In the news:

First up: Japan.

The stark reality of the situation:

Japan: Before and After

I hope the article below is correct:

Japan Does Not Face Another Chernobyl

Another update:

Explosion at Japan nuclear plant

In other news around the world:

Saudi Arabian forces prepare to enter Bahrain after day of clashes

Saudi forces are preparing to intervene in neighbouring Bahrain, after a day of clashes between police and protesters who mounted the most serious challenge to the island's royal family since demonstrations began a month ago.

The Crown Prince of Bahrain is expected to formally invite security forces from Saudi Arabia into his country today, as part of a request for support from other members of the six-member Gulf Co-operation Council.

Lieberman: Hamas waiting to take over West Bank

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that the Foreign Ministry believes that Hamas is stronger than Fatah in the West Bank, in a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

He explained the estimation that "Hamas does not want to seize the West Bank now due to realistic assessments." They are waiting for the day when PA President Mahmoud Abbas and PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad "obtain the the maximum that the Palestinians are able to receive from the international community, then they will seize power," he said.

The Palestinian Authority, Lieberman said, "does not want negotiations with Israel because they think they can get a lot more through the international arena."

The following stories represent follow-up reports regarding the brutal massacre of the Jewish family in Israel. They are all worth reading for a variety of reasons, all stated in these articles:

First - a review of the events:

Palestinian terrorist butchers Jewish family in Samaria

Now, the commentaries:

Jewish Family Massacred? Not Big News for World

As five members of one Jewish family were being laid to rest, news of their sadistic massacre had all but disappeared from the world's leading news websites. As of 11:00 AM EDT Sunday the item was completely missing from CNN's homepage, while appearing in a low spot on both the BBC and FoxNews websites.

FoxNews used text it received from the Associated Press, which did not use the word "murder" to describe the crime, but rather said that the Fogels were "knifed to death" and referred to what happened as "killings." While noting that three of the victims were children, it did not note that the youngest was a three-month-old girl and another was a three-year-old boy.

The Associated Press / Fox News piece did see fit to note that the attack took place "in Itamar, home to some of Israel's most radical settlers" - in an apparent attempt to make the victims seem less innocent and more deserving of their fate.

As stories from the Middle East often tend to dominate world news, the downplaying of the Itamar massacre is curious from a professional point of view, even if one ignores its grisly aspects.

Predictably, the massacre has galvanized Jewish public opinion against any further concessions to the Palestinian Authority and has triggered a government reaction blaming PA incitement for the crime. This could mean that the crime will turn into a watershed event for Israeli public opinion and government policy. Mainstream news media appears to be ignoring these aspects of the story.

Selection Sunday for Savages

The Palestinian Authority on Sunday named a new town square.

"Palestinians from President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction named a town square on Sunday after the leader of a 1978 bus hijacking in which 35 Israelis were killed."

The Palestinian Authority conducted the naming ceremony two days after five Israelis were stabbed to death in their home in Itamar, the victims including an infant and a four year old. This raised the question of whether the perpetrator or perpetrators of these murders will be deserving of a town square named for their "heroic acts" at some future date.

It appears that the clearest road to a Palestinian town square named in your honor remains to kill lots of Jews, many of them young Jews, and in vicious fashion. It also helps to get lots of media attention for the murders, most of which will point to Israeli settlement activity as the root cause of all the problems in the "occupied territories' , and in the rest of the world.

Naming the Dead

And it’s not only Hamas. It is also us — us Western liberals who somehow manage to turn a blind eye to such butchery. “Responsibility for the evil atmosphere which incites such pogroms does not rest solely with the Arabs of the PA or Hamas,” Phillips observes. “It must also be laid at the door of those left-wing Israeli and western journalists and intellectuals who are obsessively egging on these Jew-hating exterminators. . . .

The Arab incitement is simply not reported by the western media.” Item: the murder of the Fogel family came just days after a West Bank Palestinian youth center announced a soccer tournament named after Wafa Idris. And who is Wafa Idris? Why, she’s the first female Palestinian suicide bomber. She killed an 81-year-old man and injured more than 150 other Israelis in 2002.

The Palestinian Authority, another story reports, “has repeatedly presented Wafa Idris as a hero and role model, naming places and events after her, including a summer camp for youth funded by UNICEF, a Fatah women’s military unit, a university students group for Fatah members, a Fatah course, and more. There have been public demonstrations and songs on PA TV to honor her.” How would you feel about honoring Timothy McVeigh, perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing, with similar accolades?

And lastly:

An Open Letter To Harvey Weinstein

On the same day that a family of five were being murdered in their home in Israel, Harvey Weinstein ran a self-congratulatory promotional piece for his company’s terrorist propaganda flick, Miral.

Harvey Weinstein denounces Peter King and urges him to go watch Miral. But perhaps it is Harvey Weinstein who should drive to a small town lost in the Samarian Mountains and retrace the steps of the murderers in the name of the nationalistic mythology that movies like Miral glamorize.

