Boortz Call - Israeli Flotilla

Here I am calling in and giving Neal Boortz the business over the Flotilla incident.  I think I did well.  I even had enough time to set up the audience and deal with his attempts to burn through my airtime.

(I barely avoided badmouthing Florida's diving... they've got enough to deal with without someone on national radio talking down their tourist draws.)

Olmert the Oil Speculator

As far as I can find, he hasn't been repudiated by the Israeli government for this comment:

"If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective," Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz told the mass-circulation Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

And oil spikes. It had been down to $125ish, but with that little splash it spiked to $138.

By depressing contrast, when Saudi Arabia proposed pumping another 500,000 bpd, the market yawned. This is something to keep in mind while the Republicans are pushing to make us "energy independent" by pumping another 300,000 bpd from the Coastal Shelf.

Israel's Out of the Closet

So much for the "policy of nuclear ambiguity", eh?

A decades-long silence about Israel's possession of nuclear weapons has been broken in an apparent slip of the tongue by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, during a visit to Europe.

That's one hell of a slip-up. Maybe you could attribute it to a slip of the tongue, as an aide characterized it, if you were feeling generous. However, when you have the Secretary of Defense making the same admission in the same week, the likely explanation bends towards coordination.

The subject of Israel's nuclear capability was also touched on last week by the next American defence secretary, Robert Gates, who suggested that Israel had atomic weapons.

He told a Senate confirmation committee that Iran might want an atomic bomb because it is "surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons: Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west and us in the Persian Gulf".

We're really ratcheting up the pressure on Iran, aren't we?

Via Juan Cole

Freedom is on the March, with the Israeli's and Saudi's getting closer:

Meanwhile, a de facto Israeli-Saudi alliance appears to be building against Iran and the Shiites. Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz is now saying that the 2002 Beirut peace plan put forward by then crown prince--now King--Abdullah of Saudi Arabia must be the basis for going forward with an Arab-Israeli peace process. Abdullah got the Arab League to offer Israel full recognition and political and economic relations if only they'd go back to the 1967 borders and recognize a Palestinian state.

At the time, then prime minister Ariel Sharon dismissed Abdullah's plan rather rudely. But now Israel has been bloodied by a Lebanon war that it lost on points to Hizbullah despite its clear military superiority. Bashar al-Asad of Syria pointed out that every generation of Arabs hates the Israelis more than its predecessors. Iran is emerging as a new hegemon in the eastern stretches of the Middle East.

I have heard Israeli ministers talking of this plan on the news in the last few weeks. Essentially, the Israeli's give back 90% of the land they occupied, and trade 1-for-1 for the remaining 10%. Once they remove the Palestinian's grievances, the Israeli's lives will get easier. They'll still have to be forever vigilant and independent through strength, but by ceasing the very real oppression of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, they'll sap some of the power out of their opposition.