IRIS Blog

God bless America:

Lots of lottery winners announce they're quitting the workforce as soon as they get their hands on the prize money.

That's not the case with Wayne Leyde.

The 26-year-old, who won $1 million when he scratched off a ticket Tuesday near his home in Mead, Wash., tells ABC News that he plans to park his winnings in the bank and volunteer for a third tour in Iraq.

The Palestinians believe they have found the way to destroy Israel--raise the heat slowly. For now.

The Israeli city of Ashkelon, located 17 kilometers (11 miles) from Gaza, was hit by several Iranian-made Grad (Katyusha) rockets on Thursday fired by Hamas militants in Gaza. One hit an apartment building, slicing through the roof and three floors below, and another landed near a school, wounding a 17-year-old girl.

After Thursday's rocket attacks on Ashkelon, Israel activated its "Code Red" rocket warning system there. Israel hesitated to activate the system because officials didn't want to send 120,000 people running for shelter every time a rocket was launched in the direction of the city. The army is now considering installing more radars near Ashkelon so that the system will be able to better analyze the course of an incoming rocket and warn only the residents of the target neighborhood, rather than the whole city, defense officials said Thursday.

Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy defense mister, said Friday, "We're getting close to using our full strength. Until now, we've used a small percentage of the army's power because of the nature of the territory." Israel does not intend to launch a major ground offensive in the next week or two, partly because the military prefers to wait for better weather, defense officials said. But the army has now completed its preparations and informed the government it's ready to move immediately when the order is given.

Yet another find confirming the Biblical claims about ancient Jerusalem. This story contains an interesting twist. Jews apparently innovated in the importance of individual names, just as the Hebrew Bible is the only document of national significance in the ancient world that assigned importance to the names of anyone other than royalty:

An ancient seal bearing an archaic Hebrew inscription dating back to the 8th century BCE has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem's City of David, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Thursday.

The find reveals that by 2,700 years ago, clerks and merchants had already begun to add their names to the seals instead of the symbols that were used in earlier centuries.

The state-run archeological body said the seal, which was discovered near the Gihon Spring in the City of David outside the walls of the Old City, bears the Hebrew name Rephaihu (ben) Shalem, a public official who lived in the Jerusalem neighborhood during this period.

The excavation, which is being carried out by Haifa University Professor Ronny Reich and Eli Shukron of the Israel Antiquities Authority, also uncovered pottery shards that date back to the Iron Age 2 (8th century BCE), which they used to date the seal, as well as fragments of three bullae, or pieces of clay that were used to seal letters or goods.

The discovery revealed an interesting development in the ancient world: whereas during the 9th century BCE letters and goods were dispatched on behalf of their senders without names, by the 8th century BCE the clerks and merchants had already begun to add their names to the seals, the archeologists said.

"In contrast with the large cluster of bullae that was found two years ago, in which all of its items contain graphic symbols [such as a boat or different animals - fish, lizards and birds] but are of an earlier date [end of the 9th-beginning of the 8th century BCE], the new items indicate that during the 8th century BCE the practice had changed and the clerks who used the seals began to add their names to them," Reich said.

Mahmoud Abbas continues to follow the playbook of his mentor of forty years, Yassir Arafat--talk peace in English and 'armed resistance' (synonymous with terror) in Arabic. Only this time, he threw in some bragging about how the PLO trained Hizballah in its leadership of all the other 'resistance' groups. This confirms what IRIS has been saying for years--that the Global Jihad is an allied force:

PA President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday said that he does not rule out returning to the path of armed “resistance” against Israel and took pride in the fact that he had been the first to fire on Israel and that his organization had trained Hizbullah.

In an interview with the Jordanian daily al-Dustur, Abbas said that he was opposed to an armed struggle against Israel - for the time being.

“At this present juncture, I am opposed to armed struggle because we cannot succeed in it, but maybe in the future things will be different,” he said.

The PA president also expressed pride both in himself and in his organization, Fatah, for trailblazing the path of resistance.

“I had the honor of firing the first shot in 1965 and of being the one who taught resistance to many in the region and around the world; what it’s like; when it is effective and when it isn’t effective; its uses, and what serious, authentic and influential resistance is,” Abbas said.

“It is common knowledge when and how resistance is detrimental and when it is well timed,” he added. “We (Fatah) had the honor of leading the resistance and we taught resistance to everyone, including Hizbullah, who trained in our military camps.”

Although many Israel supporters were worried today over the trumpeted attempt by Hamas to organize a mass storming of the Gaza border today, Ehud Olmert had other priorities. He hadn't heard about it. Fortunately it was an exaggerated threat:

Israel deployed thousands of troops and police along the border with Gaza on Monday, but a Hamas demonstration against Israel appeared to pass without incident. Organizers had hoped to form a human chain running the length of the 25-mile strip, but turnout was well below expectations. About 5,000 people, many of them schoolchildren, joined the chain outside of Beit Hanoun, about four miles from the border. After the protest ended, some 2,000 Hamas loyalists marched toward the Erez crossing until Hamas police blocked the road.