Come along Harvey, into the bedroom where a father and his three month old daughter, Hadas, were fast asleep. It can be hard to get a 3 month old baby to fall asleep. Her father must had quite a time of it that night.

Babies may not have language, but they do have fears. They are afraid of the strange new world they were born into. And they need parents to comfort them and assure them that everything will be alright. That they are loved and protected.

When Rabbi Fogel finally got his little baby daughter to sleep, she must have felt safe with her father there. The man who would have taught her about life. Who would have done his best to protect her. And the man whose throat was slashed in his sleep along with his child’s.

Tell me Harvey, do you know what goes through a three month old baby’s mind when her throat is being slashed?

The mother had been in the bathroom while the bloody work took place. A small moment of peace while her children slept. She didn’t let them cut her throat, the way they had that of her husband and her baby daughter. Instead she fought them. They had to stab her to death.

If you ever make a movie about these particular terrorists, be sure to emphasize how hard it is to stab a mother to death. She will fight for her children. And the terrorists will have to work to kill her. You should swoop the camera down sympathetically on their sweating faces as they do the hard work of murdering her.

From there they went on to murder 11 year old Yoav who was reading in bed. Next was 3 year old Elad. Why stab a 3 year old boy twice in the heart? That is the question, Harvey. I understand once. Once is certainly enough to kill any 3 year old. But twice? Maybe it was that each killer wanted a turn and a share of the glory of murdering a toddler.

Your article promoting Miral urges that ‘understanding the “other” requires us to step out of our comfort zones’. Step now out of your comfort zone.

Family members have released photos of their children lying in their blood, but I don’t think you will want to see them. They are too far outside your comfort zone. There is plenty of blood and gore in your movies, but this is different. These are the bodies of inconvenient children. Their deaths don’t fit into your ideological framework.

The Fogel family is at peace now, for the most part. They have found the only form of peace that the terrorist gangs have ever delivered, in return for land, money, weapons and international legitimacy. Not the entire family of course. Three children survived. Three settlers. Three obstacles to peace.

There is a lot more contained in this article and it is all worth reading. Just a couple of additional quotes below:

“The Prophet says: ‘You shall fight the Jews and kill them, until the tree and the stone will speak and say… ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah - there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’”

These are not the words of some mad lunatic, or a tiny extremist minority, but of the Sahih Bukhari, the second holiest book of Islam.

In poor starving Gaza, candies and sweets are being handed out to celebrate the courageous murder of a baby.

“Unless the Palestinian narrative is finally understood and acknowledged by Israelis and their American supporters, there will never be peace in the Holy Land,” you say. As if peace were in your hands to give.

But we understand the Palestinian narrative all too well. The real one and the fake one. We know the olive groves, the bulldozers and the keys. And we also know the terrorist gangs trained by Islamic fanatics and Socialist dictators to seize the land and murder its inhabitants.


If you want to know the real narrative, then put Miral on a shelf and ask where the Christians of the region have gone.

Why are there so few left? The answer would make for a much better movie, but it is not a movie that you will ever make. It is not a movie that any theater would ever show. It is a story of bigotry and genocide.

It is an old story and a new one. You can find its oldest chapters in the Koran, along with the graves of the Jews of what is today Saudi Arabia. Its latest chapters are being written in Europe, where Jews once again flee European cities, not from men in uniforms, but in long robes. And unless that narrative is understood, there will be no peace in the Holy Land, or anywhere else.

Watch now as the sun rises over the Samarian mountains, see as the men walk with their guns, as their ancestors did with sword and spear right in this place. This town where the son of Aaron, brother of Moses, was buried.

For they died not in Auschwitz, Madrid or Medina, or a thousand other foreign lands, but on the soil of their forefathers. This is a mystery you cannot touch, for you are not a part of it.

Roll the projector in the UN General Assembly. Beam at the compliments for your willingness to distribute a movie whose inherent bias justifies the murder of Jews. And yet in that small town so hated by the world, men and women will rise with the sun, carrying their guns and their determination

Before them lies the future, behind you the past. They live in the answer to the mystery. Those children are dead, yet they live. They died in pain and horror, yet they live. They are buried now, yet they live.

And in the town of Ithamar, named after one of his ancestors from thousands of years ago, Rabbi Cohen will walk back to his own home, and hug his own children. And he will stand watch over them. While the UN cheers your movie, he will go on carrying his gun and looking after his own land, though the world hates him for it. He is a free man born of a free nation.

And when he sits down at his Passover table to thank his G-d for his freedom and his land, he will be free as few are. As you with all your wealth can never imagine. And though he will one day die, like Ithamar and those children, he will live forever. Go now, Harvey. This is no place for you to be. It is his home. It is his land. Not Miral’s and not yours. Go.