Tuesday, August 15, 2006
By way of Hot Air comes a perfectly loathesome screed from Andrew Gumbel writing for Independent. (Quick summary: What's with Americans liking Israel more than Hizbollah, anyway? It's got to be the Jewish Lobby. Brilliant, insightful, and subtle -- exactly what you would expect from Robert Fisk's home publication.) I won't bother commenting further on the article, as Allah has already done a fine job. But I did recognize a particular name mentioned at the end -- one Rabbi Lerner, still happy to be the Arab apologists' favorite tool:
"There is no major figure in American political life who has been willing to raise the issue of the legitimate needs of the Palestinian people, or even talk about them as human beings," Lerner said. "The organised Jewish community has transformed the image of Judaism into a cheering squad for the Israeli government, whatever its policies are. That is just idolatry, and goes against all the warnings in the Bible about giving too much power to the king or the state."
Well, it's nice to know that there is some Jewish theology that the Independent is willing to publish uncensored. I won't bother commenting on the religious angle -- hard for me to imagine anything more pointless than debating strawmen with cheap "dissenters." Better to just point out the last time Lerner appeared in these pages, encouraging people to attend the rally from which he was thrown out -- for being too "pro-Zionist" and quite frankly, just too damned Jewish. Opposing the removal of Saddam Hussein was more important, see.

Priorities, man. The Rabbi has his priorities.
Monday, August 14, 2006
I'm sick of the recurring outages and annoying arbitrary character limits at BackBlog, so comments have been switched over to HaloScan. Unfortunately, that means comments for old posts have disappeared from the blog. This was not an easy tradeoff to make, but I think it'll make things better in the long run. It's always possible to retrieve BackBlog comments by hand if necessary.

Convenient as I find Google News for my news-gathering needs, their utter lack of judgement -- no doubt passed off as "objectivity" within Google -- can be jarring even to me. I mean, what kind of "news" bot would consider the North Korea Times a source? Well, see for yourself.

It's unclear whether this site is really an organ of the Pyongyang government. It's hosted in Australia, where North Korea doesn't even have an embassy. It's also substantially more slick than Pyongyang's official website. The official web site looks like a page out of 1994; the "Times" is a bit closer to 1999. Of course, if it's not really a Pyongyang mouthpiece, Google has been had by a prank -- or perhaps an Aussie "admirer."

Amusing aside: apparently there are Seymour Hersh fans in Pyongyang. I'm really quite tempted to believe the whole site's a prank. And Google is not in on it. Though perhaps The New Yorker can help -- have they been paid by the North Koreans for running this story?