MIRROR, MIRROR, YOU SUCK: London's Daily Mirror newspaper, always one of the world's left-most journals, has really gone off the deep end in the last week, proclaiming the U.S. "the world's foremost rogue state," with columnist John Pilger writing that "WE ARM ISRAEL because we don't want to upset George Bush. Which makes us pathetically UNETHICAL poodles."
Stories like this of rabid anti-Israel sentiment in Europe, diligently collected by the Little Green Footballs blog, remind me of one of the lighter moments of my visit to Israel in 1995. We had just learned in our history class all about Britain's 1947 mandate to split what was then called Palestine into two separate states, one for the Jews and one for the Arabs. Then, a few days later we traveled to the Yad V'Shem Holocaust museum, and it turned out that a delegation lead by then-Prime Minister John Major was visiting the same day. As Major's entourage walked by about a hundred feet from us (visible, but clearly way out of earshot), one of my classmates lurched forward and screamed at Major, "It's all your fault! YOU AND YOUR FUCKING MANDATE!"