Sultan Knish

All the Warning Signs Were There

2009-11-08T22:27:00.000-05:00

He is inside your borders. He works deep inside your political and social structures. Openly he expresses his support for your murderers and enthusiastically promotes his message of hate. The bumper sticker on his car reads, "Allah is Love", but that love is the "love" which the Koran 61:4 describes as follows, "Surely Allah loves those who fight in His way in ranks as if they were a firm and compact wall."

And when on one fateful morning he gives away his possessions, as was expected of Mohammed's followers, "The ones who belong to Allah are those who give away, wholeheartedly everything they possess thus proving true their claim of love. Abu Bakr (Mohammed's successor) held this rank, which, on one occasion had brought every content of his house before (Mohammed) the Messenger of Allah"...

... and that evening carries out his planned massacre, following the words of the Hadith, "The Messenger (Mohammed) said: "Leaving for Jihad in the Way of Allah in the morning or in the evening will merit a reward better than the world and all that is in it" (Sahih Muslim 3492) ... all the warning signs were there.

But the warning signs were not there just for Nidal Malik Hassan, an Islamic radical from a family that had immigrated from one of the world's ugliest sources of Islamic radicalism, who had attended radical mosques and fraternized with radicals Imams. Hassan is only one blip of red in an ugly impressionist painting scrawled across the globe in shades of crimson and black. Each Muslim who follows the way of Jihad or feels compelled to support those who do, is a single point of red in that red and black atlas. Each one of their victims, murdered, raped, honor killed, tortured, beheaded and crippled are the black dots. And both the black and red dots are growing in number to cover the world.

Nidal Hassan is only one blip in the great ugly splotch of red and black scrawled across the United States, from east to west, to the north and the south. And that splotch is only one of many marring the globe and spreading across it.

The goal of the Islamists, of many of those very same Imams who ministered to Hassan's religious questions, and the larger Saudi funded Wahhabi organizations that fund and train them, is not to create a single Nidal Malik Hassan eager to die for the Jihad, but to create tens of thousands of Hassans and thousands of Fort Hoods in the United States alone. While they smile and lie through their teeth to the media, they are already working on spinning the incident to their advantage, to play the old game so common in Europe and America of positioning themselves as the alternatives to those "other" crazy Muslims like Hassan who might be tempted to take weapons in hand, if their recommendations about increasing tolerance are not followed. And the first recommendation of course is to avoid radicalizing Muslims by not attributing the attack to his Islamic beliefs.

How they must chuckle as they urge law enforcement to suppress the truth about Islamic violence in order to avoid marginalizing and further radicalizing Muslims... even as they themselves promote radicalism, host pro-terrorist speakers and preach the Koran's message of Jihad, death to the unbeliever and a Sharia ruled Caliphate across the earth. How they must laugh as the very law enforcement agencies that are meant to uncover and prevent crimes, instead cover up for their crimes. And they go on taking their invites to the White House, running their Islamic academies and putting out their ideology, one strain for the general American public, and another for their own boys, and beneath it of it one great engine of death humming along as it helps turn out the next Nidal Hassan, the next Hassan Akbar, the next James Cromite, the next John Walker Lindh or Adam Gadahn ... the next eager American practitioner of Mohammed's way of death.

All the warning signs were there. Not simply for Nidal Malik Hassan, reading and hearing the same call to death over and over again for years, until he reached a decision that is considered praiseworthy within the context of the Koran... but for Islam in general.

All the warning signs are there. They are in the Koran and in books sold in every Muslim bookstore in America and Europe. They are on tapes and on YouTube. They are in the bodies of their victims and the Muslim killers. They are there in the long flowing black Abayas and beards that mark radicalized Muslims, but they are just as there behind the false smiles of Western born and educated killers like Nidal Malik Hassan who drive around with bumper stickers reading, "Allah is Love", only for his targets to realize too late that in Islam, love is indivisible from death, and that the worship of Allah is most praiseworthy when it is carried out through Jihad, the murder of infidels.

The bloody common denominator of all these things is Islam. And while our brave and brilliant politicians insist that we are not at war with Islam, shunning and even imprisoning those who say otherwise, Islam is at war with us and has been since its inception nearly a millennium and a half ago. And will continue to be until we either once again force it back and break its momentum, or until it destroys us all.

Like a hive of angry bees, the Jihadists circle us waiting for a chance to sting. And like bees, they die or become useless once they have stung us. Nidal Hassan is not likely to sting anyone again. His work is done, but there are countless other buzzing angry killers, emerging from the hive and quietly waiting their turn. The warning signs are all there, but political correctness has determined that the whole thing is a misunderstanding caused by us, and our political leaders have decided that the best way to avoid being stung is to insist that there are no bees there, or if there are only a handful of particularly radicalized bees. Occasionally we venture forth to swat a few bees, but each time we ignore the hive. And it is out of the hive, that death comes. The bees are nothing in and of themselves, the hive is everything.

Looking back from some future vantage point, or even from the present, all the warning signs were there. Our enemies are not subtle, only their propaganda is and even that relies in the main part on our willingness to fool ourselves, on our cultural, political and media institutions to blare forth lies that on the face of them should be naturally met with laughter or a punch in the face. They kill us, they run away and cry that they are the victims-- and it is our own press and politicians who take up the cry, who go to minister to the murderers and not the murdered, to the butchers and not the butchered, to our enemies and not to our brothers and sisters.

After every serial killer does his bloody deeds and they are finally uncovered, the neighbors gather around and repeat the same mantras, "He seemed so ordinary", "He was nice but kept to himself" and that all time favorite of people dwelling in neatly painted houses next to corpse pits, "How could we know?" All these mantras are of course a lie. They are excuses made by people who knew on some level, who noticed things that made them uncomfortable before they put those thoughts away, locked them up and decided their day would be better without thinking too much about such things, or going out on a limb that might endanger them, or worst of all... and this is the great terror of modern civilized man, make them appear crazy themselves.

The warning signs were there. The warning signs are still there. Not just for Nidal Hassan, but for Islam itself. We have seen the bodies and we have buried some of them ourselves, family, friends and fellow countrymen. We have heard the screams. We know what has been. It does not take a prophet to know what is to come.

All the warning signs are there. The question is what are we going to do about them?

They Kill Us and We're the Ones to Blame

2009-11-07T21:27:00.000-05:00

Hardly had the final shots been fired at Fort Hood and hospitals were filling up with the wounded that the media rushed to assign blame for the massacre, not of course to Nidal Malik Hassan, who had opened fire aiming to kill as many soldiers as possible, but on the US Army and on his fellow soldiers.

Completely ignoring his Islamic ideology and Palestinian Arab background, the media speculated that he might have been suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, even though he had never served in a combat zone, that he was angry over being deployed to Iraq, even though he had a history of pro-terrorist postings predating that, and finally that he had been bullied by other soldiers for being a Muslim, a claim that has since emerged as completely baseless. All of these however were ways of shifting the blame from Nidal Hassan and his Islamist ideology, and onto his victims, the men and women he had tried to kill, and the United States Army itself. Once again the media apparatchiks had decided that blame for a Muslim killing spree rested not with the perpetrator, but with his targets.

If Muslims follow a predictable pattern in their homicidal attacks, their Western Dhimmi apologists follow an equally predictable pattern, always willing to shift the blame onto anything and anyone, but the killers themselves and their hatefilled ideology. It's never Islam. Never the Koran. Instead it's always the general unfairness of our foreign policy, our flagwaving and our obstinate refusal to let Muslims have whatever part of the world they have their sights on today.

Once again, they kill us and yet somehow we're the ones to blame. Because we didn't love and nurture poor Nidal Malik Hassan enough. We didn't install enough foot baths, respect his religion hard enough and worst of all we presumed to make war on his brothers who had murdered thousands of us on September 11. That of course is our original sin, fighting back.

As we speak the media talking heads are still furrowing their great weary brows, scratching behind their ears and wondering, what could the motive possibly be. The FBI, which has no doubt gone through more sensitivity and tolerance sessions than Nidal Hassan spent with his ass in the air at his local mosque, is of course also searching hard for a motive.

Currently some of the talking heads are peddling PTSD by Proxy, to avoid the minor problem that Hassan had never actually served in combat. Should this brand of lunacy take hold, it would allow anyone and everyone who has been near people who might have conceivably had PTSD to claim PTSD by Proxy as if it were a cold virus passing through the air. Somehow this is made to seem more logical than that Nidal Hassan tried to kill a number of soldiers because he believed that his religion commanded him to do this. An event that had already occurred before and for which we have the evidence of his own words praising suicide bombers as heroes.

Thomas Kenniff, a former JAG who tried to bring some logic to the subject in his appearance on Larry King, was denounced as a racist for pouring cold water on the attempts to sell PTSD by Proxy as the motive, instead pointing to Hassan's radical beliefs. For this Olbermann denounced him as the Worst Person in the World. Thomas Kenniff's crime was to interfere in the narrative that Larry King and just about everyone was trying to sell, of Nidal Hassan as another example of a worn out and overstressed US Army in which all the soldiers are on the breaking point.

By ignoring the fact that 66 percent of the deliberate attacks within the US military by other soldiers, have involved Muslims-- the media is engaging in blatant deceptiveness. Unless Muslims somehow suffer from a form of PTSD more severe than non-Muslim soldiers, or unless Muslims comprise 66 percent of the US military-- both false statements, it is obvious that the question of Islamic beliefs should be investigated as central to these acts of violence.

But PTSD is still the narrative the media insists on going with, and will insist on going with, even if Nidal Hassan comes on TV tomorrow and proclaims that he did it all for Allah. That is because PTSD fits the liberal narrative of blaming the media and exonerating Hassan specifically and Islam in general, while indicting the US and the military. It turns Hassan into a victim, and his victims into either co-victims or perpetrators.

As this charade continues, more claims of Hassan's supposed harassment for being Muslim will be employed to create some equivalent of Colin Ferguson's "Black Rage" defense. The military will in turn work harder to bend over for Muslims and look the other way at radicalism and extremism, while cracking down on any criticism of Muslim misbehavior in the ranks, exactly the sort of behavior that will help insure another Fort Hood massacre.

Meanwhile the dominant narrative will be Nidal Hassan's suffering, his pain and his agony. Not that of his victims. All lies that will reveal that the media knows quite well why he did it. Had Nidan Hassan's name actually been Michael Smith, and had he actually been suffering from PTSD, the media would not be spending all this time defending him and exploring his pain. He did not simply commit his crimes because he is a Muslim, the media is defending him because he is a Muslim and in particular a terrorist.

These sorts of apologetics for terror have a long and shameful history for western liberals. When Hitler sent his troops goosestepping along, it wasn't his fault, but that of British and French Imperialism for oppressing the German people. Only when German troops attacked the homeland of socialism, the USSR, did they finally wake up long enough to get in front of the troops, until the war was over, and then American soldiers once again became the brutal occupiers who were preventing Western Europe from being "liberated" by the glorious Red Army.

Stalin too was never to blame for anything, it was all the Western spies and capitalist agents who were constantly trying to subvert the Great Socialist experiment who were at fault. And how could one blame Stalin for killing millions of them, when they kept popping up everywhere, doing such subversive things as eating, breathing and smiling at the wrong time. The same great heroes of Western Liberalism who put pen to bloody ink in advertisements supporting the Moscow Trials, would defend every Soviet atrocity and wail that American nuclear missiles were endangering the world. Not Soviet nuclear weapons of course. Never. Those were only a defensive response to Western imperialist aggression.

When the armies of four Arab nations (3 out of 4 of them run by Arab Socialist regimes, two of those being Baath Party dictatorships) prepared to invade Israel and "drive the Jews into the sea", the same liberals who would spend the next forty years after that war wailing about the plight of the Jordanians and Egyptians who had colonized Israeli territory and now found themselves inside Israel, aka the Palestinians, remained absolutely silent. The prospective genocide of millions of Jews only two decades after the Holocaust did not trouble them in the least. The Israelis were the ones to blame for presuming to build a country that the USSR and its Arab Socialist allies wanted to destroy.

Nazism and Communism are down for the count, and Arab Socialism is being rapidly replaced by Islamism. And the Islamists are the new murderers who are somehow always the victims. Always.

When a car bomb goes off in Kabul, the media quickly rushes to brush off their talking points about negotiating with the Taliban. When Muslim pirates take hostages, we're told that it's only because the poor dears are hungry and fighting against pollution, making them the world's first Islamic Pirate Environmentalists. When four airplanes are hijacked and aimed at national landmarks, naturally it's because of Muslim outrage over the long list of things they're currently outraged about. When rockets are fired at Israeli villages, clearly it's Israel for not making as many concessions to terrorists as everyone in the "world community" and various British labor unions thinks they should be making.

It is of course never the terrorists' fault. Heaven forbid. Ours is but to die and take the blame for the actions of our murderers.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - A Brief Shooting Roundup

2009-11-06T16:40:00.000-05:00

In lieu of a regular extensive Friday Afternoon Roundup, I'll just offer some quick links to people who are doing it better on the major story of the last two days. The Fort Hood attacks.

First up is Andrew Bostom who looks at the martyrdom of Nidal Malik Hassan

And the contemporary advocacy of such “martyrdom” operations by Islam’s most esteemed mainstream clerics is what ultimately gives legitimacy to the mass murderous actions of pious Muslims such as Nidal Malik Hassan. This is the unspoken, but irrefragable truth our craven “elites” in the military, government, and media must be forced to acknowledge, and confront.

Indeed, which is any war that fails to acknowledge the ideological basis for terrorism in those fatwas is as futile as fighting Communism while avoiding saying anything bad about Lenin.

Next Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch has a lot of important updates on Hassan.

Hassan, like many Muslims viewed the War on Terror as a War on Islam.

The initial spin about Hassan being harassed for being a Muslim has turned out to be so much hot air.

And there is a possibility that Hassan was reacting to Al Queda's latest marching orders

The gunman who killed 12 people today at Ft. Hood appears, based on current media reports, to be Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan who was listed as a participant in a Homeland Security Policy Institute's presidential transition task force last year.

The task force was not officially affiliated with the White House. It was a project of the Homeland Security Policy Institute, an independent thinktank housed at George Washington University, aimed at drafting policy recommendations for the incoming Obama administration.

According to the task force's May 2009 report [pdf], a "Nidal Hasan" from the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine was a task force event participant. Other participants included Senate and House staffers, Department of Homeland Security officials, Defense Department officials, and reporters for Politico, the Washington Post, and the London Times....

In the 11th edition of the online magazine Sada al-Malahim (The Echo of Battle), which was released to jihadist Web sites last week, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Nasir al-Wahayshi wrote an article that called for jihadists to conduct simple attacks against a variety of targets. The targets included "any tyrant, intelligence den, prince" or "minister" (referring to the governments in the Muslim world like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen), and "any crusaders whenever you find one of them, like at the airports of the crusader Western countries that participate in the wars against Islam, or their living compounds, trains etc.," (an obvious reference to the United States and Europe and Westerners living in Muslim countries)....

The Muslims Against Sharia blog cites my own look at Faizal Khan that I posted yesterday. As does Andrew Bostom.

Atlas Shrugs cites Hassan's participation in a Homeland Security Panel

The gunman who killed 12 people today at Ft. Hood appears, based on current media reports, to be Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan who was listed as a participant in a Homeland Security Policy Institute's presidential transition task force last year.

The task force was not officially affiliated with the White House. It was a project of the Homeland Security Policy Institute, an independent thinktank housed at George Washington University, aimed at drafting policy recommendations for the incoming Obama administration.

According to the task force's May 2009 report [pdf], a "Nidal Hasan" from the Uniformed Services University School of Medicine was a task force event participant. Other participants included Senate and House staffers, Department of Homeland Security officials, Defense Department officials, and reporters for Politico, the Washington Post, and the London Times....

Meanwhile back in Israel, Hassan's family's former Arab neighbors in Jerusalem are celebrating the attack

China Confidential sources in East Jerusalem say many residents of the predominantly Arab section are expressing strong support for the Muslim U.S. Army major who mowed down his fellow soldiers at the huge Fort Hood, Texas base and processing center for troops bound for Afghanistan and Iraq.

The word on the so-called Arab street is that Major Nidal Malik Hasan should be admired because he stood up for fellow Muslims overseas, against U.S. "aggression," and that his anger, disappointment, and presumed sense of betrayal over U.S. President Barack Obama's failure to end the Afghan and Iraq conflicts is understandable, especially in light of Obama's own Muslim heritage.

In Hamas-ruled Gaza, sources say, the reaction is overwhelmingly in support of the shooter. He would clearly be given a hero's welcome there.

Maybe it's time we finally woke up. Time and past time.

Brief Update: Fort Hood Shooter's Former Imam had Terrorist Ties

2009-11-06T00:12:00.001-05:00

Hasan attended prayers regularly when he lived outside Washington, often in his Army uniform, said Faizul Khan, a former imam at a mosque Hasan attended in Silver Spring, Md. He said Hasan Malik was a lifelong Muslim.

"I got the impression that he was a committed soldier," Khan said. He spoke often with Hasan about Hasan's desire for a wife...

Nothing stood out about Hasan as radical or extremist, Khan said.

"We hardly ever got to discussing politics," Khan said. "Mostly we were discussing religious matters, nothing too controversial, nothing like an extremist."

Was Khan doing nothing more than talking to Hassan about his wife hunt?

Faizul Khan is not just some Imam. He is on the board of directors of ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA's links to terrorist are extensive and well known.

The Islamic Society of North America is a Wahhabi Islamist group co-created by Sami Al Arian, of the Palestinian Arab terrorist group, Islamic Jihad.

Islam scholar Stephen Schwartz describes ISNA as "one of the chief conduits through which the radical Saudi form of Islam passes into the United States."

According to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, ISNA "is a radical group hiding under a false veneer of moderation"; "convenes annual conferences where Islamist militants have been given a platform to incite violence and promote hatred" (for instance, al Qaeda supporter and PLO official Yusuf Al-Qaradhawi was invited to speak at an ISNA conference); has held fundraisers for terrorists (after Hamas leader Mousa Marzook was arrested and eventually deported in 1997, ISNA raised money for his defense); has condemned the U.S. government's post-9/11 seizure of Hamas' and Palestinian Islamic Jihad's financial assets; and publishes a bi-monthly magazine, Islamic Horizons, that "often champions militant Islamist doctrine."

Adds Emerson: "I think ISNA has been an umbrella, also a promoter of groups that have been involved in terrorism. I am not going to accuse the ISNA of being directly involved in terrorism. I will say ISNA has sponsored extremists, racists, people who call for Jihad against the United States."

Emerson further reports that "In September 2002, a full year after the 9/11 attacks, speakers at ISNA's annual conference still refused to acknowledge Bin Laden's role in the terrorist attacks."

That's who we're playing with here and Faizul Khan is not just a member, he's on the Board of Directors and held down a major Saudi funded mosque in Washington. Khan was also the Administrator and Assistant Director of Rabita, the Muslim World League.

The Muslim World League is one of the larger Saudi funded Islamist groups.

MWL promotes Wahhabism, the extremist form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia. In the 1980s, the League's Pakistan office was run by Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood and brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden. Khalifa was the co-founder of the Benevolence International Foundation and he helped to finance Operation Bojinka, a foiled 1995 plot that would have simultaneously detonated bombs aboard eleven U.S.-bound airliners, blowing them up in mid-flight over the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea.

In addition, two members of an al Qaeda sleeper cell based in Boston worked at MWL's Pakistan office. One worker, Nabil al-Marabh, number 27 on the FBI's list of wanted terrorists, was arrested by federal agents in Detroit shortly after 9/11; it was reported that he "intended to martyr himself in an attack against the United States." The other operative, Raed Hijazi, was apprehended and tried in Jordan on charges that he planned to blow up a hotel filled with Americans and Israelis on New Year's Eve in 2000.

In his book The Two Faces of Islam, Stephen Schwartz reports: "In 2000, the Muslim World League (a provider of funds to Osama bin Laden) hosted 100 prominent American Islamic personalities on hajj [a pilgrimmage to Mecca]. They were accompanied by a delegation of 60 Latin American 'academics and specialists.' All expenses for the latter were paid by Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to the United States."

After all this it's certainly possible that Faizul Khan and Hassan Malik did nothing but chat about Hassan's search for a wife, but considering the overview of the kind of extreme Wahhabi groups we're dealing with here, it is entirely possible that Imams like Khan helped shape Hassan Malik's radical Islamist worldview. Especially since it dates back to his time in Maryland, rather than being the product of army frustrations, as the media spin is attempting to portray it as.

Nidal Hassan had written online

Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that "IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE" and Allah (SWT) knows best.

One wonders who exactly those scholars were.

The Greatest Scam on Earth

2009-11-04T23:08:00.002-05:00

In 2000 Al Gore was a failed Presidential candidate with a paltry 2 million dollars to his name. Not a lot of money for a guy whose lavish mansion gobbles up almost a 150,000 dollars in electric utilities annually alone, and that of course is before property taxes and all the other costs of owning a home in Belle Meade, which has one of the region's highest costs of living. But besides growing a beard and lecturing college students on journalism, a hobby he had last practiced in the 70's, Al Gore didn't have much of a career plan.

But Gore didn't starve on the streets either, and eight years later, despite not having much in the way of a job, the former Vice President is worth over a hundred million dollars. Expanding your net worth by %2500 percent sounds like the Madoff investment plan, but the scam that Al Gore invested in is one that makes Madoff look like a piker... because Gore invested in The Greatest Scam on Earth.

The Greatest Scam on Earth naturally revolves around the earth itself, combining millennial apocalyptic visions with junk science to create global warming. In 1920 the American poet Robert Frost wrote, "Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice, From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire." Taking an incomplete cue from poem, the school of environmental apocalypse first tried to sell the idea of an ice age, before switching over to global warming.

In the 70's the talk was of a coming ice age.

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Naturally of course mankind was to blame for the problem

Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The University of Wisconsin's Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.

And of course the world was doomed.

University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: "I don't believe that the world's present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row."

Doomed I tell you. How will we ever survive 1972? And yet here we are in the year 2009, and while it is chilly outside, New York City is not enclosed by giant icebergs. Neither is any other part of the world that isn't normally enclosed by icebergs.

Today Time Magazine runs virtually the same stories, except all that stuff about the world freezing to death, has been replaced by stories about the world melting to death. A coming Ice Age was a plausible place to start the environmental apocalyptic panic. After all scientists claimed that humanity had already endured an ice age, and there was something plausible about claiming that another one was on the way. Nuclear winter had become a potent boogeyman of the Cold War, convincing most Americans that a nuclear exchange would doom the planet.

But as Frost had pointed out all the way back in 1920, the idea of the world perishing in flames had a more poetic appeal. From medieval paintings of hell as a place scorched by flame, to the modern atomic terror... fire was a more compelling villain. And by redirecting the locus of environmental impact away from inhabited areas to the North Pole and other arctic regions that most people did not have any experience with, it became possible to claim just about anything at all was going on there. Anything at all.

Today, as the case of Al Gore demonstrates, there is a great deal of money to be made from preaching from environmental apocalypse. Green Business is big business and today you can find green labels on everything from cars to paper towels. Celebrities have embraced green, the way they once embraced African babies, and have introduced timely proposals for the general public, including drinking rat's milk and breathing less.

The difference between the madman who stands on a street corner with a placard reading, "ThE WORLD IS GONG TO END!" and Al Gore is the difference between madness and big business. If Al Gore really believed in his own dogma, he wouldn't be spending more on electricity a year than the average family's income. If celebrities really believed their own sound bites, they wouldn't be flying private jets around the world. But the Greatest Scam on Earth is not about living an environmentally virtuous life, but about selling environmental virtue to others. At a price.

Cap and Trade is the final solution for American manufacturing and industry, destroying what's left and leaving the rest as government subsidized shells. Wall Street will profit, investors will flock to buy absolutely worthless bonds whose only purpose is to add overhead to American businesses, and everything else will head on a ship to China, which has been smart enough to cash in on global warming alarmism, without actually giving up any of its heavy industry.

But that really doesn't matter, because millennial panics never take into account the long term consequences. They are about the irrational panic of a minority and those orchestrating the panic who expect to profit from it. The same Al Gore who owned a zinc mine and spoke lovingly of Tobacco farming turned himself into an environmentalist prophet thanks to some ghost written books and a documentary created by PowerPoint. In the process he earned himself a Nobel Peace Prize, and more importantly a hundred million dollars, which is only the beginning if the Obama Administration pushes through the rest of the rent seeking proposals that will transform the American economy into a sharecropping venture overseen by a handful of American politicians and foreign investors.

The Greatest Scam on Earth is set to destroy America's economy. Its propaganda mills are restlessly chattering away in magazines and movies, schools and commercials offering up the same old vision of the crying Indian, the visage of the world we sinfully polluted. The hypocrisy of such lectures being delivered by magazines printed on dead trees, by celebrities who live opulently thanks to goods being transported for them around the world, by politicians who stand to benefit personally from the crisis they are manufacturing of course falls on deaf ears. The scam grinds on, and the one thing all that green is sure to accomplish, is to put us all in the red.

Obama Gets Run Over by the Change Bus

2009-11-04T00:15:00.000-05:00

If the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia were to be seen as a way of taking the pulse of Obama's popularity, the White House spin machine has to be just about ready for a trip to the ER. Obama's people were already braced for a loss in Virginia, writing off Deeds for being insufficiently willing to turn over his campaign and office to Obama's people to do with as they please. New Jersey's Corzine however had followed every ugly step in the White House playbook, from backing their radical agenda, running petty personal attacks against the opposition and relying on ACORN's gangbangers to bring out the vote.

But tonight Deeds and Corzine are out, and Obama's political star has taken a beating. Obama alone isn't to blame of course. Deeds was hardly a political superstar and Corzine was an arrogant and abusive politician whose favorite hobby was raising taxes on an already overtaxed state. Both men though would have had a much easier time with Bush in office and the perception that Republicans were asleep at the economic wheel. That is why Democrats have kept trying to run for office as the minority party pushing for change. The problem is that tonight's election was indeed about change, and change meant giving the Democrats the boot.

In the twilight of 2009, most Americans still have the same concerns they did a year ago. The concerns about the economy haven't changed, neither has their desire for a set of policies that works. Only the party in power has changed. The same independent voters that helped make a difference in the 2008 election, once again showed up... still wanting change. And change this time around means bad news for the Democrats, who have become the bosses.

The 2009 Democratic party playbook hinged on three elements, Obama's charisma, painting the Republican party as radicals, and relying on ACORN style Get Out the Vote operations. And now all three have failed. The value of the Obama charisma dollar has been dropping with each unnecessary TV appearance. The average American doesn't hate Obama yet, but as with most celebrities who have stopped doing interesting things, is bored by him. Painting the Republicans as radical is one of those tactics in which Democrats believe that painting their beliefs across a giant canvas is a can't miss strategy.

While Democratic media propaganda has obsessively pushed the line for a whole year that the Republicans are a radical party, the public hasn't much paid attention or cared. Louder opposition has actually paid off for the Republicans with independent voters looking for a vocal opposition to a crummy state of affairs. Denouncing your enemies as extremists may play well among a party whose ideological base is a toned down form of radical socialism, but it doesn't connect beyond that base and the chattering classes on the coasts. Instead, as the media found out during the Town Hall protests, it actually makes them more appealing.

Finally ACORN was seriously wounded, but it certainly had the same organizational abilities it had beforehand. ACORN was aggressively pushing into New Jersey to prove that it could do in a statewide election, what it had accomplished in local Democratic primaries in New York. Instead all it generated was complaints about gangbangers going door to door. No doubt there's a hefty amount of voter fraud in New York and New Jersey with ACORN's name on it in both states, but it wasn't enough to tip the scales. Because you can't steal every election. You can only help steal an election that's already close and trending your way. But stealing an election against the current is a much tougher challenge worthy of a Huey Long. ACORN and Obama don't quite have that kind of power yet. At least they didn't tonight.

The Democratic playbook for 2009 is in tatters. And best of all those who wrote it will not understand how or why. After a year of furious efforts targeting the Republican party, the only damage dealt to the GOP has been self-inflicted, while every attack has actually made the Republicans more popular. Using Obama as a magic totem who can do anything just wore out his charisma batteries that much faster. And relying on dirty tricks can only help so much when the voters are already turning on you.

The real story is told by the independent voters shifting away from Obama. Change to independent voters meant a more functional set of policies and an economic bounce. If Bush was to blame for the economy going south, as the Democrats had insisted in 2008, surely the Democrats could fix it. And if they couldn't. More change.

Americans treat most politicians like diapers, changing them when things turn bad. An election is often a way for an electorate that is ignored between elections to send a message to those in power to either get things right or get out. Obama and the Democrats treated 2008 as a historic victory and a mandate, when it was a message that the public was unhappy with the economy. They took their win as an open invite to loot the treasury into the trillions, to pass gigantic unpopular bailouts and nationalizations. And they were wrong. Deeply wrong.

Obama's constant trips abroad made him seem like a mayfly, flitting about here and there, useless but bright and colorful. In better economic times, that might have been enough, but unless the media can somehow spin unemployment into gold, to allow Barry Hussein to hang up a Mission Accomplished banner on the economy, the polls will not go the poppinjay's way in 2012. Just as they didn't go his way tonight.

Obama's charisma was not able to salvage Corzine. It cannot sell his health care agenda to the public. It cannot hang on to the independent voters. The only real question now is what the Democrats will do after tonight. The moderates will pull back further, but Obama and his radical allies are likely to keep going in the same direction they have before. Which should be welcome news for everyone who enjoys a good lemming stampede.

The independent voter is abandoning Obama and his newly reradicalized party, and the moderate Democrat will soon follow. Tonight's election also will serve to make Democratic congressmen from more conservative districts cautious about following Obama's agenda. More cautious than they already have been. And when combined with Obama and Pelosi's determination to keep working on ObamaCare, the result is likely to be a boondoggle that will drag on indefinitely, which in turn will only feed the perception of a do-nothing congress and a failed administration.

Change is not an open ended mandate or a blank check. Change is a warning to either perform or meet the same fate as the last incumbent. And while Obama was clutching the keys to the kingdom in his dirty little hands, flying endlessly around the world, taking Air Force One on dates and primping and posing for magazine covers; ordinary Americans were losing jobs, families were cutting back, credit card bills piled up, vacations vanished and people came to work every day not knowing if it would be their last. Tonight was a major warning sign to Obama that these Two Americas cannot co-exist forever. And sooner or later Americans will want their White House back from its current lazy and debauched tenants.

Mayor Mike and the Root of All Evil

2009-11-02T23:07:00.000-05:00

Mike Bloomberg's mayoral races have become a quadrennial farce in which an outmatched Democratic party hack, whose only virtue is having done enough favors for those above and below is pounded to pieces by a billionaire with virtually the same political views, but a virtually unlimited amount of money and a great deal of cunning and determination. New Yorkers who do not like Bloomberg and have never liked him, are likely to go out once again to vote him in, mainly because the alternative would be worse. And the sad thing is they are right.

But what is interesting about this specific race in the great quadrennial farce that underlies so much of modern urban democracy, is just how dirty a race in which the main candidate neither needs anyone's money, nor expects to gain any money from his victory, really is. The proponents of campaign finance reform told us that by limiting campaign donations, a cleaner and uncorrupted breed of candidate would emerge. In fact just the opposite has happened, campaign finance reform instead made candidates beholden not so much to individual donors, but to organizations and 527's, who took on the outsourced campaign work on their behalf. But Bloomberg does not need any of those 527's, instead he's spending up to 200 million dollars of his own money on the campaign. But does that make Bloomberg's campaign any cleaner?

Money as the root of all political corruption is often cited in terms of campaign donations, but eliminating campaign donations does not eliminate corruption. Not even eliminating the politician's own financial profit motive does, as Bloomberg has repeatedly demonstrated for us. Because while Bloomberg may not need to take anyone's money and does not expect to profit financially from winning, the financial corruption is still very much present in the real root of all evil, the exchange of taxpayer money for political influence.

While Bloomberg uses his own money to buy campaign ads just about everywhere, he uses city money to dole out grants and programs in a strategic manner to groups likely to support him, as well as to specific organizations. One of the worst examples of that saw Bloomberg providing hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Newmanites, best exemplified by the deranged bigot Lenora Fulani, who had hijacked the Independence Party in exchange for their support. And despite a long history of hatefilled statements, Fulani and Bloomberg are still campaigning together. But Fulani is only the ugly tip of a mostly hidden iceberg.

Attacking campaign donations only targets the most visible leg of a much bigger horse. Money is only the crudest form of support that politicians solicit. The subtler forms involve endorsements from organizations and big names willing to come out and campaign, groups who will run phone banks, hand out leaflets and throw the weight of their support behind a candidate. And there is always a price to pay for that sort of support, usually at taxpayer expense.

While campaign contributions are itemized on the bottom line, the billions of dollars of taxpayer money spent buying political support can never be enumerated. There are only glimpses here and there when they reek of obvious corruption, a politician's spouse suddenly getting city work thrown to her small business, a union bigwig appointed to a new position created just for him or an obscure community center no one ever heard of before suddenly receiving an open ended multimillion dollar grant. But these are only a handful of pebbles in an ocean of corruption and waste.

Because the real root of all evil is not in the campaign donations that politicians solicit or the money they hope to gain from the right politician connections. Those are all major parts of politician corruption, but even when they are eliminated, the corruption does not go away. The Bloomberg effect demonstrates that the real source of the corruption is not a profit motive for the candidate, but the profit motives of his supporters.

The ugly truth is that city, state and federal treasuries are coinage minted to buy political support and political favors. They can be used to build up some organizations and destroy others, to elevate the careers of some politicians and give back to core constituencies. This money feeds the chain of graft and kickbacks, the backroom deals and political machines that define local and national politics. The same system that all too often become synonymous with democracy in America ever since 1800 when a clever sociopath named Aaron Burr rigged a city corporation meant to provide water to New York into a scheme to create a bank and an entire voting base for Jefferson, in the process helping to turn Tammany Hall into the political monster it would become.

And at the root of all that evil is the money. Not campaign money, but the great treasure chest of taxes and revenues that the political vultures base their careers on fighting their way to and then doling out piece by piece to their supporters. And the more political support they need to buy, the more the taxes have to go up to pay for it. The more corruption tears at that treasure chest, the more the revenues have to be expanded. And when businesses flee or collapse, and inflation rises... the only solution as ever is more taxes.

Bloomberg is far from alone in this practice. Every major and minor city, town and village runs on some variation of the same scheme. As does the Federal government. Bloomberg's lack of a profit motive only exposes the system itself for what it is, a political practice that hinges on taking public money to pay for political support.

Since it virtually impossible to get elected without the support of groups and people who will want political favors at taxpayer expense in return, and once elected to any legislative or executive position virtually impossible to get anything passed or done without in turn signing on to budgets and bills that use taxpayer money as payback for political favors-- the same system has continued growing out of control. Reformers may try to step in and cut back spending a little, but the head of the spending hydra always grows back, because the purpose of American politics has come down to getting your hands on some of that money, and the definition of political power has come down to the ability to distribute that money.

Politicians run against each other promising to bring back a larger share of that money home to their district. Naturally a sizable portion of the money brought "home" will go to those who supported that politician, in one way or another. It's how the game is played. Campaign finance can no more fight this problem, than it can make your teeth shine and your shoes fit, because the problem is not so much in the private money that the politician gets, but the public money he gives away. If politicians did not have public money to give away, campaign finance would be a minor problem, because there would be a limited incentive to buy their favor in the first place.

Bloomberg may spend 200 million of his own money running for office, but he has probably spent at least 10 times that amount in public money on buying political support. But to buy political support, it has to be worth something in the first place. The hodgepodge of organizations who deliver the vote only have power thanks to the money and services they can distribute by way of government grants. ACORN is a typical example. If those organizations could not exploit government money, then their own profit motive would not exist and they would not have any votes to deliver.

It's not money that is at the root of political evil, but the power of politicians to expropriate and redistribute increasingly unlimited amounts of it from the people, for their own political ends. At the heart of all that corruption is the ability of local and national governments to amass vast sums of money through both taxation and deficit spending that are not strictly necessary for the function of government. That is the root of all evil, and until it is dug out, its poisonous sap will flow into every branch of politics and human life.

Welcome Back Ahmed

2009-11-01T22:52:00.000-05:00

After 8 years of watching bridges, looking to the harbors and the skies, of scanning packages and throwing out nail clippers-- a new administration has enthusiastically targeted a new enemy, other Americans. While the ceremonial obeisances are made on the 9/11 anniversary, and the troops stay on in Afghanistan and Iraq as political counters for the 2012 election, the Obama administration has rediscovered the great and terrible enemy of the Clinton Administration-- other Americans.

Reassuring the public that no more will innocent Taliban and frightened Muslim detainees whose only crime was being Osama bin Laden's bodyguard, or going to Pakistan to train and kill infidel women and children, be detained off Cuba and forced to eat three square meals a day and wear orange jumpsuits. This is a New America concerned not with foreign enemies, but with domestic critics of Barry Hussein... all of whom have now been revealed to be Unpatriotic and Unamerican extremists by the latest report in Pravda's Newsweek bureau.

Dissent was of course the highest form of patriotism up until 2009, when it meant impeding America's attempts to defend itself from Muslim terrorism. Now of course dissent is itself the worst form of terrorism since it inhibits Obama's ability to get us trillions of dollars into debt to Communist China... which like all socialist deficit spending is naturally the highest form of patriotism. And if you're confused by any of that, you obviously haven't been reading enough Newsweek or watching MSNBC's Pravda bureau.

The new officially approved White House rendering of a wanted terrorist looks a lot less like Ahmed the Dead Terrorist and a lot more like Glenn Beck. Because people who say things that Obama doesn't like are the new terrorists. But what of the old terrorists? The United States is already negotiating with Iran and trying to convince the Taliban to take our money in exchange for trying to kill us less. Hamas will be part of a unity government that will allow Fatah to accept Israeli territorial concessions, that Hamas itself will disavow when it destroys Fatah at the conclusion of the negotiations. In other words, Welcome Back Ahmed is the new model of the day.

Welcome Back Ahmed has dominated Europe literally for some time now, where country after country is being swamped by charming jolly fellows from Pakistan, Jordan and all parts of the Dar Al Islam, who only want to earn a living, raise their families and chop off the heads of anyone resistant to the idea of imposing Sharia law on one and all.

The Welcome Back Ahmed problem hasn't bypassed the Western Hemisphere or Australia either. America seems bent on importing Somali pirates as cab drivers, who naturally develop objections to transporting people who drink liquor or the blind and their seeing eye dogs. Canada is seeing a growing spike in honor killings. Meanwhile the Lebanese are bringing their unique culture, foods and willingness to rape non-Muslim women to Australia. And only a bigot could even think to object, even when the Grand Mufti of Australia proclaims that non-Muslim women are uncovered meat.

Israel has had a Welcome Back Ahmed problem for over 50 years, ever since a Labor government decided to send troops to bring back Arab refugees who were fleeing the country in preparation for their brethren driving the Jews into the sea. Labor in Israel has depended on the Arab vote, just as Labor in England depends on the Muslim vote. And while Israel's Arab parties still rattling the old Communist chains might be a minor sidenote, the number of Arab voters paid off to vote for mainstream left wing parties such as Labor and Kadima are another matter altogether.

Like Europe's socialist leaders, Israel's socialist leaders assumed that the Arabs would be happy enough collecting government benefits, voting to the left and not actually interfering in domestic politics. Naturally they were quite wrong, and even more naturally, the left has lost any ability to arrest the process. And so as parts of England become uninhabitable by anyone without beard or Burka, Israeli Arabs are running their own terrorist groups, staging riots and just stealing anything not nailed down. And as it turned out, attempting to resolve the Arab problem on the other side of the Green Line through concessions and appeasement, actually destabilized everything inside the Green Line as well.

Of course no showing of Welcome Back Ahmed would be complete without a parallel showing of Get Out John or Steve or Reuven or Pierre. Because if you're going to keep shoving Ahmed down the throat of a domestic populace that does not particularly enjoy being terrorized by psychopaths in black, you've got to create a bigger threat than foreign extremists. The bigger threat of course is domestic extremists. Domestic extremists being anyone not on board with your policy of destroying the country.

Shifting the problem from one of foreign terrorists, to domestic nutters who refuse to be tolerant of foreign terrorists is a convenient public relations coup that turns the terrorists into poor persecuted lambs and sics the police on anyone who objects. But throwing open the doors to Ahmed carries a growing cost that given enough time eventually topples the host nation itself. While the left may view the Ahmeds as the enemies of their domestic conservative enemies... that denial can only run for so long until the bombs and the throat slittings obliterate it away.

Brought in for short term political gain and to bear the burden of a socialist state, Ahmed will not long sit idly by in the ghettos he creates himself, chew his narcotic leaves, smoke bitter cigarettes and ignore what is going on outside. And even if he does, his children who will grow half in and half out of the system, educated just enough to pass without belonging, looking from the outside in, listening to hip hop and the brayings of radical Imams, covering their hair and wearing low rider jeans, going to clubs and going to mosque-- make for a culturally explosive combination.

Given a few centuries, the Overlords of Brussels might manage to secularize Ahmed half as well as they secularized John, Pierre and Hans-- but they don't have a few centuries. They don't even have half a century left. The combination of greed, arrogance and racism has brought them to a place that has them slitting their own throats and applauding the act, a difficult trick but one they manage to improve on every day. And it is not only their throats that they slit, but that of their countrymen.

Across what remains of the civilized world, that shining urban decay of universities, think tanks, mass transit systems, courts, newspapers and research labs... the clock ticks down, an iron hand sweeping down to pass away the daylight and bring down the night. Welcome Home Ahmed, his hour come at last.

Where Have All Our War Heroes Gone?

2009-10-31T20:45:00.002-04:00

Today Barack Hussein Obama is a million times more famous than Jeremy Glick, Todd Beamer or any of the other Flight 93 passengers who rushed the cockpit and prevented the terrorists from using their plane as guide missile. He is more famous than any of the firefighters, NYPD and PAPD police officers, as well as civilians who tried to save lives during the attacks of 9/11. He is of course vastly more famous than any of the soldiers who have died over the last eight years fighting terrorism.

In Israel, the preparations are underway for the annual Rabin commemorations. The former Prime Minister is not being remembered for his shelling of a ship full of Jewish refugees and arms being brought in by Nationalist Zionists. He is not being remembered for his Six Day War heroism, which consisted him of having a nervous breakdown and then having a helmet plopped on his head for that famous Jerusalem photo, incidentally a photo that conservative general, Rehavam Ze'evi, who would later be murdered by the same terrorists that Rabin helped bring into Israel, is routinely cropped out of. No, Rabin is remembered for signing the disastrous Oslo accords, turning over a sizable portion of Israel to Arafat's terrorists, and creating a disaster that has cost the lives of a great number of Israelis in the process. Naturally Rabin is remembered as a hero, and is vastly more famous than of the soldiers and civilians murdered because of his policies.

And that in sum total is the problem with the world today. Our cultural heroes are not the people who fight evil or save lives, but who pimp appeasement in the name of peace. Every insipid quote from them about non-violence is repeated and savored, treated as a great insight into how we should all live. It doesn't matter whether their actual lives bore any resemblance to their fictional lives.

In real life Gandhi was a sadistic hypocrite who flirted with Nazi and Japanese occupations, viciously abused his wife and children, endorsed Apartheid so long as it excluded his fellow Indians and casually flipped from moralizing about extremes of non-violence, to endorsing even the most brutal butchery if it accomplished his political ends. That of course is not the Gandhi we know. The Gandhi we know is a saint of peace, an apostle of appeasement whose virtues are used as a model for urging us to never respond with force to the people who want to kill us.

Let us go back to America for a moment. Which American leader has an entire holiday dedicated in his name? Martin Luther King, who delivered the following speech;

"Perhaps the more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the north" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts... And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. "

Had the speech been penned in the halls of the Kremlin, it could hardly have been written any differently. And yet Martin Luther King has his own holiday, while the numberless American soldiers of every race and creed who died in Vietnam, remain anonymous except for a list of names on a wall.

And so it goes as we reward those who speak about peace and counsel appeasement. We speak about them fighting for peace, when in truth those who fight for peace are those who pick up a rifle and stand in defense of their country against those who would destroy, enslave and oppress. They exploit freedom to urge a surrender to those who would take away that very freedom they abuse.

The West has embraced appeasement as its cultural model, and it is a process that has been underway for some time. American 19th century liberals who had become very enthusiastic about war before the Civil War, embraced anti-war activism denouncing every conflict America entered into. In Europe the senselessness of WW1 turned it into a convenient model for reducing every war as another conflict between capitalists and imperialists, an attitude that nearly turned over most of Europe to Hitler, all but for England bringing in Churchill at the last minute to do the dirty work of war, and then giving him the boot once he was done, to make way for the work of building the socialist utopia.

In Israel Rabin's assassination helped create a convenient icon that elevates the death of one single man, over the deaths of all caused by his policies. It is as if Chamberlain had been shot to death, and Labor had gone on treating his death as a vindication of his policies even with German troops running wild across the countryside. That is literally the situation in Israel, as everyone from politicians to schoolchildren on down will be lectured sonorously on the great virtues of peace as embodied by a man who destroyed Israel's security and created its greatest crisis... in exchange for a Nobel Peace Prize.

This flavor of leftist lunacy epitomizes just how appeasement has become embodied as the modern political virtue of virtues... despite endless examples to the contrary. The great modern heroes imposed on us are the men who chose to give up, to wave the white flag in the name of peace or whatever collection of trite virtues about love, togetherness and amity that their speechwriters could cobble together on short notice.

But while a decadent culture may reward pacifists and appeasers with golden thrones and laurels, at least after death, the real world does not. In the real world, Obama's Afghan policy is faltering badly, because soft power is just a fancy way of saying indecisive. Ahmadinejad and Chavez are playing the Great Leader like a cheap deck of cards and the world is laughing at us. In the real world, agreements with the VC meant the submergence of Vietnam beneath the boot of a Communist tyranny. In the real world, shaking hands with Hitler and Stalin meant agreeing to the mass murder of millions and the tyranny of hundreds of millions. In the real world shaking hands with Arafat meant shaking hands with terrorism. And in the real world the much ballyhooed ideas, the stirring quotes that coat a sugary layer over the reality of embracing evil, are a suicide pill for civilization.

Let us stop venerating the appeasers and stop treating the Gandhis, Rabins, Kings, Chamberlains and Obamas as heroes. They are not heroes. Speaking about peace is not heroism and fighting for peace does not mean delivering a well written speech absolutely detached from the hard realities of the world. Heroism is not about expressing ideas that others will have to die for because there will be no one left to defend them. Heroism is not found by surrendering to evil, by leaving your nation naked to those who would murder, torture and enslave your citizens. Heroism is found in resisting them. Death is not proof of heroism. Many men have died and the worms have eaten their bones. Dying in defense of others is heroism and it is the common virtue that unites our true heroes, who rushed into burning buildings, manned tanks and machine gun posts in the face of overwhelming opposition, and fought back even when appeasement and the sweet song of peace seemed easier by far.

Ir is time to reject the obscene lie that claims that a well written speech about non-violence is nobler and more worthy of note and remembrance than that lonely soldier in the fog waiting for the enemy to come.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Enjoy Sharia Law on Broadway

2009-10-30T16:16:00.001-04:00

The Obama Administration is finally ready to begin the Big Push. No, not the one to stop the Taliban... but to pass a gargantuan health care nationalization plan that the majority of the American people are opposed to and that no one besides China can actually pay for.

While Hillary Clinton is off doing "valuable work" by holding meetings with assorted Pakistanis, Joe Biden is trying not to pass out during interviews, Pelosi and Reid are trying to shove ObamaCare down the American throat like a bad case of strep. On the bright side, if ObamaCare covers as many people as Obama's Stimulus plan did, I imagine it will cover about two dozen people somewhere in Vermont.

Back in Americaland though, more health care bills just means another civil war among the Democrats. Naturally the first target was Senator Joe Lieberman who was supposed to have been made an example of for actually trying to be a moderate and resisting the party radicals. Lieberman instead survived and even thrived.

Naturally the fun is just getting started. Ads are already being run targeting Lieberman... by both sides, with the conservative 60 Plus coalition warning of cuts in medicare and the nutroots damning Lieberman as what else but a shill for the insurance companies.

Of course using that same logic, Obama was a shill for Wall Street... but the double standards just keep on coming. But it's a lot of work nowadays, because Democrats have to begin selling Americans on the idea that the economy has recovered and the recession is over... despite all those lost jobs and the fact that nothing at all has recovered outside of Wall Street, where taxpayer money was fueled into the same dark maw that caused the problems in the first place.

Then there's health care reform, which Democrats have figured will be hard to sell, unless you can convince the American people that the economy is now good and the US government is rolling in extra dough. And if they can't do that by the 2010 elections, the veto proof majority is likely to be gone, and the Dems will be left with the kind of congress the GOP had post 2006, just enough power to take the blame, not enough to accomplish anything.

With Obama's numbers dropping, there's a stench of desperation coming off the Dems. A bad foul stench.

And MSNBC, the default network of the far left is running into trouble too, particularly with its newest, most hyped and most radical member. Rachel Maddow.

Most cable news ratings are going to show declines from their election year heyday last fall, but for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show (which debuted in September, 2008) those year over year declines have made October, 2009 its lowest rated month ever in both average viewers and the cable news targeted adults 25-54 demo, down 54% and 65% respectively from October, 2008.

Which suggests that MSNBC may be going the way of Air America, at least in the case of Maddow, an Air America alum, who has served as a forum for the most radical of the nutroots. While MSNBC is crowing that it beat CNN, this is more of a reflection of how badly off CNN is, than any kind of win for MSNBC.

It's not hard to see why Obama is running scared. Cable News is going the way of Talk Radio. And its biggest success, Glen Beck, comes out of the radio market. But it's also not hard to see the rapid end of the CNN model, of network news in general, because what sells best is open propaganda, not between the lines bias. MSNBC's ratings are miserable, but they're still less miserable than CNN, whose only real hope for ratings is the burgeoning Anderson Cooper gay scandal.

The 2008 election probably marked the final break between the old model of news, and the new one, that emphasizes scandals and rants. As a guardian op ed points out, FOX has helped push CNN and MSNBC to openly embrace radicalism, dropping the facade of journalism.

This is an odd and patronising fear, though true at one level. Fox is certainly influencing CNN and MSNBC, but in a liberal, not conservative, direction. That is, to compete with Fox's ratings-rich combination of news and punditry, those networks have had to scramble to find leftwing counterparts to Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

This has been a boon for leftwing gabbers. MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Ed Schultz and Rachel Maddow, all of whom dedicate themselves to railing against Republicans nightly, owe their careers in a way to Fox's success in carving out a large place for punditry in the cable media landscape. If anything, MSNBC is even more opinionated in a liberal direction than Fox is in a conservative one. Even the news anchors on MSNBC don't bother to conceal their anti-conservative hostilities anymore. David Shuster and Tamron Hall scoffed openly at Rush Limbaugh's NFL ownership bid.

CNN's Jack Cafferty, a grumpy liberal version of Bill O'Reilly, also owes his career to Fox, as does Rick Sanchez. CNN, which once prided itself on high-brow news presentation, feels it has to get into the opinion game too.

And when the bias is open, it becomes harder to claim that talk of liberal media is just a "right wing fantasy". Unintentionally FOX has helped make the liberal media come out of the closet.

On the one hand this kind of ugliness is now the default mode. On the other hand, there are no more rocks to hide behind. It was possible to argue that Dan Rather was just doing his job and not taking sides, but no one can even begin to make that same argument about Cafferty or Olbermann. And an open bare knuckle fight may be preferable to a thousand poisoned knives in the dark.

And that's what really bothers the Obama White House.

Meanwhile in worldchanging news, Hillary Clinton went to Pakistan where she had the solution to all of Pakistan's problems. Embrace Obama's Tax-Fu. (Via Gateway Pundit)

“The percentage of taxes on GDP (in Pakistan) is among the lowest in the world… We (the United States) tax everything that moves and doesn’t move, and that’s not what we see in Pakistan,” she said.

First of all you have to have a functioning country to be able to tax everything that moves. Second of all in a country where terrorists can make money off the black market, do you really want to push aggressive taxation that will expand the black market?

And then there was Hillary Clinton's hard core grasp of the major issues;

LAHORE: The leadership of Al Qaeda is in Pakistan, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Thursday.

“I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” she added. “Maybe that’s the case; maybe they’re not gettable. I don’t know... As far as we know, they are in Pakistan,” Clinton told senior Pakistani newspaper editors in Lahore,

Is anyone even briefing her anymore?

Clinton attempted a relaxed manner, with an aside about having a Pakistani roommate.

One wonders if she meant Huma Abedin whose parents were Pakistani.

At IsraPundit, Bill Levinson looks at how Green Jobs are Made in China

The New York Times (10/29, B6) reports, “A consortium of Chinese and American companies announced a joint venture on Thursday to build a 600-megawatt wind farm in West Texas, using turbines made in China. Construction of the $1.5 billion wind farm will be financed largely by Chinese banks, with the help of loan guarantees and cash grants from the United States government.”

Next I would like to take a little time out to address an article from Vdare, a site I do not link to, by Steve Sailer. You can find the text of the article here. I'm not in the habit of replying to everything that comes out of that burst sewage pipe, but since Michelle Malkin thought the article was buzzworthy, I've decided to address it.

It's easy enough to destroy it point by point, but since the article is a barely coherent hodgepodge of claims about Ashkenazi genes, Jewish media power, ancestor worship, Goldman Sachs, Israel... let's skip to the actual conclusion.

Steve Sailer concludes his "article" with the following claim:

Thus Jewish demonization of immigration reform patriots appears to have two motivations:

...

And this demonization is the single most important reason that America’s immigration disaster is still above criticism, long after it has become obvious that it is a disaster, and despite the fact that an overwhelming number of Americans are strongly opposed to it.

Really? One could almost imagine that the United States Chamber of Commerce (the organization so many bloggers are now rushing to defend) had not been pushing for more immigration and the legalization of illegal immigrants.

For the 111th Congress, the Chamber will:

* Continue to push for comprehensive immigration reform that: increases security; has an earned pathway to legalization for undocumented workers already contributing to our economy, provided that they are law-abiding and prepared to embrace the obligations and values of our society; creates a carefully monitored guest or essential worker program to fill the growing gaps in America's workforce recognizing that, in some cases, permanent immigrants will be needed to fill these gaps; and refrains from unduly burdening employers with worker verification systems that are underfunded or unworkable.

If you're confused by what any of that means, it means the Chamber of Commerce wants to legalize illegal aliens already in the US, increase temporary worker visas and increase the number of permanent immigrants.

Why does the Chamber of Commerce want that? Because it's about the money and about bringing in the cheap labor.

Really now, why do you think that prominent Republicans like Bush Sr, Bush Jr and McCain were such big fans of open borders and bringing in more immigrants. It didn't have a whole lot to do with Steve Sailer's Jewish conspiracy, and a whole lot to do with the fact that the needs of big business are not those that necessarily benefit America itself.

But unpleasant facts like that are not nearly as sexy as blaming the whole thing on the Jews.

Of course Steve Sailer might reply that the Jews run the Chamber of Commerce. But do Jews run the Catholic Church?

While Sailer appears to blame Jewish romanticism of immigration, such romanticism is hardly limited to Jewish immigrants, versus say Catholic, Irish, Italian and Latino immigrants in the late 19th and 20th centuries.

In fact the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been a major force behind the push for legalizing illegal immigrants, who happen to be heavily Catholic.

A poll by the Migration and Refugee Services of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops found that 69 percent of Catholics supported legalizing illegal aliens.

That kind of percentages are far more likely to promote unrestricted immigration, rather than the all-powerful Jews of Sailer's mythology.

I don't blame the Catholic Church for promoting the immigration of more Catholics to America. I just wish they would limit that support to legal immigration only. Nevertheless the Church has the right to promote what it likes, as does every other group in America. It's possible to take issue with what they promote, but it is perfectly possible to criticize an organization's policies, without trafficking in conspiracy theories about entire ethnic groups or trying to level all the blame for an international problem on one particular group.

The fact of the matter is that immigrant groups who came to America within the last 125 years are going to be far more likely to see immigration positively, than those who have not. Additionally big business has always needed immigration as a source of cheap labor. Steve Sailer's article, "Norman Podhoretz’s Why Are Jews Liberal? Not Good Enough", detours from those basic facts to promote his agenda, which is to begin by claiming that the Jews have taken over the GOP and to conclude by essentially arguing that the Jews have taken over America, since as Lawerence Auster points out

To say that the Jews are the primary force that is suppressing the supposed immigration restrictionist sentiment of the overwhelming majority of Americans, to suggest that but for the Jews the non-Jewish majority would have ended America's mass Third-World immigration policy by now

... which as has been demonstrated is blatantly false.

The article's early mention of Joe Sobran props up Sailer's only real thesis that runs through the piece, that Jews have leveraged their power to make themselves above criticism. One wonders which universe Sailer is living in, because in my universe the average newspaper takes the side of terrorists over Israel, emphasizes the Jewishness of criminals and is willing to print outright smears about Judaism.

A lot of the American Far Right seems slow to learn the lessons that the European Far Right is learning... that maybe they have bigger problems to deal with than the Jews. But it's always easier to take the lazy Protocols of the Elders of Zion way out.

Continuing the roundup, Obama's Muslim advisor doesn't regret anything she said on a Hizb U Tahir program, only that she went on it. Which is the sort of thing that we would buy if we believed that she was either ignorant of Hizb U Tahir, something that itself would make her unqualified to advise Obama on Muslim issues. So either Dalia Mogahed is a liar and in bed with Islamists, or incompetent. Either way she should go.

But of course we know that Obama's people have a history of quietly making contact with Islamists and terrorists. Even before he crawled into the White House.

Vlad Tepes meanwhile cites the new face of Cambridge grads, forget stiff upper lip and tweed, think Burqas.

Cambridge University will allow female Muslim students to wear burkas at graduation ceremonies, it emerged yesterday.

By tradition, students are required to wear dark suits and white shirts under their graduation gowns.

...

Yesterday it said burkas could also be worn under mortar boards to graduation ceremonies, as well as during tutorials and lectures.

Membership of Cambridge’s Islamic Society suggests it has around 600 Muslim students.

Goodbye Cambridge.

At Boker Tov Boulder, First Amendment "NOT WITHSTANDING"

Readers will note that the Organization of the Islamic Conference has a membership of 57 states. When Candidate Obama alarmed some folks by claiming he had campaigned in 57 states, there was a hue and cry -- not about what he had said and what it might mean, but against those who had noticed.

Back in the dusty BtB archives, I once wondered aloud about the "other countries" in Obama's statement that "we can't ... expect that other countries are going to say OK." I wrote then that

I don't get it. What other countries? Does he mean we take our orders from the OIC?

I guess that's exactly what he meant.

At Fiery Spirited Zionist, Obama is working to redistribute some American wealth to those 57 Islamic states

The White House Friday highlighted a new multi-million-dollar technology fund for Muslim nations, following a pledge made by President Barack Obama in his landmark speech to the Islamic world.

The White House said the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) had issued a call for proposals for the fund, which will provide financing of between 25 and 150 million dollars for selected projects and funds.

Now what are the odds that the money will directly or indirectly benefit terrorists? Considering the Zakah money that most Muslim businesses provide, a sizable portion of which goes to Islamists or terrorists... we might as well just give it to the Taliban directly.

Oh wait... we already are.

Meanwhile the way is being paved with a spate of articles claiming that there really is no group called the Taliban, that it's a broad coalition, most of whom just want food and water. The same claim was also made about Al Queda.

For those with longer memories, the same claim was made about the Viet Cong, who we were assured were mostly not Communists and perfectly jolly fellows who would happily lay down their arms if we just gave them reason to trust us.

No less a personage than Martin Luther King himself delivered this kind of nonsense back in the 60's.

What of the National Liberation Front -- that strangely anonymous group we call VC or Communists? What must they think of us in America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the south? ... Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent Communist and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will have no part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them -- the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded.

Well luckily Martin Luther King was absolutely right. We struck a peace settlement with the Viet Cong who were not all Communist and today Vietnam is a thriving utopia where its people have free elections and all are welcome to... oh wait. We struck a deal, the deal was worthless... and the nice folks that Benedict Arnold Jr told us are not at all Communists... went and created themselves a Communist dictatorship with no free elections.

Who knew? And who wants to bet that by the time Obama's people are done, they'll find some nice Taliban to negotiate with, force Karzai to cut a deal, and then take the helicopters from the embassy while beneath us the Taliban return to implement the glorious gender justice of Sharia law?

But gender justice in Islam is not completely a lost cause. Never fear.

At FaithFreedom, we have the story of a Muslim wife who tried to honor kill her husband.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A 37-year-old wife from New Brighton tried to slit her husband’s throat as he slept because he was not the devout Muslim she believed she married, and pressured her to eat pork and drink alcohol, authorities allege.

In a rambling, four-page handwritten confession, Rabia Sarwar laid out the “mental and emotional cruelty” that led to her trying to kill her husband, Susan Wagner High School teacher Sheikh Naseem, early yesterday morning, a law enforcement source said.

“I tried my best to cut his throat,” Ms. Sarwar admitted, according to court papers. Except Naseem woke up during the attempt, and took the knife from her, authorities said.

The way the law enforcement source describes it, Ms. Sarwar, who is Pakistani, told investigators that Naseem, who is half-Pakistani, had presented himself as a devout Muslim before the two had wed five months ago.

But after the marriage, she discovered more about him, she told investigators — before meeting her, he had only dated non-Muslims, and he considered Salman Rushdie to be one of his favorite authors.

Well clearly he had to die.

But the good news is that Rabia Sarwar represents a way forward for Muslim women to gain equal rights to kill men who aren't Muslim enough.

For centuries Muslim men have been able to kill Muslim women who they felt weren't Muslim enough. Now in a stirring tribute to Sharia's gender justice, perhaps Muslim women will enjoy the same rights to slit throats, throw acid and behead.

Between female suicide bombers and female honor killers, you can't deny the fact that Islam is doing its best to give Muslim women an equal role in carrying out the true teachings of Islam.

But you know aside from the homicidal stuff, the rest of the picture doesn't look good. See the following article at Reality Check

The 2009 report by the World Economic Forum has listed predominantly Islamic nations in the bottom of their annual Global Gender Gap (GGG) Index. This included such major nations as Pakistan (ranked 132 out of 134), Saudi Arabia (ranked 130 out of 134), Iran (ranked 128 out of 134), Egypt (ranked 126 out of 134), and Turkey (ranked 129 out 134). Yemen, which is 99 percent Islamic, was the bottom ranked nation as 134 on the Global Gender Gap Index. The only nation not predominantly Islamic in the bottom of the Global Gender Gap index was Benin.

In addition, the 2009 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index report does not include rankings on a number of significant and predominantly Islamic nations where women are oppressed. Somalia (population of nearly 10 million) was not included in the index. Endless numbers of reports of the stonings and Islamic supremacist abuses of women have been reported in Somalia in the past year, including the stoning to death of a 13 year old girl based on “Sharia law” in October 2008. Sudan (population of nearly 41 million) was also not included in the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index. Among other nations, Afghanistan (29 million) and Iraq (29 million) are also not included in this Global Gender Gap Index. With the index not reporting on these 109 million, the desperate fate of an estimated 50 plus million women are not included in this Global Gender Gap index report.

Even with these significant exclusions from the Global Gender Gap index report, the bottom 10 index nations (excluding Benin), which are all predominantly Islamic nations, represent a population of over half a billion individuals. These include Yemen (134 out of 134), Chad (133), Pakistan (132), Saudi Arabia (130), Turkey (129), Iran (128), Mali (127), Egypt (126), Qatar (125), Morocco (124). If women represent half of the population in these nations, then these bottom 10 predominantly Islamic nations demonstrate the ongoing oppression of an estimated 250 million women.

But there's good news. You don't have to go to Chad or Mali or Pakistan to enjoy Sharia law.

You can get it right here on Broadway.

The much-hyped, soon-to-open Breslin restaurant, situated in the 12-story Ace Hotel on Broadway and 29th, is giving members of the Masjid Ar-Rahman mosque across the street some agita. “Five times a day, there’s a hundred cabs on the street—the good news is you can always get a cab,” co-owner Ken Friedman told the Transom the other evening. He said some mosque visitors “object to seeing people drink alcohol.”

After the recent FergusStock, a festival during which famed British chef Fergus Henderson cooked whole pigs for a rapt crowd of New York chefs and foodies, Mr. Friedman said the mosque’s leaders called a meeting with the hotel. “They said, ‘Can you move the bar?’” he said. “And I laughed. And the guy said, ‘Oh, you think that’s funny?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that is funny, that is really funny, because we’re not going to move the bar just because you discovered we’re serving booze.’ Can you name one restaurant in New York that doesn’t serve booze?”

Mr. Friedman and his partner, Spotted Pig chef April Bloomfield, did agree to nix plans for a dive bar in a townhouse next door, but as for the restaurant, “I said, ‘This is the United States of America and we’ll do whatever the fuck we want.’” He said the mosque had suggested it couldn’t control the behavior of “a few bad eggs”; i.e., “we could get a brick through our window.” Mr. Friedman said he made the police aware of this threat.

Enjoy your Sharia law. Now on Broadway.

Soft Power is a Fancy Way of Saying Indecisive

2009-10-28T22:24:00.000-04:00

When Barack Obama completed his long march on the White House, liberal pundits promised us that he would completely transform US foreign policy from the dark days of the Bush Administration through soft power. Now thanks to all that squelching soft power we have gone from a foreign policy in which few liked us but we could get things done unilaterally... to a foreign policy in which everyone supposedly likes us but are actually less willing to help the new multilateral us, and as a result what we are left with is a foreign policy approach that can't get anything done at all anymore.

