Sultan Knish

Murder by Lawfare - How Liberal Lawsuits are Taking American Lives

2009-12-14T22:49:00.017-05:00

The thirteen US soldiers murdered at Fort Hood were killed by the bullets fired by Malik Nidal Hassan, but there were those who helped Nassan fire his bullets, who did everything but hold his gun and pull the trigger for him. The initial FBI review has found that the Justice Department guidelines for opening a criminal investigation were too high, in turn investigators have said that it now requires a very high standard of evidence in order to convict a terrorist plotter.

Pursuing charges before all the evidence is in hand can backfire – suspects have sued authorities before, claiming they were falsely imprisoned victims of witch hunts... Five Muslim immigrants were convicted last year of conspiring to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix in New Jersey, but they were acquitted of attempted murder after prosecutors acknowledged they were probably months away from acting.
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In January 2006, agents watched as a young man suspected of links to terrorists walked out of an Atlanta Home Depot with materials that could be used to make a bomb.

They knew Syed Haris Ahmed had researched bombmaking techniques online and shaved his head, as some jihadis have done before an attack.

However, they decided to wait to arrest him and keep building a stronger case – and risk a potential terror attack.

Not being able to stop a terrorist before he strikes. Not being able to remove Muslims who are engaging in threatening behavior on a plane. Not able to take action against a terrorist plot for fear that the terrorists will be allowed to walk free. That is what the domestic version of the War on Terror looks like today.

Those are the wages of Lawfare, the legal campaign on behalf of terrorists waged by well known liberal legal advocacy groups such as the ACLU, and the much wider base of liberal organizations and newspapers who lobbied on behalf of captured terrorists and republished every single one of their claims of torture... to the extent that the Al Queda manual made it a default for captured terrorists to cry abuse once on trial.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver, who was captured together with Al Queda operatives, became a cause celebre for liberals and liberal groups from Amnesty International to People for the American Way to the American Jewish Committee to George Clooney who was interested in making a movie about him and starring as his lawyer. They turned Salim Hamdan into a martyr and breathlessly repeated every single one of his statements. And they won. They won with Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. And they won again at trial. Hamdan was freed a few months after sentencing to return to Yemen.

The liberal establishment had fought its hardest for Osama bin Laden's bodyguard... and they won. America lost. That wasn't the only time they won. From day one every terrorist in Gitmo, every terrorist plotter seized on American soil plotting to murder Americans had the liberal establishment in their corner and fighting on their behalf. From trial lawyers queuing up to defend them to the editorial pages of every liberal newspaper in America clamoring that they had been victimized, that the charges against them were worthless and that America had besmirched itself by not bowing to the wishes of the aforementioned trial lawyers. And they won.

From Abu Ghraib to Gitmo, from Hamdan to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, they won. They successfully smeared US soldiers and interrogators and CIA agents as monsters, torturers and kidnappers. They successfully portrayed Al Queda terrorists as sensitive victims and martyrs of a latter day Gulag. The same press that wouldn't report on any of Castro's atrocities a few miles south of Guantanamo Bay if you put a gun to their heads, put on their novelist hats and transformed butchers into loving fathers, and dedicated fanatics into misunderstood patriots. And they won.

From the first when the United States decided to try captured terrorists before military tribunals, passed the Patriot Act and asked public employees to send in tips if they suspected someone of terrorist activity, American liberals rose up with a storm of indignation as if Washington D.C. had been reborn as the capital of Nazi Germany. And they kept it up for eight years, fighting their hardest to see that America lost and the terrorists won. And they got their wish. Any policy taken to stop terrorism, instantly earned their contempt. Any surrender to terrorism, instantly earned their support.

And today they're still at it again, suing civilian companies who transported captured terrorists and inciting Muslims to act out on flights and sue airlines if any action is taken against them. And their aggressive lawfare unsurprisingly comes at a high cost in American lives. The 13 dead at Fort Hood were murdered as much by the liberal lawfare of the ACLU and the New York Times, as by Nidal Malik Hassan, the Jihadist Major whose career of abusing soldiers and preaching terrorism, they helped spawn.

And the full and complete toll of those killed is only coming, as FBI agents are handcuffed when it comes to investigating Muslim terrorists, forced to hold back and then hold back some more before bringing the case to Federal court, knowing that liberal trial lawyers and Clinton and Carter appointed judges are just champing at the bit to put another terrorist back on the streets.

Sometimes the FBI can stop a terrorist in that golden moment when he has all he needs to carry out his attack and is ready to go-- and just before he kills. And if they can't, then blood splashes and bodies pile up, courtesy of the liberal lawfare being waged against America by terrorism's Madison Avenue accomplices.

And once law enforcement has folded in the face of terror, targeting private companies ensures that the path of the next wave of terrorists will be clear. Suing airlines helped insure that airline companies would turn the other cheek no matter what Muslim passengers do, as the better choice than having to pay out on discrimination lawsuits accompanied by the negative publicity that comes with being charged with Islamophobia. From the airline's perspective, if the Muslims turn out to actually be terrorists, their insurance and government bailouts will cover it, and no one will be hurt but the passengers. If they don't turn out to be terrorists, then again no one will be traumatized but the passengers.

Again liberal lawfare wins and Americans lose, both their liberty and their lives, as the implacable logic of political correctness demands universal measures that deny freedom in general, without being selective enough to actually stop Islamic terrorists. And this fits the agenda of turning the War on Terror against ordinary Americans, while immunizing Muslims as much as possible, thereby turning ordinary Americans against the War on Terror, and handing the terrorists yet another victory.

By planting a stick in the wheels of American national defense at every turn, it becomes an increasingly impossible task to protect America against terrorism, whether by toughening the Rules of Engagement on the battlefield, leaving US troops naked in the field, or by insuring that fear of lawsuits and tough standards will turn the arrest of a terrorist into a race against time, no matter how much advance warning there may be.

If the liberal organizations responsible for this do not actually want terrorists to win, then they have done a perfect facsimile of every course of action that would have been taken anyway by those who actually want the terrorists to win. The distinction then is only one of motivation, between deliberate treason and ideological blindness so thick that its practical consequences are indistinguishable from treason.

When prominent terrorist lawyer Lynn Stewart passed along covert messages to Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, ringleader of the original World Trade Center bombers, from his terrorist followers in Egypt regarding their Egyptian campaign; did she cross a line? If she did, most of the usual suspect organizations who appealed for clemency on her behalf did not seem to think so. And in truth the only difference between what Lynn Stewart did and what her colleagues do day in and day out, is that she broke the letter of the law by helping a terrorist kingpin, while her colleagues help terrorists day in and day out without breaking the letter of the law.

The letter of the law is where liberal lawfare lives, the thick legal line that blindfolds law enforcement and binds the hands of those who would stop the terrorists... for the benefit of the terrorists themselves. The thirteen dead at Ft. Hood are only the latest casualties of liberal lawfare, and they will not be the last.

The Post-Human Left Unleashes Species Warfare at Copenhagen

2009-12-13T22:50:00.009-05:00

A century ago protesters on the streets of a European city might have been marching to call attention to the plight of the poor living in slums on those same streets. Today protesters are rioting in the streets of Copenhagen, not on behalf of their fellow human beings, but for the rights of the ant, the polar bear and the crocodile. The rhetoric has not changed very much, but the core worldview has, embracing a collectivism that no longer has anything human in it.

No longer is it about the poor of Copenhagen or London or New York. In modern industrialized nations, such people have in any case become increasingly hard to find, let alone portray as the victims of greedy capitalists. It is not really about any human collective anymore, but a biological collective in which humans occupy a role within the biological kingdom, identical to the one that Americans identify within the global order, that of occupiers and exploiters.

For half a billion corporate dollars, the movie Avatar will be splashing that same worldview across a million movie screens, backed by the latest and most ingenious corporate technology, using aliens in place of animals. It is a worldview that began with Save the Whales and ends with Drown the Humans, but it is one that originates even more deeply in the collectivism of class warfare, in the notion that every modern society is innately corrupt and must be subject to a constant wave of reform revolutions meant to unseat the powerful and uplift the oppressed.

But that very notion of class struggle has been dying a prolonged and painful death, crushed by the reality that trickle down economics do work, and that capitalism writ large ultimately turns the poor into the middle class. And so to replace the vanishing domestic poor who had become the new middle class, the "new poor" in the form of Third World immigrants were imported and transported to fill the proletarian gap. And so Europe, Israel and America's left helped transform their countries into war zones, new class consciousness was raised up and once again the sons and daughters of the wealthy could get out their guitars and their Marxist textbooks, and damn the privilege and wealth of their forebears.

But once again the greatest enemy of class warfare has been productivity. Today the productive powers of capitalism have extended even to the worst off parts of Africa. From the billions that Bush had directed to Africa, to the Gates Foundation to One Laptop Per Child and to Microfinance, liberal capitalists were demonstrating paradoxically enough, that business profits could produce actual change, rather than simply treating the Third World as poster children for the perpetual evils of Western oppression.

Environmentalism, in its current embodiment as the Cult of Global Warming, has become the ultimate weapon of class warfare, except it is no longer class warfare, but species warfare. Say what you will about polar bears or penguins, but unlike every single human minority whose cause the left has tried to appropriate at one time or another-- they are not likely to pad in from the North Pole and demand a seat at the table. This has made animal rights and environmentalism the perfect pet cause for the post-human left.

Class warfare began as a dualistic view of society split between the haves and the have nots. Environmentalism perpetuates the same premise, except this time the haves are human beings, and the have nots, are the members of the animal kingdom. And that is the new face of the post-human left, the face of a dog, a polar bear, a rat-- a blue shining impersonal globe symbolizing a global collectivism no longer dependent on any political franchise or even humanity. Because the Post-Human Left is less interested in human beings than it is in mosquitoes and clams.

Of course the movers and shakers at Copenhagen have extended offers of financing to fight the pernicious effect of Carbon, one of the most common elements in the air, to African countries in order to bring them on board the Global Warming bandwagon. And too many African governments who have been trained to demand handouts from the First World have shown up on cue. Naturally they don't believe in Global Warming, but they do believe they're entitled to money for all that the West has wrought, and if shouting about the damage that Carbon has done to Africa is the way to get it, that's the way they'll go. Even more naturally the funding to fight Global Warming will go into the usual foreign bank accounts and the same places that much of the usual foreign aid that isn't human centered goes.

But then Copenhagen is the triumphant bleat of an inhuman world, a world in which humanity has no more meaning than a mollusk. Had the activists of the left thrown a fraction of the effort they have devoted to Global Warming into the genocide being carried out by the Sudanese regime in Darfur, countless numbers of people might have been saved. Instead the hypocritical jet setters of the left will get on their jets and into their limos, reserve entire hotel floors, gorge themselves on the finest delicacies imported from around the world at the expense of working class taxpayers-- all in order to spend trillions of dollars on schemes that will do nothing to fight an imaginary problem that even the dullest of them knows doesn't exist, but that will personally enrich them and their supporters.

The left has always used the ideology of Class Warfare as a lever to raise themselves up to power under the guise of a Dictatorship of the Proletariat, seizing on economic downturns and political outrage to raise up a tower of tyranny over the very people who put them into office. The EU, like the USSR, like the Obama Administration, like every international body gimmicked up to serve the interests of the same crowd, exists to merge the political and business interests of corporate socialists, with the hard left wing mobs outside that supply their ideological innovations for them.

Species Warfare has that advantage over Class Warfare, that it is fundamentally irresolvable, that success can never be measured or tracked, and that it complete destroys the self-worth of nations and individuals, teaching generations of children to see themselves as a pestilence not only against a variety of aborigines and less developed countries, but against every living thing one earth from the microbe to the trained seal.

If there is one message put forth by the Cult of Global Warming, it is essentially, A Plague on Humanity and All Its Works. And indeed if one were to take their ideology and every warmed over ancient myth presented as fact, then the inevitable conclusion is that the world would be better off if humanity had never existed. For all the clever cartoons, bright colors and adorable animals that are on the packaging-- this poisonous conclusion is the inevitable worm inside the box. Humanity is a plague. A toxic destroyer ravaging the environment. Its factories, its cows and even every breath of air that comes out of its mouth is killing the earth. Wouldn't it be better than if humanity didn't exist?

The ideology of Class Warfare successfully convinced generations of university students that they were at fault for being the sons and daughters of the wealthy and the middle class, convincing them to fight on behalf of the poor, only to find that most of the poor who weren't interested in living on the dole generally wanted to be wealthy and middle class themselves. Such a backward attitude naturally required that they be ruled by enlightened people like the aforementioned students in order to cure the poor of such selfish and greedy tendencies.

When the poor of the Free World got their wish and became middle class, in contrast to the poor of the Socialist Motherland of the Soviet Union, where everyone but the aforementioned students were poor, the ideology of Class Warfare became Global Class Warfare, and new generations of students were convinced that they were evil simply for being Americans, Canadians, Britons, Israelis, and other exploitative developed countries, who were taking advantage of the Third World. As it turned out though, like their own domestic poor, what the Third World nations wanted was to be First World nations. And while the First World nations have ravaged their own industrial economics, China and India are on the way to becoming First World nations instead.

And now Class Warfare and Global Class Warfare gives way to Species Warfare, and if turns out that all that the Polar Bears really want is to drive SUV's and own big screen TV's-- luckily they will never be able to make that known. And generations of students are taught to feel bad for simply being human, for having two arms and two legs, for having the intelligence to use a microwave oven instead of eating meat raw, and for enjoying all the comforts of civilization that have allowed them the luxury of bemoaning the fate of the animal kingdom in the first place.

And what of a people who are taught to be ashamed of working for a living, of being citizens of a prosperous country and of even being human? What comes of children who are taught that a noble savage is nobler than them and that in turn an animal is nobler than a man? We don't have to look far to see the intellectual consequences of an ideology that claims that not only are human beings no better than animals, but that we are actually worse than animals.

It is the moral and spiritual traits of a nation that make it great. And those traits are rooted in a sense of self-worth. To tell generation after generation that they are worth less than animals, is to transform them into animals, without shame, without striving and without any sense of self-worth, but that which is derived from the nakedly egotistical plumage of the animal kingdom. And such people are of course all too easy to rule over, to fool, to gull and deceive, to crack the whip overhead and watch them fall to their knees.

The chains being wrought at Copenhagen are the ideological product of a post-human left determined to wipe out every trace of the dignity of man, for their own political and ideological power. In order to rule as they wish to, one must have a nation of slaves to rule. And to create a nation of slaves, one must first eradicate every barrier between a slave and a free man. The chains are being wrought out of laws, but there are deeper chains of the mind being placed over the foreheads of every child and adult. A chain that says you are not worthy, your efforts and strivings accomplish nothing except the destruction of the earth. And it is those chains that must first be broken, for us all to be free.

Chanukah and the One Light Above

2009-12-12T18:53:00.014-05:00

For the eight days of Chanukah, it is common to see a candelabra with eight lights and one light above it, shining here and there, in the windows of stores and hallways, in people’s homes and even on intersections. Some are filled with oil, while others are topped with candles. Some tower high overhead and some are child sized. But all have eight lights and one above it, and all commemorate the same occasion.

Many nations have religious holidays and days of national liberation and independence, however rarely do the two come together quite in the way that Chanukah does. That is because Chanukah is both a commemoration of national liberation from the rule of the pagan Syrian-Greek empire ruled by Antiochus IV and a commemoration of the hand of divine influence in both inspiring and accomplishing that liberation.

The Jews throughout history have had a way of getting in the way of great empires. The Egyptians, the Philistines, the Assyrians, Babylonians and Persians had all tried to enslave and destroy the Jewish people. A few thousand years ago after an Egyptian Pharaoh had first gotten the bright idea to clap chains on the Jewish refugees who had been serving as his faithful shepherds and send them off to build the pyramids, and some 2000 plus years before the present day, Antiochus IV, like so many kings before whose sense of power had overwhelmed both their sense of reason and morals, decided that ruling over his empire would be simpler and easier without the Jews in it.

Where Pharaoh had embarked on that process by throwing male Jewish babies into the Nile, to please one of his many gods while carrying out a genocide that was meant to destroy the Jewish people and integrate what was left into Egypt-- Antiochus IV focused not on physical extermination, but cultural annihilation. The fundamental books of Jewish life, the scriptures that gave the Jewish people meaning and identity were destroyed.and banned. Hellenic ways and mores became law. Jewish ones became an offense punishable by death.

Some accepted the decree out of fear or even with enthusiasm. Others however rose up and resisted. And war came between the handfuls of Jewish Maccabee partisans and the armies of Antiochus IV’s Selecuid empire. A war that had its echoes in the past and would have it again in the future as lightly armed and untrained armies of Jewish soldiers would go on to fight in that same land and those same hills and valleys against the Romans and eventually the armies of six Arab nations. The Syrian Greek armies were among the best of their day. The Maccabees were the sons of the priesthood living in the backwaters of Israel, members of a nation that had not been independently ruled since the Babylonian hordes had flooded across the land, destroying everything in their path. Since then a shifting mass of nations and rulers had sat on their thrones while the Jews had bowed their heads.

Yet in the wilderness of Judea a band of brothers vowed that they would bow to no man and let no foreigners rule over their land. That no alien ruler would hold sway over the earth and water of their homeland, and none would be permitted to take away the legacy of their fathers, the customs of their sages and the books of their God. And while empires may and do laugh at such oaths, that band of brothers went on to destroy and wreak havoc against the might of an entire empire.

Apollonius brought his Samaritan forces against the brothers, and Judah, first among the Macabees, killed him, took his sword and wore it for his own. Seron, General of the army of Coele-Syria, brought together soldiers and renegade Jewish mercenaries and was broken at Beit Haran. In his place Antiochus IV commanded the Governor of Syria who dispatched two generals, Nicanor, and Gorgias, with forty thousand soldiers and seven thousand horsemen and orders to conquer Judea, enslave its inhabitants, utterly destroy Jerusalem and abolish the whole Jewish nation forever. So certain were they of victory that they brought with them merchant caravans to fill with the Hebrew slaves of a destroyed nation.

In turn Judah walked among his brothers and fellow rebels and spoke to them of the thing for which they fought; “O my fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God. Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle. Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory. Prepare yourselves, therefore, and put yourselves into such an agreeable posture, that you may be ready to fight with the enemy as soon as it is day tomorrow morning."

In those few words was the heart and soul of the Jewish nation fighting to be reborn, and that for which they fought, for their God, the freedom of their faith and country, and to stand as men of honor in defiance of a tyrannical empire. And though the Macabees were but three thousand, starving and dressed in bare rags, the God for whom they fought and their native wits and courage, gave them victory over thousands and tens of thousands.

Worn from battle, bloodied and standing among heaps of the enemy dead, the Macabees did not flee back into their Judean wilderness, instead they proceed to the heart of Israel, to its capital of Jerusalem and its Temple, to reclaim their land and their God. But through the armies of the Seleucid Empire may have fled, and their traitorous Jewish collaborators along with them, the Temple and the capital stood in ruins. And the brave rebels who had bested an empire entered the holy city only to confront the devastation and disgrace that their enemies had imposed on it. Some wept and others hung their heads in despair.

And so once again they bent their backs to the task, this time not of war but of peace, reclaiming the Temple, cleansing its precincts and sanctifying it again. But though they could raise up walls and clean away the blood and filth from stone and metal, some things they simply could not do. The great golden candelabra of the Menorah stood empty, for of the sacred oil, made of only the first squeezed drop of the olive, kept in purity and sealed with the High Priest’s seal, only one flask remained.

The Macabees had fought courageously for the freedom to worship God once again as their fathers had, but courage alone could not make the Menorah burn and thus renew the Temple service again. Yet it had not been mere berserker’s courage that had brought them this far. Like their ancestors before them who had leaped into furnaces and the raging sea, they had dared the impossible on faith. Faith in a God who watched over his nation and intervened in the affairs of men. And so on faith they poured the oil of that single flask in the Menorah, oil that could only last for a single day. And then having done all they could, the priests and sons of priests who had fought through entire battalions to reach this place, accepted that they had done all they could and left the remainder in the hands of the Almighty.

