This is the reason why a Jewish state is needed. To have a tiny area in the world where Jews can live as Jews, without fear. The morality of a Jewish state where Jews can live safely and securely far outweighs the pseudo-morality of Bisharat’s vision where the clock would go back to the days of Jews being bombed in markets because of a never-ending series of perceived injustices and affronts.

via Fairies, unicorns and a peaceful bi-national state.

Yet if Zakaria had done a tiny amount of homework he would have seen that Hezbollah and its leader really are pure anti-semites completely out of the context of Israel.

Remember the Buenos Aries bombing of a Jewish community center? 86 people were killed, and Hezbollah together with its Iranian allies was behind it.

Moreover, Nasrallah said “If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide”. (Lebanon Daily Star, Oct. 23, 2002)

Also in 2002 he said

“If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.”And MEMRI quotes him as calling Jews “grandsons of apes and pigs” and “Allah’s most cowardly and greedy creatures.”

(Quotes are from CAMERA.)

Is Zakaria so naive as to think that Hezbollah’s public support for a synagogue that will have no worshippers to serve a community that fled religious persecution is an example of religious tolerance? Doesn’t all evidence seem to support the idea rather that Hezbollah holds  Jews must remain, at best, second-class citizens, dhimmis under Islamic rule?

For Zakaria to quote this Hezbollah official and ignore the massive amounts of evidence of clear anti-semitism on the part of Hezbollah’s leadership indicates that Zakaria’s position on religious intolerance is not quite as clear cut as his denunciation of the ADL would indicate.

via Fareed Zakaria a bit inconsistent on religious tolerance.

via “Moderate” Ground Zero mosque Imam Rauf: “In a true peace, Israel will, in our lifetimes, become one more Arab country, with a Jewish minority”.

In the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza, hundreds of Hamas supporters took to the streets after the evening prayer to celebrate the news of the attack, urged on by the calls of an imam over the loudspeaker even before Hamas had officially said it was behind the killings.

This is a gross understatement of the ecstasy that has accompanied the news that Hamas managed to kill four unarmed civilians, two of them women.

The Hamas-affiliated Palestine Times goes into detail.

Thousands of supporters of the Islamic resistance movement Hamas on Tuesday night participated in a massive march called for by the movement to celebrate the heroic operation carried out by the Mujahideen of al-Qassam Brigades in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, which killed four Zionist settlers.

via Elder of Ziyon

Led by the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Friends of Al Aqsa Glasgow, many stores in the area are now displaying posters declaring “No Israeli Produce sold here”.Imagine the outcry that would occur if a supermarket anywhere in the free world would proudly put up a sign saying “No Arab Products Sold Here.”

And furthermore, imagine if shops that did sell Arab produce were publicly “named and shamed.” There would be numerous left-wing cries of “McCarthyism” and “bigotry” and “thought police.”

via Muslims in Scotland threaten shops that sell Israeli goods.

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states.

…I’m pretty sure that in a well-regulated country like the Netherlands, the water is reasonably free of heavy pollutants and raw sewage. (I would not, for example, let her swim in the Mekong.) This, I think, outlines a useful distinction between different kinds of regulation. I am perfectly capable of assessing for myself the risks of swimming across a small pond in Massachusetts, or the risks of swimming in the Amstel when lots of boat traffic is around. I don’t need regulations to protect me; I have common sense. What I can’t assess for myself is the risk that the water is contaminated by raw sewage. For that, I need a regulatory agency that stops households and businesses from polluting the river. To generalise: for risks I can assess myself, I don’t want regulations that prevent me from doing as I please just because I might end up suing the government. For risks I can’t assess myself, I do want regulations that give me the confidence to do as I please. One kind of regulation stops me from swimming in a pond in Massachusetts. The other kind lets me swim in a river in the Netherlands. One kind of regulation makes me less free. The other kind makes me freer.

via There Are Good Regulations And Bad Regulations.

We all need to be more free.

But tolerance is one of the first and most awkward questions raised by any examination of Islamism. We are wrong to talk as if the only subject was that of terrorism. As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything “offensive” to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter …

via Hitchens Decodes Rauf.

The only place for a Palestinian state is the West Bank, which Israel has occupied – legally under international law — since repelling the 1967 aggression launched from there. The West Bank remains an unallocated portion of the Palestine Mandate, the disposition of which is to be settled by negotiations. But with constructive bluntness, Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to America, puts aside diplomatic ambiguity:

via George Will on the “two state delusion”.

The Associated Press cracked the whip the other day, issuing a strict and specific set of guidelines, approved terminology, and “facts” to be used in its coverage of the Ground Zero mosque.

The AP’s agenda is clear, and its policy statement amounts to a resolution to agitate in favor of the mosque and dismiss criticism and concerns about it out of hand.

It is an open and unapologetic statement of journalistic bias.