Anyone observing Obama's months of waffling on Afghanistan and Iran (the waffle clearly being an obvious example of soft power) can't help but conclude that soft power is just a fancy way of saying indecisive. An excuse for endlessly exploring ways to win over others to our point of view, leading to an endless chain of meetings in which nothing actually gets done. Soft power is a committee's way of making more committees, a boost for foreign aid and a chance to spend countless lives and dollars trying to fight wars the way that everyone else would like us to fight them. Which is either not at all, or wearing bright blue helmets and paying off insurgents who turn out to be playing both sides.

The Bush Administration tried soft power over and over again, only to find that old fashioned hard power is what actually gets things done. Anyone who remembers Colin Powell making his pitiful rounds at the UN remembers that. And it's no real surprise, because while soft power may be helpful for soliciting handshakes, long term alliances are sustained by at least one of the partners demonstrating his ability to carry his own weight, act forcefully and punish betrayals of the alliance. Even Barack Obama who has championed soft power toward Iran and the Taliban, flipped over to the old fashioned kind of power when it came to FOX News. Of course all it took to make Obama abandon the mantra of soft power was for him to confront a situation that unlike Iran and the War on Terror, he considered to be a genuine crisis... a cable news network not beholden to his agenda.

Soft power is perfectly fine if you're running for office while trying to be as non-threatening as possible. But real leadership requires making the hard decisions no one else will, and you can only pass the buck so often to the Pentagon or Joe Biden's office, before it becomes clear that you don't have a foreign policy, above and beyond simultaneously running for office in every country in the world.

Democracy may be a popularity contest, but foreign affairs aren't, and soft power is premised on D.C. rules, the notion that if you hand out enough pork, you'll win more allies. But handing out pork to the Taliban, just insures you'll be facing well fed Taliban come next spring. If an honest politician is a politician that stays bought, then tribal cultures who are always looking to cut deals three different ways, have no honest politicians. Paying an insurgent to go home, while the Taliban pays that same insurgent to fight, only creates a chaotic battlefield in which it becomes impossible to know on who's side anyone is anymore.

Every war in which America focused on winning hearts and minds first, and winning the war second, is a war we've lost. You can't buy loyalty, only a temporary ally at best. What you can do is win loyalty or insure loyalty by demonstrating that you have staying powers and that your words are not simply words, but have a tangible reality and active consequences.

The key words in foreign affairs are what's in it for me. A payoff is the cheapest and least worthwhile way to gain an ally, because all you gain is an ally for sale to anyone who can make a higher bid, who has no loyalty whatsoever, and will sell you out when the moment is right. Mutual interests are a much stronger bond, but they require actual mutual interests based on substantive agendas, rather than the virtual mutual interests based on some deluded notion that assorted third world dictatorships have the same wishes for peace and beliefs in a better future that we do. Finally there need to be negative consequences, whether stemming directly from us or indirectly from what will occur if the course of action we propose is not followed.

Soft power as practiced by Obama however is all carrot and no stick, letting our enemies munch away on the carrot, while we promise never to let a stick touch our hands. If you talk enough of peace to the wrong people, it becomes indistinguishable from surrender. If you adopt a foreign policy whose chief virtue is that it allows you to make speeches, while kicking over all the military decisions to the military, while denying them the support they need to implement those decisions-- then you've created an environment in which you will insure that they will fail, while your public image will succeed. At least until the consequences of your ego and incompetence moves the country from the Chamberlainian mode, back to the Churchillian.

The key problem with Obama's plan for Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan is that he has no plan except to avoid becoming entangled with any of them in order to shift blame for the coming disasters on someone else's head. Generals often end up with the responsibility for implementing political decisions that make no sense in relation to the facts on the ground. Obama's political decision on the War on Terror can be best summed up as, "Keep busy, but don't involve me in any of it, or ask me for anything." A rule that General McChrystal openly broke thereby throwing the Afghanistan debate into the public arena, and forcing the White House to try and defend their non-policy, even if the only soldiers they can find to do it are bravely manning their blackberries and pencil sharpeners in Joe Biden's office.

Embracing soft power is a handy way to act busy without accomplishing anything or risking much of anything. The Clinton Administration used soft power to go after Al Queda. The Bush Administration used bombs and bullets. Now we've switched back to a soft power breakfast buffet of waffles with a hearty serving of appeasement and pork, topped off with Coalition soldiers dying because their rules of engagement now favor the Taliban, because one side was paying off the Taliban without the other knowing about it, or because the Taliban are certain that their victory is near and have become bolder than ever.

Soft power means never having to be sure of anything, never having to do anything and never having to say sorry to the people who die because of your ineptness and indecisiveness. Isn't soft power wonderful?

The Balance between Power and Freedom

2009-10-27T23:18:00.006-04:00

Power and freedom are both quantities that can only co-exist at the individual level. Power at the institutional level is inimical to individual freedom, because power at the institutional level is most commonly represented in the form of control.

Some control is of course necessary, it is why government exists as a necessary evil. It is why we must have courts and police officers, armies, inspectors and assorted other functional arms of the system. But that necessary evil is a balance between freedom and authority. And at the point where the necessary evil becomes an unnecessary evil, the balance tilts toward tyranny.

What is an unnecessary evil? If a necessary evil is the use governmental authority that fulfills a vital function, an unnecessary evil is governmental authority that fulfills no vital function, or government for the sake of government. This was once the American view of government that treated government with justified suspicion, particularly centralized government. Today it has become a minority view. Instead the compulsive expansion of government is seen as a necessary good... and the more functions that government takes on, the better.

And so the balance between government power and individual freedom has tilted sharply in the direction of government power. That is the inevitable result of extending centralized power, which in government always comes at the expense of those over whom the government holds power... the citizenry.

America's Founders understood that the more power is collected in a single place, the less freedom there can be. Since government power is expressed as control over the lives of those who live under it, they were profoundly hostile toward the expansion of that power. The Declaration of Independence rejects any notion of government for the sake of government, as opposed to a government of the and by the people, and the Constitution reflects a healthy suspicion of the motives of the very government it was there to emplace.

They were not anarchists, they understood quite well that government was necessary, but they understood also that power corrupts, and that men with power tend to gather more power to themselves, a process that throughout history has brought down even the highest minded republics and nations.

The Constitution was meant to frame a strict structure for the United States government, one that would prevent not only future Caesars and Napoleons, but would prevent ambition and arrogance from wielding unjustified power in the name of even the best of intentions. And that is exactly what happened.

Americans did not wake up one morning to a coup, or saw a crusading general seize power and declare himself President for Life. Instead what took place was the subtle erosion of the restrictions on government authority, and a redefinition of the purpose of government, broadening its areas of responsibility in the name of the public good.

Today in the name of the public good, the government regulates what you may eat, where you may live, how you may travel, where you may build and where you may pray, everything from the great industries to the intimate details of your family life. All in the name of the public good.

For now the government has not yet regulated what you may say and where you may say it, mainly because the tattered shreds of the old Constitution still stand in the way, but if government authority continues to expand, that freedom like all others, will be nothing more than a barrier of sand against the onrushing tide.

The Founders understood that human appetite for power was unlimited, and that were numberless rationalizations for it. The growth of socialism across Europe and America was done in the name of the public good, yet once its proponents gained real power their tactics showed a ruthless ugliness that was only limited by the scope of their authority.

The Soviet experiment, in contrast to the American experiment, demonstrated what true socialism implemented under absolute authority looks like. The experiment has been repeated in numerous nations across the world. The results have been the same each and every time. But there should be no surprise in that, as giving absolute power in the name of any ideology will result in the same exact effect.

Socialism is only as humane as the limits of the authority of those who implement it. The less limits there are, the more ruthless it becomes. That is because socialism is the theory of government absolutism writ large. And that is an inevitable recipe for tyranny.

As America moves toward socialism, and away from traditional constitutional government, in the name of the public good... it is worth remembering that power does not co-exist with freedom. Despite whatever public good is being met, the expansion of government leads inevitably to a decrease in freedom.

The more government expands, the less freedom the people who live under it have. The more power is concentrated within government, the more unrestricted its use becomes, which is why the separation of powers is such a vital part of the American system of government. Many of America's Founding Fathers were gravely worried over that concentration of power within the Federal government, and its potential for expansion. That worry has long ago become reality.

Modern Americans have been conditioned to believe that freedom is a function of government, when freedom is in fact the absence of government. That dangerous misconception creates a distorted view of the intended place of government. No government can give freedom. Freedom is not given by government to the people, it is created through the absence of coercion, not through legislated rights. By embracing the socialist premise that government actions protects and creates rights, American democracy has reverted to a pre-Constitutional understanding of the relationship between government and the individual. And in doing so Americans have stopped being citizens who shape our government and become subjects who are shaped by it, for our "own good".

Voting like Episcopalians

2009-10-26T22:59:00.003-04:00

The Conservative Jewish scholar, Martin Himmelfarb once quipped that, "Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans". That quip is often quoted but little questioned, because in fact Episcopalians often vote like Puerto Ricans themselves.

The Episcopalian Church supports illegal aliens, health care nationalization, the anti-war movement, abortion, card check, gay rights and affirmative action. It has an openly gay Bishop, it is a member of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice and the Church has even spoken out in support of transgender civil rights. It was one of the key backers behind 40 Days for Health Reform. The 75th general convention delivered a resolution condemning the War in Iraq. The All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena took the anti-war position so far it became infamous for delivering an anti-war sermon before the 2004 election, resulting in an IRS investigation.

As it turns out, Jews do vote like Episcopalians after all. And the Episcopalians are not alone. America's elite liberal Protestant Churches served as the model for liberal Jewish Temples, just as liberal Protestant clergymen served as models for liberal Jewish clergymen, who were essentially aping the manners and politics of their social betters. All together they form what is known as the Religious Left, liberal clergy committed to using government powers to enforce their conception of social justice.

There are of course a great many members of their congregations who disagree. Some sit by silently or dismiss this week's sermon on the need to help the stranger, who in this case is likely to be a Muslim or transgender illegal alien. Some take more aggressive action which is the situation that has resulted in the split within the Anglican Communion.

The premise behind Himmelfarb's assumption is that Jews earn like upper class Americans, but vote like lower class Americans. The problem with that premise is that upper class Americans actually often vote like lower class Americans. Liberalism is not practiced by a bunch of radicals huddling in a cellar over a handful of bombs somewhere. And even when it is, the radicals tend to be the sons and grandsons of bank Presidents, as in the case of Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. Liberalism is practiced by the upper classes, as much if not more so than conservatism.

The fundamental economic difference between Democrats and Republicans lies in their differing approaches to economic aspiration. The Republicans emphasize the individual economic aspirations of those on bottom and in the middle climbing up the ladder through hard work, while Liberalism is rooted in the noblesse oblige of those on the top or the middle lifting up those below them through various social programs.

That is why Conservatism appeals most powerfully to the economic ideals of the working class and lower middle class, while Liberalism plays on the sense of obligation felt by the upper class and upper middle class, and the entitlement of some in the permanent lower classes.

Liberals love to play on the idea that Republicans are party of the rich, but Bill Gates, the richest man in America, is a liberal who after retiring from Microsoft has dedicated his time to using his foundation to push his political views. Bill Gates incidentally comes from a Congregationalist family. The second richest man is Warren Buffett, from a Presbyterian family, who like Bill Gates made the inevitable transition to being an agnostic, and sits on the board of the Gates Foundation. And of course is a liberal. During the 2008 election, Buffett said that it would take a lobotomy for him to vote for a Republican candidate because of his views on social justice.

Gates and Buffett's views help define why America has become so liberal. Both men like so many of their peers believe in wealth redistribution. Accordingly both Gates and Buffett donated to Obama. And both men are putting their money where their mouths are, by donating the bulk of their wealth to charity. And such views and behaviors are far from uncommon among America's wealthiest. The problem is that they are imposing them on everyone else as well.

Modern liberalism would probably not exist without the Ford Foundation. Or George Soros' wealth. Or to put it more simply, it would not exist if the top 1 percent of wealthiest people in America, as well as in Europe, Israel and much of the Western world, did not believe that their countries should be reorganized into great socialist hives. And did not spend large portions of their wealth to do just that.

The problem is not that Jews vote like Puerto Ricans, the problem is that they vote like Episcopalians. That is that Jews have abandoned the working class and middle class roots of their grandparents, in favor of joining in at the elitist table of liberalism. In an endless session of fundraisers and dinners for the liberal cause of the month, and most of all for redistributing the wealth that they attained, but don't feel they have a right to.

The people who believe most in the American Dream are not the Gates' and the Buffett's, but the Joe the Plumbers... the working class people hoping to move up, and struggling with the byzantine bureaucracy, unions and taxes that some of the wealthiest people in America helped impose on them. It is that segment of America that works hard for a living, or that remembers what it is like to work hard for a living... that represents the real grass roots base of the Republican Party. And it is that segment that unleashes the ugliest class warfare backlash from liberal elitists, whether it is Sarah Palin or Joe the Plumber.

Because there is class warfare in America, but it is a form of class warfare that thwarts the aspirations of those Americans trying to work their way up through hard work, by those who believe that sort of thing is an outdated relic that needs to make way for a socialist state. And paradoxically it is those Americans who have benefited the most from capitalism, who are doing the most to destroy it. For those who ask why Jews vote liberal, it may be much more pressing and important to ask the question, why Episcopalians who were America's elite vote liberal?

What George Bush Thought of Mohammed

2009-10-25T22:33:00.000-04:00

By George Bush I don't mean the 41st or 43rd Presidents of the United States, but the 19th century clergyman and historian George Bush, who was also the author of the first American biography of Mohammed. Bush was also the great-grand uncle of the 41st President, and the great-great grand uncle of the 43rd President. But his views on Islam were significantly different than those of his more Saudi friendly modern day relations.

George Bush was one of the more famous ministers of his day, a biblical scholar, a liberal and controversial thinker. And while his biography of Mohammed was not particularly controversial in its day, you would have trouble finding a single bookstore willing to carry it today. Bush questioned everything about Mohammed's life and history, and phrases such as, "But in the Koran, a complete fabric of imposture, the last thing we are to expect is an honest adherence to the truth", would summon riots today.

Indeed riots nearly occurred when some of the clerics at Egypt's Al Azhar University got their hands on a translation of Bush's book, "The life of Mohammed: founder of the religion of Islam". A nervous state department in 2004 quickly put out a notice stating that the book had not been written by the current President, but by "a distant relative of the current president, five generations removed, but not his direct ancestor", was the product of "more parochial times" and its views "have nothing to do with the attitudes of current President Bush, who is respectful of Islam as one of the world's great religions"

Yet despite the long passage of time and the greater availability of sources today, George Bush's 19th century text on Mohammed is overall a good deal more accurate than the apologetic pablum that Karen Armstrong and her ilk ship out to college campuses. In fact George Bush seemed to understand Islam a good deal better than his grand-nephews several times removed.

George Bush draws a picture of Mohammed as a canny plotter, the orphaned son of a powerful dynasty looking to reclaim what his family had lost. A clever merchant who kept his ear close to the ground and plotted to take advantage of the power vacuum created by tribal infighting and the decline of the Persian and Roman empires. A man who with greedy genius built an empire by transforming his personal ambitions into a vast religion.

Boasting chapters with summaries such as "Mohammed forms the design of palming a new religion upon the world, the Prophet pretends to have a night journey through the seven heavens" and "the Jews the special objects of Mohammed's enmity", pull rather few punches and at times read as if they had been written by Geert Wilders, not a fairly progressive liberal clergyman and New York University professor.

Take Bush's critique of Mohammed's progressive revelation of the Koran;

He declared himself appointed to promulge a new revelation in successive portions, the aggregate of which was to constitute the Bible of his followers. The original or archetype of the Koran, he taught, was laid up from everlasting in the archives of Heaven, being written on what he termed the preserved table, near the throne of Allah, from which the series of chapters communicated by Gabriel were a transcript. This pretended gradual mode of revelation was certainly a master stroke of policy in the impostor.

...Had the whole volume been published at once, so that a rigid examination could have been instituted into its contents as a whole, and the different parts brought into comparison with each other, glaring inconsistencies would have been easily detected and objections urged which he probably would have found impossible to answer. But by pretending to receive his oracles in separate portions, at different times... he had a ready way of silencing all cavils, and extricating himself with credit from every difficulty, as nothing forbade the message or mandate of to-day being modified or abrogated by that of to-morrow.

Or George Bush's commentary on Mohammed's cynical campaign to win over converts;

The marks of imposture are much more discernible upon the pages subsequently revealed, in which the prophet had private ends of a sinister nature to accomplish... He applied himself in the most insinuating manner to all classes of people; he was complaisant and liberal to the poor, cultivating their acquittance and relieving their wants; the rich and noble he soothed by flattery; and bore affronts without seeking to avenge them. The effect of this politic management was greatly enhanced by the peculiar character of those inspired promises and threatenings which he brought to enforce his message.

His promises were chiefly those of a blissful paradise in another life; and these he studiously aimed to set forth in colours best calculated to work upon the fancies of a sensitive and sensual race, whose minds in consequence of their natural habits were little susceptible of the images of abstract enjoyments. The notions of a purely intellectual or spiritual happiness pertains to a more cultivated people.

... Mohammed was well aware that a plenitude of these visible and palpable attractions, to say nothing of grosser sources of pleasure, was an indispensable requirement in a heaven suited to the temperament of his countrymen... such is the Mohammedan paradise, rendered alluring by its gross, carnal and luxurious character.

Or his commentary on how Mohammed got around the difficulty of producing actual miracles;

At a later period, when he was at Medina at the head of an army, he had a more summary way of solving difficulties arising from this source, for his doctrine then was, that god had formerly sent Moses and Jesus with the power of working miracles, and yet men would not believe, and therefore he had now sent him, a prophet of another order, commissioned to enforce belief by the power of the sword. The sword accordingly was to be the true seal of his apostleship.

Or Bush writing of Mohammed's night journey to Jerusalem;

The attentive observer of the distinguishing traits of Islamism will not fail to discover innumerable points of resemblance between that system and the divinely revealed religion of the Jews; and it appears to have been an object studiously aimed at by the impostor (Mohammed) to assimilate himself as much as possible to Moses, and to incorporate as many peculiarities of the Jewish economy into his own fabrication as he could without destroying the simplicity of his creed. This fact is in keeping with what may be asserted in general terms, that the descendants of Ishmael, under a consciousness that the covenanted blessings of God have flowed down in the line of Isaac and Jacob, have ever shown a disposition to imitate what they could not attain.

George Bush also notes the transition from Mohammed as the man of peace who does not compel anyone in religion, to the brutal warlord. A transition defined by how much power Mohammed had at his disposal.

In numerous passages of the Koran, published at Mecca, he expressly declared that his business only to preach and admonish, that he had no authority to compel anyone to embrace his religion... Indeed so far was he from allowing his followers to resort to violence, that he exhorted them to bear with meekness the injuries offered them on account of their faith...

But his exemplary moderation continued for the space of twelve years, seems to have been owing altogether to his want of power, and the ascendancy of his enemies; for no sooner was he enabled by the assistance of the men of Medina, to withstand his adversaries, than he suddenly "altered his voice" declaring that Allah had allowed him and his followers to defend themselves by human weapons against the infidels, and as his forces increased, he pretended to have the divine permission to act upon the offensive also, to attack his foes, to root out idolatry, and the urge the true faith at the point of the sword.

... This force, intolerant and sanguinary spirit will be found to distinguish most of the chapters revealed at Medina, so that it can be frequently determined from the tone and temper pervading it, without consulting the date, whether the portion was revealed before or after the flight. The prophet's followers have faithfully acted up the spirit of these precepts, and the terrific announcement attending the Moslem arms has been, "The Koran, death or tribute."

Finally Bush sums up the moral code of Mohammed thusly;

"Even at the present day among the prophet's disciples all over the East, no trait is more common or more revolting than 'recklessness of life', which is doubtless to be ascribed as much to national habits as to native cruelty or ferocity of disposition. We must indeed think but little of the morality of such a people, and must behold with indignation a pretended prophet, while professing to purify the moral code of his countrymen, continuing still in the practice of some of the worst of its tenents. Here, in fact our heaviest condemnation falls upon Mohammed. He did not observe the rules of morality which he himself laid down, and which he enforced upon others by such terrible sanctions. No excuse can be offered for the impostor on this score. He abused his claims as a prophet to screen the guilty excesses of his private life, and under the pretence of a special revelation, dispensing himself from the laws imposed by his own religion, had the female sex abandoned without reserve to his desires.

... This is but too fair a specimen of the general character of the Koran. By far the greater part of its contents were fabricated to answer particular purposes which he could effect in no other way; and this was an expedient which never failed. If any new enterprise was to be undertaken, any new objections answer, any difficulty to be solved, any disturbance among his followers to be hushed, or any offence to be removed, immediate recourse was had to Gabriel, and a new revelation, precisely adapted to meet the necessities of the case, was granted.

....teaching, that the grand principles of morality are not eternal and immutable, growing out of the very nature of the relations substituting between the Creator and his creatures, but are mere arbitrary rules, subject to be relaxed, modified, or dispensed with, as circumstances may dictate."

In short George Bush reduces the story of Mohammed and the narrative of Islam to its bare bones as a sham and charade, carried out by one man and his greedy and deluded disciples. Bush is by no means as harsh as he could be no Mohammed. At times he defends him against the attacks of early Christian writers. He takes tales of Mohammed's supposed heroism in battle at face value, though those tales all come from his own followers. Nevertheless the book succeeds at dissecting Islamism far better than any college text could.

And if all this had not sufficiently succeeded in offending and enraging Muslims, George Bush had also called for the creation of a Jewish State in Israel.

It is ironic that a 19th century George Bush understood the character and menace of Islam, far better than his 20th century kindred. Had George W. Bush listened more to his namesake and less to CAIR, America might be far safer for it.

Obama Replaces the War on Terror with the War on Critics

2009-10-24T21:50:00.000-04:00

For eight years Democrats pounded at the doors of D.C., throwing their own fecal matter around, and claiming that it was only a matter of time until Bush had them all rounded up for being unpatrotic. And like the frenzied mob at a Black Friday sale waiting for the doors to open, shoving and shoving against the glass, until the doors finally open, and the mob bursts through stomping over any store personnel in the way, Democrats have been completely unable to let go of the attack dog politics of the last 8 years and actually govern.

