Headlines Thursday 8th January 2009

Hamas feeding kids a TV diet of hatred
Piers Akerman
ISRAEL’S Operation Cast Lead is unfolding like a familiar soap opera on the nightly news.

A series of Palestinian terrorists making blood-curdling threats against Israelis, a hail of missiles aimed at Israeli civilian targets, retaliatory strikes against the terrorists - who unfailingly seek to shelter behind innocent civilians - followed by scenes of weeping parents at crowded hospitals.

It is a plot line designed to soften the hardest heart. Unfortunately, those who buy the tear-jerking material unquestioningly are being duped.

No one, let alone a parent raised in a Western culture, could imagine placing children directly in harm’s way or encouraging impressionable infants to worship death but that is what the thugs and murderers responsible for the slaughter in Gaza have been doing.

It is an Islamist thing and Palestinian TV, often subsidised by the United Nations and European Union, is full of it.

In regular drama directed at kindergarten-aged children, children are taught that martyrdom is a beautiful state to aspire to, that suicide bombers are heroes and heroines and that even cartoon characters can sing and dance and murder their way into paradise.

Palestinian Media Watch and the Middle East Media Research Institute have been documenting this extraordinary perversion in recent years.
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PICK ONE
Tim Blair
The frowning begins:
Having large families should be frowned upon as an environmental misdemeanour in the same way as frequent long-haul flights, driving a big car and failing to reuse plastic bags, says a report to be published today by a green think tank.

The paper by the Optimum Population Trust will say that if couples had two children instead of three they could cut their family’s carbon dioxide output by the equivalent of 620 return flights a year between London and New York.
Coincidentally, population-curber Ian Lowe has three children.
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HOME MADE, HOME DELIVERED
Tim Blair
Every day, hard-working Gaza craftsmen lovingly create a new batch of their celebrated modest home-made rockets – which are then exported throughout the region
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FOUNTAINS FROZED
Tim Blair
A warmy prediction in England:
The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average.
That mildness sure has a crisp edge to it:
Yesterday tens of thousands of motorists were left stranded in a record day for car breakdowns amid chaotic scenes on the roads as temperatures in parts of the country dropped to as low as minus 11C (12.2F) …

In central London, shivering tourists witnessed the unusual sight of the fountains in Trafalgar Square frozen.
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CHARMS OF COMMUNISM
Tim Blair
Castro enthusiast Richard Gott, who’d previously visited Cuba in 1963, recalls a subsequent visit in the late 90s:
I found a Cuba preserved in aspic: nothing seemed to have changed - one of the unique and neglected charms of communism.
Prison cells tend not to change much over time, either. It’s one of their unique and neglected charms. By the way, aren’t we conservatives meant to be the ones in thrall to changelessness?