(JTA) --Israel's air force bombed a mosque in Gaza City used to store rockets.
The mosque bombed Wednesday afternoon was also used as a staging ground for launching rockets and missiles, according to a statement from the IDF spokesman's office. The most recent launch from the mosque occurred Wednesday morning, according to the IDF.
The strike, undertaken after significant intelligence confirmed that munitions were stockpiled in the mosque, caused the Kassam rockets and long-range Grad missiles stored in the mosque to explode.
"The IDF will continue to attack any target used for terrorist activity and will not hesitate to strike those involved in terrorism against the citizens of the State of Israel even if they cynically choose to operate from locations of religious or cultural significance," the IDF statement read.
Meanwhile, at least 12 Palestinians were permitted to enter Israel Wednesday for medical treatment, including three children.
Also on Wednesday, 93 trucks carrying about 2,500 tons of food and medical supplies entered Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, according to the Defense Ministry.

although the columnist Badrya Darwish is a bit gloomy about 2009. She is trying to be cheerful and optimistic but she is depressed about conditions in Gaza, the economy in general and some local events in Kuwait.  In particular
As for Kuwait, also it's not a relaxing scene.  . . Still parliament keeps threatening, and the latest fashion is of having a group of mutawwa (religious police) planning to patrol our streets and neighborhoods to correct our behaviors. They've already started - as you've heard - in Hawally by beating two girls not wearing the hijab. Watch out while you're walking, maybe someone will hit you with a stick to tell you that you aren't dressed decently or covered up enough.
I can't help but force myself to feel optimistic about 2009. Despite there being nothing much promising and a lot of dark clouds over our heads. It looks like it's going to be a gloomy year for many, many people.
Have a happy new year.
According the The Arab Times these "Taleban style youths"  are being sought by the police.
Police are looking for two youths riding in a Jeep for ‘punishing’ two female students of the Business Institute in Hawalli for not wearing hijab, reports Al-Qabas daily.
The students told police the youths got down from the Jeep their jeep and insulted them in public for not wearing the Islamic head cover, beat them with a cane and escaped. Acting on information police rushed to the spot but failed to find the culprits.
Security sources said this is the result of radical ideology promoted by the committee fighting the strange phenomena in the country. It looks like those behind the incident want to propagate virtue and prevention of vice.
What "strange phenomena? Two headed chickens and a surfeit of frogs were the usual portent of disaster in mediaeval England. In Arab countries it must be a derth of headscarves.

The Spectator's editorial gets it right - mostly - but underestimates the importance of Islam:

As the rest of the world makes one of its periodic moral flyovers to scrutinise the latest round of bloodshed in the Middle East — and none can doubt the terrible human cost of the Israeli assault on Gaza — it is as well to recall the sequence of events that led to the air-strikes. Hamas (which controls the Gaza Strip that Israel quit in August 2005) and Israel had been observing a nervous six-month ceasefire brokered by the Egyptians. Israel offered a resumption of trade with Gaza if the violence ceased completely. It did not. Even at its lowest level, 15 to 20 rockets were still raining down on Israel each month. Hamas also abused the cessation of violence to re-arm itself via the underground tunnels that run from Gaza into Egypt. The Islamist terror group then announced the end of the ceasefire, claiming that Israel’s refusal to resume trade was a demonstration of its bad faith. On Wednesday, 70 rockets were fired on Israel. Three days later, Israel began its assault on Gaza.

Let us be clear: Hamas chose, and chooses, violent confrontation. In this context it is notable that both Egypt and Fatah have laid the blame for the bombardment of the past few days squarely at its door. Of course, the conflict is asymmetric, in the sense that the Qassam rockets deployed by Hamas are not as sophisticated as Israel’s modern ordinance. But proportionality does not require Israel to lower itself to Hamas’s technological level. Proportionality required restraint from Israel until restraint was no longer rational: that point was passed last week, if not before.

The high death toll — apparently 281 at the time of writing — is self-evidently ghastly. But those who rightly lament the civilian casualties should direct their fury at Hamas, which deliberately embeds its fighters and weapons in the civilian population. Indeed, the callous disregard of Hamas towards those it claims to champion was demonstrated on Friday when one of its rockets misfired and killed two Palestinian schoolgirls.

Those who criticise Israel’s actions should consider what Britain would have done if Sinn Fein had come to power in the Irish Republic during the Troubles and rockets had been regularly fired across the border. It is hard to imagine Her Majesty’s Government sitting idly by. Equally, it is hard to imagine that any Israeli government would have acted differently from the way this Kadima-led coalition has. Israeli elections are indeed imminent. But simply to interpret the military response as a cynical electoral ploy to shore up Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister, and Ehud Barak, its defence minister, is to see the conflict through lazy Western eyes: from its foundation Israel has believed, correctly, that its very survival is at stake. Its leaders have acted accordingly, often in a fashion that baffles those fortunate enough not to live in nations encircled by foes that call for their extinction.

So far so fair. But not the next bit:

In the meantime, the incoming Obama administration should continue with the Bush administration’s efforts to improve governance in the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank. It was, after all, the rank corruption of the PA that allowed Hamas to make its electoral breakthrough in the 2006 elections.

The PA is certainly corrupt, but the writer is wrong to see it as a "partner for peace". It is not different in kind from Hamas, just in less of a hurry, as Hugh Fitzgerald has pointed out many times (see here for his comprehensive argument on the subject). Both want Israel destroyed - Islam requires it.

This has been a bleak and bloody week in the history of the Middle East, a horrible throwback to the slaughter of the Six Day War and the conflict of 1973. But nothing should detract from the fact that Israel, like every other sovereign state, has the inalienable right to defend its citizens and territory against attack. No progress can be made until the finger-waggers of the West acknowledge that right.

The finger-waggers, who may or may not be the same people as the bruschetta-eaters, should indeed stop wagging. They should instead give support to a country that is in the frontline of a struggle for the very civilisation that allows them the luxury of finger-wagging and bruschetta-eating. But whatever we in the West think, no progress can be made while Islam dominates the hearts and minds of the Arabs. "Support" for the PA means more money for more rockets and more babies who will grow up to be human bombs.

Damian Thompson:

The Guardian/BBC (have they officially merged yet?) has produced a news story/documentary on the "science of the Virgin birth" which suggests that Mary may have suffered from various gruesome gynaecological abnormalities.

The author of the Guardian article, Aarathi Prasad, is also presenter of tomorrow's Radio 4's programme. If you follow the link, you'll notice that "the miracle of Mary's virgin pregnancy" is followed by the word corrected in bold type. This because the Guardian does not know the difference between the virgin birth and the immaculate conception: hence also the disappearance of the original headline, "Immaculate deception" (geddit?).

That's odd, given that Prasad claims to have spent "many years with nuns" contemplating the virgin birth. She can't have been paying attention. But she's fascinated by the "science" of the miracle:

One possibility, according to Prof Sam Berry [emeritus professor of genetics at UCL], is that Mary may have had a condition called testicular feminisation. Women with this condition have an X and a Y chromosome like a man, but their X chromosome carries a mutation that makes their bodies insensitive to testosterone. This leads to their developing as a female.

Genetically male, and probably sporting ambiguous genitals, Mary would have been sterile. But had she become pregnant spontaneously, her child could have inherited an intact Y chromosome.

To stop him developing as a female, like his mother, Jesus would have needed what geneticists call a "back mutation" – a highly unlikely reverse of the X chromosome glitch that caused the testicular feminisation in the first place. Other possibilities to explain the virgin birth include Mary being a genetic mosaic, formed from twins that fused into one body while maintaining chromosomes from both, Y and all.

I'm so sick of these programmes and articles offering "scientific" explanations for biblical miracles. If you're not a believer, then the Virgin Birth and the Star of Bethlehem are myths, full stop. You can't join the dots between miracle/myth and historical reality with ingenious pseudoscholarship (though you can often talk a commissioning editor into buying a neat seasonal package).

Incidentally, what a nice touch of Radio 4, broadcasting the programme for the Catholic solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. I look forward to a programme examining the ethics of the sexual relationship between the pre-pubescent child Ayisha and the middle-aged Mohammed – scheduled, of course, for the appropriate Islamic feast day. 

Not just the ethics - the physical effects of repeated rape on a child. Is it any surprise, for example, that Ayisha couldn't have any children? Such a programme would be really brave, so expect the BBC to produce it when Hell freezes over.

"In Gaza, medical officials said the number of Palestinians killed in the Israeli bombardment had reached 400. While many of the dead were Hamas security personnel, the United Nations said a quarter of those killed were civilians. Israeli officials have put the number of Palestinian civilians killed at closer to 10 percent."

Who is telling the truth? Is it "the United Nations" when it says that "a quarter of those killed were civilians" which would mean about a hundred such casualties (still an amazingly small number, given the conditions under which Israel must destroy the military ability of Hamas to inflict damage on Israel). Or is it it Israeli officials who "have put the number of Palestinian civilians killed at closer to 10 percent"? 