Instead what we've gotten is massive incompetence, massive malfeasance and an enemy of the month. When in doubt the motto of the Obama Administration has been, ATTACK SOMEONE. Whether it's Rush Limbaugh, Jim Cramer or Glenn Beck-- the party now in power, but still trapped in the vortex of their own hate, is obsessed with waging a war on all their enemies, both real and imaginary. Forget the E Pluribus Unum on the seal of the United States. The new motto is, They're all out to get me.

Putting the most radical Democrat in the race and his coterie of dot com brats, wannabe Marxists with homes in Chevy Chase and academic radicals, followed by an admiring train of media groupies, has only made the whole thing that much worse. Taking radicals who believe the government is out to get them into power is a historically proven way to get a government certain that the only way to build paradise is to destroy anyone who stands in their way.

Opponents of the Bush Administration often branded its War on Terror as being paranoid, an overreaching of executive power and a threat to civil liberties. Of being too paranoid and too willing to see enemies on all sides. With the Obama Administration however the War on Terror is now making way for a much higher priority conflict, one being fought against American citizens... the War on anyone who disagrees with them. If the Bush Administration had terror alerts, the Obama Administration has critic alerts.

Despite holding both Congress and the White House, in less than a year the Obama Administration is well on its way to becoming the most paranoid White House in American history. In less than a year, the Obama Administration has already launched major campaigns against talk radio and cable news hosts, threatened reporters who "crowd the plate", demanded that other news networks stop listening to the cable news network that is being critical of him, declared war on the Chamber of Commerce, threatened the AMA, threatened car dealers, threatened health insurance companies, thrown its backing behind a phony Anti-Israel lobby masquerading as a Pro-Israel lobby in order to displace the actual major Pro-Israel lobby, continued blaming all its financial missteps on the Bush Administration, gave away hundreds of billions to banks and auto companies only to turn around and blame them for mismanaging it-- and the list goes on and on.

There's one word for that kind of behavior, particularly for a party that has secured a veto proof majority and can pass just about any legislation it wants, no matter how destructive or even downright illegal -- crazy. After 8 years of being the opposition party, the Democrats have not adjusted to being in power. And while the Republicans have begun to learn to act like an opposition party--- the Democrats bizarrely enough also insist on acting like the opposition party. And what are they opposed to? Anyone who criticizes them or rejects any of their proposals.
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Democrats continue to hurl abuse at conservative media personalities, as if they were in charge of some Latin American banana republic, instead of a country with centuries of legislative tradition. And their approval ratings continue to sink further as a result, because what the radical regime of Mao admirers in D.C. can't seem to understand is that they were not elected to wage war on the Republicans-- no matter what their nutroots tell them, they were elected to address serious economic problems. And they have only made them much worse by treating the stimulus and bailout plans as loot for their donors, political allies and pet projects.

Democracy means having a voice of opposition always at your back. But by demanding the legislative privileges of the ruling party, combined with the attack politics of the opposition party- the Democrats have created an unholy mixture that is a surefire moonshine recipe for tyranny. Democracy is the right to dissent, and a ruling party that insists on waging a war against its critics using the leverage of two of the centers of governments, is severely undermining the right of dissent.

The most disturbing aspect of the Obama Administration's War on Critics is that it is directed primarily not at Republican politicians, but at media figures and ordinary citizens who show up at Town Hall meetings to voice their dissent. Had the Obama Administration directed its full fire at Michael Steele, John Boehner or at least potential 2012 opponents such as Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney, it would still be a profound waste of time and abuse of political power-- but it would not be nearly as dangerous as when it assails radio hosts or Town Hall protesters.

There is a fundamental difference between attacking political opponents in Congress, and attacking anyone in the general public or press who speaks out against your policies. An Administration that consistently does the latter is displaying dangerously paranoid behavior that can easily tip over into going beyond smear campaigns of intimidation and into taking direct action to forcibly suppress that same speech it does not like.

Politically the Democratic approach is failing. Limbaugh and Beck have only benefited from the White House's attempts to smear and silence them. And most Americans have not swallowed the bizarre claim that the Obama Administration can't get anything done because of its critics. While the Democrats continue acting as if Bush is in power and it's their solemn duty to destroy him, the actual burning issues go unaddressed. Democrats pretend that they can ignore the economy and the War, because those are supposedly legacies of the Bush Administration. The problem with that sort of delusional irresponsibility though is that voters expect solutions, and they don't expect them from Limbaugh or Beck, but from the folks living it up in D.C. on the taxpayer dollar.

The role of critics is to question. The role of government is to answer those critics, not with personalized smear campaigns and shunning, but by demonstrating that their policies actually work. The Obama Administration has been unable to do this, and with a sharply rising deficit, huge unemployment rates and no bang for all the stimulus and bailout bucks-- instead continues to try and silence the critics. But the United States is not Venezuela or Cuba, and unlike his ally Hugo Chavez, Obama cannot send troops to seize FOX News and turn it over to CNN. So instead he's doing the next best thing, and in the process sharply undermining the barriers that protect free speech and political dissent in America.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - All the Trains Run Through Obama

2009-10-23T16:53:00.002-04:00

This week Obama began throwing around his weight more than usual. In the USSR all the trains ran through Moscow in order to centralize control of the country. In the US today, Obama is pushing to make sure that all the trains run through him.

First Obama's minions began pushing the rest of the media to denounce and distance themselves from FOX. This of course is only the latest in the Obama Administration's long addiction to public Stalinist purges and denunciations, but this time it was launched against an entire network.

And second the Obama Administration now appears to be targeting state Democrats who don't "coordinate" with the White House. The Washington Post spins it as the White House distancing itself from a supposedly losing candidate in the Virginia Governor's race, but the practical upshot of it is that it's a warning shot that blames losing candidates for not relying enough on Obama, sending the message that the failure to "coordinate" your campaign with the White House will be a death blow to your candidacy.

Senior administration officials have expressed frustration with how Democrat R. Creigh Deeds has handled his campaign for governor, refusing early offers of strategic advice and failing to reach out to several key constituencies that helped Obama win Virginia in 2008, they say.

Translation, he failed to pay off ACORN, SEIU and whatever other munchkins and 527's the Obama Administration has its deals with.

Of course the next step is to suggest that Deeds is kind of a racist, or forced to be a racist because everyone in Virginia is a racist.

A senior administration official said Deeds badly erred on several fronts, including not doing a better job of coordinating with the White House. "I understood in the beginning why there was some reluctance to run all around the state with Barack Obama," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly about the race. "You don't do that in Virginia. But when you consider the African American turnout that they need, and then when you consider as well they've got a huge problem with surge voters, younger voters, we were just a natural for them."

Of course that fails to explain why if race is the issue, Obama won in Virginia.

But a more pertinent point is that Obama's approval rating fell well below 50 percent in Virginia, which might actually make him a liability, for political, not racial reasons. And just maybe Deeds wasn't willing to turn over his campaign to Obama's cluster of radical left wing groups and unions, and mortgage the next four years, just to have Obama come to town for a day or two, and take some pictures.

But national Democrats are contrasting Deeds with New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine and New York congressional candidate Bill Owens, who they say have more actively sought the White House's help and more vigorously and publicly backed its agenda. Polls show Corzine in a competitive position in New Jersey and Owens ahead, while Deeds has turned aggressively to Obama voters in recent days in an effort to overcome a significant deficit in the polls.

Spot the key phrase in that paragraph. That's right, it's "and more vigorously and publicly backed its agenda"

The real point of course is that Corzine is further left and more willing to give the Obama Administration a blank check in New Jersey.

Although Deeds often praises the president on the campaign trail, he has distanced himself from Obama and Democratic policy priorities at times. At a debate in September, he declined the opportunity to label himself an "Obama Democrat." And just this week, he said he did not believe that a public health insurance option is necessary and that as governor he might consider opting out of one if Congress extends that right to states.

Again the key criticism is that Deeds hasn't been willing to lean far enough to the left, to hyphenate his party identification with Obama, and to back a public option.

Democrats on both sides of the Potomac River cite prominent Democratic businesswoman Sheila Johnson's endorsement of McDonnell in July as the first sign of trouble in the Deeds campaign. They say Deeds let several weeks go by after his June 9 primary without calling Johnson, the co-founder of Black Entertainment Television and one of Kaine's leading donors.

Again Deeds just didn't pay enough fealty to the people around Obama. All the trains have to run through ~~Moscow~~ Obama.

Meanwhile in more "people around Obama" news, we have this following lovely tidbit.

Comedian David Cross brought his stand-up routine to Washington's Warner Theatre Wednesday night and made a shocking confession (assuming he wasn't joking...) at the end of his routine: That he snorted cocaine while seated just yards away from President Barack Obama at this year's White House Correspondents' Association dinner.

"But it's crazy and there's security, Secret Service is standing there," said Cross. "I've got photos of all this. ... I'm there and the president is right here and with all these people at the table" Cross snorted some coke, he said. "Maybe 40 feet from the president of the United States!"

Cross said he texted his friend to say, "No way you can ever top that."

I'm sure Obama will be very angry with his fellow cokehead for not sharing.

Meanwhile in the UK there's a flurry of worry over BNP leader Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time and the BNP's increase in popularity.

Of course it would be childishly easy for any party to steal the BNP's fairly one issue thunder, by getting serious on immigration, deporting Islamists and closing the door to out of control immigration. But none of them show any willingness to do it, which is why the BNP will continue holding on to a valid populist issue that anyone with any common sense understands represents a major national crisis, and yet one that no mainstream party wants to touch.

Until that happens the far right will keep making political gains, while newspaper columnists dismiss the reason for those gains as just the product of xenophobia and ignorance. And while it's easy enough to dismiss the BNP, there is no dismissing the immigration elephant in the room. Those same issues became vital in elections in Italy, Holland and France. It's only a matter of time before they play that same role in the UK and the US as well.

Back in the US, falling temperatures are freezing out global warming dogma.

Global warming is becoming a much tougher sell. A new Pew Research poll says the percentage of people surveyed, who believe climate change is a very serious problem, has dropped from 44 percent last year to 35 percent.

Only 57 percent believe there is solid evidence of rising temperatures. That's down 14 percent. There is a similar drop in those who say global warming is man-made. Just 36 percent believe it, down from 47 percent.

One expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Daniel Weiss, tells the Wall Street Journal the findings were caused by: "Right-wing media personalities... distorting science while the mainstream media remains trapped in its he-said, she-said narrative."

Oklahoma Republican Senator and global warming skeptic James Inhofe says the poll reflects concerns over proposed climate change legislation: "The more Americans learn about cap-and-trade — the more they oppose cap-and-trade."

Naturally the CAP folks will argue that it's all Rush Limbaugh's fault. These of course are the same people incapable of a rational debate, who are now busy tarring and feathering the formerly popular Freakonomics author for questioning an element of global warming dogma.

The duo has been hammered with a smear campaign, unprecedentedly, before the book has even been released.

“It reminds me of what happened when Michael Crichton wrote ‘State of Fear,’” said Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy at the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, which gets some of its funding from the energy industry. “The problem for the left is that there are still some people who don’t toe the party line who have megaphones. And anyone who has a megaphone, they’re going to go after.”

And some of their harshest fire is saved for people on their side of the line, who step just a bit out of line.

Continuing the roundup, Stop Islamization has an article on Islam, A Powerful Doctrine of Cruelty and Hate – Attempted “Honor Killing” (Arizona)

Yesterday, another atrocity perpetrated by a follower of the “religion of peace” occurred, this time outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Apparently, the father of a not-Islamic-enough 20-year old daughter decided that she had become “too western”. His “religion of peace” response – run her (and her friend) over with his car. This peaceful response on the part of the father in this case was meant to result in the death of the daughter (not “peace”). According to CNN, she is in the hospital with life-threatening injuries [1]. CNN provides no details on the friend’s condition.

The “Arizona Republic” has several articles [2] on this case, none of them on the front page of their site. Both victims remain in hospital today; the “peaceful” father is still at large.

Family and friends of the victims told detectives that the suspect had made threats toward his daughter because she was not living according to traditional Iraqi values, Tellef said. However, police cannot immediately determine whether that was the motive in the incident.(Arizona Republic [3])

What could the reporters of the “Arizona Republic” mean by “traditional Iraqi values”? Is there some Baathist tradition of parents killing their children because they aren’t Baathist enough? Is this some new “traditional value” that is post-Sadam? Or is this some Islamic tradition that is meant to destroy children who are leaving or who have left Islam? There is substantive precedent to believe that the cause of this barbarism and cruelty and homicidal intent on the part of the father in Arizona is a direct result of Islamic concepts and “legal” guidelines and obligations and nothing else. This attempted child murder is called an “honor killing”

But naturally, it can't be an Islamic tradition, as we all know it's the religion of peace...

Debbie Schlussel cites a report which shows just how unprepared America is for bioterrorism under Obama's watch.

The Obama administration is . . . failing to address the more urgent and immediate threat of biological terrorism, a bipartisan commission created by Congress is reporting today.

The report . . . cites failures on biosecurity policy by the White House, which the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction says has left the country vulnerable. The commission, created last year to address concerns raised by post-9/11 investigations, warns that anthrax spores released by a crop-duster could “kill more Americans than died in World War II” and the economic impact could exceed $1.8 trillion in cleanup and other costs.

The government’s efforts “have not kept pace with the increasing capabilities and agility of those who would do harm to the United States,” the report says. “The consequences of ignoring these warnings could be dire.” Says commission Chairman Bob Graham, a Democratic former senator from Florida: “The clock is ticking.” . .

But who needs to prepare for bioterrorism, when we can tackle the far more burning issue of GLOBAL WARMING. Now 10 percent off at Borders.

In another slice of the globe worth watching news, tensions are again escalating between China and India.

Keep in mind that the last time the rhetoric spun out of control over a border dispute, the result was the Sino-Indian War

Beijing - China and India have taken a vituperative war of words and diplomatic barbs to an unusual level of tension in recent days, prompting fears that the traditional rivalry between the two Asian giants could spin out of control.

"The most urgent present job for both sides is crisis management," says Han Hua, an expert on South Asia at Peking University. "I don't think either government wants the situation to go further downhill."

The recent angry exchanges were prompted by a decades-old border dispute over which the two countries went to war in 1962, and which has proved impervious to 13 rounds of negotiations since.

But deeper resentments lie behind the spat, says Shen Dingli, deputy head of China's South Asia Research Institute. "The structural problem is leadership," he argues. "The question is who leads in Asia?"

The real question is who leads globally. With the US under Obama out of the race, there will be far more explosions of local and global tensions, as aspiring governments seek to fill the vacuum that the US surrender on the world stage has left open.

Politico looks at Obama's strategy for marginalizing conservatives, a political cordon sanitare if you will.

Hume challenges the media to be more than WH lapdogs

Via CAMERA, Yoram Ettinger reports on changing demographics in Israel, between its jewish and Muslim population

Kerry flip flops again, this time on J Street

At Gateway Pundit, Evil dictator meets Obama chic comes to DC

A Co-founder of Human Rights Watch blasts his own organization for its pandering to evil

At Human Rights Watch, we always recognized that open, democratic societies have faults and commit abuses. But we saw that they have the ability to correct them — through vigorous public debate, an adversarial press and many other mechanisms that encourage reform.

That is why we sought to draw a sharp line between the democratic and nondemocratic worlds, in an effort to create clarity in human rights. We wanted to prevent the Soviet Union and its followers from playing a moral equivalence game with the West and to encourage liberalization by drawing attention to dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Natan Sharansky and those in the Soviet gulag — and the millions in China’s laogai, or labor camps.

When I stepped aside in 1998, Human Rights Watch was active in 70 countries, most of them closed societies. Now the organization, with increasing frequency, casts aside its important distinction between open and closed societies.

Moral equivalence wins again.

The Weekly Standard challenges the uninsured figures being spread by the Obama Administration

Meanwhile soldiers being sworn in to the Shimshon Brigade in Israel refused to expel any more Jewish families, to make way for Hamas and Fatah strongholds

Immediately after an IDF swearing-in ceremony at the Western Wall on Thursday night, IDF soldiers being sworn in to the Shimshon Brigade and their parents raised signs vowing not to participate in the evacuation of Homesh.

Homesh is a Jewish town in northern Samaria from which all Jews were expelled by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005 to demonstrate that the disengagement expulsion of Jews was not limited to Gaza. Since then, Jews have returned to Homesh time and time again, with the IDF expelling them each time, often on the Jewish Sabbath.

Steven Plaut writes on the man the Gulag could not break

At IsraPundit, Bill Levinson writes that the Democrats are now openly the party of Wall Street profiteering on cap and trade

Senator Gillibrand’s own words, from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, show that the real purpose of Barack Obama’s climate change legislation is to give Wall Street speculators yet another tulip bulb scheme to replace the mess (mortgage backed securities) for which we are still paying with a $750 billion stimulus package, various bailouts at the taxpayers’ expense, and ten percent unemployment.

We encourage our readers to circulate this article, and Senator Gillibrand’s own words, as widely as possible to show that Barack Obama’s cap and trade agenda has very little to do about protecting the environment and everything to do with lining the pockets of fat-cat Wall Street speculators, the same kind that gave us the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, at the expense of the American people. It is especially important to convey this message to the working people who make up the Democratic Party’s base. We also remind our readers that General Electric, which stands to benefit enormously from cap and trade, raised almost half a million dollars in bundled contributions to elect Barack Obama.

The entire thing is worth reading...

Edgar at the Jihad threat also writes about Mia Farrow's Anti-Israel Tantrum

I have seen some pretty insane anti-Israel rants recently but the Mia Farrow CNN interview I saw yesterday probably takes the biscuit. I tried to find the interview to link to - but it is not on either the CNN site or youtube yet. I didn't catch the start of the interview but my understanding is that the rationale for the interview was that Mia Farrow had visited Gaza as part of her role as 'UNICEF Ambassador'. I heard her say something like the suffering of the Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank was 'the worst ever seen in the world', but that was nothing compared to what she said in response to the interviewer Rosemary Church's question about whether her role had led her to see the suffering of Israeli children from Qassam rocket attacks. Her response was that the Qassam rockets fired at them

"were only filled with mud".

At the JIDF, a story on how the Jews dominated Israel in 1695

..No settlement in the land of Israel has a name of Arabic extraction. The names of settlements are mostly of Hebrew extraction; some of Greek or Latin-Roman. In fact, no Arab settlement (except for Ramla) has had an original Arabic name to this day. Most names of Arab settlements are of Hebrew or Greek extraction which have been impaired and replaced by meaningless names in Arabic.

There is no meaning in Arabic for the names Acre, Haifa, Jaffa, Nablus, Gaza or Jenin and the names of cities, such as Ramallah, El-Halil and El-Kuds have no historical or philological roots in Arabic. In the year 1696, the year in which the tour was taken, Ramallah, for example, was called Beit El, Hebron was called Hebron and Mearat HaMachpelah was called El Chalil (a name for Abraham of the Bible). The land was, on the whole, empty and desolate; the inhabitants were few and concentrated in the cities of Jeusalem, Acre, Safed, Jaffa, Tiberius and Gaza. Most of the inhabitants of the cities were Jews, the others were Christian; there were very few Moslems, mostly nomadic Bedouins.

The Saints of Socialism and the Religion of Radicalism

2009-10-21T22:35:00.001-04:00

A magazine features a cover photo of Obama with a halo beaming behind his head in the likeness of the murals of medieval saints. Women faint on hearing his speeches. He delivers those speeches with lines and cadences borrowed from his mentor, a radical clergyman. "In a way Obama is standing above the country, above the world. He's sort of god. He's going to bring all different sides together," proclaimed Newsweek editor Evan Thomas.

Barack Obama is of course a messiah, one of the latest in a long line of socialist messiahs, men whom socialists and liberals believed were meant to radically reform the world, to teach people to overcome selfishness and greed, and unite as one.

The phenomenon of the quasi-religious worship of Obama is only shocking to those who fail to understand that socialism is itself a religion. Henri de Saint-Simon, the French 18th century thinker who coined the term socialism, described it as "The New Christianity". Like many early socialists he envisioned its ideas as a tool for returning to primitive Christianity. The famous 19th century historian Renan explicitly made the comparison, writing, "If you want to get an idea of what the first Christian communities where like, take a look at a local branch of the International Workingmen’s Association." The Association is better known as the First International, one of whose members was Karl Marx.

The original name of the Communist party that Karl Marx would go on to head was The League of the Just, whose stated goal was, "the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth, based on the ideals of love of one's neighbour, equality and justice". The same essential principles sum up the ideals of the Religious Left today which define religion in terms of social justice. Of course the end result of this process wipes everything from the blackboard, including God and the Bible, which become nothing more than props for socialist preaching. And that is exactly what the religion of socialism looks like.

Communism was never atheistic, it simply rejected one god, in favor of human divinities worshiped for bringing social justice to mankind, Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the whole gang of crimson murderers and thieves. These men formed cults of personality around them because they embodied the theology of socialism as a vital active work on earth. To socialist Christians they embodied the message of Jesus. To socialist Jews, the message of the prophets-- stripped of anything but social justice.

But what sort of religion is socialism exactly? What drives and motivates it? Socialism views individualism as sinful and unity as the solution to human evils. The brotherhood of all men, a phrase that resounds from the French Revolution down to Saint-Simon and to the Bolsheviks, idealizes a collectivist struggle and tyranny under the guiding hand of the great socialists.

Saint Simon, the original socialist, did not envision the common man running things. Instead he foresaw socialism as being overseen by "Men of Science" who would direct the industrialists on how to run society for the benefit of all. Two centuries later, virtually the same dogma runs through the administration of Barack Obama, with its manifold Czars and Harvard graduates directing everything from banks to car companies.

They are the Saints of Socialism, presumed to know better by virtue of their commitment to socialism, just as nothing could be built in Communist China without crediting Mao's red book as its inspiration, and Stalin was presumed to know all there was to know every field better than its practitioners. The supernatural competence credited to Obama by his supporters must be seen in that light.

The paradox of socialism is that it demands equality for all, and yet insists that the common man is completely unfit to make his own decisions. Their argument is that individual man is too flawed, too bent on seeking personal advancement and wealth, and too little given to considering the needs of society as a whole, a flaw that he can only overcome in concert with others as part of a larger organization dedicated to the betterment of man. That same line of propaganda runs through the talking points of every socialist agenda, from health care nationalization to environmentalism to multilateralism. One bad. Many good.