If they had won by the strength of their hands alone, then the lamps would burn for a day and then flicker out. But if it had been more than mere force of arms that had brought them here, if it had been more than mere happenstance that a small band of ragged and starving rebels had shattered the armies of an empire, then the flames of the Menorah would burn on. The sun rose and set again. The day came to its end and the men watched the lights of the Menorah to see if they would burn or die out. And if the flame in their hearts could have kindled the lamps, they would have burst into bright flame then and there. Darkness fell that night and still the lamps burned on. For eight days and nights the Menorah burned on that single lonely pure flask of oil, until more could be found, and the men who for a time had been soldiers and had once again become priests, saw that while it may be men who kindle lamps and hearts, it is the Lord Almighty who provides them with the fuel of the spirit through which they burn.

Those are the eight days we remember every Chanukah. Not the long wars that came before or after. For life is struggle and few lives are lived at peace and without difficulty. But it is those eight days, the days in which we see that we are not alone in our struggles, and whether we are lost in the wilderness of Judea or the cities and towns of any land, there is a light above us waiting to light our way. The windows behind which the Menorah stood were narrow on the inside and wide on the outside. For it is not the Menorah or the Temple that needs the world, but the world that needs the light of the Menorah. And so above the eight oil lamps or candles that we light throughout Chanukah is a single light. The Shamash, the one who guards and watches above us all. The light with which all the other lights of the Menorah are lit. The light above.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - On the Radar and Off the Radar

2009-12-11T14:40:00.005-05:00

While the media remains obsessed with the private life of a golf player, we are given the chance to contemplate the spectacle of just what a public service the media is performing for us.

A decade from now it is estimated that as much as 90 percent of the media jobs will vanish away. Newspapers have been hit hard by Craigslist and the internet. Radio will give way to satellite radio. Network newscasts will die along with the networks that spawned them. The specter of technology is haunting the media and in turn the "journalists" plead and whine, telling everyone how much we need them.

And once again they demonstrate just how much we don't need their trivial petty coverage of the lives of celebrities intermingled with left wing radicalism. We don't need it at all.

Meanwhile on the eve of Chanukah, the holiday that celebrates the Jewish reclamation of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem from Syrian-Greek tyranny, the tyranny still continues on the temple site as a bride and her father were arrested by an Arab policeman because she "moved her lips" adjacent to the mosque that Arab occupiers planted there.

A Jewish bride and her father were arrested on the Temple Mount the day before her wedding, after an Arab policeman claimed he saw the father muttering prayers and the bride nodding her head.

The father and daughter were being taken around the site on Wednesday morning by her brother Eli, a volunteer who conducts regular tours at the Temple Mount, when suddenly they were accosted by the Jerusalem policeman.

“We were in the northern part, and I was showing them the archaeological evidence when suddenly a police officer came over to us, Mahmoud Hativ was his name, and he claimed that my father had muttered prayers. “We tried to argue with him and said it wasn’t true, but he said, ‘You can’t fool me,’ and insisted that my father had prayed,” Eli told Israel National News.

“My sister was just standing there silently, not moving at all. She didn’t say a word. It was her first time at the Mount. Other cops came over, Mahmoud said that she had also been involved, and they decided to arrest them both,” he continued. “He let me go right away, because he couldn’t make any claim against me.” His sister and father were taken to the Kishla police station near the Jaffa Gate in the Old City of Jerusalem.

It is rather ironic for this to occur so close to Chanukah which celebrates the reclamation of the Temple. In 1967 Israel reclaimed Jerusalem, but in the name of tolerance chose to leave the Dome of the Rock, a mosque planted by the Muslim conquerors on the spot intact, and give Muslims authority over it. Despite the fact that when Muslims ruled the city, they showed no similar tolerance to Jews, and in fact barred Jews from the Western Wall repeatedly.

Every where about the Mosque of Omar are portions of pillars, curiously wrought altars, and fragments of elegantly carved marble - precious remains of Solomon's Temple. These have been dug from all depths in the soil and rubbish of Mount Moriah

Prof. Shlomo Dov Goitein of the Hebrew University states that the Dome of the Rock was intended to compete with the many fine buildings of worship of other religions. The very form of a rotunda, given to the Qubbat as-Sakhra, although it was foreign to Islam[citation needed], attempted to rival the many Christian domes of its time. A.C. Cresswell in his book Origin of the plan of the Dome of the Rock notes that those who built the shrine used the measurements of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The diameter of the dome of the shrine is 20m 20 cm and its height 20m 48 cm, while the diameter of the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is 20m 90 cm and its height 21m 5 cm.

Former Chief Rabbi Goren who appears in the famous photo of the liberation of the Western Wall, called for the mosque to be demolished. He was not heeded. Instead Israel showed its tolerance toward Muslims and in return Muslims have repeatedly turned their so-called holy site into a flash point for violence, hurling rocks down at Jewish worshipers and preaching hate toward non-Muslims, as well as damaging and defiling historic artifacts from the Temple.

Perhaps it is time for Jews in Israel to take a lesson from what the Hindu did in destroying the Babri Mosque that had been built on the site of the destroyed Ayodhya Hindu temple. Now that would be a true celebration of Chanukah.

But there has been an attempt to block Obama's pressure through the democratic process

The Knesset took a step closer toward requiring a referendum that could make territorial concessions in the capital and the Golan Heights more difficult, when it voted Wednesday to waive an initial reading of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem Referendum Bill.

The bill now goes for further processing in committee, after which it would need to pass second and third readings in the plenum, a procedure that could take several months.

Polls have shown that, were such a referendum mandatory, there would be strong opposition to concessions in Jerusalem and the Golan.

The bill would require that any return of land under the administration and judicial authority of the State of Israel pass a national referendum, as well as a government decision and Knesset approval.

The bill does, however, offer the government a way out - in the event that the concession passes the Knesset by a two-thirds majority, or if within 180 days after the Knesset okays the government decision, a general election is held.

Essentially this would mean that any of Obama's demands against Jerusalem would have to pass a public referendum, rather than just a political one. And the odds of that are slim. If this bill makes it to law, then a major wall will have been erected against Obama's plotting against Jerusalem.

Meanwhile on the Iranian front, the "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys" are pushing sanctions a lot harder than Obama is.

Meanwhile Obama unsurprisingly bashed America in his Nobel speech

Furthermore, America cannot insist that others follow the rules of the road if we refuse to follow them ourselves. For when we dont, our action can appear arbitrary, and undercut the legitimacy of future intervention — no matter how justified.

Of course Obama himself follows no rules, but insists that others do. Seems like he's quite the unilateralist himself.

Meanwhile The History Channel is proving itself an able replacement for PBS by dedicating a show to promoting the conspiracist ravings of Marxist revisionist historian Howard Zinn, the left's answer to David Irving.

And Howard Zinn is prepping a full on assault on American schools so our children can grow up with the same textbooks used in the USSR

VOICES’ function is to provide live performances of readings from the book Voices of a People’s History as well as educational materials to schoolteachers. The nonprofit’s site provides teachers with resources, including a teaching guide that explains how to get students excited about Zinn’s history books. Their educational materials also includes the Zinn Education Project, a resource for teaching Zinn’s perspective of American history to – drum roll please – pre-Kindergarten through high school students! Included in the curriculum for pre-K students (that’s three and four year-olds) is “Rethinking Columbus,” which counters “the myth of Columbus.” In Zinn’s view, our pre-K children “need to hear from those whose lands and rights were taken away by those who ‘discovered’ them.”

Another teaching lesson for our three-year-old students is “One Country! One Language! One Flag!” that includes teaching ideas for “examining the history of the Pledge of Allegiance and the political milieu in which it was written.” The teaching plan suggests introducing our pre-K-ers to the lynching of African-Americans in the 1880s, and introducing the history of violence and discrimination against minority groups. It also proposes a discussion on an old “One Language!” chant allegedly used in classrooms up until 1942, and poses teachers with the question, “Why not lead kids in the original Pledge to the Flag, including the ‘One Language!’ chant and the Nazi-like salute, and then lead a discussion about the politics of the Pledge?”

And off in the Religion of Peace land, a Muslim man has been extradited from Germany to Denmark for cutting off his Danish girlfriend's nose.

The woman aged 22 was near death after a knife attack in the couple's apartment in Bispehaven in Hasle. Specialists at Aarhus University Hospital battled for hours to save her life after the knife-bestial violence Sunday 11th Specialists to Aarhus University Hospital battled for hours to save here life after the knife-Bestial violence Sunday 11th October this year, and succeeded. October this year, and succeeded.

However, the woman's face as the leather, that not even the finest plastic surgery to correct the damage. However, the woman's face as the leather, that not even the finest plastic surgery to correct the damage. Professionals who currently do not want the name in the newspaper, is pessimistic about the outcome. Professionals who currently do not want the name in the newspaper, is pessimistic about the outcome. She never gets her old look back. She never gets her old look back.

Her partner of Middle Eastern origin, fled after the bloody drama at noon. . He rushed from the apartment and sat behind directed in his car and drove south. German police stopped him in the evening to a parking area in Hamburg. The 27-year-old made havoc on the spot and was charged with threats to bystanders. The

Just another blip in the great darkness of the Religion of Peace. Coming soon, near you.

That along with the murder of a professor by a Saudi grad student at Binghamton University. (Those Saudis sure can get visas real easy.) And an adultery death sentence in Spain, Sharia law coming back to the continent.

More blips in the darkness. More and more. And more blips still.

For five weeks, Lay Response denounces Muslim prayers held every Friday through the streets of Barbes district. These days, the Boulevard Barbès, street fishmongers and Leon Street are occupied by Muslims, and sidewalks prohibited non-Muslims throughout the Muslim prayer. The street and the street Polonceau Myrha, meanwhile, are totally confiscated over 100 meters: blocked at each end by Islamist mosques and Polonceau Myrha, vehicles and pedestrians are unable to borrow, and the inhabitants of these Street can no longer enter or leave their homes for the duration of prayer.

We reported that this intolerable situation has lasted for over 10 years, and we protested against the alleged culpable inaction of the French authorities - both the City and the 18th arrondissement of Paris City Hall as the Prefecture of Paris and French government - leaving an entire district of Paris to be led by Muslims.

Because the situation is far worse than what we condemned in the past weeks: in fact, not only the police take no action against Muslims blocking streets, but she supports them against non-Muslims, and let deliberately control the whole area Myrha-Polonceau during Friday prayers.

Euarabia, here we are.

And so are their collaborators. The ACLU is working to make sure that even if we do get an American government back in power in the United States, that their lawfare will make any company think twice before helping to protect America against terrorism.

The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Company, on behalf of three victims of the U.S. government’sunlawful “extraordinary rendition” program. The lawsuit charges that Jeppesen knowingly provided direct flight services to the CIA that enabled the clandestine transportation of Binyam Mohamed, Abou Elkassim Britel and Ahmed Agiza to secret overseas locations where they were subjected to torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

If the Saudis aren't funding the ACLU, they're getting a hell of a freebie. And American companies will get the message that it's better for business to surrender to terrorism.

One passenger in speaking of the recent Air Tran incident said that Air Tran "decided that it was better to emotionally traumatize each and every one of the remaining passengers on Air Tran Flight 297 for the remainder of the flight. They had a chance to remove the offenders … but didn't."

Certain passengers pranced around wildly in the aisles, sang, shouted, pointed finger "guns" at others and "shot" them, refused to sit, moved around changing seats and refused to listen to the direction of the flight attendants.

The crew, some sobbing, all of them deeply distressed refused to fly with that flight.
Who could blame them. Not trusting the judgment of their own crew, Air Tran decided to put another crew on board and fly anyway with the offensive "terrorists" still on board.

Naturally if an ordinary person so much as talked back to a stewardess, the plane would be turned around and he'd spend a few hours being interviewed by the DHS.

Air Tran's official site says you should book a holiday present for yourself. Yes, a present of perhaps watching terrorists do more dry runs for future mayhem. And one day maybe even the real deal.

Air Tran was once known as Valu-jet before one too many airline catastrophes, including fires onboard and the well known crash of flight 527 in the Florida everglades due to e forced them to redo their face.

Dhimmi Air, we love to let terrorists run wild and it shows.

Finally Jack Kemp at the American Thinker cites just how far back the Dhimmi problem in the US military goes

A technical note also for regular readers of the blog. You may notice that the sidebars have changed. I have replaced the widget for recent posts as it was loading too slowly and producing pop up windows, with a javascript embedded solution that feeds recent posts with thumbnails. For those interested in duplicating it, this was the solution I used. I did try out Bryandel's modified Feed2JS solution, the actual recent posts with thumbnails results are better, but since it is hosted on his site, its speed depends on his site and when installing, I found that at some points the blog simply did not load. It is a better solution, but less usable. I implemented Top Posts using label categories and recent comments via FeedBurner through BuzzBoost. It is far simpler to do, but thumbnail free.

Rethinking the American Way of War

2009-12-09T23:29:00.010-05:00

Contrary to popular misconceptions, the War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan was never a quagmire. Both wars were concluded with comparatively lightning speed and relatively few casualties. It is not the wars that became a quagmire, but the reconstructions and the occupations, the various euphemisms for the long process in which US troops and civilian contractors spend years trying to rebuild and stabilize the country they just invaded.

And this has unfortunately become the American way of war. While to many people the bomber or the fighter jet may embody American fighting power, the practical reality is that America at war is more aptly reflected by the diplomat trying to keep a shaky and corrupt government in power, or the infantrymen killing long days waiting for an insurgent attack. But it was not always this way, because what we now think of as the American way of war, would more accurately be considered the diplomatic way of war.

But it might be time to reexamine some of the underlying assumptions behind the American Way of War. The first assumption about the American Way of War is that we fight wars in order to stabilize regions that have become unstable. This is of course a very "diplomatic" approach that uses force when diplomacy fails in order to restore the situation to a level of stability that allows for diplomacy to take hold again.

This is the classic "Diplomacy First and Last" approach that Hitler and Imperial Japan effectively finessed in WW2. It presumes that wars are just diplomacy by other means. This locks countries into a very predictable mode that can be exploited by any tyrant who understands just how far he can push, while still keeping negotiations open. "Diplomacy First" governments may be militarily strong, but politically weak. They will negotiate until a line has been crossed so grave that the only response is war. And while they may be formidable during the actual conflict, they default to their previous weakness when the war is over, since their overriding interest is in stability, not victory.

While to most ordinary people, wars are fought in self-defense or to counter a growing menace, to diplomats wars are fought in order to create a stable regional, continental or global order that can permit them to be the ones to conclude agreements, control trade and maintain all the other accouterments of regional stability. As such they do not fight wars to "win", but to "stabilize". And as such as their wars are 10 percent war and 90 percent reconstruction. And it is why our wars have become 10 percent war and 90 percent reconstruction.

There may be honor among warriors, but none among diplomats who rush in to co-opt the worst butchers and war criminals when the war is done. Because their goal is stability, not morality. When the fighting is done, diplomats work to teach forgetfulness, oddly confident that the defeated enemy is just as forgetful of the war as they are. And yet the vanquished enemy never is. And sometimes there is a blood price to pay for that kind of deliberate ignorance.

9 years after September 11, it may come as a surprise to most people that we have not been fighting the Taliban or Baathists or Islamic terrorists. In fact we're cut deals and are prepared to cut deals with all three. Instead we've been fighting against barriers to "stability", and unsurprisingly in tribal cultures that are never stable and never stop fighting unless there are guns pointed at their heads, we have failed to achieve it. But that is because we have been fighting a diplomat's war, rather than a soldier's war. We have focused on reconstruction, rather than defeating the enemy, getting out and letting the survivors decide if they want to trifle with us again.

But we have forgotten how to fight "war" wars. The only kind of war we can fight anymore is one where the soldiers secure the ground, and then play peacekeeper, well digger and diplomat. And when the casualties mount, we blame the soldiers for not winning against the "dedicated" insurgents, or we blame our leaders for getting us into an unwinnable war, when the war was entirely winnable, just not on the diplomat's terms. Yet that is exactly the kind of war we have been losing ever since WW2.

In the aftermath of WW2, when the the USSR and the Allies were contending for Western Europe, the Truman and later the Eisenhower administration, unrolled an approach that focused on countering Soviet influence by rebuilding Western Europe and winning the hearts and minds of the population in parts of Europe in danger of going red. Which usually meant the parts that had a strong Communist insurgency during the war, that now might turn on the US occupation forces.

For the next half century, the US and the USSR would fight an extended proxy war around the world, shuttling around diplomats, foreign aid and weapons in a quest for everyone's "hearts and minds" in a prolonged conflict whose toll was mostly economic and diplomatic, except in cases of sporadic warfare in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East and Afghanistan. And while the original Cold War may be over, it is not clear whether the lessons of it were ever properly learned.

For all the money and effort the US expended into winning hearts and minds, rather few hearts and minds were ever won. The Soviet Union proved to be better at the game because it didn't simply ship aid, it exported revolution and chaos which proved to be far more potent than digging wells and teaching villagers about elementary hygiene. Meanwhile an American strategy that hinged on incompletely backing weak tyrants and then being surprised when they were unable to stand up to the insurgency is one that would fail over and over again, and one that continues to fail into the present day. Its capacity for wreaking havoc on American foreign policy is only second to the eagerness with which the State Department has sold out reliable allies in the hopes of winning over more enemies.

Only during the Reagan Administration did the US make some real headway against the USSR by not exporting aid, but exporting revolution, most notably in Latin America and Afghanistan. Essentially after repeated disasters and on the verge of the fall of the Soviet Union, the US finally borrowed the Soviet handbook long enough to deliver a few bloody noses to Ivan. Unfortunately the punches were thrown shortsightedly enough that they would rebound to bloody effect against the US.

But the common denominator behind all these problems lay in the premise that the United States needed to seek global hegemony to counter the USSR's drive for global hegemony, without actually understanding the commitment that this would require. The United States was not wrong in believing that the extant Soviet threat meant that the US could not simply pack up its bags and go home, the way it had after WW1. But a generation of leaders were wrong for failing to understand the rules and nature of the game that they had committed the country to.

And even more problematically, with the fall of the USSR and the rise of Islam, the US approach has done nothing more than dust off the old Cold War handbook, while robbing it of vigor and commitment. Foreign aid has boomed, but to little purpose. We are continuing to try and win the hearts and minds of people whose own holy books and sense of national pride tell them that we're the enemy. And the cost being expended is staggering to very little gain.

In Afghanistan and Iraq all the talk of reconstruction was geared toward that old ambition, stability. To create stable governments that can resist "extremist" terrorism and will avoid stepping on any regional toes. But what it has done in practice is put us in the middle of a proxy war with Iran, Pakistan, Syria and any Islamic country willing and eager to promote terrorism and a local insurgency, not to mention such familiar players as Russia. And while the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent have certainly made an impact, a dollar spent by Iran or Pakistan to arm a terrorist is worth a hundred thousand of our dollars spent providing electricity or digging wells. Because fighting for the hearts and minds of an alien culture and religion against their coreligionists is an essentially unwinnable war. Nor is it a war we should be fighting.

And that is the second fundamentally wrong assumption buried in the standard guide of the American Way of War, which is that stability requires winning the hearts and minds of the population. What stability actually requires is a working government. If the population is capable of electing responsible leaders and maintaining a workable government, then the model we've been using might actually work, as it did in Europe. However we seem determined to use it in Third World countries which are invariably ruled by dictators, no matter how the oppressive regime might be dressed up as, with inevitably disastrous results.

The fact of the matter is that digging wells will not win Afghanistan. Especially if we focus on our well digging to advantage those very same tribal areas that are the friendliest to the Taliban, thereby acting like divorced parents competing for a child's affection. Not only that our aid actually motivates previously stable areas to cultivate insurgencies in order to receive some of the 1.2 billion dollars designated for CERP. Going around the country handing out bribes is at best a short term solution that creates long term problems. And our conflicting task remains the same, that of trying to stabilize an unstable country and win a war without alienating any of the population. Both those tasks are inherently impossible.

