View From the Middle East

The latest according to Aljazeera:

"The leader of Lebanon's Hezbollah has said his fighters would expand their presence in Syria, saying the group was engaged in an existential battle against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Hassan Nasrallah acknowledged for the first time that his Shia group was fighting across all of Syria in support of President Bashar al-Assad's government. He called specifically on his fiercest critics in Lebanon to back his intervention across the border, warning that their support for Assad's opponents would not save them from ISIL. "Today we are facing a kind of danger that is unprecedented in history, which targets humanity itself," Nasrallah said, speaking ahead of Monday's anniversary of the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000."-more

Israel Breaks the Rules

Many many years ago I was a young gag cartoonist trying to break into the business. One day I found myself cooling my heels in the small reception room of a magazine publisher in New York. I sat in the room with my portfolio of work, doodling with a pencil on the pad I always carried with me ...waiting to meet with the editor. The minutes dragged on and my boredom increased.

The room was dominated by a large fish tank in which swam only one fish! It was bluish in color with an amusingly pugnacious look on his face. I walked over to the aquarium to take a closer look. The top of the fish tank was not covered, and so I could look down into the water from above. Absent-mindedly I tapped the water surface with the eraser end of my pencil ...and the fish jumped, snapped, and SANK HIS TEETH INTO THE WOOD OF THE PENCIL!! He then let go and dropped back into the water. I staggered back, in shock. I looked at the deep teeth holes in my pencil and was thankful that I had decided against tapping the water surface with my finger.

When I was ushered in to meet with the editor I was still shaking. "What kind of fish is that in the reception area?" I asked. "Oh that's a Piranha" was the answer.

When I did today's cartoon I drew the fish to look like the piranha fish that attacked me in a New York reception room more than forty years ago.

Piranha