HANGING WITH HEZBOLLAH, Part I.

INDEED: Michael Young to the Obama White House: “The last thing [Syria’s Bashar al-Assad] will ever do if he manages to repress his own people is undermine this by negotiating with Israel.”

The White House, though, is hardly the only place in the American government where foreign policy makers don’t understand this. As our Secretary of State recently said, members of both the Republican and Democratic parties believe Assad is a “reformer.” It doesn’t take more than a decade for an absolute dictator to reform his own system, and reformers don’t shoot hundreds of unarmed kids in the back while calling them pawns in a Jewish conspiracy.

A MUST-READ: High Noon in Pakistan, by Walter Russell Mead.

HEADLINE OF THE DAY: Manless Drone Strikes Brainless Men.

ONLINE GULAG MUSEUM launched in France. (Via Claire Berlinski.)

SHAMELESS PLUG: Sol Stern gives The Road to Fatima Gate a great review in City Journal.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, MOM.

I LOVE THE FIRST AMENDMENT, I REALLY DO. The UK government says it will regulate journalists’ Twitter feeds. The US government would probably do this, too—and oh so much more—if it could.

THE NEW OSAMA VIDEOS. Have you seen them? He looks pathetic.

BARRY RUBIN ON SYRIA: Killing Americans, Murdering Syrians, Allied with al-Qaida. It’s a No-Brainer: The Regime Must Go.

LEE SMITH on bin Laden’s death and the Islamic way of burial: “To fret over bin Laden’s end, to lament the killing of an American enemy, identifies you as something other than a friend of the United States.”

And by the way, his book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, is essential reading for everyone interested in the Middle East.

AYAAN HIRSI ALI: Will the Muslim Brotherhood succeed where Osama bin Laden failed? The gradualists–not moderates, but gradualists–in the Brotherhood do have a greater chance of success. Unlike the vicious psychotics of Al Qaeda in Iraq, they won’t alienate their soft supporters until it’s too late.

SIGH: Kenneth Pollack thinks escalation in Libya is inevitable. How about we just kill Qaddafi and wrap it up instead of declaring him untouchable and dragging this out? That’s easier said than done, of course, but it looks like we’re not even trying.

JUST ONCE I’d like to read an article by Noam Chomsky that isn’t faux brilliant in its moral and political idiocy, one that suggests he does, in fact, live in the same world as the rest of us, but he can’t even manage it after Osama bin Laden is killed.

AT LEAST THEY ACKNOWLEDGE HE’S DEAD. Here is a photo gallery showing thousands of reactionary Islamists taking to the streets in Egypt and Pakistan to protest the death of Osama bin Laden.

THE FALSE-MODERATE Tariq Ramadan is slippery as usual when asked about the death of Osama bin Laden.

WE ALMOST HAD AN EVEN BETTER WEEK: Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born Al Qaeda leader in Yemen, was almost, but not quite, killed by an American missile attack.

This whole operation in Yemen is seriously under-the-radar, at least in the U.S. I wonder how many Americans even know who al-Awlaki is and that we’re firing missiles into Yemen in the first place?

THANKS, GLENN, for trusting us with the keys to the blog while you’re away. Enjoy your vacation!

PETER ROBINSON interviewed me on his fantastic show Uncommon Knowledge about my new book, The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel. NRO has been posting one segment each day, but you can watch the whole thing over at Powerline.

THOUGHTCRIME: A judge in Hamburg files a criminal complaint against German Chancellor Angela Merkel because she “endorsed a crime” by saying she’s glad that Osama bin Laden is dead.

WELCOME BACK, GLENN. Here’s a public thank-you for trusting us with the keys. And thanks to all you Instapundit readers for hanging out with us last week.

GOOD GRIEF: So Dennis Blair is out as director of national intelligence, which is fine, but now President Obama says he has “more confidence” in John Brennan? This is the man who wants to go looking for moderates in Hezbollah, who do not exist, and promote them within the organization, which he could not do even if they were real. We can’t monkey with Hezbollah’s org chart any more than we can Al Qaeda’s or the Iranian government’s.

I’d have a little more faith in the Obama Administration’s foreign policy officials if they demonstrated more consistent knowledge of Middle East 101.

WONDERFUL. WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Hugo Chavez vows to continue financial crackdown in Venezuela.

HELL ON THE MEDITERRANEAN: “An iron curtain of a strict theocracy is slowly descending on Gaza, but many human rights proponents still prefer to depict it as the embattled bastion of freedom fighters.”

DARIUSZ TOLCZYK AT THE NEW CRITERION on Russia’s persistent unwillingness to fully face up to the mass murder of tens of thousands of Polish military officers and intellectuals in the Katyn forest by Stalin’s NKVD in 1940.