Do we have any past experience, any history, any dealings with the Israelis or the Arabs, anything on record, to lead us to conclude that the Israelis might be the ones attempting to tell the truth? Of course we do. The Israelis have, over many years, been found to have a firm habit, when discussing casualties -- their own, and that of the enemy -- of telling the truth. The Arabs, and not only the Gazan Arabs and the "West Bank" Arabs, but all of the Arabs, have had an unbroken record of nonsense and lies, about their "great victories" over the enemy -- think of Nasser during the Six-Day War, even inveigling Hussein of Jordan to join, disastrously, with him through such tall tales -- and about the "atrocities" of the Israelis, and about the numbers of innocent Arabs killed by those terminally evil Israelis. We all know this, and even those who act as if they think the Israelies and Arabs are somehow on the same moral level -- or that the Israelis are worse -- again and again let the mask slip, and reveal their real (and accurate) understandings. A good example of this telling the truth about casualties. Indeed, when they err, they err by accepting Arab figures, or by accepting, at first, or not taking the trouble to rebut, at once, the kind of blood-libel stories such as that about Israeli responsibility for the death (real? faked?) of Mohammad al-Doura (for more on this, see the exhaustive report by James Fallows written for "The Atlantic").

We also know -- the Gazan Arabs have repeatedly been quoted in news accounts about this -- that the Israelis have done everything they can to warn civilians to get away from any place, including the apartments of known Hamas leaders, that might be a storehouse for major weaopnry. They have dropped thousands of leaflets. They have instituted a campaign of callling up the cellphones, and then, if those phones are not picked up, the housephones, of as many people in Gaza whom they can reach --apparently the Israelis have a computer program that automatically dials and re-dials these numbers, and a recorded voice, in Arabic, warns them ---because they are trying to cause as few civilian casualties as possible. And that makes perfect sense. It would be idiotic for Israel to wish to increase civilian casualties. However, it would not be idiotic, and it makes perfect sense, for Hamas to increase the total of civilian casualties. There have been accounts in the Western press, some of them with Arab co-authors, about the attempts of  Hamas bullyboys to convince Gazan Arabs, that is "civilians," to rush to act as human shields for Hamas arms depots and Hamas bigshots who want others to protect them, and about the refusal of the Gazan Arabs to do so.

We have not forgotten, have we, the hysteria over the "Israeli war crimes" in Jenin that did not take place, for in Jenin the only "war crime" that took place was that of the Israeli military, insisting on not using airpower but requiring its reservists to go on foot into the warren of crooked alleyways, only to have 32 of them die when a wall was deliberately exploded on top of them. There was no mass killing as the Arabs -- and their willing collaborators in the Western press -- had insisted, and yet we have never heard, have we, a mea culpa, much less a mea maxima culpa, from that same wilfully misled Western press. And "the war crimes in Jenin" business is not unique, but rather, representative.

We already know, we have been through this many times before, that the Arabs, in toting up their civilian casualties, ascribe the deaths of all those who die of natural causes just before, and during, a conflict, to the Israelis. Thus a 90-year-old man who dies in his bed will be toted up as a "civilian casuality." We also know that Hamas has been busily executing,at hospitals --  some of Gazan Arabs were apparently horrified at the spectacle -- the prisoners who, when the Israeli Air Force bombed a Hamas prison, were free but wounded. And no doubt those prisoners, executed simply because they had been awaiting "trial" on charges of collaboratiing with Israel, will be toted up, in the Hamas or U.N. count, as "civilian" casualties of the Israelis. And so on -- simply use your imagination, and think of all the ways you could, were you a member of Hamas, swell those "civilian figures" even beyond the easiest course: simply making up something, and knowing no one could ever check. 

But the main point that needs to be made is this: it is that the word "United Nations" here deeply misleads. In Gaza, the United Nations is entirely an Arab affair. There may be, for the purposes of plausibility, merely a Western collaborator with the Arab cause, at the very top. But the staffs of UNRWA, in Gaza as elsewhere, and the U.N. personnel in Gaza, as everywhere else having to do with the "Palestinian" Arabs, is from top to bottom Arab. It is not the "United Nations" that is putting out this figure about "civilian" casualties. It is Arabs working for the local and immediate Arab cause -- that is, the never-to-be-ended Jihad against the Infidel nation-state of Israel.

Now imagine if that reality -- the "United Nations" in Gaza means "the Arabs in Gaza, with a handful of Western collaborators of the Arab and Muslim war against Israel" -- were to be reflected in news accounts.

Then, the sentence with which this posting began would read thus:

"In Gaza, Arab medical officials said the number of Palestinians killed in the Israeli bombardment had reached 400. Most of the dead were Hamas security personnel. Arabs working for the United Nations have claimed that a quarter of those killed were civilians, while Israeli officials have put the number of Palestinian civilians killed at closer to 10 percent."

