In which the Israeli Military demonstrate much the same regard for the truth and for our intelligence.

"All the evidence points to the fact that it couldn't have been a mine," said Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon adviser on battlefields who led the US military's battle damage assessment team in Kosovo and worked for its intelligence wing, the Defense Intelligence Agency.

"You have the crater size, the shrapnel, the types of injuries, their location on the bodies. That all points to a shell dropping from the sky, not explosives under the sand," he said.

But, you know, television footage of a ten year old weeping over the bodies of her murdered father, stepmother and five siblings who were engaged in the deeply aggressive activity of picnicing on a beach make the military look bad. So better blame Hamas.

Actually, I've yet to see a report from anyone on that issue that convinced me of anything, one way or the other. (And much of the television footage that's being shown is edited together rather deceptively: [link]

(Basically, the questions about what sort of shrapnel and what sort of crater and what sort of injuries, I've seen different answers from different "experts," and I don't know enough to evaluate that for myself. However, I've also seen the IDF saying that they know where they shot their shells, and none of them could have landed there and then, and I've yet to see any believable refutation of that. So, no clue yet, really.)

edit: the post I linked to is from a blog that includes some analysis of the "where did the explosion come from?" question. I'm not sure how reliable that is -- I linked there because the website that the video clip originally came from uses frames in such a way that I can't figure out how to link to it directly there.

Just thought I'd throw this out there: I may have misheard (although moonlit seemed to hear the same thing) but last night I bore witness to a particularly odious bit of historical revisioning. It was during the "19 Seconds" episode of the thankfully short-lived Threat Matrix series. In what was essentially a throwaway line, they revised history to say the horrific tragedy at Bhopal was a result of sabotage. WTF!!!!

...so apparently the guy running the school where I worked until very recently, who also runs maybe half a dozen other schools in the Middle East, is not, in fact, Muslim, as we'd supposed.

Apparently he's secretly Druze - a religion I'd never even heard of, which is a sort of gnostic/Muslim/Christian secret society thing!!!

I'm most impressed. It's all very Da Vinci code.

You actually know somebody who's Druze?!? Dude. I studied them in college, but I thought they were a bit like dervishes; the subject of History Channel shows but no one you'd actually run into.

How very cool!

Apparently they pretend to be Muslim when dealing with Muslims (and possibly Christian while dealing with Christians?), but, yeah, our boss and his son are actually Druze.

(wrt Dervishes - there's a fabulous Sufi performance near the Khan twice a week, when Cairo's 'whirling dervishes' do their thing. I've been five or six times, and it still blows my mind every time. Worship and transcendence through music and dance - now THAT'S something I can understand. So actually dervishes are probably easier than Druze, really, should you find yourself in Cairo...)

So weird; I am reading "Desert Queen" about Gertrude Bell, and she goes and visits the Druze, who are a very secretive sect. She became quite friendly with them, and a Druze man accompanied her on many of her trips.

It's an interesting book, even if the biographer takes some leaps and is a wee bit florid with the descriptiveness on occasion.

Cool.

When I was in Israel last summer, we went to see a Druze village, and had lunch at a house there. (I'm not sure I'd quite call it a restaurant -- it seemed too small and informal for that. Maybe more of a Bed and Breakfast, only without the Bed part. Anyway, place that looked like a private home, and had no sign outside indicating otherwise, but they serve food to tour groups.) It was a neat lunch -- all vegetarian, and lots of different dishes, with bread to dip in them. Afterwards, someone there gave us a little talk about the history of the Druze, and their relationship with Israel and all the other countries around there. Pretty interesting. (They're the only religious group other than Jews that serve in the Israeli army, which I thought was sort of neat. And I think they said that men and women can both had the high religious positions, but I may be misremembering.)

t edit: just read the link. Sorry for being all repetitive there, then. Also, I just remembered, that in the Druze village, most of the people mostly looked Arab, except that they had bluish-green eyes. The guy telling us about their history said that that was because Druze women had been raped by the Crusaders.

And I think they said that men and women can both had the high religious positions, but I may be misremembering.)

That's what the wikipedia entry said.