Ever since 9/11, we have been working hard to win the hearts and minds of Muslims. In doing so we have compromised our national security and our war effort at every turn. We have set contradictory objectives abroad and we are surprised somehow when we cannot accomplish them. And while the military may be committed to victory, the political leadership never was. And so we stepped out of the way. We avoided military triumphalism in Iraq, and Shiite fronts for an Iranian takeover such as Muqata Al Sadr were happy enough to take over from us. We avoided alienating the tribal chiefs, and as a result we're caught playing pinball with the intricate politics of a tribal culture, which the Taliban not only understand better than us, but know exactly how to exploit our own Rules of Engagement, launching attacks that we are not allowed to respond to, as we would wind up losing the hearts and minds that we don't have anyway.

We can fight wars in our own defense and the defense of our allies, or we can collaborate on some internal hegemony in order to maintain some preconceived form of stability, but we should not confuse one with the other. Our failure to define an enemy in this conflict other than a lack of stability is the key factor behind our inability to achieve victory. Accomplishing the mission first requires defining the mission. And if we define the mission as destroying Al Queda or even Islamic terrorism in general, then that is a mission we can accomplish. If our mission however is to bring stability to the unstable, and good government to the ungovernable, then we have fallen into the trap of trying to use the military to accomplish goals that are not military at all in nature. For America to begin winning again, we must rethink the American way of war, the way of nation building and diplomacy first policy that we have adopted, but that was actually foreign to the American experience. If we want to win, we must know who we are fighting, why and what we are fighting for.

There is No Peaceful Solution to Terrorism

2009-12-08T22:53:00.000-05:00

It has become fashionable in modern circles to believe that terrorism is the cry of the oppressed, that bombs on buses are the voice of the disempowered and that beheaded schoolteachers are the response of a people deprived of their human rights. They are of course wrong.

Terrorism is nothing more strategic atrocity, a horror show meant to shock and repulse, to weaken morale and bring about negotiations. Which is precisely what diplomats and peace activists willingly provide them. Their notion of a "peaceful solution" invariably ends with the butchers in charge and everyone else on the run. The result may indeed be a peaceful solution, insofar as anyone who disagrees has been executed or fled into exile, and a reign of terror insures that no one disturbs the peace.

The liberal premise is that terrorists are themselves victims who act violently only because they lack any alternative recourse. And yet when given a chance to rule, terrorists invariably demonstrate that they are not monsters because they are oppressed, but that they are oppressed because they are monsters. Communist terror on behalf of the oppressed peasants and workers before the Revolution, was nothing compared to the horrors that were unleashed under the USSR. Nazi violence on behalf of a dispossessed Germany proved to be forgettable compared to the genocide they unleashed as the ruling party. Palestinian Arab terror before the Oslo Accords seems almost simple in comparison to their reinvention of Suicide Bombings after the agreements granting them autonomous territory inside Israel.

From Shiite terror in Iran to the Taliban in Afghanistan. From Latin American Marxists to the Brown Shirts of Berlin to Mugabe and the Viet Cong -- empowered terrorists are not peaceful terrorists. A brutal thug before a treaty is no different than the same brutal thug after the treaty. The only difference is how much power he has.

There is no peaceful solution to terrorism, because terrorism is not a peaceful act. The only way to defend against force is with greater and smarter force. To try and make peace with terrorists is to reward their tactics and insure that they will be repeated over and over again. You cannot defeat terrorism by making peace with it. You can only bare your own throat to the knife.

That is a lesson that Israel has been demonstrating for 17 years during which every treaty, each agreement and concession has been met with greater and deadlier outbursts of violence and terrorism. Israeli concessions on Ramallah, led to suicide bombings in Tel Aviv. The forced evacuation of Jews from Gaza led to rockets raining down on Israeli villages. The willingness to negotiate after all this has turned Jerusalem into a war zone. If Israel agrees to the latest US-EU plan to divide Jerusalem-- the war will move on to the Galilee and the Negev. The apartments in Jerusalem that were once used for target practice by Jordanian snipers occupying half the city, will in turn be used for the same purpose again by Fatah and Hamas terrorists. But one thing is certain, the violence will grow and continue.

To reward a terrorist for his terrorism is to legitimize terrorism as a tactic, not only morally, but politically. The occasional liberal who suggests that terrorists would gain more sympathy if they used civil disobedience, rather than bombing pizzerias, is clearly not paying attention to the consequences of his own politics. The Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Buddhists who have stuck to non-violent protest and moral agitation have no state and no hope of ever having one. By contrast Arafat and the greasy thugs who inherited his place, rule over a major chunk of Israel. The difference lies in the willingness of diplomats to search for "peaceful solutions" for mass murderers, but not for their victims.

Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Hitler's Germany and Arafat's Palestinian Authority all provide eloquent testimony to the consequences of cutting deals with terrorists. Whenever terrorists have been given charge of a country, whether it is the Bolsheviks or the ANC, the Sandanistas or the Nazis, the 26th of July Movement or the Taliban-- the result has been an ugly and dysfunctional country. The ugliness may be covered up with propaganda on the surface, particularly if the terrorist movement has foreign sympathizers on the right or the left in the international press-- but it is easy enough to see.

The wages of terror are more terror. The wages of conspiring together with evil is death. No amount of treaties or concessions can paper over the hard truth that evil will not be pacified with a few provinces or hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid. Take a murderer serving a life sentence out of an American prison, give him his own state and an armed gang to oversee a city. The results will be painfully predictable. And to see them in action you only need to go to the Palestinian Authority or Zimbabwe, which unless you're a fellow traveler of those in charge is a risky proposition.

And while free nations fuss and worry over the morality of torture and targeted killings of terrorists-- there is rather a shortage of concern over the morality of negotiating with mass murderers with the aim of putting them in charge over the lives and fates of millions. But of course terror isn't terror, when it's practiced by the "right" people. It isn't terror when the butchery is progressive. When the dungeons and rape rooms are stocked with the enemies of a socialist regime. And vice versa.

Liberals shed more tears and vented more fury over the captured Baathists with women's underwear on their heads at Abu Ghraib than they ever did over the hundreds of thousands gassed, raped, hacked to pieces and tortured to death under Saddam. The reporters who wept sickeningly when an HIV positive terrorist toad was airlifted out of Israel, for once bereft of his familiar pistol, and airlifted to France, to finally croak in Paris, had no tears to spare for any of Arafat's legion of victims, both Jewish and Arab.

The phony outrage directed over the aging Mugabe's reign of terror in Zimbabwe is pure hypocrisy by the very same people and countries who forced the United African National Council out of power, to make way for Mugabe, who had by that point already become notorious for brutally murdering his political opponents. But then the wages of terror are always terror. And that includes politically correct terror, progressive terror and whitewashed terror as well.

There is and has always been only one solution to terrorism. It is the very same thing that is done when a murderer is found to be roaming the streets. You stop the murderer. You do not sit down and negotiate the murderer. You do not discuss his point of view. You do not shake hands with him or hold photo op conferences. You kill him. And if you begin negotiating with murderers in the name of pacifying them, then soon you will have a great many murderers and a great many murders as well. And then there will be peace, the peace of the grave and the peace of the slave.

There is only one moral response to terror, to make no peace with it. To determine that terrorism and its practioners must be destroyed. That they are to be treated as the inhuman monsters that they are. That those who shelter, arm and finance them are to share their fate. That their sympathizers and well wishers, their lawyers and media adorers should be seen no differently than the men and women who unleash rabid dogs in a schoolyard. Only when terrorists are shown no mercy, when they and their works are uprooted and destroyed, and when there is no safe place or shelter for them-- will there at last be a peaceful solution to terrorism.

If We Don't Stop Global Warming Immediately, Everyone Dies!

2009-12-07T23:11:00.003-05:00

(Since Daniel Greenfield/Sultan Knish could not post today, we instead present this article from noted climate researcher, Dr. Burton Wallace)

If We Don't Stop Global Warming Immediately, Everyone Dies!

Dr. Burton Wallace PhD

If you ever picked up a copy of Newsweek, shop for groceries or attend a local elementary school-- you probably already know that Global Warming (peal of thunder) is the most terrifying not all made up crisis to hit the world since the Y2K bug and the Swine Flu epidemic that has already claimed millions of lives.

You might be sitting in your above water home right now and scoffing at my words, but you'll be scoffing out of the other side of your mouth when the icebergs melt and you're sharing your basement with a very angry Polar Bear. Believe me I have spent months of my life living in Antarctica side by side with very angry Polar Bears and I can promise you that you won't enjoy the experience.

I realize that the leak of private emails from the Anglia Climactic Research Institute has undermined some people's confidence in the charts and graphs we show people on television. And I really do understand why. It's because you people are ignorant swine unfit to kiss the boots of brilliant scientists like me. You probably think the earth is still flat and that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. People like you persecuted Galileo, hounded Newton and picked up torches and burned out Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory. You understand nothing of science. Nothing!

Yes we destroyed all our raw data, used statistical tricks to manipulate our presented data and suppressed the work of anyone who disagreed with us. But what you ignorant swine completely fail to understand is that this is how science works! If you prevent us from manipulating our data to fit our preconceived conclusions and driving dissenters out of academia-- there will be no science anymore!

Why if we made our raw data available to anyone who wanted to use it to reach different conclusions, the result would be sheer chaos! There would be multiple interpretations and possibilities. What would happen to Scientific Dogma and Orthodoxy in such a horrible mixed up world. Because if there's anything that science is diametrically opposed to, it's open debate on a theory.

Can you imagine how tedious and boring it would be for us to test every possible hypothesis and then use experimentation to determine which is right? It would take ridiculous amounts of time. What we've done instead is streamlined the process by 'making stuff up' and then manipulating the data to fit. We get grants. The economy is destroyed. And everyone is happy. Except you people. You're never happy.

Do you want to go back to the way they used to do science when they actually tried to discover things for real? That's ridiculous. What would happen if the conclusions didn't fit our hypothesis. We would have to sign our name to ideas we completely disagree with or get real jobs. The role of a real scientist is to conform his or her work to the conventional political and scientific orthodoxy. These days that means proving that man is a virulent pestilence whose presence is destroying the planet. And then they give us our grant money. Why can't you people understand that?

Yes in the olden days the scientific method was about discovering the truth. Well in the olden days democracy was about popular representation. You don't see that around anymore, now do you? All those old fashioned ideas are going the way of the dodo. The future is us. We are change. And it's time you changed with us. Sure we understand that you're hopelessly backward and ignorant. You probably still believe in God. You think life has some kind of meaning. You think your many times great-grandfather wasn't an ape. But we know better. And Big Bang Theory help us, you're going to know it too.

The bottom line is that Global Warming (ominous peal of thunder) is real because we say it is. And we're scientists. It doesn't matter whether Global Warming (drum solo) is objectively real, so long as it's subjectively real. Because objectively speaking the planet is suffering from too much pollution and overpopulation, and so if we have to make up some imaginary environmental crisis you can believe in to make you all go along with fixing those problems, we'll do it. Because we're scientists, which means we're obligated to make stuff up for the public good.

The bottom line is you need us. Without us, who would issue a study telling you that drinking chocolate wine is healthy one week, and then issue a contradictory study the next week telling you that drinking chocolate wine will kill you before you're twenty, leaving you confused and afraid. Scientists, that's who. Who can spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a probe to Mars that crashes because we failed to tell apart Meters from Feet. Us scientists, that's who. And failures like that just mean we'll be taking another few hundred million dollars from you to do it all over again. Who can create climactic data models based on nothing more than pure hatred for humanity while destroying the raw data? You got it. Scientists!

Because doing science is all about progress and grant money. And you can't make any progress without making mistakes and then lying about them so no one knows any better, until centuries later finally someone comes along to tell us we're wrong... and we run him out of town or burn him at the stake.

2500 years ago, Pythagoras coined the Pythagorean Theorem and then built a cult around his mathematical findings that forbade his followers from eating beans. Thomas Edison stole all his inventions and Kurt Godel thought everyone was poisoning his food until he finally died of malnutrition. But that's science people. And science is often crazy. Sometimes it's paranoid or based on a complicated tissue of lies in which our entire grand theory turns out to be based on assumptions that fit other assumptions that fit a set of assumptions we made back in 1914, when we thought that Mars was covered in canals made by aliens because there bugs crawling across the lenses of our telescopes. But it's vitally important that we respect the process, by which I mean, "Shut up and do what we tell you, because we have PhD's and you don't!"

Sure we could have listened to Galileo, instead of locking him up. We could have listened to Semmelweis when he claimed that doctors shouldn't do autopsies and birth babies without washing their hands in between. And sure thousands and thousands of mothers died because we wouldn't listen. But what's a few thousand poor dead women when it comes to the dignity of the scientist. Yes, no doubt we could have listened to Doppler, instead of waiting until he was dead. We could have taken Robert Goddard seriously, instead of arguing that rockets can't possibly travel into space because there's nothing for them to push against in vacuum. But who has time to listen to loons like that anyway?

We keep ignoring most of Einstein's ideas about the universe in favor of Quantum Mechanics, even though Einstein keeps being proven right. The Law of Conservation of Energy? We ridiculed the very idea. X-Rays, a hoax! Radio has no future! We testified for the prosecution at Alexander Graham Bell's trial when he was charged with fraud for raising money to build something that clearly couldn't exist-- a telephone. Two brothers who ran a bicycle shop in North Carolina flew a plane. We made fun of those ridiculous Wright Brothers. Not a single scientist agreed to come and see their supposed "plane" fly. Scientific American magazine published an article calling them the "Lying Brothers" and claimed that anyone who saw the plane fly was crazy. And you know science was proven right, because planes can't fly. Planes can't fly!

That's science people and it's time to accept it. So grab your recycled toilet paper, put a diaper on your cows, shut down all your heavy industry and most importantly stop breathing. Stop breathing at once because all the carbon coming out of your mouth is destroying the planet. Stop asking to see our raw data or questioning our methods. We're scientists, that means our only method is to create charts that look good to people who barely passed the bar exam but somehow managed to get voted into office. That's science.

And if you happen to see a plane flying overhead, pay it no attention because planes can't fly. At least they can't, once we ban them and everything else to save the earth from Global Warming (horrified scream).

Dr. Burton Wallace PhD is a verified scientist who has published papers proving that the North Pole will melt 5 years from the date anyone reads his paper. He drives a Volvo that runs on cooking oil and melted squirrels which makes him better than you.

How to Reform Islam

2009-12-06T22:31:00.012-05:00

There is no discussing Islam without discussing the Moderate Muslim. Like the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, the Moderate Muslim is often a topic of conversation, but rarely has much to say about himself. And even those who note that the Moderate Muslim is somewhat less in evidence than the Dodo or the Mammoth, turn instead to the project of reforming Islam.

It is of course possible to reform Islam. It is also possible to reform a serial killer. It is however not likely, and certainly not safe to stake your serial-killer prevention strategy on letting the serial killer run free, while you try and talk to him about the virtues of not cutting off people's heads and wearing their skin.

For over a thousand years Islam has been the serial killer of world civilization, decimating entire cultures and religions, practicing ethnic cleansing, genocide, terrorism and endless war. Islam is currently involved directly or indirectly in conflicts or terrorism on virtually every continent. Modern Islamist movements have fused the modern tools of war from IED's to Lawfare to Social Media, with ancient fanatical beliefs blended with the leavings of National Socialism and Communism to create a global killing machine.

Now how do you go about reforming something like that? A rational proposal for reforming Islam must first begin by asking why proposals to reform Islam have gotten nowhere before.

The simple answer is that it's because the unreformed version of Islam is far too success for there to be much of a market for a reformed version. Al Capone wasn't interested in reform when he was shoveling in money hand over fist. The old blood and guts version of Islam is doing better than ever around the world, more so than any pale reformed versions.

The Wahhabis have shown that it's possible to live in America or the UK, get a degree as a doctor, preach terrorism and still get educated at the infidel's expense. The infidels will then fast during Ramadan to avoid offending you, ignore your incitement to violence and look the other way when you send money to terrorists. They will draw the line when you actually open fire or set off a car bomb-- but not to the extent of looking at your mosque or at Islam itself.

If you can be an Islamic extremist while finding career success in the West. If you can be an Islamic extremist and get an invitation to the White House or 10 Downing Street. If you can be an Islamic extremist and still have liberals compete to defend you and promote your agenda-- what possible reason is there for reform?

Non-Muslims may want Islam to reform, but why would Muslims want Islam to reform? The key to answering that question is also the key to reforming Islam.

Right now Muslims, particularly those in the West, have very little incentive to reform Islam. And you can thank the Cult of Tolerance and its ugly sibling, Political Correctness for that. If anything, violence and extremism has actually made Islam more successful by intimidating and extracting more concessions from the Dar Al Harb.

Religions typically reform due to internal pressure, but where is that pressure supposed to come from in the Muslim world? Yes there is a great deal of oppression within Islam, but that oppression is more than balanced out by the benefit that the oppressors gain within the system. For every 11 year old girl married off to a 40 year old man, there is a 40 year old man who is marrying an 11 year old girl. For every second wife who is beaten and humiliated, there is a first wife who enjoys her status. For every honor killing, there is an Imam. And so on and so forth.

Iran has demonstrated that given time the public would turn on an Islamist regime. But that would require waiting so that the inhabitants of every Muslim country wind up living under an Islamist regime, allowing them all to see what that would be like long enough for them to rise up and overthrow it. The obvious hole in this plan is that until the end game, the result would make the Cold War look like a water polo match with a nuclear armed Caliphate dominating a major portion of the globe. And then there's the question of letting Europe be taken over and turned into Eurabia long enough for the grandchildren of those haunting the Finsbury Park Mosque decide that maybe living under Sharia law isn't the solution to all human ills.

So where does all that leave us? With a partial answer. There is a way to reform Islam, but it requires turning up the temperature high enough to make actual reform seem like a good alternative. France's attempt to ban the Burqa is a partial but rather weak step in that direction, by making life as a full-on Muslim incompatible with enjoying the benefits of life in the West.

But the answer isn't quite that simple. We can narrow down three reasons for the current spread and vigor of Islam.

1. Militancy - Militant belief systems are more likely to pick up followers than dishwater ones. Islamic militancy has helped it crush any attempts at moderation, and seem appealing to Western converts by contrast with their liberalized and reformed religions.

2. Western Appeasement - By accommodating Islamic extremists, our societies have effectively surrendered to them by demonstrating that it is possible to have the best of both worlds. To enjoy the economic fruits of a Western lifestyle without compromising on Islamic beliefs and practices in any way.

3. Saudi Money - The influx of oil money and the challenge of domestic terrorism has caused the Saudi royal family, the Guardians of Mecca to spread Islam through the Wahhabi takeover of mosques, which insures that the more aggressive version of Islam will be well funded and backed by the diplomatic power of the House of Saud.

To neutralize the first two reasons, we have to change ourselves first, rather than changing Islam. Only if we cease to appease and tolerate Islamism, is Islamization likely to falter. By turning up the temperature and making life hard for Islam in the West, we can force some reforms, out of necessity, if not out of moral conviction. The third reason requires us to wean ourselves off oil while confronting and neutralizing Saudi Arabia, the UAE and any Muslim oil nations that export Islam abroad.

What exactly does reforming Islam mean? At her talk Wafa Sultan said that reforming Islam would essentially require creating a new religion and calling it Islam. And that is the problem with any attempt at Islamic reforms, unlike most religions, militancy is the heart of Islam. You cannot remove expansionism and Jihad, without removing the roots of Islam in Mohammed's murderous hordes spreading death and fear around the world. And yet that is exactly what reform requires, to create a version of Islam in which its social and ritualistic aspects are stripped of violence, intolerance and war.

This would require significantly rewriting or abrogating the Koran. Simply deemphasizing sections of it or treating them as metaphors, would open the door for the old blood and guts version of Islam to come roaring back at the first sign of outside weakness. As has already happened in the past. It would require changes to Muslim prayers and the undoing of the Muslim sense of superiority to the "infidels" and "people of the book".

Is it impossible? The Islamization going on around us is part of a well funded effort by Muslim countries that decided that exporting Jihad and Islam was in their interest. Demonstrating to them that not only is it not in their interest, but that it will ultimately destroy them by cutting them off from the tourism and trade that is the only thing keeping them from eating their own camels, is far more likely to make it happen than anything else. Similarly Muslims abroad must be made to realize that they face a choice between embracing a version of Islam that can co-exist with their neighbors, or a boat back to wherever they came from.

