Currently running on BBC News:

Israeli dies in Gaza rocket raid

An Israeli woman has died of her wounds shortly after a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit her car in the border town of Sderot, medics say.

The woman was the first Israeli killed in a rocket attack since November.

The attack came after Israel carried out an air strike on a refugee camp in northern Gaza. The Islamic Jihad militant group said four members died.

Israeli air strikes have killed more than 30 people in the past week, several of them civilians.

Although the BBC report does not say it explicitly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the two acts were related. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that the killing of the Israeli woman was in retaliation for Israel’s earlier attacks.

You could be forgiven for thinking that if you only read this story, and you didn’t know that militants had fired over 200 rockets at Sderot since November, that a home and a school were hit in the past week, and that the situation had become so bad that the Israeli government had already started evacuating people from the town.

in other words, one incident has very little to do with the other. At least not in the way that this story portrays it. If the rocket attacks were retaliation, they could not have started last year.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to see Fatah now accused of being in the pocket of the Zionists. This from the New York Times article covering the Israeli air strike and the rocket attack on Sderot:

Asma al-Hayya, 24, said her father, Nimir, worked in Israel until the beginning of the second intifada, or uprising, in 2000 and was killed “because his brother is Hamas,” she said.

“This isn’t war between Hamas and Fatah,” she said. “This is a war against Islam. Those pretending to be Fatah are collaborators, and they coordinate with Israel against Hamas.”

A Hamas legislator, Huda Naaem, said, “Inside Fatah there is the program that is American-Zionist, and which fights resistance.” Another Hamas legislator, Jamilah Shanty, asserted that Hamas “will remain in government to protect resistance, so we will continue fighting and will insist on government, too.”

A very sad situation indeed.

The gay bashing Westboro Baptist Church has found a novel way of pissing off America.

Not content with picketing soldiers’ funerals, waving banners claiming American deaths are god’s punishment for tolerating homosexuality, they have taken one of the most goodhearted song of the past generation and given it an evil twist.

“God Hates The World” is a parody of the song “We Are The World” that raised about $50 million for famine relief in the 1980s. In the new version, Westboro Baptist congregants cheerfully sing about the world’s sins and mankind’s impending doom:

“God hates the world and all her people, you, every one, face a fiery day for your proud sinning. It’s too late to change His mind, you lived out your vain lives, storing up God’s wrath for all eternity.”

Needless to say, Warner/Chappel Music, which holds the rights to the song, has written to the Church threatening legal action. But the Church has countered that the song is a parody and is protected under First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and religious expression.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, church attorney and daughter of Wesboro pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., told BusinessWeek, “It’s all our effort to deliver a faithful message to this generation.”

Meanwhile, church members are planning a protest appearance at the funeral of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the evangelical pastor who died a couple of days ago.

“WBC will preach at the memorial service of the corpulent false prophet Jerry Falwell, who spent his entire life prophesying lies and false doctrines like ‘God loves everyone,’” says a message on the church’s website godhatesamerica.com.

“Falwell warmly praised Christ-rejecting Jews, pedophile-condoning Catholics, money-grubbing compromisers, practicing fags like Mel White, and backsliders like Billy Graham and Robert Schuler, etc.”

Weekly services at the church in Topeka, Kansas, must be a blast.

(Cross posted at Anorak.)

My Sweeney vs Scientology post quickly devolved into a debate on Anti-Americanism in the UK. Vikram, with whom I disagreed in the comments section, would no doubt love the following post on EU Referendum:

It is not often one whoops with joy listening to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, but Jon Humphrys interviewing John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, this morning was a sheer delight. (You can listen to the piece here.)

From Humphrys we got the usual BBC droning, with forthright responses from Bolton. Eventually though, after a run of sneering negativity over Iraq, Bolton had had enough. What did it was the suggestion that the US was “a busted flush”, Humphrys calling in aid George Soros.

“Are you kidding me!”, responded Bolton. “This is a man of the extreme left. I am sure you will find a great deal in common with him, as would many others on the continent.”

A sniffy Humphrys was not going to take that lying down though. On the attack, he demanded: “Do you make the assumption then that because one asks questions – perfectly valid questions about the conduct of American policy – one is on the extreme left?”

Bolton was unfazed: “I can see it from the content of your questions and the perspective from which you’re coming and from the direction that your questions are taking. If you tell me you’re a conservative, I would be happy to accept it.”

That really got Humphrys going: “I would tell you that I’m neither conservative, nor left wing not right wing, nor middle wing, because…”

A laughing Bolton took that in his stride: “You have no views at all. Your brain is empty, you have no views at all…”

Attempting to muster all his majesty, Humphrys was almost squeaking in indignation: “I have an awful lot of views, Ambassador, a view for every subject under the sun but I don’t express them during the course of my interviews. I ask questions… That’s what interviewing is about… You’ll have heard of a thing called devil’s advocate… Maybe they don’t do it like that in the United States, but…”

“I know, you’re a superior Brit as well!” rejoins Bolton.

You can see why he really pissed them off at the UN.

Via Anorak.

In Soviet author Yevgenii Zamyatin’s futuristic novel We, the citizens of One State live in apartments made of glass so that they can be monitored constantly.

We is the ultimate dystopian novel. Written in 1921, decades before A Brave New World and 1984, it is all the more poignant considering its author lived through the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.

Zamyatin believed in the Russian Revolution, but he was quickly disillusioned with the reality of life under Bolshevik rule.

I have written before about his 1931 letter to Stalin requesting deportation rather than suffering a “literary death” under Communism. For most people the letter would have been the equivalent of a suicide note, but Stalin let Zamyatin go.

I thought of Zamyatin and his glass apartment today when I read this news brief from Iran:

Tehran, 17 May (AKI) – Owners of trendy internet cafes, as well as bars and restaurants popular with young Iranians have received a letter signed by national police authorities in which new measures are announced to enforce “the country’s moral health.” “Public places will not be allowed to use dark windows anymore or curtains which make it impossible to view from the outside what is going on inside,” said the letter, which states in particular that men and women must not be allowed inside internet cafes together but in separate days or schedules “to avoid unpleasant promiscuity.”

Via Anorak.

The BBC ran a strange story yesterday about the military hearing of a Guantanamo detainee which was held behind closed doors. Under the headline US detainee ‘mentally tortured’, the BBC reported:

Mr Khan complained about how US guards had taken away pictures of his daughter, given him new glasses with the wrong prescription, shaved his beard off, forcibly fed him when he went on hunger strike, and denied him the opportunity for recreation.

This led him to attempt to chew through his artery twice, Mr Khan said.

Later, Mr Khan produced a list of further examples of psychological torture, which included the provision of “cheap, branded, unscented soap”, the prison newsletter, noisy fans and half-inflated balls in the recreation room that “hardly bounce”.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much 24, but since when did the wrong prescription glasses, a prison newsletter and half-inflated balls constitute torture? Surely even force feeding a detainee on hunger strike doesn’t amount to torture. And since when would any of these methods provoke someone to attempt suicide by chewing through their artery?

What’s interesting about the BBC story is that with just a couple of extra details it could have made a much stronger case for Khan’s allegations of torture.

The same story in the New York Times today said that the transcript of the hearing, which was held behind closed doors, was “heavily redacted” and that “it appeared that many of Mr. Khan’s accusations of torture had been redacted.” Additionally, Khan’s lawyer claimed that the redactions of sections dealing with her client’s torture allegations showed “that the United States…disregarded the fundamental rule of law.”

So why leave it out? Is the BBC suddenly on Jack Bauer’s ‘torture now, ask questions later’ side?