Sparse Posting

In the relatively short time that I’ve been doing this blog, I’ve already experienced first-hand a phenomenon often mentioned by other bloggers, namely the sense of pressure to post on a regular basis (I was trying for at least one post per day).

Once I began to notice that I was getting a certain relatively steady level of traffic, which I took to mean that I had a set of regular readers, I began to feel that didn’t want to disappoint them — or should I say you.  If you were going to be nice enough and appreciative enough to come back to my blog every day then I sure wanted to have something for you when you arrived.

Unfortunately, I’m finding I just plain don’t have the time for a post a day. Things are now happening in other areas of life that are making that pace — already leisurely enough by the standards of some bloggers — impossible.

I’m not going to announce a cessation of blogging. I’ll just say that I don’t know how often I’ll be able to post. I may get a couple of posts up per week, or maybe only a couple per month, or maybe not even that. I don’t want to say I’ll stop because I can well imagine that something will come along that I’ll just have to post about. By then, of course, I may well have no more readers. Pity, but oh well. If a tree falls in the woods and there’s no one around to hear it, the tree has still fallen.

Haiti? Never Heard of it. But Dubai – Now THAT’s a Story with Legs!

How long did the Haiti earthquake stay in the news? A week or two? Not more than that. These days you can open the Google News home page at random, at any time of any day, and not see a thing about it. That earthquake seems so long ago. We certainly haven’t heard much for a while.

How long did the Dubai hit stay top, front and centre on the Google News home page? Well, it’s over six weeks now, and counting. It’s non-stop. The biggest story of the year. Seems like only yesterday — yet it happened just exactly one week after the Haiti earthquake.

When NATO takes out Taliban and Quaeda terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan via targeted killing, it’s a line in the news for one day. When Israel takes out a Hamas terrorist in Dubai via targeted killing, the whole world erupts and can’t get over it for months.

There’s a good op-ed about this in today’s FT. It’s a reply to the appalling anti-Israel smear-job that the FT ran last week, and a capable defence of of Israel’s right to defend itself. Andrew Roberts writes:

The intelligence agents of states – sometimes operating with direct authority, sometimes not – have carried out many assassinations and assassination attempts in peacetime without the legitimacy of those states being called into question, or their being described as “rogue”. In 1985 the French Deuxième Bureau sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior trawler, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, without anyone denouncing France as a rogue state. Similarly, in 2006, polonium 210 was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko without Putin’s Russia being described as “illegitimate”. That kind of language is only reserved for Israel, even though neither Pereira nor Litvinenko posed the danger to French and Russian citizens that was posed to Israelis by the activities of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

The reason that such double standards still apply – more than six decades after the foundation of the state of Israel – is not because of the nature of that doughty, brave, embattled, tiny, surrounded, yet proudly defiant country, but because of the nature of its foes.

Indeed. Read the whole article — it’s not long and it’s very much worth a read.

Haiti is forgotten because nobody really cares. How much private satisfaction is to be gotten out of reading about a human catastrophe on an unimaginable scale? Gloating over the supposed mis-steps and supposed immorality and general all-around terribleness of the Jewish state, however — that’s something there’s a market for.

Five-Day Break

I won’t be able to post anything for the next five days but I hope to get something up this coming Tuesday. Please do come back next week!