While Islamic reform is not the likeliest or best option, the best chance for it to take place is as a byproduct of the rejection of appeasement and the tolerance of Islamism by the First World. If it is made decisively clear that Islam stands in the way of trade, tourism and immigration, reform may happen. If pressure is applied to make sure that this reform is more than a few interfaith lectures and an audience of men and women, typical of the sort of phony show reforms the Saudis put on for American politicians and reporters-- it may even lead to something.

But regardless of whether or not Muslims choose to reform their religion, we must resist Islamization as if there were no reform possible. And as a paradox only by doing so, can Islam ever be reformed.

Surrender on a Timetable

2009-12-05T19:42:00.010-05:00

Not long after taking power he announced that he was determined to see an end to the Afghan War. The number of troops serving in Afghanistan was increased to 108,000 and given a 1 year deadline. The allied regime in Afghanistan received a simple and direct message, that after a year they could no longer count on military support. It was time for the Afghan government to figure out how to make it on its own. It was bluntly suggested that they forget social reforms and seek to cut a deal with the Mujahadeen.

The year though was 1985, not 2009. And the leader in question was Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, not Barack Hussein Obama. The parallels however are quite striking. Like Obama, Gorbachev came to power and viewed the War as Afghanistan as a leftover of the old regime that was interfering with his broader multilateral goals. Gorbachev responded with a temporary surge and a year deadline for the Russian military and the Afghan government.

The result of Gorbachev's surge on a timetable made 1985 the bloodiest year of the war for Russia. His timetable and public distaste for the war, effectively negated the temporary surge of manpower because the Mujahadeen didn't have to defeat the Russian forces, all they needed to do was hang in there until the Russians got tired and left. The Russian timetable inspired a new show of unity from the Mujahadeen which united into a temporary coalition and escalated the violence. The withdrawal dragged on for another year. And then another. International negotiations and a final show of show, combined with behind the scenes Soviet deals cut with the Mujahadeen finally brought the Soviet presence to an end in Feb 1989.

Now 20 years later Obama is duplicating virtually all of Gorbachev's mistakes, from the timetable to the public criticism of the war, to the backdoor negotiations with the Taliban. Unsurprisingly US casualties have already doubled under Obama. By dithering on his final decision and keeping McChrystal at bay, Obama demonstrated his lack of commitment to the war. And while his advisors might imagine that throwing another high profile media event in a symbolic location will solve all image problems, it will not. The Taliban scented blood as soon as Obama was elected. They scented blood again when Obama threw out a tepid speech, relying heavily on insincere Bush era sentiments that he had made a point of rejecting in the past, packed with a timetable and excuses for his allies on the left.

Karzai has already gotten the message and is now prepping for talks with the Taliban. Gorbachev has resurfaced from his tar pit of obscurity to advise Obama to begin withdrawing troops. Administration figures are sending conflicting messages on the credibility of the timetable. Pakistani leaders are complaining that Al Queda will pull out during the surge and focus its activities on Pakistan. The media is meanwhile taking an uncharacteristically hostile tone to the speech, describing it as "controversial" and playing up the difficulties of deployment. And the chaos is just beginning.

Obama's decision was the safe one, signing on to a limited surge, followed by a graduated withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan timed to begin before the election, giving the public the feel good sensation of troops beginning to come home, but without showcasing the consequences of a complete US pullout. As always Obama did what was best for himself, spending what he considers to be worthless currency, the lives of US soldiers, and the already devalued American dollar in the way that will serve him best.

No one in the Obama Administration believes that the temporary surge will stabilize Afghanistan. And it showed in Obama's speech, a long rambling series of justifications and recycled rhetoric. It's as if Jesse Jackson and David Frum had collaborated on the speechwriting duties. Between the justifications for the original invasion of Afghanistan, the not too subtle attempt to blame Bush for the current situation, justifications for his own inability to reach a decision, references to completely mythical international troop contributions and more justifications to his liberal allies for being involved in the war in the first place... it was less a speech and more of a running defense against all the criticisms that he has received and expects to receive once the speech has been delivered.

Obama's speech was essentially a long drawn out excuse note to everyone he was disappointing or upsetting, from the military to his liberal allies to Muslims around the world. It was a speech short on solutions or new policies, and long on vague rhetoric. But then Obama was not really trying to shake off the Bush legacy, but to exploit it this time out. In his speech Obama had managed to make his proposed retreat look like a courageous stand. Those in attendance on the base knew better, but many of those watching at home did not. And they were his real audience.

The Obama Administration had come in focusing on domestic policy, spending big on domestic projects that mainly benefited his own political allies on Wall Street and in the unions. But with approval ratings tanking and majorities polling against Obama's policies, Afghanistan can actually seem safer than Porkulus. Traditionally Presidents have polled higher when international politics were in the picture, and Afghanistan gives Obama a place in the sun where he can't be overshadowed by Pelosi, while at the same time cynically transposing public criticism of his own deficit spending, to the cost of the War on Terror.

There is a reason that Obama's West Point speech was sandwiched between the public fallout over ObamaCare and his new planned shift to speaking out against the deficit. Sticking Afghanistan in there allows Obama to associate the deficit with Bush's War on Terror, rather than his own stimulus package and bailout spending. It also casts his own spending in a patriotic light, rather than the cynical image of a political hack paying back his Wall Street donors and UAW and SEIU backers with trillions in taxpayer debt held by the People's Republic of China. By playing the Wartime Emergency card, the White House Chicago crew think they can dampen down criticism of the deficit, as well as framing economic problems within the context of an ongoing war-- both themes alluded to in Obama's West Point speech.

For Obama, the risks of Afghanistan seem relatively negligible. The loss of American troops only troubles him as a political, rather than human problem. And while Obama would rather spend his money elsewhere, in his administration money is being spent as if it were an infinite commodity anyway. His only real reluctance to spending it in Afghanistan is that there are no union members there to take their cut. And whatever goes wrong, the blame can and always will be laid at Bush's door. That makes Afghanistan the political equivalent of a drive thru, a place where Obama can score some political points before moving on to his real agenda.

This short intermission is only a segueway to pushing the next grandiose stimulus plan, and the backlash from his liberal allies who expected him to give them surrender on a silver platter, and were aching to see US helicopters abandoning terrified Afghanis by February, only allows Obama to claim that he is positioned on the middle ground above extremism and partisanship. But while Obama scores his political points, it is US forces who will be fighting and dying against an emboldened Taliban, while knowing that their own victories will be rendered meaningless in two years.

When Gorbachev pushed for a withdrawal from Afghanistan, he did so because he understood that the real battle was inside Russia's borders where the Communist party was losing its grip on the country. Obama similarly wants to withdraw in order to focus on his real agenda, tightening the grip of the Democratic party and of his own left wing backers on America. For a man who considers his real "extremist" enemies to be Republicans not Taliban, the only real plans Obama has for Afghanistan is to surrender on a timetable.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Obama's F22, Climategate and IED Dog

2009-12-04T16:01:00.001-05:00

Obama gave his speech only to discover what being on the other side of the media bias line looks. Suddenly articles ominously mentioned his "controversial" speech, because of course a controversial speech is one that the media disagrees with. Stories before the speech ran touting the soldiers who don't want to serve or deploy.

And Obama's speech was a failure on both sides, providing a temporary limited surge along the lines of the same policy Gorbachev enacted right before the end. Liberals who wanted Afghanistan to be Vietnam right now, and wanted to see US helicopters taking off and US interpreters being slaughtered discovered that they will have to wait another 18 months. Meanwhile anyone who takes the War on Terror seriously realizes that all Obama offers is a face saving gesture for his own political career.

Peter Roff at US News and World Report pointed out that Obama's Speech on Afghanistan Said nothing At All

In a more narrow sense, however, the speech was wanting because it displayed, in a most disquieting way, the idea that, to Obama, it seemed more important for the United States to be able to get out of Afghanistan than it was to win or, for that matter, to achieve a meaningful, measurable objective as the result of sending additional troops into the region...

The whole business, for all of the apparent deliberations that went into crafting a new policy, continues to smack of indecision. "Never before has a speech by President Barack Obama felt as false as his Tuesday address announcing America's new strategy for Afghanistan," he wrote, adding it "left both dreamers and realists feeling distraught."

Indeed. There was nothing in the speech, or in the spin coming from the president's allies within his government and on Capitol Hill, that could not have been announced with significantly less fanfare two, six or even nine months ago, somewhere around the time that the U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, originally asked for reinforcements. Instead we were left with a speech that, trying to be all things to all people on all sides of the issue, ended up being nothing of significance at all.

Der Spiegel was equally devastating

One can hardly blame the West Point leadership. The academy commanders did their best to ensure that Commander-in-Chief Barack Obama's speech would be well-received.

Just minutes before the president took the stage inside Eisenhower Hall, the gathered cadets were asked to respond "enthusiastically" to the speech. But it didn't help: The soldiers' reception was cool.

One didn't have to be a cadet on Tuesday to feel a bit of nausea upon hearing Obama's speech. It was the least truthful address that he has ever held. He spoke of responsibility, but almost every sentence smelled of party tactics. He demanded sacrifice, but he was unable to say what it was for exactly.

...

The speech continued in that vein. It was as though Obama had taken one of his old campaign speeches and merged it with a text from the library of ex-President George W. Bush. Extremists kill in the name of Islam, he said, before adding that it is one of the "world's great religions." He promised that responsibility for the country's security would soon be transferred to the government of President Hamid Karzai -- a government which he said was "corrupt." The Taliban is dangerous and growing stronger. But "America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars," he added.

It was a dizzying combination of surge and withdrawal, of marching to and fro. The fast pace was reminiscent of plays about the French revolution: Troops enter from the right to loud cannon fire and then they exit to the left. And at the end, the dead are left on stage.

Liberal responses have meanwhile ranged from angry to disappointed to conspiracy mongering hysteria. In particular a piece at CBS News by Tom Engelhardt claimed that the entire speech had been the product of a military coup against Obama. No seriously. The piece is a hysterical full run on rant that could have been authored by a younger Bill Ayers and demonstrates the level of denial permeating some of Obama's liberal media backers.

Apparently though despite this supposed coup, Obama was able to successfully banish an F-22 from the vicinity of his speech, so that the Prince of Chicago's would not be tainted by any military association.

But some things are best summed up by late night jokes

"President Obama ordered 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban, but on an 18-month timetable. In a related story, the Taliban announced they are on a 19-month timetable." -Jay Leno

Meanwhile the Climategate fallout continues with a UN Panel set to begin its investigation.

It is interesting so far that the two most serious blows to the left's political hegemony came from two young people with a video camera, and an anonymous hacker.

Obama meanwhile is busy making the case for healthcare by slurring the Roma. He really is a European politician.

And April Ryan or the American Urban Radio Networks has made the news twice.

First when Chris Matthews declared that "Homeland" was a Communist Neo-Con word.

MATTHEWS: It sounds so vaguely, it sounds like Russia. It sounds like- because it`s one of those neo-con words I despise. Defending the United States. You don't have to defend the homeland, the off-land islands, like we're Japan. We have some other space we defend. That's what got us into trouble in the first place... Okay next time. By the way, when we stop term, using terms, start using terms like the motherland and the fatherland, that's when we are getting imperial.

I don't think anyone's surprised that Chris Matthews doesn't like the homeland. Then April Ryan told off Gibbs when he once again felt the needs to compare reporters asking questions he didn't like to little children.

Look for the usual liberal and feminist blogs who would have lost their minds had Rumsfeld talked to a black female reporter this way to remain completely silent.

Meanwhile for those who can make it there will be a protest against Obama and Holder's plan to hold civilian trials for Al Queda terrorists in New York.

***CALL TO ACTION***
# SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5 RALLY IN FOLEY SQUARE:

STOP THE TERROR TRIAL IN NYC!

NEW YORKERS TO ATTORNEY GENERAL HOLDER:
“WE WILL FIGHT YOU ALL THE WAY!”

What: December 5th rally protesting the NYC based trial of 9/11 conspirators
Where: FOLEY SQUARE, MANHATTAN
When: Saturday, December 5th, 2009 12:00 noon
Who:

The 9/11 Never Forget Coalition, a diverse group of 9/11 victims, family members, first responders, active and reserve members of the military, veterans, and concerned Americans, is holding December 5th rally protesting the plan to bring the 9/11 terrorist conspirators to trial in New York City.

Meanwhile at the Jerusalem Post, there's an interesting article from a former Islamic terrorist who worked together with Zawahari defending the Swiss decision to ban the Minaret.

The Swiss people who rejected building minarets may be sending a message that their tolerance did not change the Muslim world and is not reciprocated. For several decades Muslims have been allowed to build mosques in Europe, wear their traditional symbols such as the hijab, and preach Islam to non-Muslims. Despite such high levels of tolerance in the West, non-Muslims are not permitted to practice similar rights in several parts of the Islamic world. Preaching Christianity is criminalized in a number of Muslim countries. Furthermore, non-Muslims are not permitted to have their holy books or to build their religious temples in many Shari'a-controlled areas. This lack of reciprocity of Western tolerance will naturally make many Westerners feel that showing tolerance to Muslims is not effective.

The entire thing is worth reading.

In the aftermath of my article this week on Wafa Sultan, I have noticed someone very aggressively circulating a hit piece targeting her from In Focus, a paper as the largest Muslim newspaper in California. The piece relies mostly on claims from some anonymous Syrian informant who supposedly knew the Sultans.

Let's take a look at what In Focus is.

Asma Ahmad, a Pakistani Canadian citizen who grew up in Saudi Arabia attending American-run schools and formerly edited the national newsletter of the Muslim Students Association, is the paper's managing editor and only full-timer staffer

The Muslim Students Association is a project of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is behind the creation of Hamas and Al Queda. We're talking about hard core Islamist propaganda funded by the Saudis.

And what sort of things does In Focus and Asma Ahmad print...

Asma Ahmad is the managing editor of CAIR-California’s monthly tabloid, In Focus. Under her leadership, in October of 2006, In Focus published an article lauding Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah. The piece read, “[I]t was undoubtedly the epic heroism of the resistance fighters that dealt the humiliating defeat to the Anglo-American-backed Zionist forces, but such heroism would not have been possible without the larger-than-life leader to inspire, direct and focus it. Nasrallah’s leadership in war and later has made him into an emblematic figure of long-cherished hope not only to a majority of the Lebanese people but also to the Arab nation as a whole and indeed to the Muslim world.”

This isn't even Islamism. This is open support for terrorism. And that's the source of the hit piece targeting Wafa Sultan.

For more on this topic, please see my previous article today, Rebutting the Smears Against Wafa Sultan

Some in the blogsphere have noticed Charles Johnson of LGF's official statement about breaking with the right. A statement that is redundant since the break seems to have actually come at least a year ago. It's tantamount to David Horowitz suddenly writing an article to state that he is no longer a liberal. File this one under things everyone already knew.

By way of personal disclosure, LGF used to be my home away from on the internet. Long before I began blogging myself, it was the blog I loaded first every day and throughout the day. For a while it epitomized the best of the counter-Jihad blogsphere. That LGF is long gone and I miss it a lot. I haven't mentioned LGF in a while because there is nothing to say about it anymore.

The new LGF is obsessed with waging war on Creationists, anyone who doesn't believe in Global Warming and pretty much everyone to the right of Johnson. The War on Terror has gone by the wayside, folded in between 20 other stories about how Palin will destroy America, mainly I suspect to make the original readers feel less uncomfortable about being at a site that has become virtually indistinguishable from DailyKos except by its color scheme.

But this isn't about the "Right". It's possible to be pro-evolution, gay marriage and global warming-- and write against Islamic terrorism. It's possible to be an atheist who's 100 percent for secularism and blog against Islamic terrorism. Talk of breaking with the right is nonsense. Charles Johnson was always a liberal, but he used to be anti-Jihadist liberal.

Johnson was not the only one who woke up after 9/11, only to go back to sleep again. He just took longer than most to do it. And it is a shame because for a while LGF was a great resource, a roundup and a snapshot of what terrorists were up to around the world, combined with rebuttals for the anti-war movement.

But much as Johnson may protest, this isn't about Beck or Lew Rockwell or Robert Stacy McCain or the BNP. If it really was, then LGF would still be covering the War on Terror as the major focus.

This is because Charles Johnson with the passage of time discovered something worse than 9/11, Creationism. Just as Andrew Sullivan discovered something worse than 9/11, Opposition to Gay Marriage. And claiming anything else is simply dishonest. Johnson may or may not wake up again. Probably not. But the War on Terror goes on regardless of him or any other individual or any infighting in the blogsphere.

By dropping out of the fight, Johnson has not ended it, only made himself irrelevant to the true great struggle of our time. Others will see the struggle and come in his place.

At Love of the Land, a piece by Dr. Aaron Lerner noting the impact of Obama's demanded settlement freeze on Israel.

Israeli property owners, possessing all the necessary permits to build their homes, will now face the costs of having the completion of their homes delayed by ten months.

And the building contractors and others associated with the construction activity that has been frozen will also face various costs through no fault of their own.

Mystical Paths further points to the devastating impact on the same Palestinian Arabs that Obama claims to want to help

Palestinian Authority statistics from 2007 state that 13% of "Palestinian" men in the West Bank work in construction in the settlements and Israel (including Jerusalem and other supposed "occupied" areas).

In the name of peace, the U.S. just forced Israel to place 13% of "Palestinian" men, the main or sole wage earner for their families, on the unemployment line. Oh wait, there is no unemployment line in the West Bank. No unemployment insurance, government benefits, social security, dole, etc.

13% of the "Palestinian" workers of the West Bank were just set up to starve in the name of peace. Given an unemployment rate of 18% in the West Bank "Palestinian" areas, we're going to take that up to 31% for peace.

In AFSI's Mideast Outpost meanwhile Rael Jean Isaac and Ruth King look at the Axis of Anti-Semitism.

In Germany the left has put the Jewish community in a double bind. Historian Suzanne Urban reports that groups on the left embrace Jews as valued allies against neo-Nazi Holocaust denial, even as these same groups defame Israel and her supporters. As German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder observed in a hearing by the Interior Committee of the Bundesrepublik: “The modern anti-Semite condemns ordinary anti-Semitism, but he names himself without hesitation anti-Zionist. He is grateful for having his chance to show his resentments in a politically correct way. The anti-Zionist has the same attitude toward Israel as anti-Semites carry toward Jews.” Making the situation of Jews even more uncomfortable, the left demands that as victims of the Holocaust, they publicly identify with Moslems, their chief tormentors. Writes Urban: “The former victims should be alert and help the actual victims—it is seen as their duty to warn against anti-Islamic attitudes.”

And Yoram Ettinger reports that as usual the Israeli public, outside the voting booth, seems to be more right than their leaders. At Israpundit

A Jew with a View asks people to turn out at the Stop Islamization rally on the 13th

Climate Realists has a video discussing whether Al Gore's Oscar should be revoked in the wake of Climategate. Of course if falsehood revokes an Oscar, Michael Moore would have to give his back too. But then again we already know that falsehood and even covering up for mass murder won't revoke even a Pulitzer Price.

Victor the Contractor at Director Blue charges that Obama represents Dictatorship, not Communism.

Lemon Lime Moon describes Obama's speech as his defining moment.

And finally to close off the roundup, IED Dog

Cena, an easygoing two-and-a-half-year-old black Labrador retriever, is the unit's IDD: IED Detection Dog. He's trained to sniff out the homemade bombs — the military calls them improvised explosive devices — that insurgents have planted all over the roads, fields and paths where the Marines patrol on foot.

Patrols sometimes look like one big frolic for Cena, who likes his job. It is, after all, not much different from being walked. He lopes around, sniffing paths and piles of hay and corn shucks, wagging his tail and usually — but not always — obeying the command of his boyish handler, Lance Cpl. Jeffrey De Young, 19, of Holland, Mich.

Rebutting the Saudi Smear Campaign Against Wafa Sultan

2009-12-04T12:33:00.002-05:00

With the release of Wafa Sultan's book, A God Who Hates, the various Saudi front organizations have sprung into action doing their best to smear her reputation.

