The AP reports:

Hossam Jaradat, the West Bank leader of Islamic Jihad's militant wing, was shot by undercover Israeli soldiers in the Jenin refugee camp on Aug. 23, doctors said. After treatment at a Palestinian hospital, Jaradat was transferred to a medical facility in Jordan where he died Wednesday, the health officials said.

Curiously, the Israelis deny involvement, so maybe this is more warfare among internal rivals.

Mark Seddon, the UN and New York correspondent for al-Jazeera, plays fast and loose in the Guardian with the concept of "understanding."

In Oklahoma City I met a Republican member of the state senate who, while condemning the act that disfigured his city, wanted to explain how this home grown act of terror came about, what motivated the survivalists and why they felt aggrieved. But that was because the Oklahoma bombing came from within, rather than from without. It is difficult to imagine many American politicians, who while condemning foreign terrorists, try to understand what motivates the killers and in so doing redress some of the larger injustices those same terrorists use to feed violence thereby separating the small minority from the vast majority who seek justice through peaceful means.

How does the international community find a peaceful and just solution that suits the vast majority of people in the Middle East?

In, no surprise, the Guardian, Neil Clark gets all sentimental about slavery.

The irony is that far from being backward, eastern Europe, thanks to the residual effects of 40 years of socialism, still puts much of western Europe (particularly Britain) to shame when it comes to the quality of its education, public transport and healthcare. Children of the former socialist countries regularly come top of European studies of comparative education systems: in the latest International Maths Organisation competition, Bulgaria finished fifth, Hungary seventh and Romania 10th.
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The east-west divide and the xenophobia that accompanies it will only end when there is a more honest, balanced appraisal of the legacy of communism and an acknowledgment that despite the lack of political freedoms there were also solid achievements.

Did you know that there is no excuse for an alliance between the US and Israel, because Israel is just as bad as Saddam? So says the Independent Institute's Ivan Eland.

In Saddam Hussein’s war crimes trial for the 1988 Iraqi “Anfal” campaign that gassed Kurdish villages, his defense lawyers have argued that Iraqi forces were really attempting to strike Iranian forces and the Iraqi Kurdish pesh merga militias that were in and supported by the hamlets. In other words, the lawyers are asserting that the innocent Kurds who were killed were collateral damage in an effort by the Iraqi government to rid its territory of Iranian fighters and their Kurdish allies during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Curiously, this defense sounds similar to Israel’s defense of killing more than one thousand Lebanese and perpetrating widespread destruction of Shi’ite neighborhoods, apartment houses, water services, electrical power stations, ports, factories, roads, and bridges in Lebanon in its efforts to punish Hezbollah. Yet Saddam Hussein is on trial for war crimes and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is still in office.

But Eland assures us that Israeli perfidy has no bounds.

To punish the people of Gaza for electing the wrong party in democratic elections last January, and for Hamas’s capture of an Israeli soldier, Israel slapped a blockade on the area that prohibits almost all goods from being exported and restricts imports, except for limited food supplies.

Eland is not, so far as I can tell, a raving anti-Semite. He is, however, a fanatical isolationist. So we get excuses for Saddam and bizarre attacks on Israel as a way saying that there is no good reason for the US to be engaged with the rest of the world. There are some very good libertarian scholars associated with the Independent Institute. If it were the only libertarian think tank around, I would have some sympathy for their position, but given all the options, I cannot think why anyone would want to be associated with an outfit that includes Eland.

Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian finally throws in the towel:

Insults are not predictions: they're not meant to come true. But the leading nations of Europe seem bent on proving that every word of abuse rained down on them from across the Atlantic over the past few years was justified. To call the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" once appeared no more than a neocon slander. The American insistence that Europe was a continent of limp-wristed wusses, who were fond of fancy oratory but ran from the first sign of trouble, could be written off as mere Texan bluster.

Not now. With France in the lead, the great powers of Europe are confirming the US right's prejudices. During this summer's war between Israel and Hizbullah, they certainly talked the talk - pressing for a ceasefire, demanding an international force be placed between the combatants. But now it's time to walk the walk, and the Europeans are finding they'd rather stay on their chaise longues.

The French are the worst offenders. In a hurry to show the Americans how great powers ought to conduct themselves in the Middle East, France boasted of its status as the former colonial master in Lebanon and jointly proposed the UN resolution that would end hostilities. Central to that accord was the promise of a 15,000-strong force capable, alongside the Lebanese army, of keeping Hizbullah behind the Litani river and Israel behind its own border. France would supply most of the troops and be in command.

