Briefly, though I’m sure most of us know about yesterday’s news,

A suicide bomber blew himself up Wednesday next to a food stand in the central Israeli town of Hadera, wounding at least 30 people and leaving a path of destruction at an open air market, police and rescuers said.

To update the above, there have been five resultant deaths. To me, that’s five cold blooded murders of innocent civilians, not to mention the crippling of numerous other soft targets.

How very nice, still more humanity from the Palestinian end of things.

Interestingly enough, it came on the heels of a prediction by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that the Palestinians would, through their terrorism, eventually destroy Israel and he even offered words of encouragement to that end.

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday predicted a wave of Palestinian attacks that would erase Israel “from the face of the Islamic world,” just hours before a suicide bomber killed five Israelis in a marketplace.
The attack, which wounded about 30, also made a mockery of a major speech by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who appealed in Ramallah yesterday for an end to attacks that he said were undermining attempts to establish a Palestinian state.
Iran’s firebrand president called for Israel’s destruction at a conference in Tehran titled “The World Without Zionism.”

For the trillionth time or so, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the guy who let western governments, shamefully including ours, bully him into ceding Gaza to the Palestinians, said there would be no further talks with Mahmoud Abbas until he acts against armed groups.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has ruled out talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas until he takes “serious action” against armed groups, the Prime Minister’s Office said Thursday, a day after five Israelis were killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber in Hadera.

Israel and the Palestinians earlier this month had delayed a meeting set for mid-October, their first since Israel completed its Gaza pullout on September 12. Officials had said the summit could take place in late October or early November, but sporadic violence since then had cast doubt on that timetable.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also called on Abbas to rein in militants, a PA official said Thursday. Rice called Abbas and they discussed Wednesday’s attack, the official said.

Impressively, liberal media icon New York Times manages to incorporate all the essentials into one article.

JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli army launched an offensive against Islamic Jihad militants Thursday, carrying out a series of airstrikes in what Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said would be a ”broad and nonstop” response to a suicide bombing that killed five Israelis.

”Unfortunately the Palestinian Authority has not taken any serious action to battle terrorism,” Sharon said before meeting the visiting Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. ”We will not accept under any circumstances a continuation of terrorism. Therefore our activities will be broad and nonstop until they halt terrorism.”

”The state of Israel would very much have liked to move peace efforts forward,” he added. ”To my regret, as long as terror continues we shall not be able to move forward as we would have wished.”

So as I said, it’s just another chapter that is identical to all those that came before. In good faith, Israel makes concessions. Staying true to their track record, the Palestinians make terrorism.

It looks like this time out, an act of terrorism has been the straw that broke the camel’s back{no un-PC reference intended, at least maybe not}.

Bush, Blair and a whole bunch of other world leaders really have to wake up to the fact that there will be no peace in Israel as long as the Palestinian Authority(Fatah, who were once the military wing of the P.L.O. and who presently “own” other, active terrorist groups) or Hamas are recognized as valid political concerns in the quest for peace in the Middle East rather than being treated by the world community as the failures they are in order for Israel to achieve positive diplomatic results via negotiating with terrorists.

Yes, I have. I have defended Wal-Mart before.

And not for any in-depth political reasons, either. Just for topical observations I made a couple of years ago, when I spent some time in rural Illinois.

You know, you go to some of these extreme “fly-over zone” towns, the ones that subsist off outlying farms and a few totally locally owned businesses, and you see places in which there are no, and I mean NO job openings to speak of. A lot of families are simply clinging to their homes and eating on budgets that rate genuine pity…

There’s a Wal-Mart in town, luckily, that employs hundreds of locals in the entire range of retail. Most of the people who live in town are poor.

Wal-Mart is sort of a nucleus: It supports the locals — not just the economy, but the people. It sells them the luxuries higher income, large city residents enjoy at a fraction of the price that they can afford while simultaneously furnishing the means to buy.

Sure, a lot of people have reasons to share as to why they hate, or disapprove, of Wal-Mart. I’m personally pretty bottom-line when it comes to Retail. Wal-Mart is Retail with a vengeance; it employs an awesome amount of people who might not otherwise have any work at all or people who haven’t got any credentials but possess strong business, supervisory or merchandising aptitudes and affords them the opportunity to move ahead in the company’s hierarchy.

