hollywood vs. America has been recently proven. G-rated movies are eleven times as profitable as R-rated ones.

The first major filmmaker to avoid liberal propaganda and develop a brand for simply entertaining stories will be enormously profitable. It looks like this may be Pixar, because they focus on G-rated entertainment. There certainly are politically correct messages, but they are less blatant than most.

This means two things: Gaza's terrorist capabilities will accelerate (Egypt has turned a blind eye to Egypt-Gaza arms smuggling) and the Sinai will become remilitarized, ending the major concession won by Israel in ceding the Sinai to Egypt in 1979.

See: Egyptian Military on Gaza Border Threatens Israel's 'Edge'

From the Jerusalem Post

The cause of the afternoon incident was not immediately clear, although police were checking whether the man carried out the act in protest over Israel's pullout from Gaza. Earlier this month, an Israeli woman killed herself in such a protest act.

Update: It was a disengagement protest.

Thanks for the plug, Biur Chametz!

Information Regarding Israel's Security (IRIS) was one of the first grassroots organizations to distribute electronic updates on news from Israel to recipients around the world. Launched in 1993 via fax and e-mail, IRIS begin with a series of PLO quote sheets and progressed from there to news briefs and occasional essays.

The website followed shortly thereafter, and over the years IRIS has developed a permanent collection of resources which are hard to locate elsewhere. Most noticeable are the maps of Israel's security situation, Israel's comparative size, and the (over-) generous territorial offers Prime Minister Ehud Barak made in 2000. Also available is a set of background documents on the PLO, including its infamous charter and phased plan.

IRIS has been largely dormant for the past five years, leaving some of its material unfortunately out of date. In anticipation of the imminent implementation of disengagement, however, the IRIS staff have finally gotten their act together. This time, naturally, the medium is the blog.

The IRIS blog, edited by former Israeli radio host Barak (no relation to Ehud Barak!), is now live with frequent updates. For a site on Israeli security, the subject matter is unexpectedly diverse.

Experts Say It's Important For School Kids To Eat Healthy

by Dore Gold

Oslo didn't create a Palestinian state, but it would be hard to argue that by the mid-1990s, with Arafat ruling the Palestinians, that the Palestinians were under Israeli military occupation.

Indeed, back in 1994, the legal advisor to the International Red Cross, Dr. Hans-Peter Gasser, proposed that his organization had no reason to monitor Israeli compliance with the Fourth Geneva Convention in the Gaza Strip and Jericho area, since the convention no longer applied with the advent of Palestinian administration in those areas.7 At best, the Palestinians could argue that Oslo placed them in an ambiguous legal position, since they themselves exercised most of the functions of government, while Israel only maintained a few residual powers.

See also:
Israel Braces for PA Blitz at UN

From the Washington Post

From the Boston Globe:

A Rhode Island lawyer trying to collect a $116 million terrorism judgment against the Palestinian Authority has obtained a court-ordered freeze on all its US-based assets, severely limiting most Palestinian economic and diplomatic activities in the United States at a critical moment for the fledgling government.

The frozen assets include US holdings in a $1.3 billion Palestinian investment fund meant to finance economic development as well as bank accounts used to pay Palestinian representatives in Washington, according to lawyers and court documents filed in Rhode Island, Washington, D.C., and New York. Also frozen are about $30 million in assets from the Palestinian Monetary Authority, the Palestinian equivalent of the US Federal Reserve.

Providence attorney David Strachman, who is representing the orphaned children of a couple killed in Israel by Palestinian militants, has also initiated a court action to seize and sell the Palestinian-owned building in New York that serves as the Palestine Liberation Organization observer mission to the United Nations.

The aggressive collection effort comes as the Palestinian Authority is struggling to create economic opportunity and set up a viable government. Now, Palestinian officials say, the unpaid claim in the Rhode Island court, resulting from a 2004 ruling, threatens to complicate their efforts to become a credible emerging state.

Can anyone detect whose side the reporter is on?

Update: Soccer Dad has a thorough roundup of anti-terrorist lawsuits.

A must-read on how the conventional wisdom on Iran is wrong:

-Iran is grossly misunderstood in the West. Given headlines in Europe and America, you would think that the crisis in relations is about nuclear weapons. But the real cause is far broader: Iran's determination to reshape the Middle East in its own image ? a deliberate "clash of civilizations" with the United States.

-This is bound up with a second misconception about Iran, the idea that the regime is divided between "conservatives" who oppose accommodation with America and the West, and "moderates" more inclined to return their country to the community of nations. The real power in Iran, punctuated by the ascent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president, is now the Revolutionary Guards.