It is of course completely unsurprising that the agents of a kingdom that despises women and treats them like cattle would be furious at criticism of Islam coming from... a woman.

Ever since Wafa Sultan first came to the public's attention by defiantly challenging a male cleric and demanding her right to speak, she has been the target of repeated death threats and slander.

So it is also completely unsurprising that those same Saudi front groups would then use transparent lies and smears to attack her now. But their smear campaign reveals more about them than it does about Wafa Sultan.

First up is the claim that Wafa Sultan lied about ever being a Muslim, because she was an Alawi Muslim. This is a bizarre claim that only fanatical Sunni Wahhabi groups could make with a straight face. To argue that Sultan did not grow up as a Muslim because she grew up as an Alawi Muslim, is akin to a Catholic arguing that a Protestant is not a Christian and vice versa.

The other half of this claim is the argument that since she does not currently believe in Islam and the Koran, she is somehow unqualified to talk about what is wrong with Islam. A position that would disqualify every Scientology critic on the planet and every dissident who escapes from an oppressive regime. Wafa Sultan's qualifications to talk about what is wrong with Islam come from growing and living as a Muslim under Islam. As well as her study of what is wrong with Islam from a cultural, religious and psychological standpoint.

A corollary to this is the claim that Syria was secular and therefore Wafa Sultan did not grow up living in an Islamic society. While Syria under Assad was more secular than say Saudi Arabia, it was still a Muslim country, in the same way that the similarly Baathist Iraq was Muslim. Aside from small minorities, virtually every Syrian is Muslim and mosque attendance is normative. The state funds mosques and Islamic education is part of the regular curriculum. Islamic norms are thoroughly integrated within the national culture.

For a snapshot of that, here's an excerpt from an academic paper on Syria's educational system

Islamic education in Syrian schools is traditional, rigid, and Sunni. The Ministry of Education makes no attempt to inculcate notions of tolerance or respect for religious traditions other than Sunni Islam. Christianity is the one exception to this rule. Indeed, all religious groups other than Christians are seen to be enemies of Islam, who must be converted or fought against. The Syrian government teaches school children that over half of the world’s six billion inhabitants will go to hell and must be actively fought by Muslims...

The government is to be an Islamic State without separation of church and state. The student is constantly reminded that the Islamic state is a divine order whose wisdom, justice, and laws are imposed by God. The chapter of the twelfth grade text entitled, “The System of Government in Islam,” concludes with the following sentences:

There's your "secular" Syria right there. That's the "secular" Syria that Wafa Sultan grew up in.

Secondly, there's the claim that Wafa Sultan is a "turncoat" who has deliberately sought fame in order to get rich. As In Focus, a CAIR front magazine writes;

"As for the Sultans’ financial troubles, Halabi told InFocus that ever since Dr. Sultan gained notoriety those troubles are a thing of the past. "She bought a house for herself and bought another for her son," ... When asked about the source of her material well-being, Halabi was unsure.

As to the reasons that may have pushed Sultan to be so outspoken and vocal against Islam in a post-9/11 world, Halabi sympathetically remarked, "Poverty. It drives people to sell their soul."

The "mysterious source" of their material well-being is that Wafa Sultan was able to become a practicing doctor in the United States. Doctors in the United States tend to have not particularly mysterious sources of material well-being. And whatever money she has made from her speaking fees is hardly anything compared to the security costs of regularly dealing with death threats from Muslim.

Thirdly, let's discuss the In Focus magazine hit piece, Wafa Sultan Reformist or opportunist? that is the source of many of the smears aimed at Wafa Sultan.

In Focus bills itself as the largest Muslim magazine in California. Unsurprisingly the whole thing is attached to the usual Islamist groups. Who runs In Focus?

"Asma Ahmad, a Pakistani Canadian citizen who grew up in Saudi Arabia attending American-run schools and formerly edited the national newsletter of the Muslim Students Association, is the paper's managing editor and only full-timer staffer"

What is the Muslim Students Association? The Muslim Students Association is a project of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is behind the creation of Hamas and Al Queda.

Does In Focus support Islamic terrorism? Does a bear use the men's room in Yellowstone National Park?

"Asma Ahmad is the managing editor of CAIR-California’s monthly tabloid, In Focus. Under her leadership, in October of 2006, In Focus published an article lauding Hezbollah and its leader Hassan Nasrallah. The piece read, “[I]t was undoubtedly the epic heroism of the resistance fighters that dealt the humiliating defeat to the Anglo-American-backed Zionist forces, but such heroism would not have been possible without the larger-than-life leader to inspire, direct and focus it. Nasrallah’s leadership in war and later has made him into an emblematic figure of long-cherished hope not only to a majority of the Lebanese people but also to the Arab nation as a whole and indeed to the Muslim world.”

Absolutely shocking that a pro-terrorist Islamist publication would have issues with Wafa Sultan.

The In Focus magazine hit piece on Wafa Sultan, "Wafa Sultan: Reformist or opportunist?" primarily relies on a long chain of bizarre stories by some supposed anonymous figure who claims to have known and still be friends with Wafa Sultan.

The odds are good that "Halabi" is just a tag that allows In Focus to assemble whatever smears or stories they collected about Wafa Sultan under one name, while playing the FUD game by trying to make her think that one of her friends is slandering her to In Focus. And his claims that Wafa Sultan is really a Mexican migrant worker and is just doing this for the money are too silly to even be worth paying attention to, right up there with the Zionist arachnid bubble gum of lust.

Fourthly, is the claim being circulated by Muslim "activists" that Wafa Sultan called for "nuking the Muslim world". Naturally this relies on circulating an out of context and off the cuff remark in which Wafa Sultan agreed that it might end up taking the same measures to stop Islamofascism that it did to stop Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. However she had already stated and would state in her speech that Islam could be reformed without violence if sufficient pressure was placed on the Saudi royal family.

Naturally Islamist front groups which are often Saudi front groups are not interested in citing that part of her remarks, only her agreement that it might indeed take the use of nuclear weapons if the Clash of Civilizations continues escalating. This is an entirely reasonable statement when you consider that Iran and Saudi Arabia are both going nuclear, and if such weapons fall into the hands of Islamists, the result is likely to be a nuclear exchange.

The best way to prevent a situation where anyone is getting nuked, is for those same Muslims who are busy smearing Wafa Sultan, to actually begin listening to her and try to reform Islam away from violence and terrorism. Naturally they aren't doing that. It's always been easier in the Muslim world to shoot the messenger, than to actually listen to her. Particularly if it's a "her".

This essentially sums up the list of smears currently being circulated aimed at Wafa Sultan. More of course will arise as her tour continues. If you do see such smears being circulated, feel free to link to this article for a rebuttal and provide any updates in the comments.

Netanyahu Plays the Caliph's Game

2009-12-02T23:45:00.001-05:00

Once upon a time a mad Caliph demanded of an old servant of his that he teach a donkey to talk for his amusement. If he refused, he would be put to death. If he failed he would be put to death as well. The old servant shrugged and assented, asking for a year's time. When other servants asked him why he had accepted, he answered. "A year is a long time. Either the Caliph will die or the donkey will learn to speak."

Now in Jerusalem, Netanyahu is busy playing Caliph Obama's game. He knows that the donkeys of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas are not about to learn to talk like human beings and engage in actual diplomacy, instead of using diplomacy as a subterfuge for terrorism. But at the same time he knows that the American Caliph is not about to cease making irrational demands for talking donkeys. So once again Netanyahu is playing for time.

It is hard to tell whether Netanyahu is trying to finesse the Caliph, or repeating the mistakes of his first term, when he gave in to the Clinton Administration's pressure, only to be forced from office by Clinton's hired goons anyway. And there may be no practical difference.

The 10 month freeze on construction beyond the Green Line that Netanyahu agreed to has already resulted in a revolt within the Likud and the settlement community. Inspectors have been met with protests and acts of civil disobedience. Netanyahu in turn has canceled his trip to Germany and is trying to settle the bubbling political crisis.

While everyone in the government is assuring the public that the freeze is only temporary, there's no sign that this belief is shared on the Caliph's side of the fence. America and the EU view the freeze as a sign of things to come. And while construction has frozen, Obama and the EU are busy creating new facts on the ground. Obama has already broken ground by calling Jewish housing in Jerusalem a Settlement. A leaked classified EU report meanwhile calls for the European Union to strengthen the PA's hold on Israel's capital city and pushes for sanctions against Jewish residents of East Jerusalem.

Netanyahu's show of "good faith" has not averted Palestinian Arab terrorist attacks, nor a drive by the US and the EU to disenfranchise Israel in its own capital. All it has done is frozen Israel's ability to respond by countering the facts on the ground created by Fatah terrorists and their EU and US government backers, with facts on the ground of its own. Countering efforts to ethnically cleanse Jews from their own country with the most potent antidote, Jewish settlement.

Once again Netanyahu has not made diplomatic concessions to the Palestinian Authority, which in any case lacks a legal government and no longer even controls its own territory. He made a political concession to Caliph Obama. But he would be extremely foolish to expect any gratitude for it.

The 10 month freeze is viewed as inadequate in Washington D.C., a minimal concession that Obama had to settle for because he couldn't get anything more out of Netanyahu this time around. Like a mugger who escapes with a few quarters, only because he couldn't grab the whole wallet, an embittered Obama will be back because his administration is governed by the belief that the only way to bring stability to the Middle East is by taking that wallet away from Israel and giving it to the Muslim terrorists of Hamas (Gaza) and Fatah (Palestinian Authority).

Obama settled for 10 months only to avoid leaving the impression that he had failed to accomplish anything, but he certainly won't be settling for 10 months. But Israelis have a grabbing onto the faintest statements from America for a thin shred of hope. Rabin insisted that the Palestinian Authority would be easily revocable if violence ensued. Sharon took American assurances about retaining some of Judea and Samaria as ironclad guarantees, when a few years later Obama demonstrated that they weren't a clod of dirt, let alone the misery and horror inflicted by the Gaza Disengagement on the people of Israel. This lack of memory, this perpetual political amnesia is the same reason why conservative Israelis are baffled that Netanyahu 2.0 is a lot like Netanyahu 1.0, only a little better at playing politics.

Meanwhile Netanyahu has found that cutting a deal with Obama may actually destroy him at home. Parliamentary critics point out that the Knesset never voted on the freeze. And with the scope of the freeze touching on even sizable Israeli cities such as Beitar Ilit, with a prominently Haredi population, the outrage extends well beyond the usual settlement activists, as Israelis who are not usually caught up in politics are discovering that the freeze will hit them hard in the wallet and prevent them from building and expanding homes, or moving into partially constructed housing.

With everyone in his government looking to score points, Netanyahu is more on the defensive than he has ever been. Barak has seen his chance to boost his otherwise terrible standing within the left wing camp with a round of settler bashing, both metaphorical and physical via the dreaded Yasam units. Shas played its usual cynical game by opposing the freeze in word, and sitting out the vote to score brownie points, while not actually voting against the freeze. Lieberman is busy touting his foreign affairs credentials, despite the fact that much of the world thinks of him as little more than a shaved ape in a suit. Which is not altogether far from the truth. The Likud meanwhile is full of pretenders to the throne who are willing to talk tough, right up until the point that they sit down in the big chair themselves.

The UTJ, which as usual cares about only money, is putting a bill forward to have the government compensate everyone who now be losing money on existing construction projects. While the UTJ move is another cynical example of a corrupt Haredi politics that cares only for its own finances, it is clear that no one in the government went so far as to consider the economic fallout from the freeze. And that fallout extends beyond Israel and to the Palestinian Arabs as well, who depend heavily on Israeli construction in the Settlements and Jerusalem for their income. This means that a construction freeze is paradoxically likely to inspire further violence.

By agreeing to the freeze, Netanyahu made another concession that will make it harder for Jews to live in Israel. Because each concession has only served to whet the wolf's appetite for territory in the Arab world, and the drive to stamp out Israel in the EU and the State Department. A 10 month freeze on housing construction in Judea and Samaria doesn't mean 10 months in the chandelier lit halls of Brussels and Washington D.C. It means an indefinite freeze as a precursor to turning the territory over to Fatah and Hamas, while ethnically cleansing its Jewish population. And anyone who thinks any different, is fooling themselves.

But by turn Netanyahu's harshest critics are ignoring the unpleasant reality that weakening him or forcing him out, will only bring the same results it did last time, when it ushered in Barak's election as Clinton's puppet, followed by Sharon ethnically cleansing Jews from Gaza in exchange for worthless promises that Obama has already disavowed.

To survive Israel must stop making concessions, and recognize that it is not negotiating with the PA, which has never taken the negotiations seriously in the first place, and used them only to help extract financial aid from its foreign sponsors. It has been and is negotiating with the US and the EU. And those negotiations must cease.

Feeding into the idea that the process is a dead end and futile, can't help but weaken the foreign policy advocates of creating a stable Middle East by feeding Israel to the terrorist crocodile. And Netanyahu has demonstrated that he is quite capable of wasting everyone's time and frustrating them in the bargain, almost as well as Arafat did. If Israel can't have a leader who can openly dispense with the niceties and the negotiations, then it may have to settle for a leader who borrows the Palestinian Arab negotiating handbook and turn the entire process into a hopeless sinkhole.

In the World Championship chess matches, the Soviet authorities determined that Karpov, their man, should defeat Korchnoi, who had defected from the USSR, successfully terrorized the latter. Karpov won, but wound up facing Bobby Fischer, who was crazy enough to terrorize any opponent without requiring the services of the secret police. If Netanyahu lacks the courage to openly drop the pretense of negotiating with the US and the EU, he can turn the negotiations into a complete farce. That is the third answer to the Caliph's game. Because the Caliph is not all powerful, he only has as much power as your cooperation gives him. Israel's willingness to negotiate has made it into a target. Only by destroying the process one way or another, can Israel survive and be free.

Choosing Freedom over Islam, and the Story of Wafa Sultan

2009-12-01T22:37:00.044-05:00

Today I attended a Q&A Wafa Sultan as part of a book signing for her new book, and I noticed that the common theme of virtually every question that was asked by the attendees could be summed up as, "What can we do to stop Islam?"

There is of course no simple answer. Communism, the closest parallel to the current threat we face, attacked us at a military, political and cultural level. Islam attacks us at a military, political, cultural and religious level-- making it a four part threat. And while the Soviet Union did finally collapse, looking at the state of freedom in America and Europe today, at a political environment that has dispensed with democracy in favor of judicial activism and class warfare politics that owe a good deal to the dictatorship of the proletariat-- the question of whether we defeated Communism, or Communism defeated us, remains open.

The Soviet Union proved unable to defeat us militarily, despite dedicating the bulk of its industrial capacity to building weapons, and successfully allying with much of the Third World to create an anti-Western world order in the U.N. But culturally and politically, Communism did a great deal of damage in the West. More so than most people understand. The American and European of the year 2009 lives in a system whose political premises resemble those of the USSR more than they do his own country of 1909. And this goes to show us that Communism accomplished far more through subversion and infiltration than nationalism and armed conquest. And the best proof of that is Eastern Europe, which was today is more honestly capitalistic than Western Europe which spent the last half century free of the Soviet boot.

Had Trotsky's way prevailed over that of his less visionary contemporaries, Communism might have triumphed as an international revolutionary movement, rather than failing as a Second World poorly industrialized armed camp. And that is a scaled down version of the threat that we face with Islam today, backed by oil money from otherwise backward countries, polished by the disingenuous lies of a merchant culture and driven by a fanaticism that even few Communists could aspire to. And we have no better answers to the problem of what to do about a movement that subverts our society from within, than we did back then.

In her talk Wafa Sultan emphasized the importance of being informed about the real nature of Islam. And certainly the first stage of defense against cultural, political and religious threats-- which circulate by way of ideas, is to be informed. But information itself is very much a subjective thing. It is possible to tell someone that Islam is currently involved in conflicts all over the world, that it is responsible for millions of deaths through acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing. You can list all the objective facts about Islam, without in the least shaking his belief that Islam is all right based on episodes he's seen of Little Mosque on the Prairie or because Mohammed, the deli guy in the store under his office, is always friendly when he comes in for a sandwich.

For rational people the objective facts of the case may suffice, for most people they will not. We live in an age where objective reasoning has been destroyed in the First World through a process of careful cultural obliteration. To tell someone that a million are dead in Darfur is to give him a meaningless statistic that is "awful", but not relatable. By contrast, to chronicle the story of a single orphan does far more than listing the millions dead and raped.

The satirical Israeli comedy series Latma had an episode in which the UN Human Rights Council's bewigged Judge Goldstone mockingly tells the "news team" that what Israel did wrong was kill 1300 terrorists, instead of half a million. "Today everything is upside down. One dead man is a massacre, a thousand is a war crime and a half a million slaughtered is a mere tragedy... Because of the size of the television screen. One dead man is a drama, but a half million, what do you see?" In short, you can list all the reasons why Islam is evil and the full list of atrocities, and still come away with nothing. By contrast an individual story, a personal narrative, makes the subject meaningful in a way that little else can.

That is why Wafa Sultan's book, A God Who Hates, is valuable in both providing the personal narrative of an ex-Muslim and the cultural and psychological brew that goes into making and distilling the toxic poison of Islam into the human soul. Wafa Sultan provides an examination of Islam from the inside that few Western experts could contend with and a personal narrative of what life is like for an educated woman who is relegated to the status of a second class citizen under Islamic law. But Wafa Sultan's challenge is that she not only deals with what is wrong with Islam, but what is wrong with us for being so willing to sit idly by in the face of the Islamization of our countries.

We are all too eager to rush around looking for a moderate Islam, all too willing to embrace the path of least resistance, little realizing that the path of least resistance for us, is also the one that offers the least resistance to Islamofascism. If Islam represents an absolute and unforgiving sense of structure that purports to be the will of Allah, a god made in the image of the tribal traditions of fearful men afraid of death while all too eager to deal it out to others, the modern West is equally devoid of structure, and all too willing to embrace the alien rigidities of Islamic or Socialist codes that govern every aspect of human life and death.

But Islam in the abstract is despite all its horrors, different than the day to day reality of living under Islamic laws and mores, of existing in a culture in which there is no room for human values, only for Islamic ones. That is the story that Wafa Sultan's book tells in all its horror. It is also the story of leaving that world behind for a world in which human values matter more than the words of the Koran. A God Who Hates is a Koran as well, or rather an Anti-Koran, that recites not the legends and myths of Mohammed, but the facts of how life under Islam is actually lived.

And that is a story that the types of people who would not ordinarily be influenced by books about the growing Islamic threat need to read most of all, because it could be their story. It could be the story of any intelligent woman growing up in an Islamic world.

Throughout the Cold War, people in the free world often argued about whether Communism was good or bad, without actually understanding what life under Communism was like. Only now in 2009 with America and Europe drifting deep into the shoals of socialism, is there a growing understanding of what Communism was like. That is because understanding the bone deep truths of life in a religious or political culture requires that you actually live that life. Without that, the only way to convey those truths is through personal narrative.

After WW2, Victor Kravchenko defected from the USSR and wrote one of the most famous books about life behind the Iron Curtain, entitled, "I Chose Freedom". Wafa Sultan's A God Who Hates may be as equally important a text for looking behind the sand curtain of Islam, as I Chose Freedom was for looking behind the iron curtain of Soviet Communism. Because Wafa Sultan chose freedom, just as Kravchenko did. And understanding why, is key to understanding the kind of intellectual resistance that will be important to inoculating a gullible population against the contagion of Islam.

We are not currently living under Islam. At worst we're getting a small taste of that. But given time that will change, and A God Who Hates is a compelling look at the society our children and grandchildren will be living in, if we do nothing. Today former Soviet dissidents living in the West point out bitterly that they escaped the USSR only to end up living under Communism anyway. We owe it to them, and to those who have escaped Islam, and to our own posterity, to build societies that are alternatives to Islam, that both reflect everything Islam can never be, while rejecting its attempt to creep in and draw tight a strangehold over us. Islam, like Communism, is a system of slaves and masters. And it is only a society that draws closer to slavery that can be drawn toward Islam. And it is only a society of free men and women that can resist it.

Let us consider this final warning from Kravchenko's I Chose Justice, which predicted the Communist takeover in China, fall of the Soviet Union, as well as the fall of the Soviet Union... and a Communist takeover of America.

