"World's gone mad, and no one's paying attention!"

With the likes of Katie Couric, Brian Williams and Anderson Cooper reading us the news of the day, we here in the States tend to take major world events a little less seriously here in the States, especially when they’re up against big stories like the airliner that made an emergency landing because a woman passenger was lighting her farts.

But in Israel, where lives hinge on every word, folks listen to the big stories like those people in the old commercials used to lean over the chess boards to hear Radio Free Europe. And what they get out of the news is often very different than the spin we hear.

Our Man Elli in Israel is working as a TV news reporter out of Jerusalem. In one of his irregular dispatches, he sends us this exclusive impression of December 5, 2006:

We're living in a world gone mad, and no one is paying attention.

US Defense Secretary-designate Robert Gates testifies today that he could not guarantee that if Iran possesses nuclear weapons it would not put its threats against Israel into action. So Iran marches on to attain nuclear capability, which it is likely to use against Israel. But he is against an American military operation against Iran because the consequences of a military confrontation with Iran could be dramatic and could lead to chemical and biological terror attacks.

But not attacking them now could very well lead to Iran using an A-bomb in a terror attack. Is that better? So we're going to sit back and wait for that to happen-- and THEN react? Are we all nuts?

Meanwhile, Iran is holding a two-day conference on the Holocaust next Monday and Tuesday, with 60 scholars from some 30 countries participating. Its purpose? To “provide the opportunity for scholars from both sides to give their papers in freedom and without pre-conceived ideas,” according to the deputy foreign minister, Manouchehr Mohammadi.

What's amazing is not that Iran is hosting the conference, but that 60 scholars from 30 countries are taking part! There is no subject of Jewish history more thoroughly examined than the Holocaust-- and that includes the Exodus from Egypt. What exactly will this conference achieve? Easy. They will announce that the gas chambers never existed for the purposes previously believed, because they could never have killed that many Jews in the allotted time frame. This itself is not a new plank in the platform of Holocaust denial, but it will be stated anew as if it was suddenly an original revelation proven by some scholar after years of study. And on and on.

So the Holocaust didn't exactly happen as previously reported for the last 65 years, Israel should not exist and be wiped off the map, and there's no guarantee, says the upcoming U.S. Secretary of Defense, that Iran won't nuke Israel if given half the chance.

And the world stands on the sidelines watching. Gevalt.