-During the past few years, the Guards have in many ways become the government. Ibrahim Asgharzadeh, a former IRGC officer, says this new military-political elite has staged a creeping coup d'etat. The Guards built an impressive grass-roots network throughout Iran and created two political-front organizations: the Usulgara (fundamentalists) and the Itharis (self-sacrificers), each attracting a younger generation of military officers, civil servants, managers and intellectuals.

-Ahmadinejad's victory is the beginning of the end of the clerics' dominance. He is the first non-mullah to become president since 1981. The holder of a Ph.D., he is also the best educated of the six Islamic presidents so far. He can be expected to be a far more formidable enemy of the West ? and of America in particular.

-Recently Ahmadinejad announced one of the most ambitious government mission statements in decades, declaring that the ultimate goal of Iran's foreign policy is nothing less than "a government for the whole world" under the leadership of the Mahdi, the Absent Imam of the Shiites ? code for the export of radical Islam. As for the only power capable of challenging this vision, the United States is in its "last throes," an ofuli (sunset) power destined to be superceded by the toluee (sunrise) of the Islamic republic. Geopolitical dominance in the Middle East, the tract unequivocally stated, is "the incontestable right of the Iranian nation."

Summarized by the Presidents Conference Daily Alert

From the New Scientist

A must-read by Daniel Pipes.

The trial of the lone survivor of last year's Beslan school terrorist atrocity has begun. At least 172 of the 344 people killed in the Islamist terror operation were children.

This is a must-read because:

-Hamas has distributed posters and tapes throughout PA-controlled territory, turning the mastermind of the Beslan operation into a heroic martyr.

-The mainstream media attempted to cover up the fact that the perpetrators were Islamists who clearly saw themselves as part of the Global Jihad.

-This is part of a pattern of Jihad operations in which brutal rape is a motif. (e.g. in Darfur: "Each of us was raped by between three and six men?.One woman refused to have sex with them, so they split her head into pieces with an axe in front of us.") Islamists find ample justification for this in the Koran.

-Because Israel has expertise with child terror, victims were airlifted to hospitals in Israel. All costs were picked up by a Jewish charity.

Here are some excerpts:

A 10-year-old boy testified Thursday, August 25th in the trial of the one lone terrorist to be captured alive after the siege in Beslan. One of the female terrorists ... told us that if she found a phone on anyone, that person would be killed and three more people near him or her would be killed too.

Malik Kalchakeyev, 14, speaking slowly and in great detail, told of how the schoolchildren and their parents were herded into the school's gym, how the attackers stopped providing water and how they taunted the exhausted hostages, often forcing them to stand and sit quickly in the hot, crowded gym.

"On the second day, we were all very thirsty. Women told us, the boys, to pee into plastic bottles so that the children could then drink our pee," the boy said, bursting into tears. "I peed into a bottle, and small children -- even babies -- drank it."

Alan Kochiyev, 13, told how the attackers shot a hostage in the gym. He also recalled how they forced a boy sitting next to him to stand up and threatened to shoot him if the hostages did not keep quiet.

A 17-year-old girl testified that the hostage takers gave a bucket of water to one boy and told him to give it only to the children. They said that if any adult drank the water, they would shoot the boy.

Here are some additional details about the atrocity:

One gunman, whose pockets were stuffed with grenades, held up the corpse of a man just shot in front of hundreds of hostages and warned: "If a child utters even a sound, we?ll kill another one."

After more than 24 hours in the sweltering heat of the school gymnasium in Beslan, one of the boys trapped inside could not take it any longer.

Summoning up his courage, he approached a hostage taker with a bayonet fixed to his assault rifle and asked him for a drink. It was probably the worst error that he could have made.

?Instead of giving him water, he drove his bayonet through the boy?s body,? said Stanislav Tsarakhov, 10, another captive standing nearby. ?I don?t know if he died.?

On the last day of the siege the terrorists did not allow anyone to use the bathroom.

Some children ate plants that were in the building, because they were so hungry.

When the hostages tried to escape as the storming took place they were shot in the back, one of the hostages claims that one of the terrorists who was shooting was smiling as the children were falling.

From the Jerusalem Post

Rich Richman has the story.

By a 41%-31% margin, Israelis surveyed agree that "disengagement brings terror not peace." 51% believe Sharon should retire now versus 40% who are in favor of him continuing in political life.

We told you this would happen.