…of a long time back, before I became mired in barrages of work and other inescapable responsibilities and my posting here was punctuated by long gaps, a few days or even a week at times, and just one post a day when I could work in the time.

Now it seems that when folks visit, they often expect that whatever new post they see is the only new one, read it and move on. (sigh)

Back in my earlier blogging days, it wasn’t unusual for me to do multiple posts in one day. Now that I’m doing my semiretirement thing and getting more time to myself, I hope to have more days (well, maybe I shouldn’t say “days”, since I prefer to blog in the stillness of the hours between midnight and dawn) like that.

It felt good to be able to do that this morning.

That said, here it is, four decades after a tiny country called Israel beat the everlovin’ tar out of the overwhelmingly massive bulk of the Arab world in a mere six days. I imagine that a lot of red faces peered out from within the confines of their dish towels after that humiliating attempt at an invasion was over, and that a lot of Islam’s wives and daughters, in the absence of dogs for fathers and brothers to kick, were thoroughly beaten by male family members.

Yeah, that was one solid ass whuppin’, and Israel even came away from dishing it out with some nice parcels of real estate. The Arabs could’ve had it back had they been smart enough to negotiate peace, but they preferred to play the roll of Menacing Moozlims, and so after a few years, Israel made use of the land, settlements sprawling out as Jewish immigrants arrived from America and Europe.

After losing a rematch in 1973 (Syria and Egypt were the unlucky attackers there, with a new, and as it happened, short lived monicker: The United Arab Republic, or UAR), the Arabs decided that the smart thing to do was to let the so-called “Palestinians” carry on the campaign of ridding the Mideast of Israel and the Jews by proxy. Israel is still there, along with lots and lots of Jews.

Muslims and other Israel haters, most of these styling themselves “intellectuals”, including many shamefully misguided liberal Jews here in the west tend to have revised history to support their descriptions of Israel as a usurper of Palestinian lands, the perpetrators of an “occupation”, “oppressors”, etc. Forty years means those of us old enough to remember are at the youngest middle aged and provides the opportunity for the creators of anti-Israel propaganda to use it to disinform two generations’ worth of subsequently born young people via schools and the media.

This OpEd from yesterday’s Opinion Journal by WSJ Editorial Board member and columnist Bret Stephens unrevises some embroidered or otherwise innacurate accounts of situations and events circling around, or as results of, the Six Day War.

On the morning of June 5, 1967, a fleet of low-flying Israeli jets surprised the Egyptian air force on the ground and destroyed it. This act of military pre-emption helped save Israel from what Iraq’s then-President Abdul Rahman Aref had called, only several days earlier, “our opportunity . . . to wipe Israel off the map.” Yet 40 years later Israel’s victory is widely seen as a Pyrrhic one–”a calamity for the Jewish state no less than for its neighbors,” according to a recent editorial in The Economist.

And the alternative was?

The linked article, while not long, is a good and worthwhile read. Here it is again.