The religion of organization is the theology of socialism. Only united toward common goals are men anything more than selfish hoarders. And since men individually are selfish, only transcendent individuals who can unselfishly see the larger vision and steer the world toward it, can be allowed to lead. Men who are "special", who play the role of the transformative messianic figure, smashing political and economic obstacles to create a new world order.

Or as disgraced former Presidential candidate Gary Hart put it;

He is in fact an agent of transformation. He is not operating on the same plane as ordinary politicians, and this makes him seem elusive to the conventional press and the traditional politicians. His instinct for the moment and the times is orders of magnitude more powerful than the experience claimed by others. Experience in the old ways is irrelevant experience. In an age of great transformation, experience of the past is worthless because it is a barrier to the breakthrough gesture...

The past is worthless, so the transformative figure need not have any actual qualifications. Experience is irrelevant because it is rooted in the past that is going to be demolished anyway. Who needs to know how many states there are or when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In the brave new America, there will be no states and Columbus Day will be the new Nakba.

The idea of the transformative figure plays a key role for radicals, who often have tossed aside even liberal theology in favor of radicalism. Religion to them is social change, their saints were martyred while protesting for the oppressed, and their messiah is the avatar of social change, a man who shatters the links to the old ways, ushering in a new society and new ways of thinking.

Chris Matthews was not being obsequious when he proclaimed, "This is the New Testament". He was literally having a socialist religious experience. One that many others in the media have experienced as well. When your religion is social change, the man who embodies that change is the messiah. His words are a New Testament, setting aside the old, in favor of the new. A new world order. Hope, and most of all change.

I have spoken mostly about Europe, but American radicalism also has a long history of creating such artificial manmade supernatural religions right down to the modern New Age movement. Spiritualism, promoted by liberal theologians in liberal Churches, once played a major role in America, tying in even the 19th century George Bush, one of the country's most famous ministers, and the great, great granduncle of George W. Bush.

In the 19th century radical Quakers like Isaac Post, promoted the predecessors of Oprah, namely the Fox sisters or Ascha Sprague, who traveled around the country, appearing on stages and claiming to communicate with the spirit world. In the process they also promoted everything from evolution to feminism and abolitionism while picking the pockets of gullible audiences. Their publications boasted names such as Banner of Light and The People's World.

While it is easy to dismiss Spiritualism as silly superstition today, in the 19th century they were known as Christian Rationalists, because they had essentially reduced religion to a science. And while that science was a collection of lunatic nonsense inspired by a man suffering from delusions, its premise denied the unknowable, replacing conventional theology, with one based on animism, spiritual transformation and social change-- elements heavily present in the Oprah crowd today.

"We're all here to come together – to appreciate our uniqueness and to treasure our diversity, and we're here to evolve to a higher plane . . . The reason I love Barack Obama is because he is an evolved leader who can bring evolved leadership to our country." Oprah Winfrey

The rhetoric is virtually the same, backed by the old Spiritualist notions that we are here to move on to a higher plane and a time of social transportation is here. Combined of course with socialism's driving force, the evolved leader who can embody that social change.

The New Age movement was not a radical break with the past, no more than Oprah's rebranded Tolle material is, both are successors of Spiritualism's radical past. The original version of the Spiritualist's Communion of Saints, in which the dead would return to uplift the living, has faded away. Along with the Fox Sisters knuckle rapping messages from the other side. But in its place has come environmentalism, which like Spiritualism fuses animism with radical politics, and is fed by the New Age movement.

The Spiritualists believed that the dead had returned with a message for mankind to cease its selfish ways and ascend to a new level. Environmentalists preach that the earth is alive and in peril, and calls on us to cease our selfish ways and ascend to a new way of living. Both mask supernatural dogma with a veneer of science. As absurd as Arthur Conan Doyle's search for fairies might seem today, he believed that he was applying strict scientific methodology to an important issue, no more and no less so than any environmentalist today.

The common element is transformation. The theology of socialism is one that promises transformation through collective action. Change is its religious experience. And those who teach the masses to Hope for Change, for the great evolutionary revolution, are its saints and messiahs.

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh...

Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence

Ezra Klein, The American Prospect

It is doubtful that any spiritualist could have better expressed this same set of ideas. The idea of Obama as a force that elevates, that causes you to experience yourself as an agent of historical change and that finally teaches us to transcend by envisioning an ideal America as a socialist kingdom of heaven on earth, where no one is hungry or sick or discriminated against... and the government led by him takes care of us all.

Not the word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh. Flesh is weak. Needy, greedy and selfish. Socialism is doctrine triumphing over humanity, Orwell's boot on the face of humanity, keeping us down for our own good. And if any of us have the gall to feel bad about it, that is where the preachers of the Socialist Word come in, to "inspire" and "elevate" us to be better cogs in the collectivist machine. To be agents of revolutionary social change.

We are the ones we have been waiting for. Hope and Change. Some must sacrifice for the good of all.

The Myth of the World Community

2009-10-20T22:28:00.001-04:00

From the fluttering blue flag of the U.N. with its stylized symbol of the map of the world enclosed by olive tree branches, to the whole collection of global organizations and imagery right down to posters featuring children from every country holding hands, and the rest of the globalist propaganda-- Americans have been imprinted as never before from a very early age with the idea that they are part of a global community, rather than merely one nation. But behind the olive branches and the posters of smiling children, lies a very different truth entirely.

The entire notion that there is a world community is itself mostly a myth. The United Nations does represent most of the nations of the world, except for the really unpopular ones. But it does not represent the peoples of the world, only the heads of their regimes. And since most of the UN consists of nations that are not democracies and that do not have truly free and open elections-- the UN's much ballyhooed global community is nothing more than the well paid lackeys of tyrants, dictators, sheiks and assorted Third World leaders, along with their First World enablers.

Paradoxically the more the UN's membership expanded, the less democratic it became-- because most of the nations who joined were not democracies with open elections. As a result the expanding UN became a tool of tyrants, beginning with the USSR which successfully turned the UN into an Anti-Western body to serve its own agenda, with only the Security Council retaining some shards of decency.

Behind the fluttering blue flag and smiling multiracial children, are the representatives of a great many dictatorships dining out at expensive New York restaurants on your dime. Turtle Bay is not the home of a kinder and gentler world. It is the home of every two bit thug who wants to spend 3 hours ranting about his pet causes, as everyone from Khrushchev to Castro to Arafat to Chavez to Khadafi have demonstrated for us.

To accept the idea that tyrants and their appointed lackeys represent some sort of global consensus that supersedes the wishes of the free people of democratic nations such as the United States or Canada, is to embrace a global consensus that is undemocratic and even anti-democratic in nature, that rejects individual freedoms in favor of tyranny. And that in a nutshell is exactly what the United Nations is about.

Nor is it the exception to the rule. Centralization and federalization innately leads to less freedom and democracy, because the greater the scope of a system, the less veto power the public has over it. Even the EU, which is composed of individually democratic nations, openly disdained Ireland's No vote, insisting that the process would go forward regardless. That is an inevitable outcome when a political system becomes so large that it can only be run by bureaucrats and diplomats who have six degrees of separation between them and any actual electorate... a dangerous situation that eventually allows them to cut the electorate out of the process altogether.

The conglomeration of bureaucracy and politicians without an electorate, translates into a political elite that becomes indistinguishable from tyranny. That is what the EU is, and that is what the UN aspires to be, a global government that answers to the powerful, not to the people. Presenting the bureaucrats and diplomats as representing something higher and nobler, a larger unity, helps the bitter medicine of tyranny go down easier, but no amount of blue flags, smiling children and talk about unity can entirely obscure the fact that such a transition is one that leaves democracy behind in favor of oligarchy.

What is so appealing about that larger unity anyway? The United States had its chance at a larger unity within a semi-democratic system ruled from London. Instead the Founders chose to fight a war in order to be able to make their own decisions locally by the American people. The UN and virtually every international organization erodes that right, in the name of compromise, brotherhood or just plain international political consolidation.

Politicians who already work within large political systems, find the idea of upscaling those systems immensely appealing. Somehow a system that serves 100 million people is better than one that serves 10 million people, and one that serves a billion people is even better. But in fact larger systems have a way of being less efficient and more wasteful, as well as far less democratic. The larger the political system, the more it's meant to grind the town meeting under it, to reduce the individual to a single vote or a political crank if he insists on political involvement, without traditional forms of political affiliation.

We are told repeatedly that multilateral policymaking is better than the unilateral kind. Which is a fancy way of saying that a committee is smarter than an individual, a notion that simply doesn't hold up. A committee is best at achieving a compromise that serves the interests of the more numerous or the more powerful. It is however least likely to achieve a worthwhile solution, only one that its members can agree on. And if most of those members answer to tyrants rather than to citizens, those agreements will be ones that serve the interests of tyrants.

That is why the UN brays incessantly about human rights, but only as a cudgel with which to beat those few member states who actually do have human rights. You will not see the Saudi treatment of women or the Chinese treatment of political dissidents on the table at the UN. But should an American drone take out a terrorist, or Israeli soldiers stand guard to keep terrorists out, should Western countries refuse Third World refugees or try to hold on to their free speech-- then the UN is naturally on the case.

The United Nations is not a world community, it is a community of tyrants. There is no world community, because most of the people of the world are not free to have any say in their own lives. To talk about the UN as if it has any moral standing, is as ridiculous as getting the guards and inmates of a prison to vote together on what conditions inside the prison should be like. The UN is not a force for peace, it is a force for maintaining the political status quo for its louder voices, and for grinding under those free countries they consider their enemies.

One day when all men are free, when the citizens of Muslim nations may believe what they choose, when the Chinese and Russian secret police forces have gone the way of the Gestapo, when the people of every nation can vote in free and open elections for the candidates of their choice-- then we may talk of a world community. But for now the rights of the citizens of free countries can only be vested in the autonomy of their own political systems. Any international agreements that compromise the independence of their political systems, also compromise the freedom of their citizens and the accountability of their representatives.

The White House Takes a Chokehold on the Media

2009-10-19T22:26:00.000-04:00

Even as the White House preaches tolerance toward Muslims and Sikhs, it is practicing intolerance, signaling that anyone who challenges the leaders of an embattled America is cynical, political and -- isn't this the subtext? -- unpatriotic... We should dread a climate where the jobs of columnists and comedians are endangered by dissent.

Maureen Dowd, New York Times, September 30, 2001

That was 2001, the Republicans were in the White House and liberals were busy lecturing us on the dangers of a climate where dissent is considered unpatriotic. Now it's 2009 and the liberals hold Congress and the White House and are busy creating a climate where dissent is un-American and the subtext is... criminal.

Where the worst that people like Maureen Dowd or Jacob Weisberg could dig up as examples of the Bush Administration creating a climate of intimidation was an offhand comment about Bill Maher praising the courage of the 9/11 terrorists or putting a positive spin on news from Iraq-- those days are now long behind us. If post 9/11, a few columnists faced public outrage for their comments, today the Obama Administration openly orchestrates political attacks against its media critics.

Whether it's FOX News or Rush Limbaugh or CNBC-- the Obama Administration has openly and shamelessly targeted dissenting media figures. And even told the press how they were going to do it. And naturally the same defenders of the press who furrowed their brows when Ari Fleischer suggested that maybe an obnoxious comedian should think twice before calling the 9/11 terrorists courageous and the US Air Force cowardly... are cheering the media crackdown on.

Obama's top people did their tour of the Sunday Morning talk shows to spread the message to a cooperative state run media that FOX News was to be sidelined. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, "it’s important not to have the CNN’s and the others of the world being led and following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization."

Had the Bush Administration gotten into the business of deciding that cable news networks with a liberal bias are not legitimate news organizations, the furor would have been endless. And the same columnists repeating the Obama Administration's talking points today, would have been the first to point out that this would mean that the government now gets to decide what a legitimate news network is or isn't, based on its level of favoritism to the White House.

Back in 2005, when the Bush Administration was merely paying less attention to the press and focusing on getting its message out through PR firms, Eric Boehlert at Salon hysterically claimed that this was part of a giant plot by the Bush Administration to destroy the press altogether. Boehlert wrote, "The Bush administration has been at war with the media from Day One. Is its real goal to undermine the press itself -- and thereby eliminate inconvenient truths?..." Boehlert then went on to give a description of the Bush Administration that could all too easily apply to the Obama Administration, "the Bush administration's well-documented mastery of cold-blooded political hardball, its record of contempt for journalism, its cavalier willingness to cross ethical lines in dealing with the press, and its arrogant assertion that it alone creates and controls reality".

But Boehlert's accusations would be far better directed toward the Obama Administration, whose White House Communications Director Anita Dunn gloated publicly;

"Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn't absolutely control... Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why the campaign was saying it. One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters. ... We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it."

There could hardly be a better textbook case of contempt for journalism and arrogance in believing that it and it alone controls reality.

At no time did the Bush Administration create an Operation Matthews to target Chris Matthews. Or go on talk shows to announce that the White House no longer considers CNN a news outlet. Mostly the Bush White House dealt with the media's liberal bias by trying to talk around them. By contrast the Obama Administration is not satisfied with having the allegiance of the majority of the press, but actually conducts wars against that fraction of the media that it does not yet control.

Naturally Boehlert sees no attempt by the Obama White House to create its own reality by trying to intimidate and directly attack media outlets that broadcast reports critical of its policies. These days he works at Media Matters pushing the Obama Administration's segregation of dissenting media outlets line, specifically FOX News. The thinking apparently is that the first step is to prevent any other media outlets from repeating any stories that FOX News breaks. After all nothing can be allowed to interfere with the White House's media echo chamber in which reporters repeat White House talking points to the public and back to the White House again.

That is not journalism. It is very literally propaganda. And calling on the media to segregate dissenting reporters and channels from the propaganda stream is an attempt by a faltering administration to create its own reality in defiance of the actual reality outside. The Obama Administration has tried to create its own economic reality, its own military reality, its own diplomatic reality and above all else, its own spin reality. And to do that, to make sure that the public hears nothing but the White House talking points day in and day out, you need control of the press.

Lenin's technique for seizing power in a city was to first grab the telegraph office in order to be able to control communications, then the electricity to control power, the railway stations to control transportation, the police stations to control enforcement, and ration cards to control food distribution. The first step though was to control communications. And when Anita Dunn, who considers Mao her favorite political philosopher, boasts about the Obama campaign's ability to control the media and feed unfiltered propaganda to he American public... the key word remains, "control".

And the stunning hypocrisy of the media, which repeatedly accused the Bush Administration of suggesting that its dissenters are unpatrotic or unamerican, in turning around now and calling FOX News "unamerican", as Jacob Weisberg does in a Newsweek column, demonstrates not only their bias, but their fundamental lack of standards of any kind. Boehlert and Weisberg and Dowd are not journalists, though they do get up to wave the ink stained flag and salute the masthead at every occasion. Rather they are propagandists willing to say anything to promote whatever the liberal agenda might be at the moment.

But the fallacy of both the White House and its adoring media fans is in believing that controlling the media also means controlling the American public. Health care nationalization isn't failing because of FOX news, it's failing because the public doesn't like what it sees. FOX news played its part, but the Obama administration's combination of deceit and incompetence sealed the deal. And while the rest of the media is content to explain the White House's talking points to America, FOX News is actually asking the hard questions about the people in power.

If dissent is now unamerican and if repeating the White House's talking points has become the essence of true journalism, then the claims made about the White House during the Bush Administration have finally come true... one administration later.

Why Left Wing Anti-Zionism is Anti-Semitism

2009-10-18T22:42:00.005-04:00

In a clear demonstration of just how "progressive" they really are, the Anti-Israel left is hard at working trying to revive the medieval blood libel. First the Swedish daily Aftonbladet repeated Palestinian Arab propaganda about medically impossible organ thefts, and then the left wing Counterpunch magazine run by Saddam supporter Alexander Cockburn printed an article actually using medieval blood libels against Jews as proof. There is something striking about an Anti-Semitic radicalization on the left so extreme that after being accused of using organ thefts as a modern day blood libel, it actually tries to revive and legitimize medieval blood libels.

Leftists like Alexander Cockburn naturally claim they're not Anti-Semitic, but rather Anti-Zionist. Indeed Alexander Cockburn published a book "The Politics of Anti-Semitism" dedicated to that premise. But as implausible as the premise that an enthusiastic defender of Saddam Hussein like Cockburn and so many of the left, who nevertheless obsessively attack Israel for human rights violations, are not displaying a clear double standard... the Anti-Zionist, not Anti-Semitic argument flies out the window when you're publishing articles reviving medieval blood libels against Jews, sourced from the likes of "Israel Shamir", the pseudonym of a Swedish Neo-Nazi, and another regular at Counterpunch, who writes articles about Jews with charming titles like "The Vampire Killers," "Poisoning Wells," "Kugel Eaters" and "Bloodcurdling Libel".

Cockburn and his ilk though are simply the leading edge of left wing Anti-Semtism, dipping into the foulest wells of bigotry and unashamed to harvest the rotting fruit of Goebbels and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Like much of the European left, the American far left is beginning to abandon the "Anti-Zionism not Anti-Semitism" pretense for the pure "medieval" stuff, which helps them bring Muslims on board, while directly carrying the war to their Jewish critics. Embracing unabashed Anti-Semitism allows the left to discard any defensiveness regarding the double standard they maintain toward Israel, and simply damn Jews as a whole.

But that same attitude is pervasive in more subtle forms among the left in general. Take a visit by Mia Farrow to Gaza, where she naturally condemned Israel closing its border with the Hamas run territory. Did she stop to condemn Hamas' ongoing campaign of violence against Israelis? Naturally.

Farrow also criticized militant rockets, advising Gazans "not to give the international community ammunition to view you in a negative way." Stopping them, she said, could lead to greater international aid.

She did not condemn Hamas' rocket attacks on civilian towns because they're wrong. No, she condemned them because it gives biased people "ammunition" to see the otherwise non-violent and idealistic Hamas terrorists in "a negative way". And of course if Hamas were to stop, there would be more aid coming their way.

The inherent double standard speaks volumes about Farrow's view toward the right of Jews and Palestinian Arabs to live. But it's hardly unique to a moderately obscure Hollywood actress, it has become a commonplace attitude on the left to presume that Israel has no right to defend the lives of its citizens, because those lives are somehow inferior to those of their attackers. It is of course not a new attitude, only an old attitude coming to the fore among the left once again.

Historically Anti-Semitism was a common approach on the part of the European left toward Jews, damned for their unwillingness to assimilate into the stream of workers, lawyers and peasants so dear to the left, and of course for their capitalism. The pamphlets and books of Socialists and Marxists regularly contained Anti-Semitic invective... long before they had managed to seize on Zionism as the issue. Marx himself used language toward Jews not too distant from what Goebbels would propound in the next century. In the early 20th century, Communists routinely supported Russian and Arab pogroms of Jews. In fact that support led to a New York boycott of the Communist rag,The Daily Worker by newspaper sellers that effectively destroyed its circulation.

Leftist Anti-Semitism began to decline somewhat in the 20th century as the left achieved its goals of destroying Judaism in Europe and America, and recruiting large numbers of Jews into the ranks of socialist movements. A variety of tactics was utilized from the straightforward purges of the USSR which utilized its "Jewish Section" to shut down synagogues, imprison and execute Jewish clergy and outlaw all Zionist movements; to using Socialist Anti-Jewish newspapers in Europe and America, such as the Forward aimed at a Jewish audience, that routinely mocked Judaism and promoted Socialism as the only answer.

Israel however represented a fundamental breach of the Socialist agenda that demanded that Jews assimilate, abandon their religious beliefs and work to build socialism in the countries in which they live. Instead Israel's rebuilding gained a major boost from Jews who "turned their backs" on the German socialist and Russian Communist movements, and worked to build their own country instead. And that is a "Heresy" that the left has never forgiven the Jews for.

The agenda of the left was an end to ethnicity and religion, a one world government in which everyone would be brothers. Rebuilding Israel flew in the face of that agenda. It was separatist and nationalist, and when the USSR staked its bet on the Arab world-- for the left, the deal was done. Israel was to be the enemy of the left. Passing time has exchanged the labels to conform with political trends. But behind all of them is the old classic Anti-Semitism of Karl Marx who blamed the Jews for popularizing capitalism, writing, "The god of the Jews had been secularized and has become the god of this world... Money is the jealous god of the Jews"

H.G. Wells, that great believer that all of mankind must be ruled by a benevolent one world state, stated the position of the left very clearly in "The Shape of Things to Come". And that position is worth hearing, because beneath all the hypocritical nonsense about human rights violations that the left spews from every corner... it lays out the grievance of the left against the Jews... and how the left's Anti-Semitism is linked to its Anti-Zionism.

The Jews had been able to keep themselves a people apart, eating peculiar food and following distinctive religious practices, a nation within the nation, in every state in the world. They had been a perpetual irritant to statesmen, a breach in the collective solidarity everywhere...

It might have been supposed that a people so widely dispersed would have developed a cosmopolitan mentality and formed a convenient linking organization for many world purposes, but their special culture of isolation was so intense that this they neither did nor seemed anxious to attempt. After the World War the orthodox Jews played but a poor part in the early attempts to formulate the Modern State, being far more preoccupied with a dream called Zionism... It emphasized their traditional wilful separation from the main body of mankind. It irritated the world against them, subtly and incurably.

H.G. Wells' case against Israel is also his case against the Jews. They are one and the same, both damned for undermining the "collective solidarity", for failing to be "cosmopolitan" and helping to link together the world into Wells' envisioned socialist modern state.

And to this day, the left characterizes Jews as good or bad, based on their willingness to assimilate, abandon their distinctive religious practices and help create the "Modern State". Good Jews help enable the "Modern State". Bad Jews hold to religious practices and are Pro-Israel, and therefore undermine the "Modern State."

It is also noteworthy that for all of H.G. Wells' supposed progressivism and futurism, his view of the Jews was as filled with medieval bigotry as Counterpunch writing today about Jews drinking human blood. But then the progressivism of the left has always been a sham, its origins are rooted in a primitive dream of one state ruled by enlightened men who oversee the human rabble beneath their feet. A vision that is pre-modern and fundamentally hostile to the notion of individual rights rooted in independent republics.

