The so-called International Court of "Justice."

Paul Greenberg tries to put the Kafka-esque travesty occurring at the International Court of Justice Jew-bashing into perspective.

As he notes:

The Jewish state is the only one of the UN's 100-some-odd members, and some are very odd indeed, to be excluded from serving on its Security Council.

In passing its annual resolution condemning religious intolerance, the U.N.'s General Assembly deliberately excludes any mention of anti-Semitism.

. . . .

As Yasser Arafat tried to tell Bill Clinton at Camp David, just before rejecting still another Israeli peace offer, the Jews have no historical connection to the Temple Mount. (Which would have surprised King David.)

Martin Luther King Jr. called Zionism the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. In 1975, the General Assembly of the United Nations called it an international crime.

No one says it out loud: A lynch mob in black robes is still a lynch mob.

As Bob Dylan sings in "Neighborhood Bully":

The neighborhood bully he just lives to survive
He's criticized and condemned for being alive
He's not supposed to fight back, he's supposed to have thick skin
He's supposed to lay down and die when his door is kicked in
He's the neighborhood bully.

The neighborhood bully been driven out of every land
He's wandered the earth an exiled man
Seen his family scattered, his people hounded and torn
He's always on trial for just being born
He's the neighborhood bully.

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized
Old women condemned him, said he could apologize
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
He's the neighborhood bully.

Why are these people our allies?

The official Saudi Arabian tourism website lists the people who will not be issued visas:

An Israeli passport holder or a passport that has an Israeli arrival/departure stamp.

Those who don't abide by the Saudi traditions concerning appearance and behaviors. Those under the influence of alcohol will not be permitted into the Kingdom.

There are certain regulations for pilgrims and you should contact the consulate for more information.

Jewish People

Well, they really put it right out there! No Jews!

Of course, even the non-Jewish bulldozer-diver Rachel Corrie would find it difficult:

If a woman is arriving in the Kingdom alone, the sponsor or her husband must receive her at the airport.

Every woman must have confirmed accommodation for the duration of her stay in the Kingdom.

A woman is not allowed to drive a car and can therefore only travel by car if she is accompanied by her husband, a male relative, or a driver.

(hat-tip: James Taranto's Best of the Web)

Time Suck Alert...

Yet another roadblock in the path of efficient work, Whatever Happened To... is a site which tells you, well, whatever happened to former celebrities and others whose 15 minutes are up.

Animal Rights.

Cox & Forkum, once again, get right to the point.

Animal "rights" activists don't love animals. They hate people.

When you've won, what do you protest?

In a scene out of P.C.U., a group of University of Oregon students have protested Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, a play that has evidently sparked a global feminist movement, for not being "inclusive" enough.

I miss college. I miss hearing sentences like:

"Know that what you are seeing tonight is not the result of an inclusive process,"

and

"Know that this space was not one where honest questions and concerns about race were tolerated."

This is evidently what happens when activists actually get what they wanted. The women's movement was successful. Women have equal legal rights, women may enter any profession, and more overtly run the world. (They ran it before, also, but had to let the men pretend they were in charge.)

So what's the problem with the Vagina Monologues?

Well, evidently, there was a "lack of representation of different kinds of women in "The Vagina Monologues" production." It seems that "Women of ' variety of skin colors, body sizes, abilities and gender expressions'were not adequately represented."

It's a shame, really. Because "this could have been a more diverse cast, but a safe and welcoming environment was not created for people that [the protester] consider[s] to be 'underrepresented.'" Specifically, she noted, "only one other woman of color remained in the show. 'Plus size' and queer women were also not well-represented, she said." Apparently, when advertising for the woman-only cast, they didn't put up a sign, "free milk and cookies for fat black lesbians." (And by the way, why is "Plus size" in euphemism quotes but not queer?)

The director of the show (who I'd wager is not a George W. Bush supporter) tries gamely to defend herself with logic:

[The director] said about 85 people auditioned for the show and there wasn't a large pool of "visible" people of color to choose from. She said it is also not always possible to tell one's ethnicity or sexual orientation just by looking at the person, adding that she does not usually ask people what their sexual orientation is at an audition.

Which is good, because that wouldn't really create a safe space, would it? "Hey, you, audition-chick! You a lesbian?" Seems to me that would invite a similar protest.

I'd also expect a protest over the Oregon Daily Emerald headline on this related story, "Tensions explode at 'Vagina' discussion."

Ahem.

Update: Thanks, Professor Volokh!

Can you pass the Third Grade?

Let's see.

CIA -- Iraqi Rewards Program

Do you have any intelligence about Iraq? Well, please let the CIA know about it.

I assume they also have some less self-selected sources.

Tony Snow

I have exhausted all of my sources in attempting to learn why Tony Snow was suddenly disappeared from his Sunday program, and replaced by the terminally inadequate Chris Wallace. Usually, one can easily learn the behind-the-scenes stories behind these moves. However, I have been unable to learn one single thing. Fox has not responded to e-mails... nor has Tony Snow. If there is anyone reading this, and you have any ideas, please let me know.