It is not difficult to foresee what will happen, if we ask ourselves what would have happened after the last war if the United States had emerged from it in the condition in which it must inevitably emerge from the next one. The next war will make immense demands upon the strength and resources of the United States. It will call for immense sacrifices. This time she will not be remote from the field of battle, immune from the ravages of war upon her own territory...

Now supposed that had happened this time and that at the end of the war the United States had been left bankrupt... There can be little doubt that the misery and hardships which she would have been unable to relieve, would have turned the people toward Communism, which has always profited from these conditions to make its converts...

Thus the Soviet Union may be defeated as a military machine, but the Communist ideology, and this not Russia is the enemy, will remain free to attack democracy from the rear. Russia may be freed of Communism-- this will be easy... but the other countries which have not experienced it, perhaps even in the United States itself, it will remain a more formidable enemy than ever.

The solution is to choose freedom. The systems of Islam and Communism are greedy, ruthless and seductive. They excel at falsehoods and deception, but in order to be deceived, one must first be gullible. In order for slavery to seem appealing, one must find slavery appealing. To be free of Islam and Communism, we must first be free, not in the anarchistic sense, but in the intellectual and the political sense. For to be free is to bear the responsibility of your own actions and the ownership of your own thoughts. And Islam and Communism can have no power over the minds and destiny of a free society.

Son of Stimulus Set to Attack American Economy

2009-11-30T23:20:00.000-05:00

Even as the health care debate continues to rage, Democrats have their hearts set on countering their disastrous ratings and the loss of the independent voter by rolling out a job creation package, or Son of Stimulus Plan. There are no clear plans yet, but the ones floating around as preliminary ideas are bad enough on their own. With price tags going as high as 1.2 trillion dollars and various gimmicks being trotted out to hide their cost and avoid blame for inflating the already massive deficit further, the Son of Stimulus is likely to be as big a disaster as its parent.

Take House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer's plan to pay for a job creation plan with a financial transactions tax. Not only would this plan help push investors out of the US stock market, at a time when the market is already in bad shape, but it would weigh down the stock market thereby preventing companies from expanding and going public. Which naturally would crush the very same job creation congressional Democrats claim to want.

After spending taxpayer money to bailout Wall Street, and now that the Dow Jones has hardly passed the 10,000 mark, congress now wants to abort the recovery by taxing Wall Street for their job creating programs. Which will help push the Dow Jones back down and perhaps allow for a second bailout of Wall Street. Which will naturally outrage taxpayers even further, leading to another attempt to tax Wall Street. That is the kind of economy lunacy that governs the thinking of Washington D.C., mixing the worst of socialism and corporate welfare into one indigestible stew.

Hoyer is promising that the bill would include extended unemployment benefits, which is fitting enough since the bill itself would help perpetuate unemployment by killing job growth. That same paradox lies behind virtually all of the Democratic job creation plans, which is that they involve taking money out of the economy, lowering the value of the dollar further or bulking up the national debt- conditions which would in turn backfire on the very people they're claiming to want to help.

Meanwhile New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the economic court jester of the Democratic party, is agitating for a jobs creation plan that does not offer any tax cuts but instead provides aids to local governments to cover their gaps combined with a low paying public works program. Krugman, who favors enlarging the deficit, doesn't even bother trying to explain how this will be paid for. A variation on Krugman's reboot of the WPA is a work sharing proposal that would essentially also mean having the government directly subsidize jobs. The problem with both approaches is that they don't actually involve real job creation, but a dressed up form of public assistance, no fundamentally different than the able bodied welfare recipients who are expected to do some work in exchange for being on the dole.

But it all comes down to government welfare programs, rather than job creation. Job creation involves creating actual private sector jobs, in contrast to the government maintaining artificial jobs which will vanish the moment the funding for them does. Furthermore since the money to fund such job welfare programs will itself help damage the economy further, this is yet another type of job creation plan that will undermine the ability to create genuine jobs. And additionally work sharing drags us closer to socialism, with the government deciding which jobs to subsidize, thus propping up some businesses at the expense of others.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi meanwhile has gone back to making the argument that the only way to cut the deficit, is by spending more money on job creation programs, never mind the fact that the last stimulus failed to create any actual jobs, but did succeed in bulking up the deficit. This time the plan can't fail. Pelosi is trying to win back the working class by talking up infrastructure projects, but considering that the last stimulus plan had its infrastructure projects gutted to, in the words of Obama's economic advisor Robert Reich, avoid giving jobs "to high skilled people who are already professionals or to white male construction workers". Instead the money was funneled into more social services spending, which helped lead to the He-Cession. This was in keeping with the ruthlessly partisan approach that characterizes everything the Obama administration does, and mandated that what few jobs there were, would go to Obama's own base. The result has helped lead the backlash among swing voters away from Obama and against the Stimulus Plan.

But Obama and his congressional cronies have no real answer, because their plans are all focused on using government spending as a tool, rather than realizing that government spending is the problem, not the solution. Since most of the job creation plans involve spending more money, the result would not be jobs created, so much as government subsidies and more social services spending that would place a band aid on unemployment, while helping perpetuate the economic conditions that cause unemployment. Tax cuts, damned for their association with the Bush Administration and for running counterintuitive to the socialist premise that government action is the solution, rather than government inaction, are hardly heard from.

There is some talk of a hiring tax credit, but it is not only widely opposed by congressional democrats who are allergic to any talk of tax cuts, but follows the rigid socialist pattern of attempting to tightly control business to get the results they want, rather than understanding that human economic behavior is not a Stalinist puppet show in which you can pull a string and create jobs. A hiring tax credit would certainly create more jobs than anything and everything that Obama has done until now, but that is faint praise at best. Mainly what a hiring tax would accomplish is to allow Obama to take credit for every business that chose to hire a worker and receive a hiring tax credit, regardless of whether or not the business hired a worker because of the credit, or because it needed to hire said worker anyway. A year from now Obama would be able to claim to have saved a million jobs, if the government hands out a million hiring tax credits to every pizzeria that decided it needed to hire an extra delivery boy on weekends.

And above it all, Obama's union backers who helped dictate his auto bailouts and health care plan are breathing down his neck. Union officials will be prominently in place at Obama's jobs summit, which is likely to be an amen chorus backing Son of Stimulus and shaping it into another giant boondoggle of pork and money used to save union featherbedding. But Congressional Democrats have failed to realize that another extension of unemployment benefits and a few hundred billion more lavished on state governments such as California which have created their own financial disasters by kowtowing to unions may make for some cheerful headlines, but will not improve the situation of those same Americans who have turned against them.

Nor will using various gimmicks to hide the cost of the spending by spreading it across different years or pretending to pay for it out of money saved from absolutely nothing, disguise the inevitable fact that Son of Stimulus, by the time it goes through both the House of Representatives and the Senate, will be another monstrous spending plan with nothing to show for it.

Furthermore Pelosi is wrong when she claims that Americans will willingly accept a higher deficit that they will have to pay off, in order to get a few WPA or workshared jobs. Many Americans who have jobs have turned against Obama and Congress because of their fiscal irresponsibility, rather than simply because they haven't gotten their share of the pie. Congress may be incapable of simple math, but millions of Americans who run their own businesses are well aware of the consequences of out of control spending as Democratic politicians act like they have an unlimited American Express card from the Bank of China.

For hacks like Pelosi the only possible reason for public dissatisfaction is because they haven't seen their share of the pork. But Pelosi can't see past her own pork-centered attitude to realize that Americans increasingly want fiscal responsibility from their government, at a time when they themselves have to tighten their belts. Instead what they see is a line of pigs slurping uncontrollably from the trough and on hearing of their anger, they wipe a little of the mud off their faces and offer them a slurp too.

Independent voters who are particularly hard to fit into the interest groups that Democrats are so good at rewarding, are the least likely to fall for Son of Stimulus, and the most likely to be further alienated by a Congress and Administration that shows itself to be completely incapable of changing its ways. It is not a question of pork, but of responsibility and accountability. Obama promised voters the most transparent administration ever, only to provide an administration of czars and a complex tangle clashing figures. The Democrats promised a congress focused on fixing the economy, yet everything they've done has only hurt the economy more. Obama and his spin artists have cynically tried to disguise that by claiming that their deficit spending actually averted a depression, an evidenceless claim, and by bandying about completely fraudulent numbers of jobs saved. What all this adds up to is blatant irresponsibility, the same kind of irresponsibility that the people now in charge in Washington D.C. worked hard to charge Bush and the Republican congress with, only to be found guilty of it themselves by the very people who helped elect them.

As it stands now any jobs creation plan is likely to once again cross the gap between conservative democrats from districts that want to see more fiscal responsibility from the government, up against left wing democrats backed by unions and the Congressional Black Caucus who want to see a Son of Stimulus plan that's even bigger and more wasteful than what came before it, with money directed into social spending, swelling the state and federal bureaucracies and of course subsidizing union jobs. And with Pelosi and Obama at the helm, after some token protests by Democrats from American working class districts, they will probably win.

Obama and Congress think that focusing on jobs is the key to raising their numbers, but while it might bring back some straying Democratic voters, it will not actually save them in the polls, nor will it actually create jobs. That is because the source of the problem cannot become the solution until it recognizes that it is the problem. Obama and Congress are the problem. And while Obama and Congress may be incapable of recognizing that they are the problem, more and more Americans are coming to just that conclusion.

Democracy vs the Muslim Bayonet

2009-11-29T22:34:00.001-05:00

The media is filled with outrage today at the decision by Swiss voters to ban the construction of new minarets by the growing number of Muslims living in Switzerland. The vote which has been opposed by the Swiss government and both the Catholic and the Protestant churches once again demonstrates that populist democracy is the only real barrier to an Islamist takeover. But at the same time the reaction to it betrays a great deal of hypocrisy.

Going by the outrage at this ill treatment of Muslims, one might assume that Muslim countries are a haven of religious freedom. But in fact one of the codes of the Dhimmi prohibited building Synagogues and Churches taller in height than Mosques. This can be seen even in churches in Europe that were once located in Muslim ruled territories, such as the Church of Sveti Spas in Macedonia which was built mostly underground to avoid falling afoul of Muslim rules while still allowing for a high interior space. The same phenomenon can be seen in the many sunken floors of Jewish synagogues built in the Middle East.

It is ironic that all the Swiss did was pass a law that treats Muslims, much the same way that Muslims treat non-Muslims throughout the Middle East. Furthermore many of the Muslim refugees from Yugoslavia who have inflated Switzerland's cantons and want to fill the country with minarets and the vulture shrieks of radical Imams calling the faithful to prayer, have relatives back home who are busy burning every church they can find. Naturally the same human rights activists who are terribly worked up because the Muslims of Switzerland will have to make do with only four minarets, couldn't care less. Just as the same European elites who become agitated every time a Palestinian Arab is made to wait an extra 5 minutes at a border crossing to insure that he isn't wearing a bomb strapped to his chest, could hardly be less interested in the Muslim firebombings of churches belonging to the dwindling minority of Arab Christians in the area.

And while Muslims resort to the usual riots and terrorism when they fail to get their way on Jerusalem, not only are there no Synagogues or Churches in Mecca-- non-Muslims are not even allowed to enter Mecca. And of course the reason that Mecca, once one of the most religiously diverse cities in the Middle East has no non-Muslims, is because they were all massacred by Mohammed's followers. Muslim ethnic cleansing and persecution of religious minorities is the reason why the Middle East has so few non-Muslims. The one exception, the State of Israel, a democratic non-Arab and non-Muslim country in the middle of the Middle East, has faced repeated attempts at genocide for its entire history.

The human rights activists agitated over the Swiss ban on minarets might ask just how many new Churches and Synagogues have been built in the Middle East over the last 20 years. As opposed to how many new Mosques have gone up in Europe. While Europe's proportion of Muslims continues to rise, the proportion of Jews and Christians in Muslim countries continues to decline. If they were truly interested in protecting religious freedom, they would be at least as agitated over the treatment of non-Muslims in Muslim countries, including the deaths of thousands of guest workers in Dubai, the ghetto prepared for Jews in Yemen, the oppression of Christian Copts in Egypt or the second class status of Zoroastrians in Iran. But somehow religious freedom only seems to matter when it's the religious freedom of Muslims.

The question though is why should non-Muslim countries be expected to grant rights and privileges to Muslims, that Muslims are not willing to grant to non-Muslims? Why should France and Germany respect the Burka while Christian schoolgirls are whipped in Sudan for wearing to the knee skirts? Why should Christian and Jewish countries guarantee equal rights to Muslims, when Muslim countries treat their Christians and Jews as second class citizens? Why should Muslim guest workers in Germany have rights, when Asian guest workers in Dubai are treated like cattle? Why should Muslims be able to have mosques in Jerusalem and Rome, when no non-Muslim is even granted access to Mecca since Mohammed's original ethnic cleansing of the region? Why should Muslims in Switzerland be able to erect their minarets, while churches are being torched in Yugoslavia? And finally and above all else, if non-Muslims cannot live in peace and equality in Muslim countries-- then why should Muslims expect to live in peace and equality in Europe, Australia, North-America and Israel?

The short answer is that there isn't a single reason why. Noblesse oblige might prompt First World nations to offer equal rights to Muslims, but those rights would be eroded by rising Muslim demographics. Thanks to growing Muslim populations, Jews have once again become a persecuted minority in Europe. And native Europeans are quickly following them. The paradox of extending equal rights to those whose religion prevents them from accepting the liberal premise of human equality is that this attempt at equality will ultimately undermine and destroy any notion of equality for all.

Muslims have always rejected human equality as antithetical to the values and teachings of the Koran. And as a country draws closer to legalizing Sharia, the first casuality is human equality, whether it is equality between men and women, or between Muslims and infidels. And so former republics dedicated to freedom and equality die the death of a thousand accommodations, making concession after concession, silencing dissent and finally bowing their heads to the sharp knife of Islamic rule.

When London Mayor Boris Johnson calls on non-Muslims to fast during Ramadan in order to better understand Muslims, have Muslims or anyone else been called on to fast during Yom Kippur or Lent in order to better understand Catholics or Jews? But Johnson has gone from a rational examination of the Koran and Islam in 2006, when he stated;

To any non-Muslim reader of the Koran, Islamophobia — fear of Islam — seems a natural reaction, and, indeed, exactly what that text is intended to provoke. Judged purely on its scripture — to say nothing of what is preached in the mosques — it is the most viciously sectarian of all religions in its heartlessness towards unbelievers. As the killer of Theo Van Gogh told his victim’s mother this week in a Dutch courtroom, he could not care for her, could not sympathise, because she was not a Muslim.

... to singing the praises of Islam. But that has become the price of political power in the First World, with the first order of business being to bow your head to Mecca, to pretend that the Koran is not a genocidal text, and that Islamic terrorism is some sort of baffling accident that has absolutely nothing to do with Islam, aside from the coincidental similarity of the names.

This has nothing to do with morals, and everything to do with politics, with Saudi money and Muslim immigrants who create their own sullen angry ghettos, reacting to any real or imagined slight with ugly violence. There is no love for Islam, outside of the ivory towers of a few universities and civic buildings, but there is a great deal of fear.

And thus time and time again, it is the people who can be counted on to defy Islamic supremacism. While the politicians kneel facing Mecca, there are still a great many citizens who understand the value of civilization and sense how the rising power of Islam threatens their values and their families. Switzerland, where democracy is not just a word used by leftist politicians to shout down their opponents, as it tends to be throughout the First World, has repeatedly thwarted the integrationist aims of its political leaders at the ballot box.

And so Swiss voters spoke and the minarets tottered. Of course the political elites are already rushing to undo the damage. The Swiss government put out a press release in Arabic, even though tellingly most of its Muslim residents don't even read Arabic. There is talk of Supreme Court action, and if not then the European Court of Human Rights may intervene. Either way this temporary outbreak of democracy is to be squelched in the name of what will be euphemistically described as human rights, but in reality is Islamic power.

When Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Tayip Erdogan proclaims that, "the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the (Muslim) faithful our soldiers", a culture war is being telegraphed that only the blind can ignore. Turkey's own planned entry into the EU parallels the bayonets and soldiers spreading across Europe. Swiss voters decided that they did not want any more Muslim bayonets in their country, thank you very much. If an honest referendum were held on the subject in just about any First World country, the results would be much the same. And every politician in office who bows his head to Mecca and praises Islam to the heavens knows it too.

And if Muslims feel aggrieved, then maybe it is time we had a rational conversation about rights and responsibilities. And perhaps when there are churches and synagogues in Mecca, then there can be minarets in Switzerland. Perhaps when synagogues in Europe do not need to build tall walls around themselves and churches do not need guards against arsonists-- then no one will protect rising Islamic demographics. For the moment though Muslims demand at the point of a bayonet, what they are not willing to grant to others. And in the fact of such unrelieved dogmatic hostility and intolerance, any talk of equality transforms democracy into nothing more than a suicide pact.

Taxed for Living

2009-11-28T20:10:00.009-05:00

Forget taxes on income or consumption, the ultimate in regressive taxation is a tax simply for living. ObamaCare's mandatory health insurance or fine helps pioneer the notion that people should be taxed just for being alive. In his interview with George Stephanopoulos, Obama called his health care tax a fine. Which would then mean that the United States government is now fining people for living.

Democratic politicians from Obama on down have used the trite metaphor of a driver's license. But a driver's license is based on a choice. You can choose to buy a car or not. You can't however choose to be alive, or rather you can but the only alternative is death. That essentially makes ObamaCare a tax or a fine just for living. Which can't help but seem like a gateway arch to euthanasia, expressing a value system that sees human life itself as an unwanted nuisance at best and an offense at worst.

The stated rationale that people have to be fined ahead of time for the costs that their illness might impose on the government is not only unconstitutional, but a dangerous slippery slope. If we are going to tax people for their potential illnesses, why not tax parents of newborns for the potential expenses that their children will run up. This notion has already been percolating among some global warming agitators, which means that it will make it to congress sooner or later. Furthermore under the same rationale used for mandatory health insurance, women might be given a choice between using birth control or paying a potential child tax. If you think that's far-fetched, you haven't listened to the strident rhetoric of environmentalists pushing Zero Population Growth programs.

That is only one of a thousand possible examples where the slippery slope of fining people for being alive and a potential expense for the government can take us. Once we assume that the government can fine or tax people just for being alive or a potential liability, by the same logic it becomes possible to tax the elderly who have a higher probability of needing medical services. Similarly anyone above the government recommended weight can be taxed or fined based on the potential health problems they might cause. Such an approach would fall into line with the philosophy of Obama Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein's book, Nudge.

Essentially it would create on the one hand a whole new range of sin taxes targeting anything the government's social monkeyers disapprove of, and on the other tax people for potential expenses they might incur, fleecing the sheep two ways for the benefit of an ever-expanding government bureaucracy constantly running short of new revenue sources. Essentially the US would turn into the EU with a government boot in everyone's face, forever.

Democrats often go on about Republicans and regressive taxation, but in fact Democrats routinely push regressive taxation because their core non-minority base is upper middle class to upper class, including the two richest men in America-- and because regressive taxation fosters dependency. Regressive taxation squeezes out the middle class in favor of a dependent lower class and an independent upper class, which under a socialist regime consists of people who are either holding down top government positions or non-profit or rent seeking businesses dependent on the government.

Cap and Trade is set to to do just that by not only creating a whopping new tax, but insuring that it filters down through added expenses piled on top of businesses that will hit the poorest the hardest. The entire body of government regulations have hit small businesses the hardest, because they have less resources to cope with them. And when small businesses go out of business, their employees who are usually working class go down with them. The result has hurt the working class and made college the path to the middle and upper class, which naturally puts generation after generations' minds into the hands of the same left wing academics who helped create the entire situation in the first place.

But Cap and Trade goes beyond the maze of existing regulations to turn taxation itself into a tradeable commodity, imposing a tax to correct a fictional problem and then turning that tax into a commodity in an eerie parallel of the same kind of government tampering that created the sub-prime mortgage calamity. Since taxes inherently take money out of the economy, trading on a diminishing quantity is of course the surest way to a crash. And the consequence of an economic crash in America is that it becomes an opportunity for an even more extensive government takeover of the economy. Each cycle of diminishing returns created by government regulations gives rise to the next wave of government regulations, followed by limited deregulation on behalf of the well connected, followed by another crash.

