Hamas called off a 16-month-old truce with Israel June 9 after attacks by Israeli forces in Gaza killed 10 Palestinians, including three children playing on a beach. "The Israeli massacres represent a direct opening battle," Hamas said in a statement. Prime Minister Esmail Haniya, also a Hamas leader, called the deaths a "war crime" and urged Jordan and Egypt to intervene.

More uneasy deja vu from Lebanon. The sons of the Syria-backed President Emile Lahoud and the bitterly anti-Syria Druze leader Walid Jumblatt get into a shoot-out in Beirut—just as their fathers opposed each other in the civil war. From Lebanon's Daily Star, June 5:

BEIRUT: Following in their father's footsteps, Ralph Lahoud and Najib Jumblatt clashed on Saturday in a shooting incident that damaged Jumblatt's car. Newspapers reported on Sunday that shots were fired by President Emile Lahoud's younger son's bodyguards at the car of Druze leader Walid Jumblatt's stepson in the bustling street of Ain Mreisseh.

Nine people were wounded, five seriously, when a bomb exploded in a roadside restaurant in Hub, on the eastern edge of Pakistan's restive Baluchistan province on June 9. "It is done by those who have been carrying out such terrorist activities all over Baluchistan," said a local police official, referring to Baluch militants fighting for greater autonomy and control over the province's natural resources. Last month, nine people, including four police, were wounded when a bomb strapped to a bicycle exploded in the town. Baluchistan, bordering with Iran and Afghanistan, has Pakistan's largest gas and oil reserves, and militants resent these resources being used to benefit other regions. The revolt escalated in December when militants fired rockets during a visit by President Pervez Musharraf to the town of Kohlu. Musharraf has announced plans for major infrastructure projects in Baluchistan to win local support, but has vowed to deal harshly with the rebels. (Reuters, June 9)

Reuters reported May 29 that Mali's armed forces are hunting down Tuareg rebels who have taken up arms again, demanding more autonomy for the desert north. According to the report, the rebels used pickup trucks mounted with machine guns to attack army camps in the desert town of Kidal, some 1,000 kilometers northeast of Bamako, before withdrawing to surrounding mountains with looted weapons.

Talk about deja vu all over again. The US secretly backs a loose alliance of lawless warlords it had previously fought because they are now opposing an ultra-fundamentalist cleric-led militia with supposed links to al-Qaeda. The clerical militia has just taken the capital and seems set to bring the whole country under its control. It wins support by pledging to bring stability to a war-weary populace long brutalized by the warlords. But Washinghton fears a new regional beachhead for Islamic terrorism. The warlords get hip to this angle, and start spouting "anti-terrorist" rhetoric. Sound familiar? Only this time instead of the Northern Alliance it's the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counterterrorism, and instead of the Taliban it's the Islamic Courts Union. After a four-month siege of Mogadishu, claiming hundreds of lives, the Islamic Courts Union took the capital city June 5. The next to fall may be Baidoa, the inland city where Somalia's recently-assembled (and still largely fictional) official government is based. (Newsday, June 6)

This is not the first anti-Semitic killing in Uzbekistan this year. Yet a Google News search for the story reveals only this account from the vile Arutz Sheva (June 9), voice of the Israeli settler movement. Why is that?

Jewish leaders in the former Soviet Union suspect that anti-Semitism was behind the murder of the secretary of a rabbi and her mother in Tashkent, the major city in Uzbekistan.

We don't necessarily have a problem with prayers in German being spoken at Auschwitz. But this sad case illustrates how the Holocaust has been hijacked for propagandistic purposes: "reified" as the ultimate evil, something unique and existing outside history, serving not as a warning of where racist trends still alive and well today can lead if unchecked, but, perversely, as a reassurance of the niceties of the status quo. Thus the Pope can ruminate at Auschwitz one day after Poland's chief rabbi has suffered an anti-Semitic attack, and not even feel the need to mention the incident. Worse, it is only the Jewish press (which, needless to say, suffers from its own blind spot where Palestine is concerned) that even expresses any outrage, or gives the attacks prominent coverage. From The Forward, June 2 (emphasis added):

From the NY Daily News, June 4:

'Love' then death in Harlem hit-run
Coward kills 30-year-old helping date out of cab

A 30-year-old law student exchanged kisses with a woman in the back of a cab, helped her from the vehicle and then was killed yesterday when a hit-and-run coward mowed him down, police and a witness said.