There. That's much better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EHraMcoDM0&feature=related

Alex Burrough from The Netherlands has won last month's crossword puzzle contest. He will receive a gift certificate to swim with the dolphins in Florida which will be good for a year and is transferable.

Honorable mention goes to Paul Smith from Germany.

Thanks to Doug and Cheryl Messinger of the Dolphin Connection for providing the prize.

Yesterday, the last day of the year, is known in Italy as San Silvestro (as today is Capodanno). I suddenly remembered, last night, a bookstore in Rome, in the Piazza San Silvestro, one that was very unusual for Italy because it sold books not a full price, but discounted, because they were publisher’s remainders. And the bookstore or libreria bore the unbeautiful but straightforward name, , of "Remainders" (pronounced "Rehmaynderr"). If you are someone of slender means but champagne tastes, and covet an art book, say one of those beautiful productions from Electa on Piero or Giotto or Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the kind of book you could otherwise not possibly afford because, for god's sake, such books are very expensive, you could take the tram (and in Italy, the ride in uninterrupted by a pantografo coming unhinged as it does so often on American trackless wandering-off trams) right to the bus station in the middle of  PIazza San Silvestro, and those books, even if published a decade ago, can still be locatable at “Remainders,” and more important, in that store that  book would not cost an arm and a leg, but only an arm, or only a leg. I don’t know if "Remainders" still exists in its ashlar-and-mortar embodiment, on the Piazza San Silvestro. Perhaps it has gone the way of almost all bookstore flesh and of so much else as, for example, you, and I, dear reader, have gone, and is now only to be met with, just like us, on-line. On or near the last day of any year, newspapers and magazines – say, the Sunday Times Magazine – like to devote space to those who died during that past year. In the remains of my day, yesterday, the ubi sunt  theme settled on that bookstore, prompted by the coincidene of San Silvestro, that is  the last day of the year, and San Silvestro, the Roman square on which that bookstore could, and perhaps still can, be found. Where are they, those remains of the day, those remainders from back in the day? I need to know.

From The Jakarta Globe
Like any working mother, Yoyoh Yusroh, a legislator from the Prosperous Justice Party, begins her day tending to her children. The difference is that her family is nearly six times the size of the average Indonesian family.
Yoyoh, 46, and her husband have 13 children, aged between 6 and 23. Having as many children as possible, Yoyoh said, was something that Islam encouraged to produce the next generation of pious Muslims.
“It is not official party policy but we hold the belief that children are an asset,” said Yoyoh, a member of the House of Representatives Commission overseeing social affairs, religious affairs, women’s empowerment and child protection. She is also an outspoken critic of family planning.
The Prosperous Justice Party, or PKS, is a growing conservative Islam-based party that at one time supported the idea of Indonesia becoming an Islamic state based on Shariah law. The party’s president, Tifatul Sembiring, once commented that the party indeed encouraged its members to have many children.
Another party lawmaker bragged to a Jakarta Globe source recently that his three wives were expecting babies at the same time. He already has four children.
While there is no available research on the issue, some population experts see a connection between growing religious conservatism, particularly in Islam, and higher birth rates. The conservative Islamic movement supports polygamy and encourages families to have as many children as possible.
“The religious conservatism movement is not mainstream, but we need to be prepared if it becomes more widespread,” said Muhadjir Darwin, director of the Center of Population and Policy Studies at the University of Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta. “[Islamic conservatism] revives the idea of a big family as the norm, encourages getting married as soon as possible and tolerates underage marriage. This sentiment is still small scale, but it has to be watched.”

A construction firm manager returning from New Year's Eve fancy dress party scared off a burglar by charging at him dressed as the Norse god Thor.
Six-foot tall Torvald Alexander, 38, was wearing a red cape and the thunder god's silver-winged helmet when he spotted the raider in his front room rifling through a desk.
Mr Alexander, who runs building firm Alexander & Summers in Edinburgh, Scotland, said the burglar threw himself out of a first floor window of his £350,000 home in the Inverleith area of the city after being caught red handed.
Mr Alexander said: "As soon as he saw me his eyes went wide with terror. He looked like he had had a few drinks and decided to do a late night break in, but he hadn't counted on the God of Thunder living here."
He added: "I had just got back from a fancy dress New Year's party and because I have a Norwegian name I decided to go as Thor. It took ages making the cape, helmet and breast plate, and I must admit it was a bit chilly walking home, but when I saw that guy I just went mad and charged at him, my cape flying behind me. I think if I had had Thor's hammer with me I might have scared him to death. He had obviously taken off his shoes to creep about in silence, but when he saw me he just jumped out of the window in his socks. It will make him think again before breaking into other people's homes. Hopefully it's taught him a lesson."
Mr Alexander said he was contacting police and was going to hand over the burglar's shoes in the hope police can trace him.

by Theodore Dalrymple (Jan. 2009)


A controversy recently erupted in Sweden over an article published by the philosopher, Roger Scruton, in a magazine called Axess. He argued in it that Western art no longer had any spiritual, let alone religious, content; indeed, it had become afraid of the beautiful, from which it shied away as a horse from a hurdle too high for it. The result was a terrible impoverishment of our art.

