Religious Hate:

• In Israel the first suicide bombing since disengagement took place last week. Tens maimed, some critically injured. And despite the whole unpleasant suicide bombing / genocidal murder thing, the Palestinians want to assure everybody that they're still committed to the ceasefire.

• A violent attack against a Jewish student has prompted Jewish leaders to demand that Ukraine's government take steps to combat public and wide-spread anti-Semitism. Ukrainian officials seem, at best, loathe to respond.

• When Muslim women fall in love with non-Muslim men, apparently they become so impure that even killing them isn't good enough:

  Efforts were under way on Sunday to calm the situation in this Christian village east of Ramallah after an attack by hundreds of Muslim men from nearby villages left many houses and vehicles torched... The attack on the village of 1,500 was triggered by the murder of a Muslim woman from the nearby village of Deir Jarir earlier this week. The 30-year-old woman, according to PA security sources, was apparently murdered by members of her family for having had a romance with a Christian man from Taiba. "When her family discovered that she had been involved in a forbidden relationship with a Christian, they apparently forced her to drink poison," said one source.

  We hope that all this rioting has not been in vain, and that the deceased woman's honor has been suitably restored by her murderers' violent, bigoted rampage.

• Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urged Palestinian groups to continue trying to destroy Israel. How is Khamenei different from "millionaire and moderate cleric" former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani? Rafsanjani says Iran should destroy Israel all on its own, instead of farming it out to the Palestinians. With nukes.

• Los Angeles radio station KFI News has obtained a flier that urges gangs to "unite with the Nation of Islam" in a "jihad on the LAPD". The flier lists a contact phone number registered to a local mosque.

• It seems that radical and unassimilated Muslim immigrant populations in Europe sometimes turn out to be rabidly anti-Semitic. Especially when their host countries, like Sweden, turn a blind eye to their violence.

• In France, laws outlawing hatred do not apply to hatred against really religious Jews:

  A Paris appeals court on Wednesday upheld the acquittal of a French comic accused of making anti-Semitic slurs during a much-criticized sketch in which he dressed as an Orthodox Jew and raised a Nazi-style salute... "By his clothing, which included not just a soft hat with curls hanging off it but a balaclava and army jacket, the defendant did not incarnate Jewish people in general ... but a fraction of this community that professes extremist ideas and does not hesitate to resort to violence," Judge Laurence Trebucq wrote in his ruling.

  Judge Trebucq's nuanced understanding of Jewish sectarianism, Israeli politics, and the intersections between the two is - of course - legendary. So when he brings that understanding to bear in explaining why its OK to hate some Jews but not others, you can be confident that he's speaking from a position of knowledge.

• Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism is becoming more popular in Mexico.

Idiotarian Seethings:

• Christian groups: God destroyed New Orleans because He hates gays and abortions.. Jewish groups: He actually created Katrina because He's peeved about disengagement and the lack of Talmudic lucubration among African-Americans. Muslim groups: Don't bother looking for specific reasons - Katrina destroyed New Orleans because God hates America. Even the political and cultural Left is claiming insight into the divine will: Natural Resources Defense Council uberlefty Robert F. Kennedy is sure that God was actually aiming for Mississippi * due to Republican Haley Barbour's opposition to CO2 caps. The Creator must've just missed.
  Others on the Left are a little more humble about their abilities to peer into the Lord's mind. They're content to just join the jihadists in identifying the true cause of Katrina: George Bush hates black people.

• At various times, and to varying degrees, one finds journalism that is either transparently ideological or flat out stupid. Rarely do both come together in a single article, as when some random Associated Press Google monkey plainly and crudely used fringe Left-wing sites to write Chief Justice Rehnquist’s obituary.

• There ought to be some equivalent to Godwin's Law for Iraq-Vietnam analogies:

  A leading Republican senator and prospective presidential candidate said Sunday that the war in Iraq has destabilized the Mideast and is looking more like the Vietnam conflict from a generation ago... [Nebraska Sen. Chuck] Hagel said "stay the course" is not a policy. "By any standard, when you analyze 2 1/2 years in Iraq ... we're not winning," he said. "The longer we stay there, the more similarities [to Vietnam] are going to come together."

