Bypassing unfriendly News Editors - Israeli Defence Force YOUTUBE page

Israel Defence Force (IDF) on YOUTUBE. Here is a screenshot showing the eight clips currently available on the IDF YouTube page. http://www.youtube.com/user/idfnadesk

It seems that the Israelis are fed up with allowing foreign news agencies to filter their message. There is much at stake with coverage of the retaliatory air strikes the IAF and army gunships are mounting in Gaza. The informed will recall the many hundreds of faked images and staged videos the Palestinians and their foreign supporters (some Canadian) created during the last go-round. This combat season we find something innovative. IDF public affairs stories and even gun camera video are being posted on a new IDF created YOUTUBE page. http://www.youtube.com/user/idfnadesk

An Aljeezera photo distributed to Western news bureaus on December 17, 2008 shows an example of what provoked the current Israeli counter-strike. This NOT a rocket launcher. It is an improvised 3inch mortar, very crude but no doubt very lethal. This lemon grove must be very close to the border fence if this hooded mortar team had any hope of hitting a Jewish settlement.

The current IDF mission is code named Operation Cast Lead. Israeli drones are orbiting Gaza 24/7 and doing a superlative job targeting Hamas militia and their Kazzam and Grad rocket launching sites. Israeli suppression of launching positions and resupply squads has been amazing.

Black clad HAMAS militiamen were caught in the open on the first day of IDF strikes on Gaza. In photos from the Aljeezera news agency, December 27/08 we see a HAMAS compound strewn with dead. Note that first arrivals have stripped the bodies of weapons but nobody ministers to the fallen, or puts on any display of mourning.

Possibly at the request of the Aljeezeera photographer, a bystander volunteered to add some drama to this next image. Note that he can't quite bring himself to let go of his cellphone.

And a needed reminder of events in 2006, when Israel went sniffing for HAMAS tunnel networks - this from an Israeli cartoonist at DryBonesBlog. Since the famous "Land for Peace" agreement the IDF has had to renter Gaza several times. The Palestinians don't hide the existence of a massive tunnel network (they've published photos of the "humanitarian" variety) but they dispute that tunnels are ever used to bring in explosives and light infantry weapons. Here we see a former Israeli greenhouse complex fallen into mixed usage... there does appear to be something growing, just not as lush as the Israeli crop.

Update January 1st : World Media goes Ape when I.A.F. takes out Terrorist Muslim cleric Nizar Rayyan with an F16 strike.

Of course while IDF is a newcomer to YouTube, the Islamic radicals have used the video pipeline since its inception. Example... here is the Hamas warrior cleric Nizar Rayyam spreading the militant word:

Nizar Rayyan was very high on the Israeli "Most Wanted" list, for his role in the planning and financing of terror missions which killed Jews. Today their air force took him out with an air dropped bomb. Judging by the instantaneous impulse of the world media to describe the attack as the "assasination" of a "respected" leader (over 35,000 news articles)

we are firmly enjoined to consider this casualty a "good guy".

Nazim Rayyam, the spiritual leader of the Hamas militia, who gave his holy "blessing" to Hamas female suicide bombers, was killed in an air strike today in Gaza. Initial news reports indicate that all four of his wives and nine of his children died with him. While it is bitterly unfair that innocent children die with the militant father, no doubt he made a conscious decision to keep them very close for his own protection.

Diehard sticklers for Constitutional propriety take challenge of Obama's Citizenship to the Supreme Court

Dr. Alan Keyes and Barack Obama in debate during the 2004 Senate race in Illinois. Keyes has been contesting President Elect Obama's eligibility to assume the formal title of President, under the citizenship requirements of the U.S. Constitution. Keyes has a petition of his own on file but he supports the Donofrio petition which has just gone to the Supreme Court.

The case of the faked Obama birth registration simply will not go away, and that does surprise me. I thought the issue was as dead as his meaningless slogan "CHANGE". Last night I read a wonderful essay penned in 2007 by an American named Sam Smith on the subject of "Post Literate America" in which he commented on the meaningless rhetoric which pollutes U.S. political culture: "One can, for example, already feel the nation sinking into the semiotic fantasyland of a presidential, treating verbal symbols as substance and mushy abstractions as hardened intent." I have no idea whose rhetoric Smith was referring to, Republican or Democrat, or both, but I wholeheartedly agree.

I encountered that rhetoric this morning as jumped through the Internet, tasting the sweet and sour of websites and Blogs discussing the lawsuits accumulating around the Obama Birth Certificate ploy. Whether Obama is a "natural born" American is a moot point, but what remains certain is that the man does not wish the world to see the original declaration which his mother signed.

A screen capture of yesterday's article in the AFRO, which alleges that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is biased, and that in entertaining to the Keyes petition which challenges the status of Kenyan-American Barack Obama, he is responding to a highly personal conservative political view.

