The British Parliament’s Committee on Export Controls condemned Israel’s use of British military equipment in the Gaza war. We love this humanitarian concern coming from a nation which conducted thousands of aerial raids against German cities. British military sales to Israel are negligible, so it’s mere rhetoric. Britain complains that Israel uses British weapons and British passports. It’s time for the British to condemn Israel for using the English language.

Turkish PM Erekat, a personal friend of Olmert, complained that Israel flaunts Obama’s peace efforts. Yeah, bad Jews don’t want to be trapped in the “Auschwitz borders.”

IDF Chief of Staff Ashkenazi described the Gaza clashes that left two Jewish soldiers dead as “the high price of Israeli freedom.” Nonsense. The soldiers died not for freedom, but because the Israeli government lacks any strategic vision about Gaza and IDF made the tactical error of sending infantry instead of helicopters into the fighting.

Noam Federman, a very decent person and a conservative activist, was arrested while traveling to Jerusalem for Pesach. One of the passengers is his car was… a goat.

Federman had planned to ritually slaughter the goat on the Temple Mount—or, as he politely put it, at Hurva synagogue in the Jewish Quarter.

Federman’s act is religiously impeccable. Pesach slaughter is not a sacrifice, which is arguably banned in the Torah when there is no Temple. The Talmud bans Pesach slaughter until the time of the messiah—with no meaningful scriptural basis—but Federman was going to slaughter a goat rather than a sheep, thus this is technically not a Pesach issue.

Unlike Abraham in the case of Isaac, police did not count on divine intervention; they detained Federman and delivered the goat to the Ministry of Agriculture, lest Muslims see Federman and revolt.

Well, Muslims will keep rioting whatever Federman does.

Obama placed a courtesy call to Medvedev after the Moscow terrorist attacks. For some reason, Israel, Pakistan, and Iraq do not receive similar calls, despite the frequent terrorist attacks there.

Obama offered US cooperation in bringing to justice those responsible for the attack. Either he was speaking plain nonsense, or he was concerned about the possibility of another Russian war in Chechnya and offering to mediate, or the terrorists were not Chechen after all.

A Gazan court ruled illegal the PA order which froze the bank accounts of some Hamas charities. Soon afterwards, Hamas police raided a bank and took the appropriate amount of cash.

The charity in question, Friends of the Sick, is funded by the PA, which is funded by Israeli tax transfers.