As Frank Gaffney says in what will be a handy companion to future AP reporting on the mosque, it amounts to a “Muslim Brotherhood narrative about the Islamic cultural center formerly known as the ‘Ground Zero mosque’.” A thorough deconstruction of AP’s pravda, er, “truth,” about the project is indeed in order. “Fact-Checking the AP ‘Fact Check’ On the Ground Zero Mosque,” by Frank Gaffney for Big Journalism, August 20:

via Ground Zero mega-mosque: the gospel according to the Associated Press.

Interestingly, among those who formerly used the now-proscribed descriptor “Ground Zero mosque” is none other than Feisal Abdul Rauf, its imam and chief promoter. He called it that even though the proposed venue has always been two blocks away from the World Trade Center site.

But then Kresta went on the air and he was, well, crestfallen. He and his producer Nick Thomm told the story to the listening audience: they had contacted CAIR’s national office in Washington, which referred them to Walid, who agreed to a debate and even posted on his blog that he would be appearing. They were chagrined to report that after all that, Walid had not shown up. He had vanished without notice or explanation.

via Dawud Walid of Hamas-linked CAIR bails out of debate with Spencer.

Prejudice involves the unjustified assumption that your identity is somehow better than someone else’s identity; disagreement involves the absolutely justified – indeed unavoidable – assumption that your belief is better than someone else’s belief. (If you didn’t think yours was better, you’d give it up.) So we think that Republicans are opposed to Democrats not prejudiced against them; and libertarians aren’t prejudiced against socialists, and people who believe in God aren’t prejudiced against people who don’t.

via It Isn’t Bigoted To Criticize Religion.

A source at state-owned oil refiner Tupras (TUPRS.IS: Quote), who did not wish to be identified, perhaps summed up the current mood in Turkey: “For us, Iran is more important than America, because we get crude oil from them. We don’t get anything from America.”

via Turkey selling gasoline to Iran – at a nice profit.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, called for an investigation of those who are protesting the building of the Ground Zero Mosque on Tuesday. She told San Francisco’s KCBS radio:

via AUDIO – Rep. Pelosi calls for investigation of WTC mosque opposition – Washington Times.

Someone needs to explain to that harpy that this is wrong on so many levels. I wonder if Billy Townsend would do it… yeah, I doubt it.

Thanks to Ricochet member Okan Altiparmak and Gateway Pundit, here’s a list of 70 members of Congress who are fully paid-up members of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Shall we have a little look at the highlights of the platform of the DSA, folks? Just so we can all be clear what we’re talking about?

via Advice Goddess Blog.

Gad damned Socialists… they’re like roaches. Bringing the brain fart disease of unlimited government and the ridiculous notion that the worker is more important than business when THERE IS NO WORKER WITHOUT BUSINESS!

UPDATE: According to Chuck Welch via Facebook: “”The list of 70 names does not belong to any socialist organization. It was quoted from the Progressive Caucus which to any right-winger is too liberal. For socialists it is too liberal in the other direction.” [...] [T]hose names are part of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.”

If this is true, then that’s good.

There was, to begin with the end, the final stark stop-talking-nonsense put-up-or-shut-up challenge to Obama and his speechifying crew, that is the challenge that they provide supporting evidence, chapter and verse, local habitations and names, for this assertion:

“And here in the United States Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.”

This phrase is one more illustration of a larger problem: when it comes to Islam, Barack Obama apparently does not intend to abandon, bur rather to continue to employ, that Get-Me-Rewrite approach he used in his Cairo speech to the world’s Muslims, possibly the falsest, least-true-to-history speech ever delivered by an American president. In trying to get or be, as he likes to say (with his handful of favorite phrases, this is certainly among them), “on the right side of history” (as if, you see, history has a pre-determined “right side” and we had all “better get on it” coute-que-coute or we will be judged accordingly), he, Barack Obama, is perfectly willing to rewrite history. That is, he is willing to rewrite history in the true, and not historical determinist sense — that is, as the record of the past, as best as we can determine that record, and to make sense of it, to give the accumulated facts meaning. A little more undiluted Thucydides or Gibbon or Macaulay, and a little less watered-down historical materialism or castroesque (“history will absolve me”) derivations thereof, might be nice.

via Fitzgerald: A Little More On Obama, Islam, History, and “Getting On The Right Side Of History”.

So far, outside of Armenian, Kurdish and Israeli websites, the rest of the English-language media has ignored the story. It has been a full day since the initial report was published in English and German.

But I guess that if the mainstream media doesn’t report it, it cannot be very important. Sorry for wasting your time.

via Media ignores Turkey’s use of chemical weapons updated.

Here’s the funny part. The app isn’t mine, I didn’t write it, and I make nothing from it. I only wrote about it a couple of times, as did many other skeptic blogs. Yet the Sierra Club chairman Pope gives WUWT all the credit for it

via Quote of the Week: Greenie Fools Day | Watts Up With That?.

This is the ultimate irony: The leftists who shout about “co-existence” are the ones who want separation and who encourage by their actions the minority of Arabs who want to sabotage peaceful relations with Jews.

The people who have the best relationships with Arabs are the supposedly right-wing, militant, extremist, intolerant, religious, nationalist, racist, bigoted, land-grabbing, and illegal settlers.

via What real co-existence looks like (UPDATED).