Today's game of Russian Roulette ended badly:

Two children were who were wounded in a Kassam rocket barrage on Israel - targeting the western Negev city of Sderot - were rushed to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon early Monday afternoon.

A 9-year-old boy suffered a serious injury to his hand in the attack. A one-year-old baby and another child were lightly wounded as well. At least four adults were treated for emotional shock. Three rockets exploded in the city, one hitting a bomb shelter and a second scoring a direct hit on a house.

In response, Israel sent 60 trucks full of free goods and supplies.

The great majority of American mosques praise suicide bombers and preach the replacement of America by a global caliphate:

An undercover survey of more than 100 mosques and Islamic schools in America has exposed widespread radicalism, including the alarming finding that 3 in 4 Islamic centers are hotbeds of anti-Western extremism, WND has learned.

The Mapping Sharia in America Project, sponsored by the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, has trained former counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents from the FBI, CIA and U.S. military, who are skilled in Arabic and Urdu, to conduct undercover reconnaissance at some 2,300 mosques and Islamic centers and schools across the country.

"So far of 100 mapped, 75 should be on a watchlist," an official familiar with the project said.

Many of the Islamic centers are operating under the auspices of the Saudi Arabian government and U.S. front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood based in Egypt.

Frank Gaffney, a former Pentagon official who runs the Center for Security Policy, says the results of the survey have not yet been published. But he confirmed that "the vast majority" are inciting insurrection and jihad through sermons by Saudi-trained imams and anti-Western literature, videos and textbooks.

The project, headed by David Yerushalmi, a lawyer and expert on sharia law, has finished collecting data from the first cohort of 102 mosques and schools. Preliminary findings indicate that almost 80 percent of the group exhibit a high level of sharia-compliance and jihadi threat, including:

-Sermons that preach women are inferior to men and can be beaten for disobedience; that non-Muslims, particularly Jews, are infidels and inferior to Muslims; that jihad or support of jihad is not only a Muslim's duty but the noblest way, and suicide bombers and other so-called "martyrs" are worthy of the highest praise; and that an Islamic caliphate should one day encompass the U.S.

-Solicitation of financial support for jihad.

-Bookstores that sell books, CDs and DVDs promoting jihad and glorifying martyrdom.

Though not all mosques in America are radicalized, many have tended to serve as safe havens and meeting points for Islamic terrorist groups. Experts say there are at least 40 episodes of extremists and terrorists being connected to mosques in the past decade alone.

Some of the 9/11 hijackers, in fact, received aid and counsel from one of the largest mosques in the Washington, D.C., area. Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center is one of the mosques indentified by undercover investigators as a hive of terrorist activity and other extremism.

It was founded and is currently run by leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. Imams there preach what is called "jihad qital," which means physical jihad, and incite violence and hatred against the U.S.

Dar al-Hijrah's ultimate goal, investigators say, is to turn the U.S. into an Islamic state governed by sharia law.

Another D.C.-area mosque, the ADAMS Center, was founded and financed by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, and has been one of the top distributors of Wahhabist anti-Semitic and anti-Christian dogma.

Even with such radical mosques operating in its backyard, the U.S. government has not undertaken its own systematic investigation of U.S. mosques.

Daniel Doron has another must-read about how Israelis (and Jews as a whole) continue to believe in the salvational power of big government, despite contradictory evidence from nearly every encounter with reality. Ehud Olmert is the probably the best example of Doron's line that government's "chief function is the election of the politicians who make them up":

Israelis - and especially their university educated elites - seem to have a dangerous infatuation, a puzzling delusion about the capability of their governments to solve almost any problem. Otherwise how can one explain the recent crop of suggestions by ostensibly mature people, holding responsible positions, that government protect them from the vagaries of the dollar exchange rate or from rising housing costs.

For decades Israelis have been taking cruel and usual punishment, from runaway inflation to low wages, to monopoly induced inflated costs, to the erosion of their pensions, as a result of their trust in government management of the economy. Yet they keep asking for more, at ever growing costs, though it should have become obvious that governments cannot deliver what they expect. Governments can no more control powerful economic forces that change the rate of the dollar or the costs of housing, than they can control the rise and fall of tides.

Israelis should have discovered by now that the more government over reaches, the less it can deliver. In fact governments create, and then aggravate, most of our problems. When governments' fingers are stuck, as in Israel, in every pie, they are incapable of doing anything. They cannot even perform their legitimate tasks, like protecting the people of Sderot from Kassam attacks.

Read the whole thing...

