Welcome to people who have come here looking for the Command Post blog. You can find it here.

Somehow I've become the top result for the Google search on that phrase.

John Zorn was supposed to be appearing at the Israel Festival this summer, but the word now is that there will only be local performers (report).

This Fatah suicide bomber was planning on blowing up a boarding school for children from abusive homes.

The Onion was lame this week.

Haaretz news flashes says that the Israeli defence establishment believes that Iraq has mobile scud launchers concealed under bridges where they can't be seen from above.

Ynet is saying that the Shiite Basra rebellion has been put down by Iraqi forces.

Via the Command Post, an article on Iraq's use of their own people as human shields. Funny how there's rarely a similar complaint about the Palestinians - given that they've have been doing the exact same thing for 2 years.

It would be interesting to hear a military perspective on how Israeli and American forces respectively deal with this tactic.

Barry Rubin describes his experience discussing the Iraq campaign as part of a television panel on an Arab network - and what he calls the "wall of lies" (here).

I really hope Salam is for real, but this could be the CIA:

today my father and brother went out to see what happening in the city, they say that it does look that the hits were very precise but when the missiles and bombs explode they wreck havoc in the neighborhood where they fall. Houses near al-salam palace(where the minister Sahaf took journalist) have had all their windows broke, doors blown in and in one case a roof has caved in. I guess that is what is called “collateral damage” and that makes it OK?

Or is it only Israelis who would think that describing minimal collateral damage constitutes propaganda?

From following the events of the Iraq war (and the house-to-house fighting in Nasiriya) at the Command Post blog, it appears that the coalition forces are putting their own troops at risk in order to minimize Iraqi civilian casualties. And it's clear that Iraq is not concerned about following the Geneva conventions with any POWs it obtains.

If this is a new paradigm for warfare, it was probably first seen with the Israeli assault on the "militants" in Jenin last year.

Some Israeli commentators think that the Ansar al-Islam organization - an Islamic group operating in northern Iraq and consisting of non-Iraqis - will cause problems for the US forces. (article).

Prof. Amatzia Baram says that if Iraq attacks Israel it will be within the next couple of days (article).

An ISM-er who was among "dozens" of stone-throwing youths was wounded by rubber bullets in Nablus (report).

In Jpost print edition Barry Rubin notes that the fact that the US is targeting a foreign leader now provokes nary a peep from anyone. Jpost print also has a photo of a 5-year-old showing his gleeful siblings how to drink through a straw while wearing a gas mask.

Visit RibbityFrog for lots of info on what the Arabic media is saying about the Iraq situation..

"Israel warns Web sites on war coverage" This is one of those stories that's only interesting to the foreign media: the IDF censor is said to have contacted two Israeli BBS sites and warned them not to publish classified information about the war. The writer then insinuates this is sinister and invokes a Reporters Without Frontiers report.

The IDF censor should obviously be paying more attention to us blogs than those sites mentioned in the article, which are about as informative as the average Usenet group.

Those blogspot banner ads are now Google-esquely selecting ads to match blog content.

Anyone know a good place for (blog) image storage?

This afternoon on Emek Refaim (which is in some respects the "new downtown" ), only about 1 in 10 non-schoolkids was carrying a gasmask.

Rachel Corrie's ISM group has confirmed what I argued earlier: that the photo of Corrie near the bulldozer (captioned by Reuters, Christian Science Monitor, and others as being "before" or "moments before" she was run over) - was in fact taken hours before. So there's no photo of what happened before the accident - only the eyewitness account of ISM member Joe Smith who says she jumped in front of the bulldozer which then plowed her over with dirt.

Jurgen Hogrefe of Der Spiegel magazine recently appeared on a German radio program called "Meet the Press" and claimed that the Mossad asked German intelligence to ensure Germany doesn't protest if Israel starts expelling Palestinians from the territories when the war in Iraq begins (report).

That's more evidence that a lot of "important" Europeans (and journalists) have zero understanding of what's going on here and get all their information from Palestinian propagandists.

Zeev Schiff assesses what's likely to happen to Israel during the war with Iraq (report) He's essentially calm about the prospect of being attacked, and he mentions that Israel's own spy satellite is of great assistance now.

Schiff also presents the recollections of a source who was present in the US cabinet at the end of the first Gulf War. Reportedly, Norman Schwarzkopf favored a continued assault on the Iraqi Republican Guard and the ousting of Saddam, but Colin Powell's contrary view prevailed (article)

I'm still busy taping everything (hope this stuff is actually polyproplylene and 30 microns thick). T. tried on her gas mask but wasn't sure whether to attach the filter: too bad we didn't just check Gil's and Ribbity's blogs.

The Israeli version of Google exhibits Tel Aviv-o-centrism by removing the "Happy Purim" banner while it's still Purim in Jerusalem (BTW Google renders the "I'm feeling lucky" button into Hebrew as "More luck than wits").

Gil notes that Israblog, the Israeli blogging site, is dressed up for the holiday as Blogger.

This article quotes Joe Smith of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity movement who describes how Rachel Corrie and her fellow "activists" would confront IDF bulldozers:

Smith, originally of Kansas City, Missouri, .... said the fact that the IDF had previously taken pains not to hurt the group made him feel safe. It is precisely because the group has so much experience playing a game of chicken with the bulldozers that it understands this was not an accident.

Many members have stood in front of a bulldozer as Corrie did and then climbed up the mound of dirt, precisely so that the driver could see them. "You look into their eyes and they stop," Smith said.

So the ISM itself admits that Corrie deliberately jumped in front of the bulldozer, confident that it would stop because IDF bulldozers have always stopped in the past.

But in fact it's obvious that the driver must be considered guiltless until there's serious evidence to the contrary - just as any driver would if someone jumped in front of his vehicle.

People who arrived at this site from the Christian Science Monitor might want to take a look here (scroll down) or (a bit too thoroughly) here for some info that the CSM left out about Rachel Corrie and the blindly pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement.

Someone needs to write a concise summary of the quality part of the blogger writing on this. One thing that's clear is that the bulldozer did not run over her directly as some articles have said. Haaretz quotes a doctor in Gaza hospital to the effect that bulldozer covered her with dirt first, which would explain how she lived long enough to make it to the hospital. That would mean that the photo which the CSM says is "moments before" could not in fact have been moments before.

Haaretz (and some other accounts) said she stepped in front of the 'dozer expecting it to stop - though one ISM account says she fell.