And finally H.G. Wells envisions what the future of Israel and the Jews will be. It is also worth noting, because it is the same future that the left has been pushing Jews toward for a long time now.

And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community. The Jews were not suppressed; there was no extermination... but under the Tyranny there was never any specific persecution at all; yet they were educated out of their oddity and racial egotism in little more than three generations. Their attention was distracted from Moses and the Promise to Abraham and the delusion that God made his creation for them alone, and they were taught the truth about their race. The world is as full as ever it was of men and women of Semitic origin, but they belong no more to “Israel”.

That is the left's envisioned Final Solution. No extermination, no "specific persecution", just the end of the Jews as anything more than another DNA strand working its way through the genetic packaging of the human race. And they have succeeded all too well. The Soviet Union virtually wiped out Jewish identity in Russia and widespread secularism has done much of the rest in the West. Israel has become the holdout, the largest collection of Jews in the world.

And so the left is driven to destroy Israel. To wipe it out one way or another, and make room for the "Modern State", in which there is no G-d, no bible and no room for a bunch of Semitic nomads who had the presumption to try and talk to Him. In which men are no more than smart apes, G-d is a figment of the primitive imagination and the only gods are the enlightened rulers of the One World State.

To understand why Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism are one, we need look no further than H.G. Wells who wrote, "Zionism is an expression of Jewish refusal to assimilate."

That one sentence is the final thesis on the left's ugly legacy of hatred for Israel and the Jews. It demonstrates why Anti-Zionism cannot be detached from Anti-Semitism, because behind it is a denunciation of Jewish identity. That is the ideological fuel behind the Anti-Zionism of both Western liberals and their Arab allies. The Western liberals demand to know why the Jews just won't assimilate. The Arabs demand to know why the Jews weren't happy being second class Dhimmis in their own country. Anti-Zionism is the denial of the rights of the Jews as a people based on Anti-Semitism, the denial of the equality of the Jews. That double standard joins Anti-Semitsm and Anti-Zionism into two words for the same idea, that the Jews should not exist.

Goodbye Columbus - America Apologizes for its Own Existence

2009-10-17T21:40:00.004-04:00

Last week was Columbus Day, once considered a major event, the holiday has been undergoing a decline in recent years. Columbus Day parades have met with protests and some have been deemphasized or outright eliminated.

In California, Columbus Day became Indigenous People's Day, which sounds vaguely like a Marxist terrorist group's holiday. But while it's tempting to put that down to California's political correctness, in South Dakota, Columbus Day became Native American Day, and that is a trend that other states are likely to follow, as protests mounted under the aegis of La Raza (The Race- the Hispanic KKK) continue to grow. And while none have thus far followed Venezuela's lead in renaming it Día de la Resistencia Indígena, or Day of Indigenous Resistance, which indeed is a Marxist terrorist group's holiday, the whole notion of celebrating the discovery of America has come to be seen as somehow shameful and worst of all, politically incorrect.

About the only factor still keeping Columbus on the calendar in places like New York is his role in the Italian-American community, which have made many Mayors and Governors reluctant to toss the great explorer completely overboard. But while Ferdinand and Isabella may have brought Columbus back in chains, modern day political correctness banishes him to the darkened dungeon of non-personhood, erasing him from history and replacing him with a note reading, "I'm Sorry We Ever Discovered America."

But this is about more than one single 15th century Genoan with a complicated life who was neither a monster nor a saint. It is about whether America really has any right to exist at all. Is there any argument against celebrating Columbus Day, that cannot similarly be applied to celebrating the 4th of July?

If Columbus is to be stricken from American history books in favor of ideological thugs like Malcolm X or Caesar Chavez, who may be getting his own national holiday soon courtesy of Barack Obama (and for bonus points see if you can guess which regime's flag, Chavez's flag on the left most resembles), then America itself must soon follow. If Columbus' crimes are that he enabled European settlement of America and slavery-- those same charges can easily be put at America's door as well. And if the settlement of non-Indians in North America is illegitimate, then any national state they created is inherently illegitimate as well.

It is of course easier to hack away at a nation's soul by beginning with the lower branches. Columbus is an easier target than America itself, though La Raza of course considers both colonialist and illegitimate. But Americans are less likely to protest over the slow banishing of Columbus to the politically correct Gulag of history, than over banishing America itself, which after all was named after another one of those colonialist explorers, Amerigo Vespucci. And so first they came for Columbus Day and then for the Fourth of July.

The battles being fought over Columbus Day foreshadow the battles that will one day be fought over the 4th of July. And as Columbus Day joins the list of banned holidays in more and more cities and states across America, one day there may not be a 4th of July, just a day to remember the atrocities of the colonists against the indigenous inhabitants of North America, as we will be treated to PBS documentaries comparing George Washington to Hitler and calling the Declaration of Independence a colonialist mandate. Such documentaries of course already exist, they just haven't gone mainstream. Yet.

We celebrate Columbus Day and the 4th of July because history is written by the winners. Had the Aztecs, the Mayans or the Iroquois Confederation developed the necessary technology, skills and motivation to cross the Atlantic and begin colonizing Europe, the fate of its native inhabitants would have doubtlessly been just as ugly, if not uglier. There are naturally different perspectives on history based on which side you happen to be on.

To Americans, the Alamo is a shining moment of heroism. To the Mexicans who were themselves the inheritors of a colonialist empire far more ruthless than anything to be found in North America, the entire war represents an American plot to conquer Mexican territory. And neither side is altogether wrong, but choosing which version of history to go by is the difference between whether you are an American or a Mexican. A nation's mythology, its paragons and heroes, its founding legends and great deeds, are its soul. To replace them with another culture's perspective on its history is to kill that soul.

And that is the ultimate goal of political correctness, to kill America's soul. To stick George Washington, Patrick Henry, Jefferson, John Smith, James Bowie, Paul Revere, Hamilton, Adams, Franklin and all the rest on a shelf in a back room somewhere, and replace them with timelier Marxist and liberal heroes. Move over Columbus, Caesar Chavez needs this space. Forget Davy Crockett, the heroic General Santa Ana who was caught fleeing dressed as a woman will now be our hero for his resistance to colonialist imperialism. No more American heroes need apply. Followed of course by no more America.

This is how it all begins. Probably the final bit of politically correct lunacy is a headline in the Columbus Dispatch about the Columbus Day festival in the city of Columbus, Ohio. It reads, "Italian Festival honors controversial explorer with its own Columbus Day parade". Once the great discover of America, Columbus is now called "controversial" by a newspaper named after him, in a city named after him.

Can the day when USA Today has a headline reading, "Some cities still plan controversial 4th of July celebration of American independence" be far behind?

Friday Afternoon Roundup - J Street's Anti-Israel Hate Fest Goes off the Rails

2009-10-16T18:00:00.001-04:00

Shabbat night update - Parshat Bereishis - The Sacrifice of the Shabbat

The Torah begins with G-d creating the world. Day by day we are told what is created, and then on the seventh day after having created everything from all the stars in the universe to the tiniest bugs and finally man, G-d rests. But why does G-d rest? Is he a man that he becomes tired and needs to take a day off?

The Lord does not weary and falter. And the Sabbath is more than a day defined by negative, by the absence of work. The Sabbath is not merely the absence of work. It is the completion of work. All too often we tend to think of the Sabbath in terms of what we can't do, but that is not what the Sabbath is. The Sabbath is the culmination of a properly spent week. For six days G-d had brought material life into existence. On the seventh and final day he declared a rest from the material in favor of the spiritual.

The first week though marks the expulsion of man from the Garden of Eden, and the end of the first welfare state. And two curses are attached to that expulsion in measure to the sins that caused it.

Read more at The Sultan's Parsha - The Sacrifice of the Shabbat

The Pro-Hamas, Anti-Israel group J Street is holding its first annual gala dinner and thanks to the Obama Administration's backing, they've managed to bring a lot of congressmen on board. This is meant to be a major coup for the Anti-Israel organization by bringing a third of congress on board, giving them equal leverage to AIPAC.

But their number is already dwindling. The Weekly Standard helped inform one of the few Republicans on the list, Rep Mike Castle, of just what kind of feast this was, and he dropped out... particularly when told that one of J Street's featured speakers had a history of making some very ugly remarks.

This was followed by the departure of New York Senator Schumer and his pet Gillibrand. Followed by the departure of Senator Cochran and Congressman Mike Ross. Most of them have said that they have no idea how their names got on the list, which suggests that either J Street stupidly put politicians on the list without checking first, or that they're having second thoughts.

Today Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Reps. Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Leonard Boswell (D-IA) also joined those departing the J Street list. Lincoln again claimed not to know her name was on the list.

So to pinch hit, J Street has brought in Obama's Saudi National Security Advisor, James L. Jones, a truly perfect figure to match with the likes of Al Franken, Robert Wexler and Chuck Hagel. And of course you can't forget the Saudi backed hate group MPAC...

Condemning America for “Terrorism”: In response to America’s attack on terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in August 1998, MPAC Senior Advisor Maher Hathout said: “Our country is committing an act of terrorism. What we did is illegal, immoral, unhuman, unacceptable, stupid and un-American.” He also said America’s anti-terror action would be to blame for future hate crimes in the U.S.: “If our country commits hate crimes, why should we not expect the uneducated to do the same?” (Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1998)

“Hezbollah Members are Freedom Fighters”: “Hezbollah is fighting for freedom…This is legitimate.” (MPAC Senior Advisor Maher Hathout, at the National Press Club, June 18, 1998.)

“The Only Thing They Can Do is Throw Bombs”: “The only thing [Arab terrorists in Israel] can do is throw a bomb in a market or send somebody to suicide, we don’t have enough ability to target real targets in Israel.” (MPAC Senior Advisor Maher Hathout, in a Panel Discussion on Capitol Hill, June 18, 1998.)

Defending Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy: After Garaudy was fined by a French court for denying the Holocaust: “Garaudy is not the first one to question the holocaust…As usual, Muslim organizations and leaders in the United States were silent on the sentence imposed on Garaudy. The exception was the Muslim Public Affairs Council that issued an immediate condemnation statement…to persecute him for his right to express his opinion and question some events is a clear violation of his basic human rights…Muslim organizations should have taken the case to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.” (The Minaret, Vol.20, No.3 [1998])

Accusing Israel of “Defaming Mohammed”: “Israel created an environment of hate, and it bears responsibility for dehumanizing Muslims, defaming the Prophet [Mohammed], and supporting policies of Judaicizing [sic] the Holy Land.” (MPAC Director Salam al-Marayati, MPAC Action Alert, July 7, 1997)

Comparing Muslim Terrorists to America’s Founding Fathers: “Most Islamic movements have been branded as terrorists as a result of the rising extremism from a handful of militants. American freedom fighters hundreds of years ago were also regarded as terrorists by the British.” (MPAC Director Salam al-Marayati, The Minaret, June 1996)

And that's only one speaker... and then there's Josh Healy.

The dinner is essentially a festival of radical left wing groups with appearances from names all too familiar to Israelis, such as radical left wing thug "Rabbi" Arik Ascherman, who has harassed Israeli farmers and whose group "Rabbis for Human Rights" vandalized farms and vineyards, to promote the Arab takeover of these properties. There's Colette Avital, JJ Goldberg of the Forward, a Fatah government minister, Robert Malley, whose name came up during the election when the Obama Administration was forced to sever ties with him after his contacts with Hamas became public. There;s Hagit Ofran the Director, Peace Now's Settlement Watch, whose ethnic cleansing goal is to drive Jewish farmers beyond the green line off their land. There's a representative from the fraudulent Breaking the Silence group, the Jordanian Ambassador, Amir Peretz, who couldn't even look through binoculars the right way... and Matt Yglesias.

Chuck Hagel, Saddam's Republican, heads up the festivities. I guess Trafficant just couldn't make it.

If any of the following Congresscritters is in your district, feel free to call or drop a line telling him or her that they're supporting the well funded equivalent of an ANSWER event by an Anti-Israel group which includes a speaker who called for the destruction of the State of Israel.

The full list of shame for now includes in the Senate "great Americans" like Al Franken, Russ Feingold, Pat Leahy, Bernie Sanders, John Kerry and Jim Webb. And of course the as of yet unconvicted Ron Buris and Chris Dodd.

Along with...

Diane Feinstein, Jeanne Shaheen, Daniel Akaka, Sherrod Brown, Maria Cantwell, Tom Carper, Bob Casey, Byron Dorgan, Kay Hagan, Tim Johnson, Herb Kohl, Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Jeff Merkley, Mark Pryor, Jon Tester, Mark Udall, Tom Udall, Sheldon Whitehouse

On the House of Representatives side we have a few more criminals like Charlie Rangel, then there's Barbara Lee, Russ Carnahan, CAIR stooge Keith Ellison, Barney Frank, John Conyers, Jesse Jackson, Jr, who but for a million would be Senator Burris, Sheila Jackson Lee, Dennis Kucinich, Dennis Kucinich and the final Baghdad Boy, Jim McDermott.

But the list also includes people who should have known better, like Carolyn Maloney, Lynn Woolsey, Jane Harman and Steve Israel.

The full list features, Leonard Boswell, Charles Boustany, Bruce Braley, Corrine Brown, Lois Capps, Michael Capuano, Chris Carney, Andre Carson, Yvette Clarke, James Clyburn, Howard Coble, Steve Cohen, Gerry Connolly, John Conyers, Jim Cooper,
Elijah Cummings, Danny Davis, Susan Davis, Peter DeFazio, Dianna DeGette, William Delahunt, Rosa DeLauro, John Dingell, Lloyd Doggett, Mike Doyle, Steve Driehaus, Donna Edwards, Anna Eshoo, Eni Faleomavaega, Sam Farr, Chaka Fattah, Bob Filner, Bill Foster, Neil Abercrombie, Jason Altmire, Michael Arcuri, Brian Baird, Tammy Baldwin, Brian Bilbray, Earl Blumenauer, John Boccieri, Gabrielle Giffords, Charlie Gonzalez, Raul Grijalva, Luis Gutierrez, John Hall, Debbie Halvorson, Jim Himes, Maurice Hinchey, Ruben Hinojosa, Mazie K. Hirono, Eleanor Holmes-Norton, Rush Holt, Mike Honda, Jay Inslee, Steve Israel, Eddie Bernice Johnson, Hank Johnson, Steve Kagen, Marcy Kaptur, Carolyn Kilpatrick, Mary-Jo Kilroy
Ron Kind, John Larson, David Loebsack, Ben Ray Lujan, Stephen Lynch, Betsy Markey
Ed Markey, Eric Massa, Michael McCaul, Betty McCollum, James McGovern, Gregory Meeks, Brad Miller, George Miller, Harry Mitchell, Dennis Moore, Gwen Moore
James Moran, Chris Murphy, Scott Murphy, Richard Neal, Glenn Nye, John Olver, Solomon Ortiz, Frank Pallone, Bill Pascrell, Ed Pastor, Donald Payne, Ed Perlmutter
Tom Perriello, Chellie Pingree, Jared Polis, David Price, Nick Rahall, Ciro Rodriguez, Lucille Roybal-Allard, Bobby Rush, John Salazar, Loretta Sanchez, Jan Schakowsky, Adam Schiff, Joe Sestak, Carol Shea-Porter, Louise Slaughter, Jackie Speier, John Tanner, John Tierney, Mike Thompson, Paul Tonko, Ed Towns, Nikki Tsongas, Diane Watson, Henry Waxman, David Wu, John Yarmuth

Note, this list may change if more of the congresscitters drop out of the J Street Hamaslympics.

The Weekly Standard is to be credited for doing the reporting and creating the first signs of the exodus from J Street's attempt to legitimize its pro-terrorist political influence.

J Street is predictably enough shrieking SWIFT BOAT, and asking its members to call and beg the congressmen and Senators who still haven't dropped out to stay. Though how exactly pointing out that one of your speakers called for the destruction of Israel... remains unclear.

That is at least slightly less delusional than J Street chief Jeremy Ben Ami whining that Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren doesn't want to attend an Anti-Israel event. Well gosh, do you see the Iranian ambassador coming down to AIPAC or ZOA.

For more J Street reading, see J Street' Saudi connection at Pajamas Media

Moving beyond J Street now, a Washington Post article raises a whole new Constitutional question about Obama. Namely whether Obama can legally accept the Nobel in the first place.

Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution, the emolument clause, clearly stipulates: "And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State."

The award of the peace prize to a sitting president is not unprecedented. But Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson received the honor for their past actions: Roosevelt's efforts to end the Russo-Japanese War, and Wilson's work in establishing the League of Nations. Obama's award is different. It is intended to affect future action. As a member of the Nobel Committee explained, the prize should encourage Obama to meet his goal of nuclear disarmament. It raises important legal questions for the second time in less than 10 months -- questions not discussed, much less adequately addressed anywhere else.

The five-member Nobel commission is elected by the Storting, the parliament of Norway. Thus the award of the peace prize is made by a body representing the legislature of a sovereign foreign state. There is no doubt that the Nobel Peace Prize is an "emolument" ("gain from employment or position," according to Webster).

...

Second, the president has indicated that he will give the prize money to charity, but that does not solve his legal problem. Giving that $1.4 million to a charity could give him a deduction that would reduce his income taxes by $500,000 -- not a nominal amount. Moreover, the money is not his to give away. It belongs to the United States: A federal statute provides that if the president accepts a "tangible or intangible present" for more than a minimal value from any foreign government, the gift "shall become the property of the United States."

This is at least the second time that Obama has run afoul of the emolument clause. On June 3, 2009, the day before he gave his speech in Cairo on relations with the Muslim world, he accepted (and even donned) the bejeweled Collar of the King Abdul Aziz Order of Merit, Saudi Arabia's highest honor, from the hands of King Abdullah. (President Bush was awarded the Order in January last year.)

Aside from whether a president shows questionable judgment in accepting any preferment from the House of Saud named for its anti-Semitic modern founder, there is another issue: The Collar is clearly a chivalric "order" of the Saudi monarchy conferring a rank in that system of titled royalty and nobility. It is not a mere decoration or campaign ribbon. There does not seem to be any record of congressional permission asked for, much less granted, for the president to accept this bauble. Washington, Madison and Hamilton would have clearly understood that the Abdul Aziz Order falls under the same ban they had in mind for any public officials coveting awards made under the honors system of the British monarchy.

Taking President Obama at his word that the Nobel award is "an affirmation of American leadership," Congress should allow him to accept the award. The prize money, which legally belongs to the United States, ought to be applied by Congress to some worthy cause, such as reducing the deficit.

The media in general is likely to sidestep yet another violation of the Constitution by Obama.

Just as the media will ignore the revelations about Anita Dunn , Obama's Maoist White House Communications Director

And then the third lesson and tip actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao Tse Tung and Mother Teresa, not often coupled together, but the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is, you're going to make choices. You're going to challenge. You're going to say "why not." You're going to figure out how to do things that have never been done before.

But here's the deal — these are your choices. They are no one else's. In 1947, when Mao Tse Tung was being challenged within his own party on his plan to basically take China over, Chiang Kai Shek and the nationalist Chinese held the cities that had the army. They had the airport. They had everything on their side, and people said, "How can you win? How can you do this? How can you do this, against all the odds against you?" And Mao Tse Tung said, "You know, you fight your war, and I'll fight mine."

The left, led by Media Matters has begun claiming that Anita Dunn did nothing wrong, and that lots of people have quoted Mao. One wonders if they would take that same position had a Bush White House spokesman quoted Hitler or even say George Wallace, who unlike Mao didn't kill millions of people. We all know the answer to that. Even Trent Lott who didn't say anything nearly as inflammatory was forced out over it.

In the case of Trent Lott, the media sold the assumption that a pro-Thurmond comment was also a pro-segregation comment. In this case the media is selling the double standard that Anita Dunn making positive statements about Mao is not at all an endorsement of his views or actions.

Media Matters' lame counterattack has been to drag out a quote from the campaign manager for Goldwater... of all people. That's a level of desperate obscurity that suggests that the bad folks at Media Matters are stretched very thin indeed. I suspect we should be grateful they didn't begin analyzing any quotes from the sister's nephew of Theodore Roosevelt.

The Media Matters attack gets even lamer when you read it

In his recent book, How to Win an Election, Stephen C. Shadegg cites a statement attributed to Mao Tse-tung: "Give me just two or three men in a village and I will take the village." Shadegg comments: " In the Goldwater campaigns of 1952 and 1958 and in all other campaigns where I have served as consultant I have followed the advice of Mao Tse-tung."

Now the Shadegg quote is not an endorsement of Mao himself, but of his strategy. By contrast Anita Dunn called Mao her favorite political philosopher and her retelling of his quote was framed by obvious admiration for his cause.

Additional quotes draw on nonsense like Bush telling Rove to read Mao's biography. Which again thoroughly ignores context in favor of setting up a strawman by claiming that Beck is against reading and or citing anything said by evil dictators, rather than that Beck was pointing out that Anita Dunn was admiringly quoting Mao.

Meanwhile continuing the roundup, JammieWearingFool reports that the great stimulus plan created 54 jobs for New York... at a cost of only 500 million dollars.

Which comes out to a dirt cheap 9 million dollars per job.

Obama's real stimulus plan accomplishment may have been to make welfare look like an economically sound alternative, since at least it would be cheaper than spending 9 million per job.

Munz's Place has more from Glenn Beck on the stimulus job creation scam

Continuing the roundup, Atlas Shrugs has the unbelievable story that Russian inspectors will be inspecting US nuclear sites

The plan, which Fox News has learned was agreed to in principle during negotiations, would constitute the most intrusive weapons inspection program the U.S. has ever accepted.

Russia and the United States have tentatively agreed to a weapons inspection program that would allow Russians to visit nuclear sites in America to count missiles and warheads.

The plan, which Fox News has learned was agreed to in principle during negotiations, would constitute the most intrusive weapons inspection program the U.S. has ever accepted.

Talk about giving away the keys to the store...

Thanks to Obama there will be no missile shield over Eastern Europe, but there will be Russian agents in US nuclear sites.