And what the full combination of these measures accomplishes is to tax every single American for just being alive, for going to work and for doing their daily routines. By turning human activity into an offense, the Carbon Footprint taxes everyone alive for doing as little as breathing. The sheer horror of this may be lost on many, but we are essentially approaching an oxygen tax. We have passed the point in which government taxes labor, to the point in which government taxes life itself. And the only escape is death.

The underlying political shift involves the transition from viewing human activity as beneficial to the country and subject only to as much taxation as is necessary for the government to fund its projects , to viewing people and everything they do as a liability subject to punitive taxation. In the Obama Administration, behind all the fluff and the slogans, the worldview that sees humans as a problem for government is now the dominant theme and with that the transition of government from servant to master to tyrant is complete. Government that begins as a servant grasps the opportunity when seeing the incompetence and fearfulness of the people in the face of a crisis to become their master. And when the master grows weary of having to care for the people, he becomes their tyrant.

There is now no shortage of aspiring philosopher-kings in Washington D.C. and Brussels penning their manuscripts and explaining in finely polished language what the people must be made to do for their own good. And as it turns out the people are a horde of ignorant who eat too much, insist on owning their own cars and clinging to the things that the kings of the bureaucracy have decided they should no longer cling to. As the nobility of old once looked down on peasants, our new lords and masters of the filing cabinet and the license to breathe look down on the people of a dozen once free republics and hammer out the details of their final enslavement under such grand words, as multilateralism, environmental responsibility and a new international age of cooperation. The words may change, the details may seem petty but the grand conclusion is the same as for that of all tyrannies, the rise of strong central governing bodies no longer subject to the will of the people.

Today the dogma of environmental responsibility is being exploited for power and profit by people who couldn't care less about how many redwoods are chopped down to create new additions for their mansions, just as their thoroughly racist predecessors jumped on the civil rights bandwagon in the name of federalism. It's not the issue, but what exploiting that issue can do for their own power and profit. And so now people who fly in specialists when they catch a cold are suddenly determined to pass national health care, even though they couldn't care less if everyone between Iowa and Nevada died tomorrow, but for power and profit.

And for every new government program. For every incremental addition to the teetering mansion of big government with its alternately dusty and packed rooms, its hundred pound bills and its hundred ton budgets, for laws and statues that no one remembers but will never be repealed, the people must pay the price. Until the people can no longer pay the price, and then when the people can no longer pay the cost of the government weighing down on their backs, it will cease to be merely their master and become their tyrant. And when the people can no longer be taxed only for the work they do, then they will be taxed just for living on this earth. For the earth no longer belongs to man and the air no longer belongs to those who breathe it. Now they all belong to government alone.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - An Unprecedented Mountain of Debt

2009-11-27T15:40:00.000-05:00

Since Obama is rather attached to describing everything he does as "unprecedented", "I have achieved an unprecedented level of transparency", "I played an unprecedented amount of golf this year" and "I just wasted an unprecedented amount of money"... in honor of the Liar in Chief, we can make "unprecedented" the word of the day.

First up is Obama's unprecedented deficit. The current real cost of ObamaCare is up to 2.5 Trillion dollars and rising.

The Senate Republicans' chart demonstrates that the total for all of these costs -- based on CBO projections for the bill's true first 10 years -- is $2.5 trillion. And costs would only skyrocket from there, as the chart's trajectory suggests. In the 5 years to follow (2024-28), spending on "expansions in insurance coverage" alone would be $1.7 trillion, making the bill's total costs in its real first 15 years well over $4 trillion -- based on CBO projections.

A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you're looking at real money.

Just by way of comparison, the cost of ObamaCare is more than the entire US national debt during the Reagan Administration, which Democrats repeatedly criticized for being wasteful and running up the national debt.

That's right, one bill by Obama and the Democratic congress alone outweighs all of Ronald Reagan's national debt. Under wasteful ole Ron, the national debt was below 50 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. Under Obama we're now set to have the national debt pass 100 percent of the GDP, at which point we've pretty much sold America to the People's Republic of China.

From Clinton to Bush, the National Debt jumped by 12 percent of the GDP. Under Obama is jumped by 20 percent in only one year, and is set to make that 30 percent pretty soon.

Unprecedented? You betcha.

Oh but there's some good news, because the crunch isn't just hitting us, it's hitting Obama's buddies too, with Dubai in big trouble.

Just a year after the global downturn derailed Dubai's explosive growth, the city is now so swamped in debt that it's asking for a six-month reprieve on paying its bills — causing a drop on world markets Thursday and raising questions about Dubai's reputation as a magnet for international investment.

The fallout came swiftly and was felt globally after Wednesday statement that Dubai's main development engine, Dubai World, would ask creditors for a "standstill" on paying back its $60 billion debt until at least May. The company's real estate arm, Nakheel — whose projects include the palm-shaped island in the Gulf — shoulders the bulk of money due to banks, investment houses and outside development contractors.

Now keep in mind that Dubai World is run by the Dubai government which is in turn run by the family of the region's biggest headchopping family, which in this case is Sheikh Mohammed.

Dubai's prosperity was built on slave labor imported from abroad and by convincing stupid Westerns that Dubai was a happening place by hiring foreign architects to create insane skyscrapers and customized islands. Now Dubai World is bleeding badly and the Dhimmis who rushed to sink their money into a brutal oil rich totalitarian dictatorship are thinking twice, not because of morals or ethics, but because of finances.

And here's what helped break the camel's back

The straw that broke the Dubai camel's back is a $3.5 billion sukuk bond. It had been due to be repaid on December 14. It won't be.

Sukuk is of course Sharia finance. A lot of Western banks jumped on the Sharia finance bandwagon, only to get burned by Dubai.

Investors also face legal risk. If investors seek redress under English law, any ruling may be unenforceable as it is likely to be subject to review by the Dubai courts -- who may take a different view. The Dubai courts will never have dealt with a restructuring on this scale, and Dubai law may not allow for creditors to claim government assets. This may also test the Sukuk, or Islamic bond, structure, under which the investors are effectively the owners of the underlying assets, but may find it difficult to enforce their rights.

Dubai has spent the last few years seeking to build a reputation as a modern, international financial center. Much of that work has been undone by Wednesday's shock announcement. The need now is to start to repair the damage: and that means fair, transparent and equal treatment of all creditors.

That of course is delusional, considering that fair and transparent is not the way things are done in Dubai and the Muslim world. The irony here is that Islamic finance is not fundamentally different than what Madoff was doing, and Dubai is a great example of an attempt to turn worthless desert into desirable real estate through hype and promotion.

Meanwhile Dubai is still raising money through Sukuks vowing that it has come out strong from the financial crisis. Uh huh.

Citing Al Mal Capital fund manager, the Gulf News said "the market expects Dubai to raise another USD 5 billion soon which will take care of some of Dubai's debt and lift the confidence of the investors".

Once again another can't fail plan.

But investors worrying about transparency, need to remember that this is how debt collection works in the UAE.

A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country's royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails.

A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim's arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man's wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV.

In a statement to ABC News, the UAE Ministry of the Interior said it had reviewed the tape and acknowledged the involvement of Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country's crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed.

"The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior," the Interior Ministry's statement declared.

The Minister of the Interior is also one of Sheikh Issa's brother.

The government statement said its review found "all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department."

Anyone investing in this oil dungeon of a hellhole that is Dubai while signing on to Sharia finance deserves exactly what they get.

Meanwhile back to our own mad Sheikh Hussein Obama, Michael Goldfarb at the Weekly Standard points out that it's now better to have destroyed the WTC than given a terrorist a fat lip

They could've executed him in the desert and left him in a shallow grave for all I care, but the SEALs are professionals, and so they brought the man behind the 2004 murder of four American contractors in Fallujah to the Green Zone, where one SEAL told investigators that he "had showered after the mission, gone to the kitchen and then decided to look in on the detainee."

Maybe there's a whole lot more to this story than is currently being reported, but it'd have to be pretty terrible stuff to convince me that three Navy SEALs who successfully captured a high-value target now deserve to be court martialed for their service. A fat lip? That's enough to get you rough military justice from the Obama administration, but blow up the World Trade Center and you get all the due process rights of the civilian criminal justice system. Sounds fair, right?

And back to the Gulf, Phyllis Chesler asks reasonably enough, Why is America Still Allied with Saudi Arabia?

The Saudi mutawas (“morality police”) are terrifying. Like vultures, they swoop down on their vulnerable prey, especially women, and then send them straight to Hell. The “long beards” curse and beat their female prisoner, totally terrify her; then, they throw her into a dark, medieval dungeon, (assume the worst here). They remove her only in order to gang-rape and torture her—all presumably in the name of Islam. Her crime? In one instance, although the woman was a foreign national, she dared to take a taxi downtown without a male escort.

Remind me: Why are we still allies with Saudi Arabia? Why did President Obama bow to the King who presides over such Hell? Can we find no oil elsewhere, no other sources of energy? Do Americans really understand what goes on in Saudi Arabia? Have we forgotten that the Saudis have single-handedly exported Wahhabi fundamentalism and propaganda that has poisoned both westerners and those in the east—and have funded western universities and media as well? Does anyone remember that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia? Or that Osama bin Laden is a Saudi? Do we not understand that the Kingdom has funded bin Laden? And that they have funded many influential Islamic “charities” in North America?

...

Al Rabaa tells the story of Karin (presumably a pseudonym), a German woman who took a taxi downtown and got arrested for doing so. Thrown into a dungeon, beaten, raped, traumatized, no one knew where she was. Finally, a married Saudi man (alas, one to whom she was already attracted), moved heaven and earth to rescue her. He got her released after having her German husband deported and after marrying her without Karin even being present. A well connected Saudi man can rescue his wife from prison. Satam moved Karin into the home he shared with his first wife Fatima and their children. Satam soon lost interest in Karin and spent long hours away from home. But Karin was already pregnant. Here’s how Fatima handled the situation.

First, around midnight, while Karin was sleeping, Fatima put on loud Arabic music, came into Karin’s room and “slammed a massive stick down onto my stomach…I screamed for help. ‘No one is going to hear you, Gahba (whore)!’” The first wife kept swinging the stick at her. Karin fled. Finally, Satam got Karin her own apartment. Whereupon, Fatima started calling her to “harass and terrorize me…she spread rumors that I had a boyfriend who secretly came to visit me.” In fact, Fatima enlisted relatives in an elaborate scheme to entrap Karin and to report all such concocted suspicious doings to Satam.

But here is the most evil thing that Fatima did. Because Mimi, their housemaid, was helpful to Karin, Fatima reported Mimi to the mutawa for “fornication.” The fact that this was totally untrue made no difference. Once Mimi was arrested, Prince Salman signed her death warrant. Satam could do nothing to reverse this decree. Thus, the following Friday, after prayers, the appropriate verses from the Qu’ran having been read, Mimi was stoned to death. The two Indian men she was accused of “fornicating” with (shopkeepers, where Mimi was shopping for Karin) each received one hundred lashes.

The graphic description of Mimi’s stoning is too awful for me to repeat.

I am waiting for Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama to spell out precisely what American policy should be vis a vis Saudi Arabia given their barbaric record on human rights and their major role in funding and exporting Islamic Jihad globally.

I recommend a big tall fence to keep the Saudis in and everyone else out. If the Saudis want anything, they can pay for it in oil. Which they'll have to learn to pump themselves.

But oil money rules all. Case in point, after the Lockerbie Bombing release the UK's elite are still visibly partying with Kaddafi and his spawn.

Lord Mandelson, was there, and also Lord Rothschild's country neighbour, Cherie Blair. Neither of them picked up a gun. Various young friends of Nat with double-barrelled or European princely names were shooting. But the keenest shot was Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator, and the man who escorted the Lockerbie bomber, Al Megrahi, home to a hero's welcome in Libya in August.

Now that Libya has made its strange bargain with the West, Saif has taken up our traditional upper-class sport with delight. Near Tripoli, he has laid down 40,000 partridges.

How wonderful that Khaddafi's kids enjoy the sport of shooting birds in the UK. Pity Dick Cheney wasn't invited along to show off his hunting skills. I suspect he could have bagged something bigger than a partridge.

And more good news from the EU, its new Foreign Secretary will be a Soviet agent.

Baroness Ashton of Upholland’s past came back to haunt her yesterday when the European Union’s new foreign affairs chief was forced to deny taking funds from the Soviet Union during her days as treasurer for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Lady Ashton, a surprise choice for her post, was challenged to deny that she had contact with Russian sources while she was in charge of its accounts at the height of the Cold War.

The Times has learnt that concerns about her CND involvement are felt across countries from the former Iron Curtain now in the EU and that MEPs plan to question her about it when she appears before them for the hearing to confirm her in her post.

But don't worry, finally no mercy will be shown to humans, the WHO promises.

Margaret Chan, of the World Health Organisation, warned that “no mercy” would be shown for humans’ mistakes over climate change.

And back to Sheikh Hussein Obama, Israpundit has Ken Timmerman's interview which charges that Obama is obstructing the progress of Iranian pro-democracy groups

In the interview, Rahman Haj Ahmadi accuses the Obama administration of thwarting negotiations among Iranian pro-democracy groups that were on the verge of creating a united opposition front that could have led to the collapse of the Islamic regime during this summer’s post-election turmoil.

Those negotiations were on the verge of success, Haj Ahmadi told me – until the Obama administration inexplicably placed his group on the terrorism list on Feb. 4, 2009. The U.S. action “made the other groups afraid to work with us, for fear of U.S. government reprisals.”

You will also find in the story a link to some of my earlier reporting from the PJAK training camps in northern Iraq. Far from being a terrorist group, PJAK is dedicated to the overthrow of the Islamic Republic regime in Iran and its replacement by a pro-Western, secular, united Iran that recognizes the rights of all its citizens.

At the Copenhagen Post, a study shows that Muslim immigrants are importing anti-semitic attitudes into Europe. Shocker.

Of course the same thing is happening in the US as well, and not just with Muslims either.

Meanwhile Mikey Weinstein is back. Back in the day I caught some flack for taking Mikey Weinstein apart and demonstrating that he was actually a left wing activist, trying to tout his time in the Reagan Administration and supposed defense of Jews in the military to mainstream his credentials. In fact Weinstein is part of a left wing agenda, and now part of a pro-Muslim agenda too, piggybacking on the Fort Hood shootings to try and give Nidal Hassan some help with his alibi.

Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, says that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's alleged killing of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood is inexcusable and reprehensible. But he believes that it's important to investigate reports of harassment that Hasan said he faced as a Muslim in the military, which might have contributed to his mental state.

"There's enough out there" to look into, said Weinstein. "I'm not excusing him, but did it affect him, or was he just a maniac to begin with?"

Weinstein cited media reports quoting Hasan's family, saying that someone had put a diaper in his car and told him, "That's your headdress," and that a camel was drawn on his car with the words, "Camel jockey, get out!"

Weinstein also provided a letter, with the name withheld, from a Muslim woman and wife of a member of the military, in which she described how her best friend on the base, immediately after the shooting, told her that "Muslims shouldn't even be allowed in the U.S. Army," and that she repeatedly heard things like, "Go back to your country" and "F---ing Muslims," as she shopped at the base commissary.

Weinstein, who spent 10 years in the Air Force as a military attorney, or JAG, said that he also doesn't believe that Hasan's colleagues hesitated to report his changes in behavior because of political correctness. In fact, he claimed, Hasan's superiors would have been sympathetic to hearing such charges because of their strong Christian beliefs.

Weinstein would like to see military leaders make an "unadulterated clarion call" that Americans shouldn't "paint all of Islam with a broad brush," as well as emphasize a "zero tolerance policy" of any religious harassment.

Any Jewish newspaper that runs Mikey Weinstein's op eds slash infomercials should know exactly what they're getting into. His organization is backed by non-Jewish left wing activists. It is not about religious freedom, but about promoting their agenda. It is not a Jewish organization, but another tentacle of the myriad of left wing organizations strangling America.

Meanwhile at Joshuapundit, my article Obama Goes Mao, on Obama's betrayal of Taiwain, was nominated for the watcher's council. Header cartoon comes courtesy of Jew With a View.

And with that we close this week's roundup. An unprecedented roundup.

The Dead End Quest for Peace

2009-11-25T23:35:00.002-05:00

Peace, peace. Everyone wants peace. Or so we would like to think. Chamberlain and a sizable portion of the English electorate were certain that Hitler wanted peace and all that was needed was for everyone to sit down around a table, make some compromises (at someone else's expense if possible) and everyone could go back to buying their biscuits, playing cricket and generally enjoying life. What did not occur to them was the possibility that Hitler did not want peace. What did not occur to them was that by constantly talking about peace, they were only bridging the gap to war with their own naivete and conspicuous weakness.

A year into Obama's first term dedicated to multilateralism and soft power, the world is more unstable than ever. Iran is openly pursuing nuclear weapons and regional domination. North Korea is firing on South Korean ships. The Chavez Marxist axis in Latin America has become more ambitious. Russia is amping up the rhetoric against the Ukraine and George again, and building up its arsenal. And even Obama's staunchest apologists and defenders cannot think of a single tangible thing that he has accomplished in all his visits to virtually every major country on the globe.

But that is because peace is a paradox. To have peace, you must be prepared for war. You may speak softly, but you must carry a big stick. And like happiness, the worst possible way to go about finding peace, is by going out and looking for it. Because to pursue peace is to deliver a signal of weakness that all but invites war. Peace is produced not through goodwill, those with whom goodwill is easy to achieve are not likely targets for war, but through deterrence. War is deterred the same way that crime is deterred, through vigilance and strength.

To let go of that strength and relax your vigilance brings not peace, but instability and eventually war. This understanding of human affairs is reflexively rejected by those who assume that "we" are the real problem. That "we" are the reason why there is war. "We" are the reason why the enemy does not trust us. "We" are what stands in the way peace, love and understanding with the whole world. And if the peace initiatives fail, clearly "we" are the ones to blame and must try harder to break through and reach an understanding. And if "we" are lucky, we may wake up from this form of madness before the tanks of the people we worked so hard to achieve peace with roll into Poland.

Because there is nothing quite so pathetic as the leaders of a free nation crawling before tyrants and thugs in search of peace, beating their own breasts and offering more and more concessions in trade for false promises and falser hope.

Consider Israel's outreach program of shipping their films to film festivals, which is ironic when you consider that the average Israeli film is just as Anti-Israeli, as the average American movie is Anti-American. Israeli consulates are still flogging The Band's Visit. The Band's Visit is one of those charming movies that every liberalized country makes sooner or later, and in the words of film critic Roger Ebert showcases a vision of; "Arabs and Israelis, that shows them both as only ordinary people with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. It has also shown us two souls with rare beauty".

The Band's Visit was meant to promote Jewish-Arab and Israeli-Egyptian co-existence. The movie however was banned in Egypt, where any actual talk of co-existence with Israel is virtually a criminal offense. Which made it all the more absurd for the movie to depict an Egyptian band visiting Israel, when Egyptian writers, musicians and filmmakers are effectively barred from visiting Israel at risk of being expelled from their respective guilds. The few who have like playwright Ali Salem who faced ostracism, expulsion from the Union of Egyptian Writers and police interrogations for merely visiting Israel, have paid a high price for promoting "normalization" with Israel.

That is the "peace" that exists between Israel and Egypt, 30 years after Camp Sinai. That is the only peace that will ever exist between Israel and Egypt, for the simple reason that it is a peace based on three wars in which Israel demonstrated that it would not allow itself to be conquered by Egypt. That is of course the only way to stop a war, to demonstrate that it will not succeed.

Had England and France backed down Nazi Germany in the Rhineland, there likely would have been no WW2. Had the United States put its soldiers where its boycott was in Asia, there would have been no Pearl Harbor. Had the Allied troops in Russia intervened more directly against the Bolsheviks, there would have been no Cold War. And the list goes on and on. There are far more modern cases where a raised fist would have stopped a devastating war, then when a handshake or a hug would have done the same thing. And some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century could have been prevented not by diplomacy, but by preventing the diplomacy itself which more often than not has accommodated conquest and genocide.