Right, Wal-Mart is a corporate dynasty, but it is positive — it contributes to our economy on every front.

The left don’t like that, because they don’t believe that individuals who work hard, sacrifice and succeed should live any better than those who live off government largesse. Except, of course, for themselves.

Bummer.

Most of Wal-Mart’s inventory originates in China. China is our enemy, though no-one in the media seems to explore that fact, but on the other hand, the more capitalist ventures we share with Beijing firms, the more people we can place in China and the better HUMINT we can harvest. I’m all for that, given the fact that we will eventually have a reckoning with them, and it won’t be small potatoes.

But back to Wal-Mart — I was actually inspired to write this post by another post by Raven, of And Rightly So fame.

Wal-Mart’s greatest crime was the crime of success, the prime target of liberals, whose actual agenda is socialism, but the term “liberal” sounds better. Heh.

Think of the left as a pack of wild dogs with mange, a significant percentage rabid, descending upon any newsworthy “target of opportunity,” for the sole purpose of transforming the U.S. Constitution into the Communist Manifesto.

WTF are they thinking!?

During today’s read of Jewish World Review online, I ran into a couple of columns I thought I’d share.

Mark Steyn writes that Bush was right:Sometimes war is worth it, and John Leo tells us that — no kidding, John! — The ACLU is crossing the line.

At Jewish World Review, Johnathan Tobin weighs in on Kofi Annan’s recent benevolent change of attitude toward Israel and the issues that render it a mere attempt to mask his and the embattled U.N.’s true feelings toward the Jewish State. The column in its entirety is here.

…The United Nations seemed to be sliding back toward old-style anti-Semitism as the organization reached its zenith at its International Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. But Secretary General Kofi Annan has been spreading good will toward the Jews right and left these days. In the last year, the United Nations officially condemned anti-Semitism (amazing!) and commemorated the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

But the problem doesn’t begin and end there. The U.N. committee on the “Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” and its division of Palestinian Affairs and “Special Information Program” on the “Question of Palestine” have been there to fuel hate at every possible U.N. forum.
These organs of anti-Israel propaganda have served to fuel the conflict. And the corruption and waste at these agencies make the oil-for-food skullduggery of the past decade seem like just more of the same.

Yeah, Kofi’s scrambling to play the “hail fellow well met” to shore up the damage done over the Oil For Food scandal and the accusations from various quarters of the U.N.’s corruption, antisemitism and inefficiency, but as the author says,

The signals we should send to Congress and the White House are those of increased monetary pressure on the United Nations. Indeed, far from turning down the heat, a congressional focus on cutting funds to terrorist hangouts like UNRWA should be at the top of our agenda.

This is a new alert from Rightmarch, addressing the pork barrel spending issue:

ALERT: Last week, the House of Representatives was poised to dramatically cut over $50 BILLION in wasteful “pork-barrel” spending. It seemed like they were finally ready to do the job we SENT them there to do! Then, far-left groups like MoveOn.org sent an e-mail to their members, and over 160,000 of these leftists wrote or called Congress to demand they NOT trim back our ridiculously bloated budget…

The work of RightMarch.com is funded entirely by voluntary contributions. Help us spread the word with a donation to RightMarch.com!
https://secure.responseenterprises.com/rightmarch/?a=7

Syria, an outspoken enemy of Israel since long before the Jewish State kicked its butt in 1973, has done more than enough in recent years to warrant some aggressive attention not only from Israel, but the Coalition of the Willing as well.

Many of the Palestinians who commit acts of terrorism in Israel are trained in Syria, armed by Syria and financed by Syria, or by terror groups headquartered in Syria with the blessing of “President” Bashar Assad and previously that of his father and predecessor, Hafez Assad.

There has been evidence submitted, via satellite intelligence and from a few on-the-ground witnesses, that prior to the U.S. led invasion of Iraq, guards on the Iraq-Syria border were relieved by Saddam’s own security people in order to permit convoys of trucks to drive into Syria without any official scrutiny of their cargoes.