Little wonder that Hillary now has a better approval rating than Obama

Via Jihad Watch, the story of renegade winemakers in Hamas territory

Abu Mohammed goes to great lengths to enjoy his wine in Gaza. Risking the wrath of the enclave's Islamist Hamas rulers, he sneaks to the rooftop of an abandoned house to make his own nectar.

Here in his secret hideaway, Abu Mohammed carefully turns grapes into home-made vintages he savors only in the privacy of his own home, far away from the disapproving eyes of Hamas police and Gaza's conservative society.

Making own wine

"I started making my own wine after Hamas took power," says the 40-something civil servant who, like all the other Gaza bootleggers interviewed by AFP, declined to give their real names for fear of being arrested.

"I asked friends how to do it and I did some research on the Internet," he says.

Abu Mohammed risks much to indulge his palate.

I'm thinking that maybe Abu Mohammed should have reconsidered voting for an Islamist party in the first place. Of course since he's identified as a member of the US subsidized PA bureaucracy, he's likely a Fatah henchman in the first place.

Steven Plaut has the story of radical left winger Joel Beinin

Beinin may be best known within academia for his tour of duty as president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), a position generally reserved for haters of Israel and enablers of Islamofascism. Beinin’s publication record [1] is largely a hodgepodge of books and articles smearing Israel or promoting Marxism [2], many of them appearing in pseudo-academic and in non-scholarly political magazines. (His book Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East, said one critic, “could have been written by a Soviet flunky back in the days of Comrade Brezhnev.”) Many academics, including some of Beinin’s colleagues at Stanford, have scoffed at his academic credentials. At least one Stanford professor has insisted [3] that Beinin never should have been granted tenure.

Beinin has denounced American “imperialism” [4] on Aljazeera, the network of choice for Osama bin Laden. Just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, he published an article [5] claiming that al-Qaeda’s hatred of America was a justified and understandable reaction to America’s oppressive policies. Beinin believes, in fact, that 9/11 was America’s comeuppance for its alliance with Israel. “The American empire is going down,” Beinin claims.

Sadly academia is all too full of trash like him.

Muslims Against Sharia updates us on the status of Iran's supposedly ailing or perhaps deceased Supreme Leader

And now that Obama is moving toward appeasing the Taliban, the Times has the interesting story of the consequences of Taliban appeasement

When ten French soldiers were killed last year in an ambush by Afghan insurgents in what had seemed a relatively peaceful area, the French public were horrified.

Their revulsion increased with the news that many of the dead soldiers had been mutilated — and with the publication of photographs showing the militants triumphantly sporting their victims’ flak jackets and weapons. The French had been in charge of the Sarobi area, east of Kabul, for only a month, taking over from the Italians; it was one of the biggest single losses of life by Nato forces in Afghanistan.

What the grieving nation did not know was that in the months before the French soldiers arrived in mid-2008, the Italian secret service had been paying tens of thousands of dollars to Taleban commanders and local warlords to keep the area quiet, The Times has learnt. The clandestine payments, whose existence was hidden from the incoming French forces, were disclosed by Western military officials.

The New Centrist may be leaving the blogging world

Steven Shamrak looks at the madness of a self-destructive world

I can't understand how the family of Mohammed (be it in Lebanon , Gaza , the West Bank, Syria , Jordan or Egypt ) can afford to have 8 children. He and his wife have not worked a day of their lives. They have been given a house or an apartment and food. Their children go to school and even a college. For 60 years his family has been benefiting from the generosity of the international community delivered by the United Nations. The family has been receiving education and medical care that most Arabs in the region can only dream about. The family is a part of the so-called Palestinians refugees' scam. They became the best-educated and looked after group in the Muslim world!

Mohammed's father did not work either. The only thing he had to do was to sit and smoke his pipe, as his son does now. Mohammed's wife, as her mother before her, is a willing participant of this global charade. Her main job is to reproduce and make more professional refugees, like Mohammed, in order to boost the legitimacy of the bogus claim of the fake Palestinian people and provide demographic ammunition to an arsenal of the anti-Israel 'coalition'. And she is proud that some of her sons, instead of finding a job, are willing to martyr themselves at any time by killing Jews and bring perverted and warped honor to the family, as well as money donated by Iraq in the past and by Saudi Arabia and Iran now.

Sixty years have passed since Israel won her independence. During this time Israel absorbed several millions of Jewish refugees, including 850,000 from Muslim countries. When WW2 ended, 50 million refugees were scattered across Europe . All of them have found a country where they can live and work, for themselves and their families. All this time the international community has already willingly and quite eagerly subsidized four generations of these professional refugees. For some perverted, deeply imbedded anti-Semitic reason, it makes sure that Mohammed and his family are the best cared for refugees in the world!

Mohammed does not need to do anything but sit and smoke his pipe and wait, as his father and grandfather did. By doing so he gives permission to Islamic political expansionistic machinery and traditional international anti-Semitism to make claims, on his behalf, that Jews took his land, and to prevent Israel from regaining full control over all Jewish land. Continuation of this travesty gives them an opportunity to maintain instability in the region, manipulate the price of oil at any time they wish, sell the arms to the Muslim countries with a high profit margin, build nuclear reactors for a huge amount of money, knowing that Israel will bomb them. In return Mohammed receives free shelter, food, education for his children and medical services. Not bad for a day of no work!

I just would like to ask American and European taxpayers: Do all of you receive free housing, food, education and medical treatment from your own government? If not, why do you allow your government to subsidize these professional international parasites? So-called Palestinians are the nuts and bolts of a huge machine called Islamic expansionism.

Obama's Health Care Euthanasia Plan for Senior Voters

2009-10-14T22:35:00.000-04:00

What happens when a politician takes a look at the demographics and realizes that he has a serious problem with one particular group? In this case the politician is Barack Hussein Obama, and the problematic demographic are senior citizens.

Obama's strongest base of support was among voters age 18 to 29, which is a fancy way of saying voters who didn't have enough experience with lying politicians to know better and were easily awed by stadium rallies, social media and stylized posters. Over 30 it was already a dead heat, and over 50 the voters trended McCain's way. And 2008 only worked because of a large youth vote turnout, a demographic that traditionally doesn't do big voter turnouts. To win in 2012, Obama must either maintain that level of youth turnout or somehow reduce the voter turnout by senior citizens. A tricky problem either way, one that nationalized health care is meant to solve.

In the past politicians have tried segregation, redistricting and voter suppression as solutions... but none of those are enough at a national level. Nationalized health care however can effectively kill two birds with one stone, by getting rid of some of the elderly, and giving youth voters a new shiny toy that only works so long as they don't use it. And of course giving back to Obama's core demographic of corrupt unions, in this case the corrupt Marxist thugs of SEIU.

Now most people living in countries with national health care plans like having them... so long as they don't actually have to use them very much. Nationalized health care works best as a safety net for those who need the occasional doctor's visit or treatment for a broken leg after an accident. The more services they need however, the worse their experience becomes. And the largest and heaviest users of health care services are usually the elderly.

Health care rationing, by both private and government plans, depends on providing a base of basic services to the most people, while trying to ration the more expensive services needed for patients with more serious health conditions. It's easy enough to pay for the occasional dentist's visit, mammogram or to set a broken leg... and it's even profitable, because both business and government have a financial interest in healthy workers. The government however has much less interest in the health of seniors when it begins to require spending thousands on expensive drugs, major surgeries and regular nursing care.

When the Czars used to travel to see Russia, their subordinates would go before them erecting two dimensional facades of villages in order to create the illusion of a thriving peasantry. These villages were known as Potemkin villages after the Russian minister who originated the clever notion. Even with the rise of Communism, Potemkin villages continued to be constructed to hide the dismal truth. Even when Nixon visited Russia in 1972, he encountered more Potemkin villages. But when he overflew the sites he saw that the facades were nothing more than an illusion.

ObamaCare is a giant Potemkin village. It looks good from the outside, until you actually need it, and then like all national health care programs, it does its best to get rid of you. And it is designed to look good to younger voters who will need it the least and therefore have the least negative encounters with it, while shoving the elderly into the refuse bin. Like a mirage, it provides a glittering image of food and water, but when you step forward and reach for it, you come up with nothing but handfuls of desert sand.

In any rationing scheme the elderly will get the knife in a system that is designed primarily to offer HealthCare Lite. The result creates two kind of voters, satisfied voters and dead voters... which is a can't lose proposition. Either you don't need health care very much but are pleased to have it available if you need it, or you do need health care and then you'll probably be too busy writing letters and challenging the authorities to have any time left for politics anyway. Until you're finally hospitalized, put on a limited care plan and your IV drop gets disconnected. It's the European approach now being exported to America.

The Big ObamaCare Lie is that it will offer health care for the masses without rationing. The two of course are incompatible. The government rations its services no differently than private businesses do, the difference is that government services are more expensive and therefore delivered less efficiently, and that they come backed with a political agenda.

ObamaCare rewards the youth vote that came out for Obama with a health care mirage that is meant to make them feel grateful, and punishes senior voters who came out for McCain with health care rationing that's designed to get rid of them quickly. "...if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive...so we're going to let you die." So spoke Obama advisor Robert Reich.

White House Health Care Advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, spoke of health care rationing by age, as well as limiting health care to those incapable of civic participation. Lee Siegel wrote, "Determining which treatments are cost effective at the end of a person's life and which are not is one of Obama's priorities. It's one of the principal ways he counts on saving money and making universal health care affordable."

It is of course the priority, not simply because it is the only way to at least try and balance the books at a level slightly above complete economic disaster... but because seniors are an obstacle to the Obama administration. The senior vote is expected to keep on rising to an ever greater share of the electorate. The median age in the United States is at its highest point ever, and that is a major problem for Obama and the Democratic party because senior citizens traditionally skew more conservative. An older America would also mean a more conservative America, and one that would find itself increasingly unable to support the socialist infrastructure that has become the fundamental platform of the Democratic party.

Immigration has partially balanced things out, just as it has in Europe, compensating for a growing older population, with Third World immigrants closely wedded to the left leaning parties. And if elderly people are more likely to be the victims of their crimes... well to the socialist way of thinking, that just evens out the class situation and makes the voter demographics look a bit better. But immigration alone in the United States cannot fill the gap. That's where euthanasia comes into the picture.

Sustainable socialism requires workers to pay for it, and needs to edge retirees out of the picture. Keeping the Democratic party leaning left requires freezing or lowering the median age of Americans by getting rid of them. ObamaCare will reduce benefits for seniors and put them on a government controlled treadmill that will encourage them to die sooner rather than burden society with their presence. The outcome will look like the Tuskegee experiments on a national scale with medical problems in seniors going untreated due to rationing... and the final outcome benefiting Obama and the Democratic party.

Some might deride it as alarmist to call such an outcome politically motivated euthanasia. Yet in practice it will mean that a part of the American people who did not vote for Obama have been put at the greatest risk by his proposed policies. Had a Republican President proposed a plan that would ration medical services most for African-Americans, opponents would rightly make comparisons to eugenics and segregation. What then are we to make of ObamaCare, whose victims will be chiefly those Americans who did not vote for Obama?

Islamism Must Carry a Price

2009-10-13T22:43:00.000-04:00

Islamists are sworn to make war on the West, to drive out freedom and democracy, replacing them with the mandated tyranny of Islamic law.They declare all laws and all nations that do not originate or abide by Islamic law to be invalid. And they reserve the right to make war on them by any means necessary, from the political to the economic to the terroristic. And yet it might surprise many people to realize that most Islamists are not haggard fanatics living off dried goat meat in caves. Instead many of them are doctors and lawyers working in major American and European cities, they serve as advisors to Western politicians and write newspaper columns. Their organizations are treated with respect and given veto power over the policies of governments whose existence they reject.

And that in a nutshell is the trouble of it all. Because Islamism should carry a price, instead it only carries rewards. Islamists in Europe and America do not actually have to be isolated hermits working out of a few ghettos. Instead they are able to gain all the benefits of the West, from advanced degrees to high paying jobs to political recognition, while maintaining their hatred for the West.

The results are inevitable. The investigation of a CERN physicist for contacts with Al Queda, and a Glasgow doctor and dentist attempt to carry out an airport car bombing. These are not the alienated or disenfranchised immigrants, a description that the press routinely uses to try and turn the perpetrators into victims. No, some are even European born. Rather what they are are Islamists who blended successful lives in the society of the infidels, with their own religious fanaticism. And they were able to do that because tolerance for Islam eliminated any barriers and obstacles to being both Islamists and middle class professionals.

The question is not a casual one, because in reality most terrorism stems from the sons of the middle and upper class. The immigrants in the ghettos may riot, toss molotov cocktails at the police and rob and rape-- but it tends to be the university graduates who actually join up with international Muslim terrorist groups and begin planning attacks. Traditionally the middle class has always provided the upper ranks of terrorist groups, and it is no different with Islamist terrorists.

The lead 7/7 bomber, Mohammad Sidique Khan was a university graduate. The lead 9/11 terrorist, Mohammed Atta, was the son of a lawyer and a graduate student. Neither of them were oppressed and hapless immigrants. By contrast they had mastered the rules of their host countries, and used that to their advantage. Had they been living on the margins of society, they would have posed comparatively little threat except in the way of petty crimes. Instead their education and their ability to insinuate themselves into the lives of their target nations made them far dangerous than they normally would have been.

Tolerance for Islam, means that Islamists do not have to choose between Islamism and having the trappings of a successful Western life. They can have both, dipping their feet in specially installed foot baths, praying for the death of Jews and Christians in break rooms converted into prayer rooms, working in foodless environments during Ramadan... and plotting and scheming with no one the wiser until it all blows up on some busy day and the bloody results wind up splashed all over the TV news.

France has come the closest to trying to force Islamists to choose one way or another with the Burka ban. And it has naturally resulted in an ugly backlash, because Islamists do not want to give up the privileges they came to Europe for, they want it all and feel entitled to take it all. They see imposing Islamic law, first on fellow immigrants and their children, and then on the nation and the continent at large, as a binding religious duty. And thanks to the tolerance of the same legal and political system they are sworn to overthrow, nothing stands in their way.

Meanwhile Turkey's Islamist regime is pushing to join the EU, despite feeding hate toward the infidels and the rise of Islamism at home. The Islamists in Ankara want the economic and political advantages of EU membership, even as internally they continue to reject the rule of law, targeting their secularist political opponents and striving to recreate Turkey as an Islamic state.

Erdogan and Gul are no different than the American and European Islamists who conduct their war against the civilized world under the cover of politics. Except they are not circling a parliament or a few elected representatives, but steering an entire nation into the darkness of Islamism... and consciously providing a model for European Islamists to do the same in France and England, in Belgium and Sweden, and all around. And their model is based on the premise that Islam can be combined with all the benefits of Western life, so long as Islam is in the forefront every time.

When treason prospers, none dare call it treason. When Islamism prospers, none dare call it what it is, an elementally fascist movement, overseen by cunning politicians and fixers and manned by prosperous professionals, who happen to believe that their host societies must be subjugated to the will of Allah. European and American tolerance has removed every obstacle to Islamism, thereby inherently promoting it. After all if the aspiring Pakistani or Syrian student does not have to choose between the material prosperity of a Western life and the religious fidelity of an Islamic one, he will easily choose both. And we have seen where that path leads already. To a burning car at Glasgow Airport, to bombs in backpacks and airplanes passing low across New York City.

And still worse yet it paves the way for the subjugation of the free world under the hobnailed boot of the Prophet of murder and slavery, by the graduating classes of every university of the free world. And that is exactly what will happen, so long as Islamism does not carry a heavy price. A heavy political price and a heavy economic price. Treason prospers, so long as none dare call it treason because of its very prosperity. Crime pays, so long as measures against it go unenforced. To defeat Islamism, its host nations must insure that it is no longer a paying proposition, that it is not tolerated and that it becomes an economic, political and career ugly albatross around the neck of every Muslim and Muslim nation that practices it.

The Nobel Appeasement Prize

2009-10-12T22:22:00.001-04:00

Quick, name the greatest peacemaker of the 20th Century who never received a Nobel Peace Prize? The wrong answer given by Foreign Policy magazine is Gandhi. The right answer is British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Churchill would strike many as an odd choice for a Nobel Peace Prize. Didn't he preside over the bloodiest war of the 20th century that was fought around the world. A war that left millions dead and entire nations in ruins. And that of course is exactly the point. By resisting Hitler, Churchill brought peace to Western Europe and to every part of the world threatened by Nazi Germany. By contrast Gandhi did nothing but advise England to surrender, to let the Nazis occupy their cities, rather than "taint" themselves with violence.

Both Churchill and Gandhi wanted peace, they just wanted different kinds of peace. Churchill wanted a secure peace for England and Europe by defeating the Nazis. Gandhi wanted a sham spiritual peace by surrendering to the Nazis, letting them do their worst and priding himself on being better than them. Churchill wanted to hold the moral high ground by taking the strategic high ground. Gandhi wanted the moral high ground by waving the white flag of surrender. These radically different notions of what peace is are at the heart of our problems today.

A notion of peace that rewards the Gandhis over the Churchills, rewards appeasement over resistance. It promotes the idea that throwing your hands up in surrender is better and nobler than reaching for a gun to defend yourself and your family with. That is the significance of the Norwegian committee awarding Obama a Nobel Peace Prize, which should be renamed the appeasement prize.

The Nobel committee cited Obama's speech about a "World Without Nuclear Weapons" as his qualification for receiving the award. Naturally this does not mean that the United States will actually prevent the Hitlers of tomorrow from getting their hands on nuclear weapons. Rather it means that the United States and countries reasonable enough to follow its lead will give up nuclear weapons. Leaving them exclusively in the hands of madmen, tyrants and terrorists. That is the self-destructive Gandhian ideal that the Committee and Obama want to promote... surrender, helplessness and impotence are the points on the moral compass of pacifism.

Naturally Obama did not get the Nobel Peace Prize for anything he actually accomplished. But this actually makes him a worthy successor to Jimmy Carter, whose unwanted "diplomacy" enabled North Korea to continue developing nuclear weapons, and Al Gore who made a movie telling others to live simply, without ever following his own advice. Both accomplished little except to make empty speeches and handicap those who actually wanted and want to do something constructive. Without Carter's intervention, half of Asia might not be constantly waiting for the bomb to drop. And what Carter did for Kim Jong Il, Obama is supposed to do for the Islamists, a grand devil's bargain to enable mass murder in the name of peace.

In the face of Nazi terror, Gandhi advised England to surrender, arguing that fighting the Nazis was worse than losing to them. There is a free world today only because England, America and the remains of the civilized world disregarded Gandhi's "noble" ideas and did the right thing by fighting the Nazi war machine instead. Gandhi's ideas would not have made the world civilized, as so many today insist, they would have made the world Nazi. That is the simply truth, perverted by those who brand the armies of the free world as Nazis, and real Nazis, as victims.

Those who would apply Gandhi's ideas today to restrain and throttle the use of force against terrorism, would produce not a world free of cruelty or violence, but a world broken under the Islamist boot, a world without freedom, without kindness, mercy or hope. And where the Bush Doctrine emphasized the right of America to defend itself and the world, the Obama Doctrine emphasizes multilateral diplomacy and a willingness to negotiate until the bombs begin falling, and probably all the way until doomsday itself.

The Nobel Peace Prize has a long history of rewarding the false diplomacy of the leaders of killers like Le Duc Tho, Sadat, Desmond Tutu, Gorbachev, Mandela, Arafat and their enablers like Pauling, Kissinger, MacBride, Peres, Kim Dae Jung, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, El Baradei and of course Barack Obama. The Nobel Peace Prize does not foster peace, it fosters only appeasement. Little wonder that UN agencies won the Nobel Peace Prize six separate times. And if there is any group of organizations more useless and more disabling to the free world than the UN, look and be fairly certain that they have their own Nobel, already or pending.

In 1947, after all the American, Canadian, British and Australian soldiers who had died fighting to liberate and bring peace to Europe-- the Nobel Committee instead handed over the award to the pacifist anti-war Quaker American Friends Service Committee. This was after giving the award to the ICRC in 1944 whose conduct during the war had bordered on Nazi collaboration. After the end of a war which saw Norway itself occupied and liberated and protected from Nazi and Soviet troops, the Committee saw fit only to go on promoting the same old pacifist doctrine of appeasement first.

Yet had the British and Americans decided that a non-violent negotiated solution was best-- Norway would have gone on being ruled by Nazi Germany until the end of time. In a truly ironic paradox, had England and America been governed by the ideas that the Nobel Peace Prizes sought to instill, the prizes, whose disposal was halted by WW2, would never have been given any, except perhaps and most appropriately to Vidkun Quisling.

And that in sum total is what the Nobel Peace Prize amounts to, a trophy for the murderers cunning enough to get what they want at the negotiating table, and their pet Quislings. It is only fitting that Obama who has left Eastern Europe naked in the face of Russian aggression, given Iran an open invitation to use endless delaying tactics while developing nuclear weapons, enabled Chavez's Marxist expansionism across South America and is preparing to cut a deal with the Taliban themselves-- receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Not for what he has done, but for what he has not done... by way of omission, stand up to evil.

Obama has made appeasement look cool, which is all that the committee really values in a patsy, figureheads to turn into heroes and make the morally indefensible ideas of pacifism more palatable. Gandhi's ideas on their own are laughable, but when combined with a saintly figure somehow seem credible as a quasi-religious virtue. Obama's ideas are equally laughable, but when combined with his manufactured image, were accepted by large numbers of Americans.

Protesting that Obama has done nothing to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize misses the point. It is precisely because Obama has done nothing, but give ridiculous speeches, that has was given the Nobel Peace Prize in the first place. Doing nothing is the greatest virtue of pacifism, to lift your hands high and let the enemy have his way with your country is exactly the sort of high moral notion that the Nobel Peace Prize. Just ask the various League of Nations officials, random pacifists and disarmament promoters who received the award in the 1930's, until Hitler's armies swept across Europe, temporarily putting an end to the awards.

The Nobel Peace Prize is no high honor, it is pacifism's highest honor to the conscious and the misguided appeasers. To receive it is to paint a giant target on your own country's back. A "Kick Me" sign a hundred feet tall lighting up the night sky. A white flag waving high.

"As the world celebrates International Day of Non-violence, US president Barack Obama today said America has its roots in the India of Mahatma Gandhi." PTI

"I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions." - Gandhi