By Cherie Curland

If you only want to check Israel news once a day, try www.dailyalert.org after 8AM EST. Someone at the Council of Jewish organization Presidents (www.jcpa.org) does an outstanding job of gathering the best of all of the news, analysis, and opinion articles about the Middle East, and publishes highlights from them, and links to each article.

For up-to-the-minute coverage, I check the streaming headlines of 2 of Israel’s newspapers. The Jerusalem Post, www.jpost.com, seems best during Israel’s normal business hours (it’s 7-8 hours ahead of EST), and www.ynetnews.com seems to keep things going afterward. One blog, muqata.blogspot.com, seems to grab headlines from the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) very quickly. You can also link to the Muqata blog from another outstanding one, drybones.blogspot.com and see the sardonic cartoons published there.

The best analysis of the military/political situation still seems to be from www.debka.com. Very rarely its writers have broadcast unverified news; even so, its analysis is frightening in its depth and breadth. Another excellent analytical source is www.stratfor.com. In order to view its articles for free, you need to “Google” them, e.g. “stratfor Israel”, and link to whatever appears.

Free-thinking Lebanese are no happier about the hijacking of their government by terrorists (and Syria) than we are. I find the Beirut Daily Star, a publication of the International Herald Tribune, to be very thoughtful and professional even if I would not agree with all of its editorial opinions - see www.dailystar.com.lb/home (may not need the “home”). The Atlanta Jewish Solidarity rally featured a very brave woman from the American Lebanese Coordination Council who spoke achingly about her family and friends hunkered down there - see www.alcc-research.com for the evidence of the obvious pride these Lebanese take in the Cedar Revolution.

I’ve told several of you that this war is being fought on more than two fronts (Palestinian territory and Lebanon). I count 4, though the other 2 are closely related. The public relations battle is hard-fought both in traditional media (print, TV, radio) and the Internet. For the traditional media, www.camera.org and www.honestreporting.com do excellent jobs in identifying conscious and subconscious bias in Middle East reporting.

For the Internet, if you want an education about terrorist websites, try www.internet-haganah.us and click on “Home”. For the past few years, that enterprising young man has tracked, and in many cases, stopped, terrorist websites and their ISPs (Internet Service Providers) from getting their messages out. Once on its “home” page, if you click on “War News” you can see a good selection of the up-to-the-minute news from Israel, also often obviously from the IDF.

If you think that somehow this war is “over there”, thousands of miles away, even after the shooting at the Seattle, WA Jewish Federation, think again. For several years, the Anti-Defamation League, www.adl.org, has tracked hate groups in the US and shares that information with law enforcement. There have been pro-Hezballah rallies in Dearborn, Michigan (Google for a writeup by Don Cohen) and New Jersey (I think). The Southern Poverty Law Center, www.splc.org also tracks hate groups; however, since it shifted to a viewpoint that illegal aliens are simply “undocumented workers”, and anyone against them must be in a hate group, I stopped looking there. Unfortunately, a lot of humanitarian groups have made similar shifts, and www.ngo-monitor.org has a good grip on those.

If you can stomach translations of Jihadi sermons so venomous that G-d should shudder, look at www.memri.org and possibly www.imra.org. These two organizations also work hard to find and translate anti-terrorism articles from Arab publications when they can.

Finally, if you want to be inspired, reread the words that Senator McCain”s brother, Joe, writes at www.trebach.org/commentary/mccain.htm.

Am Yisroel Chai - Cherie

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Related: Israel, United States, War Against Islamo-fascism, Palestinians, Media/Blogsphere, Terrorist Groups

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