Blog about politics (mideast and pro-Israel, Canadian and local Montreal), world events, and random thoughts.

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The World I Know is updated on a semi-regular basis by segacs.

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9:02 AM
It was terrorism

Investigators found explosives in the wreakage from the Russian planes that crashed, and an Islamist terror group has claimed responsibility (ABC so obligingly uses the non-offensive term "militant").

Now the real question is, faced with their version of 9/11, how will Russia react? If Putin's record against Chechen rebels is any indication, he won't let this slide. But I'm willing to bet he'll continue to oppose the US at every turn in the United Nations.

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4:27 PM
Fact imitates fiction

Read this. Then read this:

A federal judge on Thursday ruled against the government's ban on so-called partial birth abortions, saying the measure was unconstitutional because it failed to provide an exception to protect a mother's health.

I wonder if I can use the novel's ending to predict what will happen next in reality.

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4:22 PM
Hatikvah in Athens

See the medals ceremony here.

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1:39 PM
Mysterious plane crashes in Russia

Two planes crashed simultaneously just outside Moscow early this morning. The immediate thought of much of the world was terrorism, but now reports are saying there's no sign of it:

Russian officials say they have not found any signs of terrorism in the near-simultaneous crashes of two passenger jets.

The planes crashed within minutes of each other Tuesday night after taking off from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport, killing all aboard.

No sign? Not exactly:

"Siberia Airlines does not exclude the possibility that the Tu-154 plane crash was caused by a terrorist attack," the airline's statement said.

"This is supported not only by the circumstances of the two air disasters taking place at the same time, but also by the telegram received by the Siberia Airlines Flight Control Center from the watch commander of the military sector of the main center of the Russian Unified System of Air Traffic Control just after the planes disappeared from radar screens."

The telegram, the airline said, noted that the two airplanes "simultaneously disappeared in Moscow and Rostov zonal centers. A hijacking warning alarm went off on one of the planes. I request the airport personnel to be more vigilant during passenger screening and boarding the plane."

If it was terrorism, so far there have been no claims of responsibility. Chechen rebels are one possibility; Al Qua'eda is of course another. Of course, it could have just been an accident... but the coincidence seems implausible:

Investigators said it was extremely unlikely for two planes to crash on the same day due to accidental causes.

But FSB officials conceded they had not found any concrete evidence that the crashes were due to terrorist acts. The wreckage at both crash sites appeared to rule out acts of sabotage, officials said.

In the menatime, Ha'aretz reports that two of the killed passangers were Israeli citizens living in Russia. That part is almost certainly just a coincidence. Though I wonder if we'll hear any wacked-out conspiracy theories about "3,000 Israelis who didn't get on the flight" in the coming days.

I also wonder, if this turns out to be terrorism, if Vladimir Putin will be called before committee hearings to try to determine why he didn't act to prevent it.

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1:29 PM
Robert Mugabe: Dictator, Tyrant... and third-greatest African of all time:

Zimbabwe's controversial President Robert Mugabe was voted the third-greatest African of all time, topped only by South Africa's Nelson Mandela and former Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah, in a survey for New African magazine announced.

Mugabe, widely criticized outside Zimbabwe for stifling dissent and crippling the economy of his once prosperous southern African nation, was an "interesting" choice because "a high-profile campaign in the media has painted him in bad light", the New African wrote.

The London-based magazine said responses flooded in after the survey was launched last December to nominate the top 100 most influential Africans or people of African descent.

That's almost as absurd, as, say, La Presse nominating Yasser Arafat as "Person of the Year"... oh wait, that really happened.

This survey result really calls into question what the readership of this magazine must have been thinking. Too much of Africa remains plunged into poverty, war and conflict, disease (the highest percentage of HIV and AIDS in the world), and tyranny. With much of the world almost ready to write off Africa as beyond being able to be saved, the continent is in desperate need of cultural role models. Mugabe, needless to say, is not exactly an inspired choice.

(By the way, none of this will stop African countries from continuing to attack Israel on a regular basis).

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1:18 PM
Zahav for Israel!

Kol ha'kavod to Israeli windsurfer Gal Friedman for winning Israel's first-ever gold medal.



Now that's a sight you don't see every day. It makes me want to stand up and cheer! I wish I could have heard Hatikva being played at the medals ceremony.

Allison thinks it's really cool that his name is "Gal", which in Hebrew means "wave".

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12:34 PM
Second gold for Canada

To Lori-Ann Muenzer in track cycling. Woohoo!

Other athletes with good chances at a medal are Caroline Brunet (kayak), Alexandre Despatie (diving), and Perdita Felicien (hurdles), as well as the baseball team and the star sailing crew. There may be a few medals still to come for us at the games.

Update: Despatie won silver in springboard. But in a shocker, Felicien fell in the hurdling race and didn't even finish.

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10:49 PM
That's class

"Judging irregularity" is what they're calling it. I call it judging corruption. Not since the 2002 figure skating have we seen this nonsense. First, a "judging error" cost South Korean Yang Tae-young the gold in the men's all-around finals, falsely awarding it to American Paul Hamm. Then, Canadian Kyle Shewfelt was robbed out of the bronze of the men's vaulting finals, despite the fact that the Romanian athlete who edged him out fell off the vault. (Canada's appeal, by the way, was rejected... by an official who also happens to be Romanian. Coincidence? Doubtful.)