But now it's time to deploy and the French have dispatched precisely 200 troops - far short of the number the UN hoped they would send. They, and the Italians, whose planned 3,000-strong contingent now puts them in line to lead the UN force, are suffering from cold feet.
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Over the past five years, the continent's politicians have made great capital lambasting the simple-minded crassness of the Bush approach, its doomed belief that the world could be reordered by force. Americans were from Mars, Europeans were from Venus - believers in the gentle suasions of "soft power". Much of that made good sense. But these Venusian Europeans usually conceded that there were times when there was no alternative to military might, albeit deployed for pacific ends. Most European leaders guiltily concede that a properly mandated force could have stopped the massacre at Srebrenica and should have stopped the genocide in Rwanda. The lesson of both those calamities is that sometimes Europe has to use hard power. Now is just such a time, and Europe is dithering pathetically. The result is that a Washington Post commentator could yesterday declare with justification that "as we always learn, Europe without American leadership is a mere tourist destination".

The Irish Independent (registration required) reports that Mary Robinson is very angry at the US for prolonging the latest round of fighting in Lebanon, because it did not put enough pressure on Israel to give up fast enough.

The Irish ex-President has said if the US had pressurised Israel to end its bombing of Lebanon, the war with Hizbollah would have stopped sooner.

She's criticised the Islamic group for sparking the violence by kidnapping two Israeli soldiers, but says the root cause of the problem stems from Israel's occupations.

The Washington Post has a piece on the chef Michel Richard, head chef at Citronelle in Georgetown. After fourteen years of living in Europe, one line suggested to me why this French chef works in America.

He sighs. He walks as if his feet hurt. He is 58 years old. He needs to lose 50 pounds. The fact that his audience has paid a huge sum for the privilege of adoring him gives him little comfort. As far as he is concerned, he is only as good as the next meal he makes.

The Guardian runs a silly piece by John Mullan on Bush's decision to read Camus.

All this is disturbing proof that George W is not the weird being that we had all liked to suppose. A few months ago, Camus' novel came top in a poll conducted for G2 among male Guardian-reading types, who were asked what book had most influenced them. The Outsider beat off JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five to claim the distinction of the book most likely to have changed their lives. Oh dear. Perhaps, chaps, George is one of us.

Given how fashionable open Jew hatred is becoming, Lionel Shriver is right to say this about her defense, in the Guardian of all places, that Israel actually has a right to exist.

I've a penchant for painting bullseyes on my forehead, so why not make my score of self-destruction 100%? Defend Israel.

Well, were Israel really "wiped from the map", I bet even virulently anti- Israel Europeans would miss it. The existence of a permanent Jewish refuge helps to ameliorate residual European guilt over the Holocaust. The sheer ferocity of the Israeli people reassures Europeans that the Jews are alive and well: "Look at them, with all those war planes! They're not endangered; they're scary!"

Martin Peretz summarizes the case against Ned Lamont, which is really very simple. Lamont is yet another "peace" candidate, like George McGovern and Henry Wallace before him, who pretend that the world's problems stem from the US. A quick summary:

The Lamont ascendancy, if that is what it is, means nothing other than that the left is trying, and in places succeeding, to take back the Democratic Party. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Maxine Waters have stumped for Mr. Lamont. As I say, we have been here before. Ned Lamont is Karl Rove's dream come true. If he, and others of his stripe, carry the day, the Democratic party will lose the future, and deservedly.

The Guardian reports that Jean Baudrillard will appear at the Frieze Art Fair in London in October. Who? The Guardian quotes an organizer of the fair, who is giddy as a twelve year old girl about to see the latest boy band.

The 77-year-old will speak at the Frieze art fair on October 14, in conversation with the literary theorist Sylvère Lotringer. Amanda Sharp, co-organiser of the fair, said: "He is the most important intellectual working today: an icon. If you ask any young artist who the most important writer on sociology or philosophy is, they will tell you Baudrillard. He is very au courant, from what he says about politics to what's happening in art practice."

The Guardian describes him:

In his writings on the September 11 attacks he argued that the events were the natural completing gesture of globalisation and the overwhelming power of the US. A New York Times critic said of them: "It takes a rare demonic genius to brush off the slaughter of thousands on the grounds that they were suffering from severe ennui brought about by boring modern architecture."

The horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them - the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel

By the grace of terrorism, the World Trade Centre has become the world's most beautiful building - the eighth wonder of the world.