The same magazine had published, shortly before, an article about Islamic art in which the author said that such art was inseparable from the religious ideas and beliefs that it embodied. This passed without remark: no one wrote in angrily to say, ‘So much the worse for Islamic art.’  more>>>

Swarms of locusts over Gaza

The screen shows what look like two swarms of green locusts over the Mediterranean Sea, approaching the Gaza Strip.

These are not locusts, though, but more than 50 Israel Air Force fighter jets that participated last Saturday in the unprecedented and astonishing air strike that was the opening act for Operation Cast Lead against Hamas.

The entire attack, during which 50 Hamas targets were hit, took exactly three minutes and 40 seconds.

Each green dot on the screen represents four fighter jets which fly in formation. Each swarm has several "foursomes" and was led by a veteran pilot who, like a conductor in an orchestra, needed to ensure that all of the aircraft carried out their missions in complete synchronization.

These new details were revealed on Thursday, the sixth day of Operation Cast Lead, which until now has been mostly fought by the IAF.

The aircraft have flown close to 600 sorties over Gaza, bombing several hundred targets from rocket launchers and weapons storehouses to Kassam manufacturing plants, smuggling tunnels and homes of senior Hamas operatives.

Most of the targets were prepared ahead of time by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), the Southern Command and Military Intelligence.

During its flights over Gaza, the IAF also works to produce new targets such as rocket cells and their launchers. Already two years ago, the IAF decided to open a joint operations center in the Southern Command headquarters in order to "close" intelligence and operation "circuits" faster than before.

This center works in cooperation with the IAF's main command-and-control center located underneath IAF headquarters in Tel Aviv. It is there, that decisions are made to carry out targeted killings, like the bombing Thursday of Nizar Rayyan, one of Hamas's top clerics and leaders.

The IAF films almost all of its bombings, not just to be able to release the videos to the media but more importantly to study the pictures.

"Each operation is extremely complicated since it requires not just a well-trained pilot but also precise intelligence on the target's exact location," a defense official explained Thursday.

One example was in the bombing of weapons-smuggling tunnels in Rafah, along the Egyptian border. In the video, one can see the bomb dropped by a fighter jet hit a structure which is built over the tunnel's entrance. Suddenly, several hundred meters away, there is another explosion at another entrance to the same tunnel and caused by explosives that were packed inside.

With over 400 Palestinians killed since the beginning of the operation, the UN has claimed that a quarter are innocent civilians. While the IDF says it regrets the loss of innocent life, tactically the ratio is relatively low, considering the urban warfare setting Hamas operates from within and the fact that the terror group uses civilian infrastructure, as well as civilians as human shields.

Despite this, the IAF does the maximum to minimize collateral damage and in many cases calls homes before bombing them to allow the inhabitants several minutes to evacuate before the bombing.

In some cases though the residents decided to climb to the roof of their homes hoping that the IAF would not bomb if it saw people from the air.

In response, the IAF fired nearby the building, showing its determination. The people are then seen fleeing the building which is then bombed, setting off secondary explosions caused by the large weapons cache stored inside.

The importance in targeted killings cannot be underestimated. In 2004, for example, within the span of a month, Israel killed Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and his successor Abdel Aziz Rantisi, After the spate of assassinations, Hamas asked Israel for a hudna, cease-fire.

It's been more than a year since it was first put up, and it deserves another showing: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kooj5oyujd4

A further introduction to the atmospherics of Islam can be found at MEMRI here: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qROFl0sbrjo&feature=related

Some information useful to have readily at hand, from Martin Peretz's blog at The New Republic:  

• Today (Wed.), 93 truckloads with 2,500 tons of food and medical supplies were transferred to Gaza.
• Since the beginning of the operation in Gaza Saturday, 6,500 tons of food and medicine were transferred to Gaza.
• The World Food Program has informed Israel that they will not be resuming shipment of food into Gaza because their warehouses are at full capacity, with enough supplies for at least 2 weeks.
• 12 Palestinians from Gaza entered Israel today (Wed.) for medical treatment.