By the last event - the men's high-bar finals - the crowd was fed up with the judges. And they let them know, by booing loudly when Russian Alexei Nemov got a score that they perceived as too low. The crowd kept on booing so long, in fact, that the next competitor - American Paul Hamm - had to wait them out before he could start his routine.

In the end, the only person who could calm them was Alexei Nemov. Showing incredible sportsmanship considering he'd just lost his chance at a medal, he applauded his competitors and urged the crowd to calm down so that the event could go on.

Now that's class. If only the judges showed some.

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2:47 PM
Maybe he should look in the mirror...

This headline seems better suited to The Onion than to real news: North Korea likens Bush to Hitler:

North Korea has described US President George W Bush as an "imbecile" and a "tyrant that puts Hitler in the shade".

A Foreign Ministry spokesman was responding to comments President Bush made last week in which he described the North's Kim Jong-il as a "tyrant".

This pretty much says it all, doesn't it? Kim Jong-Il, the "Dear Leader" of gas chambers and concentration camps, who has killed and tortured countless members of his population and prompted comparisons to Auchwitz and outrage by Yad Vashem. The "Dear Leader" of child prisoners and sex slaves. The "Dear Leader" who prefers to starve his entire population rather than accept outside aid. The "Dear Leader" of nuclear weapons factories who refuses to even talk about disarming.

But no. In this upside-down world, Bush is clearly the person who merits comparison to Hitler. The "Dear Leader" must be just misunderstood. Or something.

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1:55 PM
A case study of media bias

All of the following headlines refer to, in theory, the same story:

Jerusalem Post: US, Israel in informal deal on settlements

Jerusalem Post: PA slams US settlement policy

Haaretz: Tenders issued for 1,000 housing units in W. Bank settlements

Canadian Press (as reported on Canada.com): Israel approves more West Bank settlement homes, escalating crisis

Associated Press (as reported in the Globe and Mail): Israel plans massive West Bank expansion

Reuters: Israel Plans 530 Settler Homes with U.S. Acquiescence

BBC: Israel expands settlement growth

The Guardian: US deal 'wrecks Middle East peace'

Ok, that last one was just for illustrative purposes. But the differences are not so subtle. An "informal deal" in the Jerusalem Post becomes "U.S. acquiescence" to Reuters. "1,000 housing units" in the leftist Israeli paper Ha'aretz gets interpreted by AP as a "massive West Bank expansion". The Jerusalem Post reports the Palestinian Authority's accusations that this will hamper the "peace process" (what peace process?); the Guardian assumes the PA's complaint is fact.

Language, of course, is politically charged. This is just one example of the pervasive media bias that we all know exists against Israel.

In the meantime, IsraelInsider has an article deploring the use of the term "settlements" in the first place:

When we use the term "settlements" and "settlers," we feed attempts to portray not just the disputed territories and its inhabitants, but all of Israel and its people as a "settler state" akin to apartheid in South Africa. If Gush Etzion, Hevron and other communities are settlements, so too were Tel Aviv, Rishon L'Tzion and Degania along with many others. To accept the Arab vocabulary and demands for removing "settlements" and "settlers" implies we also would see the dismantling of Tel Aviv, and many other cities, towns and villages in pre-1967 Israel and removal of their inhabitants. "Towns, villages" they are, with inhabitants. "Settlements" and "settlers" only gives the Arabs propaganda ammunition.

Other criticized terms include "creation of Israel" (re-establishment, they argue, would be a better term), "occupied territories" (should be "disputed territories"), "West Bank" (preferring "Judea-Samaria"), "The Wall" (it's really a "security fence"), and of course, "militants" (terrorists). The editorial urges all Israeli and Jewish publications to choose language carefully to avoid propagating myths being spread by much of the Arab world.

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1:43 PM
Mais non, l'antisémitisme n'existe pas en France !

Here's what Meryl has to say about it:

A Jewish community center in Paris was burned down last night. The police suspect arson. But there is no anti-Semitism in France.

[ . . . ]

How can that be? Anti-Semitism is not a big problem in France. Chirac said so. He even chastised Ariel Sharon for saying that it was.

Read the rest.

On a related note, Imshin has a disgusting travesty of justice for an 11-year-old Jewish boy who was beaten up by Arab classmates who shouted antisemitic jeers at him while they beat him. The school expelled both attackers, but then their parents sued the schoolboard and the ministry of education. Subsequently, both boys were allowed back into school, and damages ordered paid to them.

The ministry of education and the parents opposed this decision in an appeal court. Imagine what will happen to the Jewish boy if he sees his tormentors back in school. The execution of this judgment means in fact expelling the victim from the school. The judgment will be rendered in August, when all France is on vacation, and the lawyer of the parents is very pessimistic, based on many recent cases in France where complaints about anti-Semitism were minimized and usually dismissed by the French courts. In this case, the administrative court judged that, based on the accused boys declarations, the anti-Semitic acts, even though recognized by the authors, were not numerous enough to justify expelling the authors form school. So, for this French court, a certain level of anti-Semitism, even though illegal (it is against the law in France to proffer anti-Semitic or racist remarks in public), is acceptable.

But no, Meryl's right, of course: there's no antisemitism in France.

Update: Bad news for France but good news for the Israeli tourism industry.

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11:46 PM
Gold for Canada

Finally, O Canada is heard over the sound system as Canadian gymnast Kyle Shewfelt wins gold on the floor event.

Disappointments, however, for the men's eight rowing team and for diver Emilie Heymens, both gold favourites, and both shut out for medals.

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