It’s very difficult to have a call to jihad, with a mouthful of peanut butter.

— Robin Williams

Here’s an IDF video showing Israel Air Force pilots diverting missiles already en route to their targets, to avoid striking civilians.

Israel National News has a pretty fair and complete account of the controversy over that staged hospital room video from Gaza: Bloggers Uncover Possible CNN Video Fraud.

Most of the mainstream media are ignoring the story, of course, because it leads to issues they’d rather not explore—e.g., the ethics of media’s almost universal practice of relying on Palestinian propagandists for their coverage from Gaza.

TIME Magazine’s Andrew Lee Butters brings up the staged video in this piece for their Middle East “Blog,” but it’s a cursory mention bordering on dismissal: Is Israel Losing the Media War in Gaza?

Israel’s decision to keep the Western press out of Gaza may also have backfired, because it’s given a monopoly of coverage to the more inflammatory reporting of Arab satellite television stations such as Al Jazeera and Al Arabiyya that maintain bureaus in Gaza. And while there are many excellent Palestinian journalists working for the Western press in Gaza, there have been some examples of doctored photographs and suspicious looking videos showing civilian suffering. Conservative blogs have singled out one video of doctors trying to resuscitate the brother of the CNN cameraman actually shooting the video, and suggested that it was really a re-enactment.

And so far, not a single mainstream source has mentioned the severe credibility problems of Norwegian terror-supporting doctor, Mads Gilbert.

Here’s a midday open thread, a good enough place to mention that if you’re logged in to an LGF account, the ratings for articles on the front page are now live — they automatically refresh every 10 seconds.

The highest Islamic authority in Saudi Arabia comes out strongly in favor of child molestation.

Saudi Arabia’s most senior Muslim cleric has been quoted as saying it is ‘okay’ for 10-year-old girls to marry.

Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh was quoted as saying those who think such girls are too young to marry are doing them an injustice. Al-Hayat newspaper quotes Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh, the country’s grand mufti, as also saying during a lecture on Monday that critics who say women should not marry before the age of 25 are following a ‘bad path’.

The mufti’s comments showed the conservative clergy’s opposition to a drive by Saudi rights groups, including government ones, to define the age of marriage and put an end to the phenomenon of child marriages.

‘It is wrong to say it’s not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger,’ Sheik Abdul-Aziz Al Sheikh was quoted as saying.

‘A female who is 10 or 12 is marriageable and those who think she’s too young are wrong and are being unfair to her,’ he said during a Monday lecture, according to the pan-Arab Al-Hayat newspaper.

More than 13,000 votes already, and the Mainstream Media is the clear leader for the 2008 Idiotarian Award. Here’s the poll again; you have until this Friday at noon Pacific to vote, and you get three votes per IP address.

[The poll has been moved to this post.]

LGF operative “Ringo the Gringo” was at the Anti-Israel Demonstration in West LA on Jan. 10, 2009, and has dozens of photos and video clips of this eruption of insanity.

This video shows protesters chanting “Allahu Akbar,” then attacking a car whose driver was flying an Israeli flag. Really bad craziness.

The dead guy is back again, with another non-specific audiotape message hastily put together by Al Qaeda’s media group: Bin Laden urges jihad against Israel over Gaza.

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden urged Muslims to launch a jihad against Israel and condemned Arab governments as allies of the Jewish state in a new message aimed at harnessing anger in the Mideast over the Gaza offensive.

Bin Laden spoke in an audiotape posted Wednesday on Islamic militant Web sites where al-Qaida usually issues its messages. It was his first tape since May and came nearly three weeks after Israel started its campaign against Gaza’s militant Hamas rulers.

“There is only one strong way to bring the return of Al-Aqsa and Palestine, and that is jihad in the path of God,” bin Laden said in the 22-minute audiotape, referring to the revered Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. “The duty is to urge people to jihad and to enlist the youth into jihad brigades.”

“Muslim nation, you are capable of defeating the Zionist entity with your popular capabilities and your great hidden strength—without the support of (Arab) leaders and despite the fact that most of (the leaders) stand in the barracks of the Crusader-Zionist alliance,” bin Laden said.

Notice that there’s nothing in Bin Laden’s statements to prove he’s talking about the current Gaza conflict. This is boilerplate Jew-hatred.

Eventually they’ll run out of old recordings to cut and paste.

Here’s a disturbing article at PJ Media by Patrick Poole on the Strategic Collapse at the Army War College.

Two weeks ago, Ricks reported on a new publication by Army War College research professor Sherifa Zuhur on Hamas and Israel that informs readers that Hamas has been misunderstood due to the misreporting by “Israeli and Western sources that villainize the group.” Zuhur concludes that Hamas isn’t so bad after all, so we all just need to get along and embrace the terrorist group through negotiations — a view apparently endorsed by the Army War College when it published her defense of Hamas.

A second post last week, “Fiasco at the Army War College: The Sequel,” records an exchange between Ricks and defense expert and author Mark Perry. Assessing the academic state of affairs at the War College, Perry informed Ricks:

It’s worse than you think. They have curtailed the curriculum so that their students are not exposed to radical Islam. Akin to denying students access to Marx during the Cold War.

This is hardly the first complaint that the military has failed to investigate and assess the strategic writings related to radical Islam and Islamic war doctrine.

Congratulations to Canadian blog Small Dead Animals for edging out Ace of Spades to win Best Conservative Blog in the internet poll called the Weblog Awards.