John Kirby is the bihop of the Catholic diocese of Clonfert, in the west of Ireland. He is also chairman of Trocaire, the Irish Catholic aid agency. Sadly, he has decided to open his mouth on the Middle East. It is depressing, but unsurprising, coming from te Trocaire crowd. There are the excuses mixed with dubious history:

The collective pressures on Palestinians, and the occupation which causes them, result in a range of consequences - including Palestinian attacks against Israeli civilians and regional instability in the Middle East.

The dream of the Palestinian people of realising a Palestinian state has slipped away under the pressure of Israel's expansion of its illegal settlements, the construction of the security wall inside the West Bank, the colossal death and casualty toll endured by Palestinian families and the systematic demolition of thousands of homes.

But this is Trocaire, which uses churches and schools for its dubious fund raising. Trocaire held a rally on Monday, calling for a cease fire. Where did they hold it? At the US Embassy, of course. How about a rally at the Iranian Embassy, since Iran is probably running Hizbollah, and certainly supplying the weapons Hizbollah uses to murder Israeli civilians. Don't be silly. David Quinn, the former editor of the Irish Catholic, once remarked that Trocaire could always be relied on to hold protests outside the US Embassy, but never to rally outside the embassies of, say, the Soviet Union.

A regular reader offers an explanation for some of the touchingly unusual concerns about Mel Gibson's anti-Semitism.

My read on it is quite simple: it affords those well-entrenched, rabid haters of Israel the chance to demonstrate that although they may fan the flame of virulent hatred for the Jewish State, they cannot at all be considered anti-semitic because, because....look how outraged the are by that drunk anti-semitic celebrity bozo who got caught driving under the influence.

So here is a golden opportunity---proof positive---that one can shaft the Zionist Entity and repeat ad infinitum any and every hideous slander about it, while regaling in the glorious fiction that you aren't in the slightest an anti-semite, that in fact you actually are making all these criticisms because of your regard for Jews, for truth, justice, humanity, peace, love (what have you) ad nauseum.

No wonder they are playing it to the hilt, and milking this sordid episode for all it is worth.

This post is an example of how not to blog, and a warning not to mix blogging on emotional issues with bad temper. At the time I wrote it (and now), I was puzzled by much of the reaction to Mel Gibson. In particular, I was puzzled by the hostility to Gibson's views on Jews (in his recent outburst as well as in his movie The Passion) from bloggers who do not ordinarily address issues of anti-Semitism (which I should emphasize is not the same as being indifferent to it). But it was done the wrong way. I was puzzled by the way Henry Farrell, a serious blogge at Crooked Timber, would go out of his way to dismiss Gibson movie The Passion as obviously anti-Semitic, although he does not usually write on the subject. Maybe from a mix of a foul mood and insomnia, or something else, that turned into an implied accusation of at least hypocrisy or maybe somethiing worse. Farrell does not deserve that. And it was silly to bring Arianna Huffington into the post. I cannot see how anyone can take the Huffington Post seriously, and so her comments should not have been dumped on in an (unsuccessful) atempt at a serious post. You can look at the original post below.

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I admit to being a bit puzzled by the fury being directed at Mel Gibson. Clearly his behavior was appalling, something he has admitted. The puzze for me is the furious tone of much of the commentary, and the sources of it. I am not talking about, say, Meryl Yourish, who is consistently ready to fire at anything that looks anti-Semitic. I am thinking of something different.

The normally normal Ann Althouse goes simply bananas.

Mel Gibson, you are discredited forever.
Everything you ever did is now tainted.
"Freedom!" It has no meaning anymore.
What artist has ever crashed like this? Not Michael Jackson. Not Woody Allen. Not O.J. Simpson. You've shown an evil heart and it changes the meaning of all of your artistic work. How horrible! How painful! Try to imagine the penance you must do.

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber denounced The Passion as anti-Semitic, yet a hunt through Crooked Timber finds silence from Farrell on suicide bombers keen to kill as many Jews as they can. Arianna Puffington is worked up, pretty much calling for Gibson's blood, but she has no problem with bloggers on her own site (try here and here) who praised the Mearsheimer and Walt rant. Yet not a word from the Crooked Timber crowd or the whole Puffington Host on Illinois' Democratic Gov. Blagojevich getting cozy with the virulently anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan.

I am not trying to, nor am I interested in, defending Mel Gibson, most of whose movies that I have seen I have not much enjoyed. But I am curious about what is going on.

UPDATE: Daniel Lapin offers more fully thought out ideas.