My e-mail to Josh

Thank you for your film. Congratulations. Your bride is adorable.
I have been married for 36 years. Now that my wife has seen this film... my life will never be the same.
I will know no peace.

THANKS A LOT!!!!
/Stuart Kaufman
Great Neck, NY

The Girl In The Picture

In honor of Valentine's day, here is a link to a guy that makes the rest of us look bad. This guy, Josh wanted to propose to his wife in a romantic fashion. So he made a silent movie, got his intended to the theatre under the ruse of going to see a Buster Keaton movie and showed her his film instead.

The entire story, along with the movie itself, can be seen here.

Josh should know, however, that all of us who are now going to hear "See! Why can't you do things like that?" are gunning for him.

Steyn on Kerry

Mark Steyn, writing in The Telegraph, has a very good response to Kerry's constant bleating about his service in Vietnam:

The only relevant lesson from Vietnam is this: then, as now, it was not possible for the enemy to achieve military victory over the US; their only hope was that America would, in effect, defeat itself. And few men can claim as large a role in the loss of national will that led to that defeat as John Kerry. A brave man in Vietnam, he returned home to appear before Congress and not merely denounce the war but damn his "band of brothers" as a gang of rapists, torturers and murderers led by officers happy to license them to commit war crimes with impunity. He spent the Seventies playing Jane Fonda and he now wants to run as John Wayne.

Vietnam was a "war of choice". But, once you chose to go in, there was no choice but to win. America's failure of will had terrible consequences. The Seventies - the Kerry decade - was the only point in the Cold War in which the eventual result seemed in doubt. The Communists seized real estate all over the globe, in part because they calculated that the post-Vietnam, Kerrified America would never respond.

And Kerry wants to head back to those days. Which is why, even taking into account Bush's blunders, like steel tariffs and the pathetic "healthcare" debacle, I'm still voting for Bush.

Memo From the TrollHunter General:

I just noticed this older post from the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. An Automated Reply From The Bull**** Detector is a good response to reflexive pro-Palestinian raving on message boards.

"Well, at least you could say you were married..."

In a testament to the macabre, a woman in France (where else?) has married a dead person.

Dressed in a demure black suit, a 35-year-old Frenchwoman has married her dead boyfriend, an exchange of vows that required authorization from President Jacques Chirac.
. . . .

Demichel told LCI television she understood "it could seem shocking to marry someone who is dead," but her feelings for him had not dimmed. His body was not present for the ceremony.

Such marriages are legal if the living spouse can prove the couple had intended to marry before the other died. The French president must also authorize it.

I think the most interesting thing about this story is that evidently French law has contemplated it. Apparently, in France, it's not that unusual to marry a dead guy.

UPDATE: Professor Volokh has graciously linked!

Thomas Sowell on the intelligence issue

Tom Sowell, always a good read, writes in today's Town Hall about the apparent intelligence failures that are now being used to try and make the point that the Iraq war was a mistake.

He makes an extremely cogent point as to why this is extremely important:

Having a President of the United States lie us into a war is not only a disaster when it happens, it is a lasting catastrophe for future presidents and for the country, because a president's credibility is a whole nation's credibility in the world. We have still not recovered from President Lyndon Johnson's lying us into the Vietnam war.

I think those of us in favor of the war make a mistake by underestimating the fact that we haven't found the WMD. I never thought the WMD was the reason to go to war, but by the same token, it was the reported presence of WMD that was used to silence critics (for whom the fact that Saddam Hussein tortured his own people was somehow not a valid reason to remove him from power). And I think, unfortunately, that the public emphasis on the WMD has come back to bite Bush on the butt (alliterative though that clause might be).

I also think an examination of the intelligence capacities of the US is overdue. But as Sowell notes:

[M]any, if not most, of those in Congress who are now complaining loudly about intelligence failures are people who voted repeatedly to cut the budgets of the intelligence agencies and to restrict their operations. Senator John Kerry is just one of those who crippled these agencies and now complain that they were not effective enough.

Intelligence is a dirty business. War is a dirty business. And both are necessary so that good people can go on and live their lives.

Sowell's final point?

Among the things that we know now is that you get cooperation in the Middle East after you have demonstrated your willingness to use force. Would Libya have revealed and dismantled its weapons of mass destruction if the Qaddafi regime had not seen what happened in Iraq? Would Syria and Iran have taken a more conciliatory attitude if they had not seen what happened in Iraq?

Negotiations are not a substitute for force. When international negotiations work, often it is because aggressors know what is going to happen if it doesn't work.

The country unites for one, brief, shining moment...

The country was united yesterday for one glorious moment, as everyone, Democrat and Republican, black and white, Jew, Christian and Muslim alike, turned to the person sitting next to them, and said "Was that just Janet Jackson's boobie?"