The status quo American media refuses to touch this hot potato, and if they mention the lawsuits at all, are quick to attack the credibility of the plaintiffs. At least one Black newspaper is addressing the politics of the case - THE AFRO in Baltimore has an interesting and very current article here. In an attempt to discredit Thomas and his interest in the petition of Dr. Keyes, the AFRO is thick with reminders of his ties to Republican presidents: "Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 and has been one of its most conservative members.
Before his ascension to the court, he was appointed by Bush to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Earlier, he served as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission - appointed by President Reagan - and worked various jobs under former Republican Sen. John Danforth.
It would take a simple majority of five justices to put Donofrio’s emergency stay on the oral argument docket. Because it is an emergency by design, the argument would take place within days."

I had to smile when I saw that one frustrated American posted his own (or perhaps his Dad's 1963 State of Hawaii birth certificate online, Ta Da! , on a X-Box gaming forum. It shows what a legitimate registration of live birth looked like in that registry used by Obama's mother.

I like this fellows comments to another game aficionado on the TEAM XBOX Forum: "See, when I hear something about someone's birth certificate, this is what I think of. The paperwork that was filled out at the hospital, signed by the parents, the doctor and an attending. Real people, who saw you enter the world all slimy and screaming, who sign the paper to say "we were here and it happened."

And the following is the stripped down pro-forma certificate which the OBAMA CAMPAIGN posted on its national website for the duration of the Presidential campaign. I copied it during the campaign. I don't know if it's still archived but there are copies everywhere.

This bare bones certificate offered by the DNC contributes ZERO to the search for the truth. As it printed on a green form revised to "11/01" or November 2001, it was purchased sometime within the last seven years. Genealogists and others, certainly a Harvard trained lawyer and Senator, can purchase database generated documents for a few bucks. Fans of celebrities often acquire them and I have several U.S. birth certificates for biographical research subjects. Actually I never settle for this kind of reductionist printout and have always managed to trace subjects back to source records. In Obama's case, the State of Hawaii is excluding researchers from examining the original declaration signed by Obama's mother. They have no legal grounds for doing so.


And finally, here is the "cover my ass" letter released on October 31, 2008 by Dr. Chiyome Fukino, person in charge of State health records in Hawaii. She claims to have "personally seen and verified" that Obama's original (we are deliberately left to assume COMPLETE) birth registration is on file. She had the gall to quote the statute that prevents her from releasing a "certified" copy of the record, understanding full well that most of the legally curious would be content if she simply held the original in front of a TV camera. Any Martin (in his court filing) made the only statement which has any validity at this late juncture, now that B.H.O. is elected : "Having released what he claimed was the "original," and having been found to have dissembled, Obama has waived any objections to release of the "real" original document."
Millions of Kenyans believe that Obama was born in a hospital in their country, and B.H.O. has made no attempt to discourage them of their belief.

Censorship, editorial cartooning and Europe's crazed Imams

In the coming Post Literate Era, public education will emphasize verbal and visual forms of communication, and the wired world is expected to be fully navigable by spoken command. In that high speed global community most forms of censorship will involve the banning of unacceptablee images. If some shudder today at the careless display of a swastika or a burning cross, that will count as nothing in a world patrolled by the agents of Image Control.

The October 2008 edition of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC had a full page on the contagion of worldwide censorship. Today we abide the incessant protests of the faint of heart or the faux of heart, condemning the most innocuous of words or phrases. Too often it leads to the murder of those who spoke or wrote blasphemy.

Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been thrust once again into the spotlight wielded by Europe's crazed imams. Why? Simply because some of his cartoons have been selected to enhance a Danish journalist's book of essays.

Lars Hedegaard's new book GROFT SAGT or "ROUGHLY SAID" is a collection of his hundred best columns. [ ISBN 13: 9788792417015 ] The fact that it is illustrated with 26 Kurt Westergaard cartoons has Europe's Muslim politicians frothing mad once again. Not one Danish publishing company had the guts to print it, forcing a Danish Free Speech association to step up to the plate.

This is one of the Westergaard cartoons in Jyllens Posten which in 2006 led to rioting, arsons and murder. In fact the anarchists bomb metaphor enjoys a 130 year tradition in European graphics and even school kids in North America recognize it from the Spy vs Spy strip in MAD magazine.

And what of the offending subject matter in the twenty six Kurt Westergaard cartoons? Bare breasted women in the company of the sacred prophet, several bombs in turbans, (now a Westergaard trademark) Muslims with multiple wives, U.S. President George Bush as a Muslim with crossed fingers, assorted Christian priests, European political figures, examples of divine intervention, Hitler as a taxi driver, etc, etc. Nothing with the power to arrest our planet in its solar orbit, but enough to inflame those who view the world through the lens of Medieval texts.