So read a July 14 article on the JTA. Some settlers write back?

Several Gaza Strip settlers wrote their Israeli identification numbers on their arms in a bid to recall concentration camp inmates’ tattoos.

Thursday’s protests, adopted by several residents of the Gush Katif settlement bloc, appeared to have begun with a local woman who scrawled her identification number on her arm and showed it at a military checkpoint rather than furnish her ID card. The Yesha settler council urged the protesters to abandon the ploy, which outraged survivors of the Nazi genocide.

“The plan by some right-wing activists to put their identity numbers on their arms perverts the historical facts and damages the memory of the Shoah,

It's starting to look like the truce is off following yesterday's suicide blast in Israel. From DPA, July 14:

Israel recaptured Tulkarm early Wednesday, after a suicide bomber from that West Bank town killed four Israelis and injured dozens when he blew himself up at a pedestrian crossing in the nearby Israeli coastal city of Netanya.

One armed Palestinian was killed and another wounded as a large army force entered the autonomous Palestinian town before dawn in search of those behind the suicide bombing.

The first apparent example of what Christopher Hitchens called "bloody foolishness" that he hoped Britons would be too civilized for following the London attacks. From Pakistan's Daily Times, July 15:

Pakistani shot dead
LONDON: Pakistani national Kamal Raza Butt was killed in a suspected racial attack in Nottingham, said police on Tuesday. Butt died on Sunday, three days after the London bombings, and the attack was "being investigated as a racially-aggravated incident," said a Nottinghamshire Police, adding that six youths arrested on Monday were in custody and being questioned. Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Inayat Bunglawala linked Butt's death to Thursday's terrorist attacks. Butt (48) had been staying in Nottingham with a friend, said police, adding that he was assaulted shortly after he left a neighbourhood shop.

From the UK Guardian, July 14:

At least 27 people, most of them children, were killed and up to 25 wounded when a car packed with explosives targeted a convoy of US soldiers on a community relations mission in a Shia area of east Baghdad.

The explosion left one US soldier dead and three injured as nearby buildings were enveloped by a fireball.

It was the second big suicide bomb in the capital this week, following the attack on an army recruitment centre on Sunday that killed at least 25 people. Last weekend senior US military officers in Iraq had claimed success in their drive to stem the relentless wave of suicide bombers in the capital.

From the Chicago Sun-Times, July 14:

Military investigators said they proposed disciplining the prison commander at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, because of abusive and degrading treatment of a suspected terrorist that included forcing him to wear a bra, dance with another man and behave like a dog.

They said Wednesday they recommended that Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller be reprimanded for failing to oversee his interrogation of the prisoner, who was suspected of involvement in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Lebanon's deputy prime minister and defense minister Elias Murr survived a car bombing July 12 which left a bodyguard dead and several injured. The bomb was placed in car parked along the route of his motorcade in a Beirut suburb. He was the first pro-Syrian politician targetted in the recent wave of attacks in Lebanon. Druze leader Walid Jumblat claimed that the blast is linked to the investigation of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri's assassination on Feb. 14. Jumblat alleged the assassination attempt on Murr is part of a plan to eliminate the eyewitnesses to Hariri's assassination. (Zaman, Turkey, July 14) (See our recent story on Lebanon)

The conspiranoid site Prison Planet has picked up on a BBC Radio 5 report from the evening of July 7, the same day as the London attacks, in which Pete Power, a former Scotland Yard counter-terrorism official and now managing director of the private security firm Visor Consultants, states that his company was carrying out an exercise on how to manage multiple bomb attacks on the London Underground at the precise time that the real attacks happened. He declines to say who contracted his firm for this work, saying only that it was "a company," and that he can't mention its name for "obvious reasons."

Bad news for Nuristan, the remote and isolated region of Afghanistan's central mountains, known until just over a century ago as Kafiristan (land of the infidels) because of the survival of the ancient Indo-European nature religion there. The region straddles the border with Pakistan, and on the Pakistani side the name Kafiristan, and the ancient "pagan" religion, still survive. Its isolation has kept it out of the war which has wracked Afghanistan for the last generation—but perhaps not for long. The anti-terrorist Jamestown Foundation website claims that the recent US anti-Taliban offensive (which resulted in the loss of a Chinook helicopter and several US soldiers), dubbed Operation Red Wing, has forced Osama bin Laden to take refuge in Nuristan: