Bizarre war tidbits

Dr. Nasrallah
Rambam hospital in Haifa is the main trauma center in the north of Israel where victims of terror attacks and rockets, as well as wounded soldiers are brought. The hospital has a staff of doctors and nurses that represent the northern region's ethnic diversity. This includes Muslims, Druze, Christians and Jews. Recent victims of Nasrallah's katyusha attacks in the north were surprised to learn that one of the trauma doctors is a Muslim Arab whose name is also Nasrallah (Nasrallah means guardian of God). As one patient put it, "I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. First Nasrallah blows me up, nows he's putting me back together again!"

Hezbollah coming to you abroad
I heard reports that the Montreal Gazette newspaper interviewed one of the Canadian-Lebanese refugees coming out of Lebanon. The woman who arrived with her four sons told the Gazette reporter that she didn't know where her husband was since he was fighting with Hezbollah. She brought her four children to Montreal to grow up safely so that they can return to Lebanon and fight Israel (and presumably whoever else they will be fighting at the time - this might include Canadian peacekeeprs). Free speech issues aside, I think Canada's anti-hate legislation needs to include speech and other activities promoting terror, to formally recognize Canada's anti-terror position.

Palestinian authority sought to use foreign infrastructure grants to set up electronic eavesdropping on Israel
A former Ericsson employee was hired by the Palestinian authority a couple of years ago to set up a cellular network using grant money from donors abroad. The Cellular network was to serve the Palestinian people for civilian purposes. However, this engineer was constantly instructed to design a network that would only eavesdrop on Israeli cellular networoks for military purposes. To his credit, he resigned his position. Although there is nothing new about Palestinians using foreign aid for terror activities, I was "pleased" to be able to have first-hand testimony to this.

Early morning siren
Yesterday, the sirens went off unusually early while I was still asleep. Instead of going down to the shelter, I padded off to the downstairs bathroom next to the stairwell. I sat down in the shower stall to wait it out. Next thing I knew I woke up about an hour later!

100
That's the total number of books translated to Arabic by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, from all languages, in the last 100 years. The total number of books translated every year into Arabic (nearly 1 billion people speak Arabic around the world) according to a 2003 G8 report: only 330. By contrast, over 1500 books per year are translated into Greek - only 11 million people speak Greek.