December 31, 2008 | 3:26 pm

Two Israelis shot at Denmark mall

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: AP

We were talking in The Jewish Journal staff meeting today about how it would only be a matter of time before retaliatory violence for Israel’s actions in Gaza was exacted upon a Diaspora Jewish community. Didn’t take long:

A gunman wounded two Israelis working at a packed central Denmark shopping mall Wednesday, Danish police said.

The two wounded men are Israelis in their 20s, police spokesman Lars Thede said. He said it was too early to speculate on whether they were targeted because of their nationality.

One of the wounded was shot in the arm and the other in the leg, police said. Their condition is unclear.

The shooting took place at the Rosengaard mall in Odense, 170 kilometers (105 miles) west of Copenhagen. It occurred around 3:30 p.m. (14:30 GMT), when the mall was filled with people doing last-minute shopping before the New Year’s break.

Thede said a video surveillance camera showed a man in his mid-20s pulling out a gun before opening fire.

“We cannot say whether he is Palestinian, Iraqi or where he is from,” he said. “It is too early to say whether this has something to do with what happens elsewhere.”

Thanks, Solomonia, for directing me to the story, which he read on Mere Rhetoric. There Omri Ceren notes that “we’re talking about a country where ‘Jews are Allah’s enemies” is a popular protest chant…’” and offers the proof with this news reports of protesters outside the Israeli embassy:

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December 31, 2008 | 2:25 pm

A Fatah official supports the Israeli airstrikes on Gaza

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Call it sour grapes if you like, but one of driven out of Gaza by force in 2007—says he’s rooting for Israel in this war:

It’s a strange world, but there you have it. I’ve been talking to friends of mine, former Palestinian Authority intelligence officials (ejected from power by the Hamas coup), and they tell me that not only are they rooting for the Israelis to decimate Hamas, but that Fatah has actually been assisting the Israelis with targeting information. One of my friends—if you want to know why they’re my friends, read this book—told me that one of his comrades was thrown off a high-rise building in Gaza City last year by Hamas, and so he sheds no tears for the Hamas dead. “Let the Israelis kill them,” he said. “They’ve brought only trouble for my people.”

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December 31, 2008 | 12:16 pm

Ceasefire? Not yet

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Truce talks have stalled:

Israel rejected international pressure for a two-day cease-fire with Hamas and sent warplanes Wednesday to demolish smuggling tunnels that are the lifeline of Gaza’s Islamic rulers.

The diplomatic efforts to forge a truce were set in motion by the scale of destruction in Gaza since Israel unleashed an offensive Saturday against Hamas militants firing barrages of rockets that are striking closer to the Israeli heartland than previous attacks.

Gaza officials say the five days of airstrikes have killed 390, including 200 uniformed members of Hamas security forces, and have wounded about 1,600. The U.N. says at least 60 Palestinian civilians are among the dead. Four Israelis have been killed by militant rocket fire, including three civilians.

The offensive has touched off protests across the Islamic world. In Iran on Wednesday, fundamentalist students asked their government to authorize volunteer suicide bombers to attack Israel. The Tehran government had no immediate response.

On Tuesday, France urged Israel to halt its operation for 48 hours. Calls for an immediate cease-fire have also come from the U.S., the European Union, the U.N. and Russia.

Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert discussed the idea of a two-day truce with his defense and foreign ministers overnight, but the trio decided to pursue the punishing aerial campaign.

Olmert told ministers Israel launched the operation to fundamentally change the situation in the south, and would not leave the job half done with a unilateral cease-fire.

“If conditions ripen to the point that we assess they promise a safer existence in southern Israel, we will consider it. We’re not they’re yet,” Olmert said, according to a participant in the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was closed.

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December 30, 2008 | 7:13 pm

Protester of Israel’s actions in Gaza: ‘Death to all Juice’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Kate Coe just sent me this photo, which she found at Amy Alkon’s blog. The email subject line read: “Who Knew OJ had so many enemies?”

This guy isn’t exactly the spokesman for the “I hate Zionism but I love Jews” argument.

Updated: Kate also just sent me this blog post from Commentary about the Israel Defense Forces’ YouTube channel:

Yesterday, the IDF did something innovative: it opened a channel on YouTube and posted videos to it that help explain why Israel is fighting Hamas. The site hosted about a dozen videos showing things like Israeli humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza and airstrikes that prevented terrorists from firing rockets at Israeli civilians.

The rank double-standard that YouTube has applied to Israel is disturbing. YouTube hosts all manner of similar footage — much of it far more gory than the grainy infrared images posted by the IDF — of U.S. air strikes. Why is YouTube capitulating to those who do not wish for Israel to be able to tell its side of the story?

After the jump is a video uploaded to the IDF channel that shows an air strike on Hamas headquarters:

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December 30, 2008 | 5:42 pm

Israel working on temporary ceasefire?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Yesterday it seemed like Israel’s war in Gaza would last indefinitely. Now there’s talk of a ceasefire—or at least a 48-hour break in fighting.

From The New York Times:

The idea was in a very early stage, the result of a conversation between French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. But aides to Mr. Barak said he was interested in exploring it and would do so with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the rest of the cabinet in the coming day.

“The leading option right now is still a ground invasion but the target of this operation is an improved ceasefire and if that can come without the invasion, fine,” a close aide to Mr. Barak said, requesting anonymity since he was not his authorized spokesman. “But of course Hamas has to agree and there has to be a mechanism to make it work.”

As the death toll among Palestinians in Gaza rose, the United States was also increasing pressure on Israel to call a cease-fire, and was enlisting Arab countries to press Hamas to do the same, in intensive diplomacy being led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the White House. The goal, said a State Department spokesman, Gordon Duguid, is a “reliable cease-fire, one that is durable and sustainable.”But despite the new attempts at reaching a diplomatic solution, most of the talk in Israel on Tuesday was of an ongoing and expanding Israeli military operation. Warplanes attacked smuggler tunnels in southern Gaza and destroyed the home of a top militant leader.

Mr. Olmert told President Shimon Peres that the air strikes were the first of several planned phases, according to spokesmen for both officials, although it was also clear that the number of targets available from the air was declining, making the likelihood of a ground offensive greater.

In Gaza, Hamas militants issued a tape-recorded statement vowing revenge for the more than 370 Palestinians killed so far in Israel’s operations since Saturday, including more than 70 civilians, and warning that a ground invasion would prove painful for Israel. Two sisters, aged 4 and 11, were killed in a strike in the north as concern was growing around the world that the assault was taking a terrible toll on ordinary people.

“It would be easier to dry the sea of Gaza than to defeat the resistance and uproot Hamas which is in every house of Gaza,” the statement, from the military wing of Hamas, said. It was played on Hamas’s television station that had been shut down by an Israeli missile but went back into action by broadcasting from a mobile van. The statement added that if there was a ground invasion, “the children of Gaza will be collecting the body parts of your soldiers and the ruins of tanks.”

Hamas continued to fire longer-range rockets at Israel, shooting deep into the city of Ashdod for a second day as well as even further north into the town of Kiryat Malachi. There were no reports of serious injuries and the number of rockets was down to about a dozen, a day after three Israelis were killed when 70 rockets and mortars were fired.

That last paragraph is the problem. Even if Israel stops its attacks, Hamas won’t stop launching rockets into Israeli hamlets, which it has been doing several times a day for the past few years.

In Los Angeles, there will be two protests this afternoon outside the Israeli consulate on Wilshire Boulevard—one against Israel’s airstrikes by the ANSWER Coalition and a counter protest, led by StandWithUs, in support of Israel.

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December 30, 2008 | 3:07 pm

Can a pastor get some peace? LA Times reports on Warren’s Christmas Eve sermon

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

So it’s come to this for the Rev. Rick Warren, and the once exceptional Los Angeles Times: Southern California’s waning news leader, which today devoted two inches to the butchering of 189 Congo villagers, assigned not one but two reporters to find out what Warren was going to preach about on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t that interesting:

Warren told the 3,100 people who packed the church’s cavernous worship center about some plans that had not turned out as anticipated. “President-elect Obama’s plans for a noncontroversial inauguration—right out the door,” he said, drawing a round of applause from the congregation.

The prominent minister also delivered a sobering message for Christmas.

“You may be going through a change in plans right now,” he said. “You hadn’t expected to be laid off or to be financially tight right now. And when that happens, you’re asking, ‘Why me, why now?’

“Jesus said you don’t understand now what I am doing, but you will understand later. That’s the . . . thing you have to learn when God changes your plan. You have to learn to trust him.”

The article goes on to mention what Warren said the previous weekend at the annual conference of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which I reported on last Tuesday.

I know the pastor—the author of “The Purpose-Driven Life” and a rising voice in politics, evangelical and beyond—generated controversy when President-elect Barack Obama asked him to say the prayer at the Jan. 20 inauguration, and I know that the media is still suffering from its Jeremiah Wright hangover and the absence of Sarah Palin, but Warren isn’t Wright and Obama’s selection really wasn’t as surprising as some want to portray it.

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December 30, 2008 | 2:10 pm

‘Jesus is Just Alright’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Wesley Pinkham read my last post about “Guitar Praise” and was wondering why “Jesus is Just Alright with Me” was left off the list. (I personally was looking for anything by Faith + 1; there’s a clip of their greatest hits, including “Pleasing Jesus,” after the jump.) Watch the above video and you’ll know the answer.

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December 30, 2008 | 10:35 am

Forget Guitar Hero, Christian rockers already have Guitar Praise

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Shows how little I know.

Yesterday I pondered whether “Guitar Hero” could save Christian music. Turns out “Guitar Praise” is already on the scene.

The game, which runs on PC or Mac, looks a lot like its secular sister but with a more holy set of songs from Caedmon’s Call, David Crowder Band, dc Talk, Relient K and a bunch of bands I’ve never heard of.

“Grab the guitar and play along with top Christian bands!  Shred those riffs or blast the bass… you add a unique sound to the solid Christian rock.  But watch out: if you can’t keep up, the artists will take a break and stop the music.  Crank it up and try again—you’ll soon be rockin’ with the best while praising the Lord!”

Sounds like you won’t get booed off stage, which, from the looks of someone playing Petra after the jump, will save some bruised egos:

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December 29, 2008 | 4:54 pm

Obama talks about Israel’s right to defend itself

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Thus far, President-elect Barack Obama, whose peace plan just had a huge monkey wrench thrown its way, has deferred to President Bush on Israel’s airstrikes on the Gaza Strip. During his campaign for presidency, Obama made numerous appeals to his strong support for Israel; CBS News, in a seven-minute video after the jump and in this post, recalls Obama’s statements.

If Israel’s assault on Hamas militants really is about the years of daily rocket attacks aimed across the border at Israeli civilians—and I have no reason to believe otherwise—this comment made by Obama during a July visit to Sderot is revealing:

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israelis to do the same thing,” Obama said.

The folks at StandWithUs drew that to my attention. The quote appeared in Haaretz, hardly a bastion of right-wing Israeli thought.

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December 29, 2008 | 3:39 pm

Jews and Episcopalians—kindred spirits

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Razib at Gene Expression did some graph plotting and found that Milton Himmelfarb’s old adage that “Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans” may no longer be true. It appears now that Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Episcopalians, too.

Episcopalians were once known as “Republicans at prayer.” But liberalizing forces in the church, from which conservatives recently split over treatment of homosexuality, have correlated with a rise in Episcopalians who identify as Democrats. Using the General Social Survey, Razib created a bunch of charts that show Episcopalians are a lot more like Jews than they are the average white Protestant.