For those who cannot understand how the Israeli elite can think the way it does, here is an instructive analog. This is what a typical leftist columnist in a mainstream newspaper has to say about the Cuban dictator:

the traditional Left is also left without neither faith that the world can be fixed nor desire or energy to do it....And on that point at least, I think that I’m already missing Fidel Castro.

Don't waste your time reading the whole thing just because I did...

In 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu coined the term "Palestinian revolving door policy" for terrorists. Not much has changed:

Fourteen Fatah terrorists, including a commander, reneged Thursday on their agreement to serve a jail term as part of a deal with Palestinian Authority government officials, and escaped from their prison in Shechem.

Israeli defense officials have warned the PA that if they do not re-arrest the terrorists within 24 hours, the IDF will hunt them down. They escaped with help from police officers who were responsible for guarding the prison complex, according to Voice of Israel government radio.

One of the escapees is Mahdi Abu Ghazale, the commander of the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades "Night Horsemen" cell. All of the terrorists are members of Fatah's Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades group.

The terrorists, wanted by Israel for various terrorist activities, originally turned themselves over to the PA in anticipation of a large IDF counter-terrorist operation in Shechem. They began their jail term several weeks ago, after agreeing to be arrested by the PA.

The deal was part of a supposed plan by the PA government to fight terrorism in Shechem by jailing wanted terrorists for three months, then releasing them and recruiting them to join the PA security force. The prisoners, however, apparently had second thoughts, said the deal is off and now refuse to return to jail.

U.S. officials, who trained and equipped the new PA police force, have been counting on the officers to prove the PA is able to control terrorism emanating from its territories, a fundamental requirement of the U.S. Roadmap peace plan.

Breaking news:

Israel and Hamas have reached an agreement on the identities of 230 Palestinian prisoners to be freed as part of a deal to secure the release of captured IDF soldier Gilad Schalit, Army Radio reported Monday morning.

According to the report, disputes remain regarding 120 additional prisoners the group is demanding be freed in the first stage of the deal - prisoners Israel has thus far refused to release.

Progress in the negotiations was reportedly made after a decision by a special ministerial committee to relax the criteria for defining a prisoner with "blood on his hands." Initially, Israel was only willing to release 44 prisoners on the Hamas list.

Yet another game of Russian Roulette from the Leftist Olmert administration:

Israel is considering a large-scale incursion into Gaza during which it would present an ultimatum to the international community for the deployment of a multinational force as the only condition under which it would withdraw, defense officials said. "We are talking about the Second Lebanon War model," a defense official said Sunday. "To go to war and tell the world that if they want a cease-fire and for us to leave, then they will need to send a force to replace us."

Caroline Glick was right. The Leftist Olmert administration really does believe that some international force can be wheedled into protecting Israel, if only the situation is allowed to become sufficiently dire first:

Throughout the war, Israel's goal was for an international force to be set up to fight Hizbullah for Israel. And low and behold, UNIFIL refuses to fight. And still today, the government refuses to recognize that suing for an international force then was a mistake. Indeed they are repeating it in Gaza.

Israel Matzav has more on this strategy, which is reminiscent of the Rock Ridge sheriff in the movie Blazing Saddles, who feigned schizophrenia and took himself hostage.

This is huge, but as always, the mainstream media will continue to treat the Saudi regime as "moderate":

Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed Thursday. Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced "another 7/7" and the loss of "British lives on British streets" if they pressed on with their inquiries. Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.

The U.S. Department of Justice has launched its own investigation under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act into the British money received in the U.S. by Bandar while he was ambassador to Washington. Prince Bandar Thursday did not contest a U.S. court order preventing him from taking the proceeds of property sales out of the country.

Your tax dollars at work:

Terror victims from across the US and Israel came here this week to urge the Bush administration not to interfere with their multi-million-dollar lawsuits against the Palestine Liberation Organization. They left feeling they'd been listened to, but not necessarily heard.

"I hope that they understand deeply now what we need from them, what we're going through, that we're seeking justice the way we're supposed to," said Shayna Elliot, one of more than 20 American victims of terror attacks and bereaved family members who met with officials at the State Department and Department of Justice on Wednesday and Thursday.

They made the trip after learning that the State Department might submit a "statement of interest" at the urging of the PLO, telling the court that the Palestinians shouldn't have to pay out on the judgments delivered against them....

Here's the quote of the week:

"Police could give no reason [for the Muslim rioting], but said that unusually mild weather and the closure of schools for a winter break might have contributed.

While this wasn't explicitly attributed to Global Warming, it did remind me of this list of 600 items that the media has blamed on the theory (e.g. spiders invading Scotland and the demise of cremation). Not bad for a phenomenon which is hypothesized to cause an average annual temperature gain of 0.006 degrees Celcius.

Meanwhile, in today's Inconvenient Truth news, we have Arctic Sea Ice Sees 'Significant Increase' in Size Following 'Extreme Cold'.