There has been no “smoking gun” level of evidence yet presented to support any theories as to what may have been in the trucks, though one theory is that the convoys were transporting WMD from Iraq into the hands of Baathist-run Syria. The anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-America, pro-terrorist, pro-tyranny crowd screams that there’s no way this could be so, for according to them, there never was any WMD in Iraq. To even hint at the possibility would be to discredit their weak, long played out “Bush lied” mantra.

However, throughout the merry time Saddam and his cronies enjoyed sending blind man Blix on wild goose chases while shuffling the sought after inventory out of his path, and since, a lot of WMD that was known to be in Saddam’s possession prior to the Blix idiocy is unaccounted for. The Mainstream Media doesn’t speculate on this, nor do their liberal subscribers, who apparently think the unaccounted-for weaponry — chemical and biological for the most part — must have simply ceased to exist of its own volition.

As the Kennedy who is a left wing columnist would say, “the science speaks for itself” or some such moronic declaration as when he blamed Bush for Hurricane Katrina because Dubya had declined to sign the Kyoto Agreement, thus causing the “global warming” that in turn “caused” Katrina. Right, so much for liberal science.

But there is a strong possibility that those missing WMD are, or were, in the hands of Bashar Assad, awaiting use at a time of opportunity.

Since we overthrew Saddam and waxed his sadistic sons, Syria has been a staging point for terrorists, including al-Qaeda mambers, entering Iraq. Damascus has been a veritable mall of headquarters for a variety of Fundamentalist Islam-based terrorist organizations and Assad has done nothing to discourage this, save for weak promises he’s had no intention of carrying out.

Now, it seems, he is bringing his country back to the strongman rule embraced by his father.

DAMASCUS, Syria — A brutal beating delivered last week to Anwar al Bounni, one of the few lawyers who dares to represent political prisoners before Syria’s security court, indicates that after a brief “Damascus Spring,” the administration of President Bashar Assad is cracking down on dissent.
And there is evidence considered strong enough to pursue an investigation into allegations that the Assad government was involved in the February assassination bombing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri.

A U.N. report last week accused the Syrian administration of complicity in the Feb. 14 bombing deaths of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and 20 others in Beirut.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, who are traveling together in Alabama, both called yesterday for international action in response to the report.
“These are very serious charges and they have to be debated at the level of foreign minister,” Miss Rice said in a British Broadcasting Corp. interview.
Mr. Straw said the report indicated that “people of a high level of this Syrian regime were implicated” in the assassination. He also referred to “false testimony being given by senior people” in the Syrian government.

Thus far, our disagreements with Damascus have been limited to barking contests and as such, Bashar Assad is making the same mistake Saddam & Sons made by assuming the United States was all talk, no action. The Husseins at least had reason to opine thusly, as our track record under the Clinton Administration was one of a toothless tiger. One of Saddam’s sons was quoted as saying, when the Coalitition was making mincemeat of the Iraqi Army, that “Bush is not Bill Clinton!” Assad is just stupid, one of those people who refuse to learn from others’ mistakes, a yipping chihuahua snapping at the heels of a couple of tigers named Israel and the United States.

It seems inevitable that if Assad doesn’t clean up his act in the very near future, that “aggressive attention” will be visited upon Syria in ways he will find to be not to his liking, extremely so.

TULKARM, West Bank (Reuters) - Israeli troops on Monday shot dead a top Islamic Jihad commander in the occupied West Bank, the most senior Palestinian militant killed since the start of an eight-month-old ceasefire.

The most thorough and spot-on post I’ve ever seen regarding our Second Amendment rights can be found at Kender’s Musings.

Michael Yon’s brand new post from Iraq is called Purple Fingers.

So nothing in the so-called “Middle East Peace Process” has really changed since Ariel Sharon, via what I believe would be more aptly named the “Roadmap To Hell,” gave Gaza to the Palestinians. Now they’ve got their new firebase and a staging point for attacks against Israel, and once they’ve gotten their seaport built, at the expense of U.S. and other nations’ taxpayers, they’ll have the perfect set-up for importing still more terrorists, such as al-Qaeda types.

