Calling UNIFIL, calling UNIFIL

The NYT reports that 3 rockets have been fired into Israel from the North. This raises a number of questions: is Hezbollah opening, or threatening to open a second front? Has UNIFIL been effective in preventing the reoccupation of the border towns and Hezbollah’s rearmament? Is the real “answer” to the question ‘do you want a ceasefire’ both a verbal yes and an actual no?

JERUSALEM — Israel’s conflict with Hamas in Gaza threatened to broaden on Thursday as at least three rockets were fired into the north of Israel from Lebanon. The rockets, presumably launched in support of Hamas, could presage the opening of a second front. The Israeli Army, in a brief statement, said it “responded with fire against the source of the rockets,” which landed near the town of Nahariya. Two Israelis were slightly wounded, the police said.

Lebanese security sources told Reuters that they believed it was unlikely that the rockets were fired under instructions from the militant group Hezbollah. But there was no confirmation or denial from Hezbollah itself.

The rockets from Lebanon fell in residential areas. Shimon Koren, head of the northern district police, instructed residents of Nahariya and Kabri to enter bomb shelters and he instructed residents in nearby localities to open their shelters. School was cancelled in Nahariya and nearby Shlomi. The Israeli government said it welcomed the efforts of France and Egypt to work out a durable cease-fire. It said it would end its assault if Hamas stopped firing rockets into Israel and ended the smuggling of weapons from Egypt. It said that if a durable cease-fire took hold, it would reopen border crossings into Gaza for goods and people. But Israeli and Hamas officials both denied an assertion by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, that a cease-fire had been agreed upon.

In another example of how denials, however implausible, can trump facts, logic and common sense, Islamabad has fired the official who admitted that one of the Mumbai gunmen was a Pakistani citizen.

ISLAMABAD — The Pakistani government on Wednesday abruptly fired its national security adviser after he confirmed that the surviving gunman captured in the Mumbai attacks is a Pakistani, a key piece of evidence contained in a dossier amassed by India on alleged Pakistani complicity in the three-day assault. …

Retired Army Gen. Mehmood Ali Durrani’s confirmation of the surviving assailant’s nationality, the first by a senior Pakistani official, followed weeks of denials by Islamabad that any of the terrorists were Pakistani.

Durrani’s ouster suggests that a struggle is raging in the Pakistan government over responding to the Indian dossier and material gathered by the U.S. that blames the November attacks on a Pakistan -based Islamic militant group with ties to a Pakistani intelligence agency.

It is remarkable how rockets can fly out of Gaza or Southern Lebanon seemingly without anyone being responsible for them; or how attacks can be launched on a major Indian city by persons who are only temporarily Pakistani. But we live in an age of marvels.

The enemies of the West have discovered that the secret to avoiding accountability is to play along with the fantasies of its elites, who will believe anything for so long as it confirms their prejudices. If your faith in the Kool-Aid is strong enough, you won’t really taste the poison.