Today, Barack Obama is hosting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House for what will be a very tense and important diplomatic meeting. Some clowns in Chicago decided to help out!

Is swine flu kosher? Israeli health official prefers you call it "Mexican flu." [via Transracial]

The reported efforts by a "suspected Israeli operative" to get Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) to quash an espionage prosecution into AIPAC hinge on Haim Saban, an Israeli-American billionaire. Who is he?

How many hot-buttons does the news that the NSA wiretapped Congresswoman Jane Harman involve? Let's count: 1) public corruption, 2) "Israel Lobby" espionage, 3) intelligence agencies spying on lawmakers and 4) Bush's hyper-politicization of everything.

New York Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman unleashed a screed yesterday on the Huffington Post about how the media never covers how bad it is for Israelis dealing with Palestinian terrorism. He should know.

Are you an American Jew considering a move to Israel? Good for you! Hope you haven't ever blogged any mild criticisms of Israeli policy, though!

Israel announced today that it's close to ending its war in Gaza, possibly as early as this weekend. Just in time for the news to be swallowed by the Obamanauguration coverage saturation.

Is it smart for Israel to blow the hell out of Palestinian civilians past all boundaries of good sense? No. But has Israel timed this war brilliantly, from a PR perspective? No doubt.

Why doesn't anyone ever write about the real victims of the current war in Gaza? That's right, the losers and freaks of Second Life.

The attached ad, ostensibly raising money to help Israelis, aired during MSNBC's Countdown tonight. As a tipster pointed out, one of the explosions looks totally fake.

Facebook, which claims its goal is to let users share their lives. has been accused of censoring posts about the fighting in Gaza. So much for Mark Zuckerberg's dreams of breaking down global barriers.

New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, in Israel playing at being an international statesman when he can't even get the 7 train to run on weekends, heard a rocket and hid in a basement.

It's brand new as of yesterday. What they're (they = the Israeli Defense Forces' Spokesperson's Unit) using it for is to, well, show instances of successful bombings in Gaza. Because, you know, they're doing that whole fighting with Hamas thing again. Apparently YouTube administrators took down one particularly graphic video, but the IDF remains committed to showing horrible bombings to drum up some positive PR. The channel's profile reads:

Alternate-universe President-elect Cynthia McKinney hopped on a boat to Gaza with 3 tons of medical supplies and then they were rammed by Israelis and forced to dock in Lebanon, where CNN cameras were waiting.

The campaign site for Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu," the Israeli candidate for prime minister, is a mirror-image copy of BarackObama.com, flopped to accommodate the right-to-left Hebrew script. Right down to the icons, it mirrors the website developed by Blue State Digital, reports the New York Times. The new-media touches may not all translate; Israel only has a couple thousand Twitter users, making it an unlikely get-out-the-vote mechanism. The imitation is meant as flattery: Netanyahu and Obama have met twice and are said to get along, and the Israeli candidate is campaigning on a similar theme of change.

Have you heard of Rahm Emanuel? He's just announced that he'll be Barack Obama's new White House enforcer! Or "Chief of Staff" as they call it "inside the Beltway." Rahm only has nine fingers, and there were rumors, once, that he lost the tenth to a Syrian tank while serving in the Israeli Army. That rumor is false—he lost it to a meat slicer—but Rahm's dad did serve the Israeli cause. As a terrorist! Rahm's dad is Benjamin M. Emanuel, a Chicago pediatrician and, in the 1940s, a member of Irgun, the militant Zionist group that attacked Palestinians and the British throughout Palestine. They killed 90 people in a Hotel bombing in 1946 and then there was this little massacre that got out of hand in Deir Yassin. Now Ben, according to the Times, "passed secret codes" for Irgun. We've no clue what that means. But according to the rules of guilt by association, Ben Emanuel is a terrorist and Rahm Emanuel is associated with terrorists and Barack Obama is palling around with terrorist sympathizers, from 40 years ago. This will help, once again, with making The Jews feel comfortable with the secret Muslim Arab as President. Reaching across the aisle!

Ehud "The Analyzer" Tenenbaum, who became world-famous when he and a number of fellow Israeli and California teens successfully exploited a vulnerability in Sun Solaris to gain access to computers at Nasa, Andrews Air Force Base and the Department of Defense, is in jail. Earlier this month he was arrested in Montreal on suspicion of having helped defraud credit card companies of $1.8 million. Wired dug up a slickly produced, pretty entertaining video produced by the FBI a year after the intrusion.I happened to be in Tel Aviv when Tenenbaum turned himself in to Israeli authorities on the day he was set to report for compulsory military service — he was treated as something of a national hero, a symbol of Israel's technology prowess, with even then Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu praising him as "damn good." Tenenbaum ended up with probation and community service instead of jail time. So it wasn't with much surprise when I read Tenenbaum's mother calling the arrest a frame-up by the FBI. The truth? The prepaid credit card scam described is a classic modus operandi in Canadian tweaker circles, at least as described in Zero Day Threat. And Tenenbaum certainly had to chops to pull it off, with the cast of fellow suspects who've been released probably participating as mules to make transactions. So once again, I'm betting Canadian dollars to donuts from Tim Horton's on meth.

Mere hours after officially declining to buy into the Borat franchise, Abu Dhabi's new billion-dollar film enterprise may soon rebuff yet another burgeoning cultural nemesis: Mickey Mouse. The magazine Israel Today reports this week that a Muslim cleric has issued a fatwa urging the murder of the Disney mascot, "whom he characterized as an agent of Satan sent to corrupt young minds." It's not just that his kids keep asking to watch Fantasia during Ramadan, either, but something far more fundamentally unsound:

Ehud Olmert is resigning as premier of Israel due to corruption charges and a universal displeasure with his governance, but the real news from the holy land is that Morrissey has arrived. Oh, the things Obama could learn about pop superstardom from the Pope of Mope, who landed at Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday for his first concert tour of the region. Israeli newswire Ynet was all over the arrival, and already my in-box overfloweth with lines about the "Moziach." (Ask Krucoff, he'll know.) If you're a Smiths fan of the Semitic persuasion, this touch-down is especially significant as Morrissey is still shepherding some of us through the big-haired awkward years. [Ynet]

Skip the politics, let's get to the tech: The Shahab-3 missiles that Iranian solidiers test-fired today — a blatant bring-it to Israel and America — could land a nuke in Tel Aviv. (The city's startup sector was recently dubbed the world's #8 tech hotspot by CNET, less than 240 milliseconds from Sand Hill Road and believe me, no packet loss from those guys.) The missile is based on North Korea's Nodong-1, an Iranian-funded adaptation of the Soviet Scud missiles that Saddam Hussein's troops lobbed at Israel in the first Gulf War. No, it's not true that these missiles are so old they use vacuum tubes instead of silicon chips. It's not true that their guidance systems are built from American GPS gear, as much as the Valley would like to take credit. What is true is that the Shahab-3's biggest vulnerability — a tendency to tumble out of control on the way down to the target — may have been fixed.