While 40 percent of white Protestants believe the Bible is the written Word of God, only about 14 percent of Episcopalians and 8 percent of Jews agree. Razib charted three significant discrepancies between Jewish and Episcopal beliefs—homosexuality, human evolution from animals and the existence of heaven and hell.

Less than 20 percent of Jews believe in heaven, which reminded me of the above scene from “South Park.” It’s from an episode in which the boys are trying to build a ladder to heaven to retrieve a raffle ticket for a candy shopping spree from their perennially dying friend Kenny. After breaking through the clouds but still proving unsuccessful, everybody’s favorite anti-Semite says:

“I think maybe we’re not seeing heaven because one of us doesn’t believe in it enough. Heaven could be like the pixie fairies of Bubble Yum Forest. You only see them if you really believe in them. You know. Maybe we’re not seeing heaven because one of us is a J-O-O.”

The clip is after the jump:

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December 29, 2008 | 3:08 pm

Israel says assault on Gaza ‘war to the bitter end’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: Reuters

So much for hopes of peace talks:

Israel obliterated symbols of Hamas power on the third day of what the defense minister described Monday as a “war to the bitter end,” striking next to the Hamas premier’s home, and devastating a security compound and a university building.

The three-day death toll rose to 364 on Monday, with some 1,400 reported wounded. The U.N. said at least 62 of the dead were civilians, and medics said eight children under the age of 17 were killed in two separate strikes overnight. Israel launched its campaign, the deadliest against Palestinians in decades, on Saturday in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns.

Since then, the number of Israeli troops on the Gaza border has doubled and the Cabinet approved the call-up of 6,500 reserve soldiers.

The strikes have driven Hamas leaders into hiding and appear to have gravely damaged the organization’s ability to launch rockets, but barrages continued. Sirens warning of incoming rockets sent Israelis scrambling for cover throughout the day.

One medium-range rocket fired at the Israeli city of Ashkelon killed an Arab construction worker there Monday and wounded several others. He was the second Israeli killed since the beginning of the offensive.

At first light Monday, strong winds blew black smoke from the bombed sites over Gaza City’s deserted streets. The air hummed with the buzz of drone aircraft and the roar of jets, punctuated by airstrike explosions. Palestinian health officials said one strike killed four Islamic Jihad militants and a child.

Some Palestinians ventured outside for mourning. In northern Gaza, a father lifted the body of his 4-year-old during a funeral Monday for five children from the same family killed in an Israeli missile strike.

On Sunday, Hamas missiles struck for the first time near the city of Ashdod, only 25 miles (40 kilometers) from Israel’s heart in Tel Aviv. Hamas leaders have also threatened to renew suicide attacks inside Israel. A missile from Gaza struck Ashdod again on Monday, seriously wounding two people.

On Monday, the White House released a statement saying “in order for the violence to stop, Hamas must stop firing rockets into Israel and agree to respect a sustainable and durable cease-fire.”

But in Damascus, Syria, a senior exiled Hamas official said there can be no talk of a truce with Israel until the assault ends and Israel reopens the Gaza crossings.

“We need our liberty, we need our freedom and we need to be independent. If we don’t accomplish this objective, then we have to resist. This is our right,” the official, Abu Marzouk, told The Associated Press in an English-language interview.

A a six-month truce between Hamas and Israeli expired earlier this month, but Hamas refused to extend it, saying Israel had violated its terms.

Most of those killed since Saturday were members of Hamas security forces, though the precise numbers remain unclear. A Hamas police spokesman, Ehab Ghussen, said 180 members of the Hamas security forces were among the dead, and the U.N. said at least 62 of the dead were civilians. A rise in civilian asualties could intensify international pressure on Israel to end the offensive.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, told parliament Israel was not fighting the residents of Gaza. “But we have a war to the bitter end against Hamas and its branches,” he said. Barak said the goal is to deal Hamas a “severe blow” and that the operation would be “widened and deepened as needed.”

Read the rest here. The only embeddable video I could find was from Al Jazeera, and it’s below. Anyone seen others?

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