The White House meeting between President George W. Bush and Palestinian Authority whip Mahmoud Abbas seems to have been a rather stagnant affair, nothing new to report, as it were, no problems resolved. They should’ve had their talk by telephone — Abbas could’ve used a $5.00 phone card and saved all the money he spent travelling to the U.S. Again, our tax dollars at work.

Mohammed Dahlan’s back from the hospital in Belgrade, and addressed his fellow Palestinians in Gaza.

Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan on Saturday praised his Fatah movement’s armed struggle against Israel, but called on gunmen to set aside their weapons and move toward democracy.

Right, and

Without the armed resistance, the Palestinians would not have made progress in their struggle, Dahlan told the crowd, in an apparent reference to Israel’s withdrawal last month from the Gaza Strip. However, he said, it was time for Fatah to control their arms, end the chaos in Gaza and focus on winning a January parliamentary vote.

“We are the pioneers in the Fatah movement and we should put an end to the division. We should be united. It’s time for democracy,” Dahlan said.

On the one hand, Dahlan praises the success of Palestinian terrorism against the Israelis — sure, he calls it armed resistance, but if blowing up soft targets like women and children is “armed resistance,” I wonder what he would call actually getting up on ones hind legs and going toe-to-toe with armed soldiers.

In the same breath as his praise for the murder of innocents and the destruction of property, he urges his terrorist brethren to lay down their arms and pursue democracy.

Until when? Until you’ve convinced the world of your sincerity, Mohammed, and foreign sources of funding have begun a deluge of largesse into your coffers to finance more mayhem when you believe the Israelis have let their guard down? Then you can praise your fellow terrorists some more when they’ve driven Sharon out of the West Bank, as well?

The Palestinians have proven that no matter who’s in charge, nothing changes. They renege on every condition they ever agree to in peace proceedings, which from their perspective is just fine as it’s okay for “the faithful” to lie to infidels, who don’t count.

Israel has been the side forced to make all the concessions in every peace attempt, the Palestinians have been asked only to disband and disarm their terrorist organizations. Israel has kept its end of every deal, the Palestinians have done nothing but accept these concessions, absorb money from numerous countries and then continue to terrorize.

Meanwhile, Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz laid down the law, warning Abbas that if the PA doesn’t hold up their only end of the bargain and deal with the terrorist groups, diplomatic negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will come to an end.

“We demand that the Palestinian Authority move from the talking phase and actively work against the terror organizations,” Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said following Sunday’s terror attacks in the West Bank.

Abass’ meek approach allowed this attack. He is not doing what is necessary. It seems that the terror organizations are trying to send him a message, that he should stop working against them,” a diplomatic source told Ynet.

This entire diplomatic spectacle is just that. Even as the Israelis have given up Gaza and pursue peace talks, the terrorism continues.

More here.

The Israelis waxed a young bomber, expect some kind of violent response from the Palestinians, who become really angry when the Israelis kill one of these monsters in self defense. According to the Arab script, the Jews are supposed to cooperate and die.

A long time ago, former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said that “there will be peace in the Middle East when the Palestinians come to love their children more than they hate the Jews.” Well…

Woman carrying baby hides hand grenade
Earlier on Saturday, IDF troops arrested five wanted Palestinian militants during an arrest sweep in a village near the West Bank town of Nablus. The forces discovered in one militant?s home a suitcase containing 10 kg of explosives.

Lt. Col. Arik Chen said his troops finally searched Jawabra after they became suspicious of the way she was carrying the baby. The soldiers found she was holding the grenade just under the baby’s backside, he told The Associated Press.

“To see a woman using her baby to hide a grenade is not typical,” Chen said.

Right, sure, anything you say. I’m reminded of an incident awhile back in which a teenage Palestinian girl snuck out of the house, took a walk down an Israeli street and blew herself up in a suicide vest.
The father’s reaction was not concern over the loss of his daughter nor for the victims of the bombing.
It was anger that his daughter had left the house without his permission nor with one of her brothers as an escort, and the admonition that had his daughter survived, he would have beaten her to death.

It would appear that nothing’s changed in the violent landscape that is Israel, except that the Palestinians now own Gaza.