  Apparently, in between suggesting a softer line towards Iran and protecting Arafat, Sen. Hagel has found the time to pick up a history degree. If he intends to continue spouting off about military history, he'd do well to learn from his disciplinary and intellectual betters. Prof. Victor Davis Hanson, former Shifrin Chair of Military History at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis:

  The specter of Vietnam will also turn on those who embrace it. Iraq is not a surrogate theater of the Cold War, where national liberationists, fueled by the romance of radical egalitarianism, are fortified by nearby Marxist nuclear patrons. The jihadists have an 8th-century agenda of gender apartheid, religious intolerance and theocracy. For all its pyrotechnics, the call for a glorious return to the Dark Ages has found no broad constituency. Nor is our army in Iraq conscript, but volunteer and professional. The Iraqi constitutional debate is already light-years ahead of anything that emerged in Saigon. And there is an exit strategy, not mission creep - we will consider withdrawal as the evolution to a legitimate government continues and the Iraqi security forces grow.

• We have to admit, it's a guilty pleasure: "Countdown to '[Rehnquist killed to] distract us from NOLA' conspiracy theories starts. . . now!". Took like 2 minutes.

Race and Culture:

• The re-primitivization of man in devastated New Orleans.

• No matter how reasonable things seem after convoluted explanations about editorial policies and photographers' experiences, it still kinda seems racist when AP says that black people "loot" food while AFP says that white people "find" food.

• At a press conference attended by prominent members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the Black Leadership Forum, the National Urban League, and the NAACP, Representatives Diane Watson (D-CA) and Elijah Cummings (D-MD) implied the widespread description of Katrina victims as "refugees" is evidence of subtle racism. Michelle Malkin's response is brutal.

• Egypt's government is so confident in the integrity of their electoral system, they saved a whole lot of people a whole bunch of time by banning domestic and international polling monitors. Not to spoil the ending, but Mubarak won. By a lot.

• Arab and Muslim media outlets are criticizing Al Jazeera for showing footage of crying settlers and disciplined soldiers in Israel. Those media outlets are following the Palestinian street, where the conventional wisdom is that the confrontations were staged in advance. The thinking is that the Jews were all cooperating to exploit disengagement and steal more Palestinian land.

• A new survey shows that racism, sexism, and disability-based discrimination have been surpassed by ageism as the most widely experienced prejudice in Britain.

• John Brogden, former Liberal New South Wales Opposition leader, was forced to resign Monday after referring to Helena Carr, the Malaysian-born wife of former State Labor Premier Bob Carr, as a mail-order bride. The feeding frenzy and public humiliation that preceded - and, critically, followed - the resignation drove him to slit his wrists in a failed suicide attempt. The entire, unseemly episode is now causing very public soul searching among the Australian press.

• The first black archbishop in England has written a blistering forward in a forthcoming book, arguing that the the Church of England is infected with institutional racism.

A Hopeful Note:

• If the first step to solving a problem is admitting that it exists, then it is surely auspicious that even the New York Times now recognizes that appeasment qua multiculturalism has brought Western Europe to the edge of an Islamist abyss.

• Turkish Prime Minster Recep Tayyip Erdogan, leader of the Islamist Justice and Development Party, received a standing ovation for attacking anti-Semitism at a New York ceremony honoring righteous gentile Selahattin Ulkumen. As a Turkish diplomat in Rhodes during WWII, Ulkumen saved 42 Jewish families from the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Sixty years later, in a country like Turkey where Mein Kampf, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and The International Jew are consistent bestsellers, Ulkumen's legacy seems dead. Hopefully, Erdogan's statements will turn out to be a step towards restoring it.

• As Pakistan and Israel open historic talks, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic Islamist reaction is muted and disorganized. A few other Muslim leaders, more interested in stability than religious ideology, are watching carefully.

This post originally and incorrectly identified Missouri as the state which Robert F. Kennedy argued God was targeting. In fact, it was Mississippi Governor Barbour's callousness toward CO2 caps which Kennedy apparently believed had drawn the Lord's wrath. Thanks Ruth.