But naturally the people who made The Band's Visit and their cultural ilk have learned absolutely nothing from their actual experience in Egypt, or understood belatedly that their enemies are not interested in seeing them as fellow human beings with ordinary hopes, lives and disappointments. To paraphrase Cassius, they insist that the fault lies not in their enemies, but in themselves. Or in those intolerant people around them who insist that their country must be vigilant and strong, instead of a pushover for the sort of people who burn books when they cannot burn the writers themselves.

While peace is a wonderful thing, it is part of a balance. There cannot be peace all the time, because humans are not peaceful creatures. As long as there is greed, hate and the will to power-- there will be war. And for as long as there is war, peace can only be obtained through a strong hand, rather than a bended knee. Peace requires war, as day requires night and summer requires winter. It is part of a natural balance that is sustained by the willingness to maintain that balance. To be willing to have peace when war is over, and to be willing to fight when peace can no longer avail.

To quest for peace is as pointless as questing for constant summer or constant day. To so is to ignore the natural balance of human affairs, and to bring on war anyway... only a war on increasingly unfavorable terms. For though men may cry peace, peace-- but there is no peace. Only preemptive surrender.

Why Global Warming is Not Science

2009-11-24T22:45:00.002-05:00

The leaked email correspondence from the University of East Anglia, whose Climatic Research Unit is a key element in the push toward blaming humankind for the earth's natural global and cooling cycles, only graphically revealed what was known all along, that the supposedly scientifically proven conclusions of global warming science were a political fortress guarding a scientific house of cards built on manipulated data and an aggressive campaign of silencing critics and dissenters.

The Global Warming boom is big business for Green Companies and certain liberal politicians who have jumped on their bandwagon, such as Al Gore who went from a few million to a hundred million, and is likely to become a billionaire if cap and trade becomes a reality. But it is not science, not simply because it is wrong, but because it is a case of scientific conclusions being powered by political ideas, rather than the other way around.

Using the scientific method to form questions, test them and emerge with true answers is only valid to the extent that the process itself is pure. Global Warming promoters have repeatedly accused dissenting climate research scientists of being tainted by money from the oil industry. But if the science of researchers who took money from the oil industry is tainted science, then the science of those climate researchers who stand to financially benefit from green industries and those who view it as a political agenda first, must be at least as tainted.

The politicization of climate science has thrust it into the middle of a philosophical intellectual war between those who believe that humanity's impact on the planet has been a negative one and those who believe it is a positive one. The essential debate is an old one, but it has significant real world implications, the apex of which has been reached with the attempt to assign every human being living on earth his or her own Carbon Footprint, which essentially means charging everyone for their part in "warming up" the planet by driving to work, using toilet paper or breathing.

While Global Warming promoters may sell their message with fuzzy images of adorable children and polar bears, the underlying message behind their ideology is a fundamentally anti-human one, that views children as a form of biological pollution and humanity as a destroyer, ravaging not merely a few forests and streams, but destroying life on earth. From the standpoint of human intellectual history such a view is not a new one. Many religious groups had an equally negative view of humanity's presence on earth. But environmentalists have cloaked their New Age beliefs about humanity's ecological sinfulness in science. And that takes it beyond philosophy and into the realm of fraud.

There is a reason that we do not unveil research programs to study which religion is the true religion or which food tastes the best. Such ideas are inherently subjective and while scientific principles can be applied to their study, the results would only reflect human bias. Thus while some questions are unanswerable because they exceed humanity's grasp, others are unanswerable because they exceed human tolerances for bias. Global Warming has clearly become one of those subjects because it is not simply about the causes of the earth's warming and cooling cycles, but about the most fundamental human questions-- namely the purpose of man on the earth.

The passion which the Global Warming debate invokes is not motivated simply by greed, though indeed there are hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, particularly if every business in the world has to buy carbon credits in order to do the most elementary things, a cost that will of course be passed on down to every single man, woman and child living on earth. But greed can only motivate people to go so far, it takes a higher passion, a fanatical belief in the rightness of your cause to push it that much further. And while the Al Gores and the companies rushing to find a way to make money from being Green may do it out of greed, many climactic scientists have been committed to pushing Global Warming because they see it as the best vehicle for transforming the relationship between man and the planet.

Essentially imagine a group of sociologists who discover an idea that they believe will force everyone to end poverty. The idea would be a compelling one, and one that they might push regardless of whether or not it was actually true. When faced with contradictory data, they would suppress it. When faced with criticism, they would suppress it and shout it down. All in the name of a higher cause that took primacy over the actual science. And that is exactly what happened with Anthropogenic Global Warming and many climate researchers who with the fervor and guarded dedication of medieval priests have assembled and championed a gigantic fraud that has captured the imagination of so many people.

Before there was global warming, there was global cooling. A theory that seems its opposite in temperature, but in fact was its duplicate in intention. Both have their origin not in a scientific method, but in an ideological one. In an agenda that proclaims apocalypse through the land in the hopes of getting mankind to live simpler and poorer lives, more in harmony with what the planet's self-proclaimed guardians think would be better for it and for us.

What has been branded as East Anglia University's Climategate is only a small peek behind the stone walls of that elite global warming fraternity, at the anger and tension, the secrets and the lies of those perpetuating the fraud for the highest and lowest reasons. The lowest of course is the hundreds of billions of dollars at stake and the highest is a quest to reduce men from the lords of nature, to its humble servants.

The world may not be set to end in fire and ice, but far more certain that fiery or snowy apocalypse, is taxes. And politicians have seen the potential uses of global warming by manufacturing an imaginary crisis that they can solve without any chance of failure, as have many of their business friends who are eager to engage in rent seeking behavior, with the planet itself being out to rent. And when all these factors are combined together, the motivating force behind promoting the myth of Global Warming takes on a terrible force, born of greed, environmental ideology and cynical politics. And all these also demonstrate all too well why Global Warming is not science. It is politics, it is ideology and big business... but it is not science.

Where Are All the Jobs?

2009-11-23T23:35:00.002-05:00

These days even Saturday Night Live is mocking Obama's failed job creation programs, mainly because the stench of Barry's economic failure has become a little too pungent to ignore. But then again Obama's programs were never designed to create jobs in the first place. As far back as 2008, I pointed out that Obama's proposal put the environment first and jobs a distance third if at all, emphasizing environment efficiency and infrastructure programs, neither of which had any serious likelihood of creating permanent jobs. And unsurprisingly they didn't.

Obama has inflated the bureaucracy at taxpayer expense, but he has not actually created jobs. Had he cut taxes by the same amount that he spent or just outright put the money to granting tax breaks to companies willing to move jobs to the United States, he could have boasted some actual job creation numbers. But Obama has no interest in creating jobs. As a former Community Organizer, read Poverty Pimp, Obama is not interested in promoting, what his mentor Jeremiah Wright called, "Middle Classedness". What he wanted and wants is to create government dependency.

Poverty Pimps do not get ahead by creating jobs, but by taking them away and replacing them with programs under their control. Community Organizers do not want people working, they want people with their hand stretched out to them. They spread misery and unemployment by shaking down businesses, blackmailing them if they will pay and driving them out of the neighborhood if they won't. Employed people have a degree of independence that unemployed people do not. And Poverty Pimps are not in the market for independence.

Instead of creating jobs, Obama created more misery. And that was always the plan. Now that he has sensed enough of the backlash to shift from talking about job creation, which his policies have failed miserably at, to talking about deficit reduction, which is a lot like Elliot Spitzer giving a lecture on ethics, but the endgame has never changed. Obama has created a monstrous deficit and every program on his agenda is meant to increase it further. For the White House which is pushing a trillion dollar government health insurance package to talk about deficit reduction is the sum of all hypocrisy.

Meanwhile Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman is busy arguing in his New York Times that the stimulus was too small and we need a much bigger stimulus plan to save the economy. But as the court jester of the Democratic economic apocalypse knows quite well, more government spending will not lead to job growth anywhere outside the civil service. The government can only create jobs under its own control and those jobs cost far more to create than private sector jobs and are built on the backs of an already overtaxed public. What government spending does is increasingly dry up the ability of companies and small businesses to create new jobs.

While the public increasingly blames the White House for the economic situation, the Obamas and Krugmans of the left blamed unregulated free enterprise. Their solution is to transform America into a centralized and planned economy, an approach that even most Communist countries have abandoned. But the liberal approach as always is to presume that it simply wasn't done right and that having all the bright boys in one room running the country would be an improvement over having businessmen run their own companies. That kind of thinking is what put a 31 year old campaign worker in charge of running the US Auto industry, with predictably disastrous results.

The Brightest Boys in the room policy goes back to the JFK Administration, where the brightest boys in the room helped give us such successes as the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam. In the Obama Administration though the boys part is sadly literal where the premium is not on experience or qualifications, neither of those being qualities that Obama himself possesses, but political allegiance. That same sense of liberal moral invulnerability promised that Obama would be able to handle Iraq and Afghanistan better than Bush, when in fact it is becoming increasingly clear that he doesn't even understand it. It also presumed that Obama could handle an economic crisis better than Bush, but in fact all Obama has done is played Poverty Pimp with hundreds of billions of dollars.

What Republicans must do in 2010 and 2012 is make clear that the chief problem with the economy is the government and the best solution is freedom. Government spending cannot create jobs, all it can do is inhibit the economic recovery that is a natural part of the economic cycles. Today more and more Americans are rejecting the idea of government dependency as an economic solution. Meanwhile when even Saturday Night Live can spell out the unpleasant economic truth that the only place that the government takeover of the economy is leading is to wildly useless spending and a sharecropper society run by our creditors from abroad-- it is clear that Obama's legislative victories carry the makings of his own political defeat.

But defeating Obama politically may well be a Pyrrhic victory if it leaves the edifice he is busy constructing intact. With falling numbers, Obama has not tried to do what Clinton did early on when he retreated from the unpopularity of his policies to try and seize the center, instead he has only tacked further left. Obama and those behind him are not satisfied with the slow revolution from within pushed by the likes of Clinton, instead they are gambling everything on the ability to transform America quickly, to replace free enterprise with socialism, and American independence with multilateral co-dependence.

And so even in the absence of jobs and growing public opposition, Obama and his people are pushing hard left, and gambling that the same factors which got them ahead in 2008, namely a tame media corps, voter fraud and the tattered remains of Obama's charisma will save them again in 2010 and 2012. And that means we can expect a growing escalation on both sides as Obama and the Democrats forge on regardless of public opinion working to create a state in which Republicans can only survive by being liberals.

Toward a Sustainable Immigration Policy

2009-11-22T22:37:00.000-05:00

While the rising threat of terrorism, violence and honor killings produced by Muslim immigration tends to be in the news lately, the problems produced by immigration are not limited solely to Islam. The problem of Muslim immigration was created by a larger trend in First World immigration policies that favors bringing in cheap labor for short term commercial and political gain. Such immigration policies however are seriously damaging to the nations that utilize them and cannot be sustained. So what we must do is look for a sustainable immigration policy.

The first principle we need to begin with is that immigration should be in a nation's interest. While this seems self-evident, it is a principle that has gone by the wayside. For a clear example of what that leads to, consider Obama's move to allow people infected with AIDS to freely enter the United States. Clearly the entry of people with a deadly communicable disease for which there is no cure into the United States is not in our interest. It is actually quite dangerous to us and offers us no benefits whatsoever to outweigh the risks. There are numerous examples in our immigration policy are less graphic but ultimately just as destructive.

Beginning with the principle that immigration must be in the nation's interest, we now need a standard for measuring whether a particular form of immigration is in our interest or not.

The ideal form of immigration is one that benefits both the host country and the immigrants themselves. Immigration that benefits only the host country is slavery. Immigration that benefits only the immigrants is parasitism. The ideal is a mutual exchange of benefits between the immigrants and their new country. And we can begin by measuring that exchange through simple statistics by breaking down the impact of a particular immigration population in simple dollar terms.

This can be done simply by taking a particular population of immigrants and balancing their contributions in the form of taxes against the social expenditures they create through social services, crime, terrorism and public assistance. Through this method any immigrant population can be broken down into a dollar amount, which can then be contrasted and compared with other immigrant populations, as well as with the native population, to arrive at a chart that shows on the financial level which immigrants offer more benefits versus losses. Such figures should be assessed for first, second and if possible, third generation immigrants, to study the extent to which absorption improves those numbers or worsens them. Further in depth studies would look at regional differences which could allow for a greater fine tuning of immigrant acceptance from urban vs rural areas, to educated professionals vs industrial workers, for religious vs secular and so on and so forth, making it possible to produce questionnaires that would allow a country to reap the maximum possible benefit from immigrants, with the minimum possible loss.

Once this is done, it becomes possible to specifically assess the consequences for local and national economies of giving preference to one immigrant population over another. If we can break down the cost of say bringing in 2000 immigrants from Ireland vs 2000 immigrants from Belize, or 2000 immigrants from Venezuela vs 2000 immigrants from China-- we will be much closer to forming a rational immigration policy. And by presenting statistics in literal dollar amounts, a compelling interest based argument can be made for reforming immigration by making it sustainable.

The next step is to go beyond simple dollar amounts and to look at a nation's overall statistics, its total and per capita GDP, literacy rate, teenage pregnancies, domestic abuse, crime rates, and so on, and look to see which immigrant populations raise our statistics, and which lower them. The ideal form of immigration increases our statistics, or at least maintains them in place, but does not lower them. Again this needs to be studied across multiple generations to see the impact that absorption has on these numbers. An immigrant population that lowers these numbers not only in the first generation, but in the second and the third as well, is as unsustainable as a smokestack spewing poison into the air.

Then there is the cultural question. Population migrations are nothing new in human history. Most countries are made up of a mix of peoples blending together over time through migrating populations. But while some such migrations are generally positive, others are generally negative. Whether a population migration is even feasible depends on how much room there is. 19th century America was able to absorb large numbers of immigrants in ways that 21st century America cannot because it lacks the same amount of open space. With the 20th century's suburbanization, that enabled the immigration and population movements of the 20th century reaching their limit in America, immigration creates crammed urban centers. And without "room to grow", immigration can destabilize and displace the existing native population. This creates an atmosphere charged with violence that easily lead to rioting and social conflict. A situation only worsened by groups with high birth rates moving to cities that are already bursting at the seams.

A sustainable immigration policy balances out immigration from population groups with high birth rates, by reducing their numbers in favor of immigration from population groups with lower birth rates-- in order to create a balance between them. Thus if immigrants from Country X have an average birth rate of 5 children and immigrants from Country Y have an average birth rate of 3 children, bringing in 2000 immigrants from Country and Country X is not parity. Instead it favors Country X in the second generation, when its immigrants might number 5000, while the immigrants from Country Y will only number 3000. The quotas for particular immigration populations would have to be set based on their projected numbers in the second generation, rather than the first generation.

This brings us to the question of immigration quality over quantity. Big business and many politicians who depend on immigrant votes want immigration quantity, which translates into cheap labor and voting blocs for their political machines. However on a national level what is needed is not immigration quantity, but immigration quality.

Cheap labor is extremely seductive, which is why even pro-business conservatives are reluctant to cut back immigration to sustainable levels. Only when there is an economic downturn, do they jump on the immigration bandwagon. Businesses argue that they need cheap labor to maintain their domestic industries, and while this is a compelling argument for many, the fact of the matter is that cheap labor jobs wind up being more expensive than outsourcing, because immigration quantity carries a higher cost for the ordinary taxpayer, than the company simply packing up shop and taking a few native jobs abroad.

Virtually every major social problem in the First World today can be traced to the desire for cheap labor. From gang rapes in California to Islamism in London, from suicide bombings in Israel to drug dealing in Sydney, from riots in Paris to honor killings in Sweden, the common element in these social problems is that they are caused by people who were brought in because they were once considered cheap labor. But cheap labor quickly turns out not to be so cheap after all.

The same big companies that complain about high taxes and socialism, seem to have no understanding whatsoever that when you import hundreds of thousands of immigrants, legal or illegal, they will have to pay the price for them sooner or later. Capitalism may rely on cheap labor, but cheap labor inevitably leads to socialism, because importing a population incapable of caring for itself, will require the government to step in sooner or later.

While we believe in free enterprise, that means responsible free enterprise. A factory that pours toxic waste into a river is not behaving responsibly and is not serving the public good. Similarly an industry that uses cheap immigration to cut costs while dumping ten times those same costs on the taxpayer, a cost that they themselves will ultimately have to make up down the road, is not behaving responsibly. The allegiance of American business must be to America, just as English businesses must be to England and so on and so forth. A loyal business does not act against the national interest, but seeks to work within a sustainable immigration policy for the larger national benefit, a benefit that will also accrue to it as well.

Immigration quality focuses on maintaining sustainable immigration, while immigration quantity provides mass without sustainability. Few First World countries can really afford immigration quantity anymore, yet virtually all of them continue to emphasize quantity over quality, thereby creating a cycle in which low quality immigration produces social problems that require government intervention, thereby raising taxes and requiring more cheap labor to try and fill the birth rate shortfall created by trying to impose a growing government burden on a shrinking number of workers. Eventually the entire socialist Ponzi Scheme collapses into either major reforms or a dark age, but by then much of the damage has already been done.

While immigration remains an important resource, it must be the product of a rational policy. And a rational immigration policy can only be a sustainable immigration policy. Real immigration reform is not immigration permissiveness, but sustainability that balances immigration against domestic growth, seeks to maximize the beneficial quality of immigration, rather than cheap labor quantity, and works to maintain the quality of life and the culture of its citizens, rather than disrupting it and displacing them. Sustainable immigration is the only answer to out of control immigration pollution.

No Room in Obama's Jerusalem for the Jew

2009-11-21T20:07:00.011-05:00

The same media which can't be bothered to notice that there is a proxy war going on between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, with Saudi jets bombing civilian targets. Who have paid no attention whatsoever to a week of violence between Algerians and Egyptians that included stonings and death threats, are up in arms over the building of 900 housing units in the Gilo neighborhood in Jerusalem.

The Obama Administration and the media are naturally not upset by the Jerusalem municipality's decision to build 500 housing units for Arabs in Jerusalem. No they're upset by a private Jewish housing project built on privately owned land. And that double standard aptly conveys their premise that a Jewish house in Jerusalem is a "settlement", while an Arab house in Jerusalem is just a house. A Jewish home violates the "status quo" and is "unhelpful for peace", while an Arab home is just a home. There is of course a name for that sort of policy, it's one that Jimmy Carter who is still continuing his tour on behalf of Hamas knows quite well, Apartheid.

In response to the Nof Zion construction, Obama warned that, "additional settlement building does not contribute to Israel’s security".But Nof Zion is not about security, as much as it is about an overcrowded Jewish population in Jerusalem looking for someplace to live. When the Arabs seized half of Jerusalem in Israel's War of Independence, they forcibly expelled the Jewish population of Jerusalem in a brutal act of ethnic cleansing that goes ignored by the same leftists who focus on elderly Arab men waving keychains in the air. Homes belonging to Jewish families were replaced by Arab families, who in turn were not expelled when Israel liberated and reunited both halves of Jerusalem in 1967.

While countries such as England recognized Jordan's annexation of East Jerusalem, they have failed to recognize Israel's reunification of the city. This has led to the ongoing absurdity in which children born in Jerusalem are treated as stateless by the US government and the US embassy remains in Tel Aviv, while the US Consulate in East Jerusalem does its best to pretend that it's in the capital of Palestine, completely refusing to recognize Israel's existence.

Were security the issue, Gilo which faces the Arab towns of Beit Jala and Al Khader, and has been shot at repeatedly from them, would be a poor choice to live in. But Jerusalem is bulging at the seams. The price of housing has shot up, and while US Ambassador Richard H. Jones may have told Jewish residents of Jerusalem that "Sometimes people do have to move to a different location. They cannot always stay close to their families", the reality is that living next to their families is exactly what people want to do. Regardless of what the State Department thinks about the matter.

1800 years ago the Romans expelled the Jewish population of Jerusalem and renamed it Aelia Capitolina, a pagan city, and renamed Israel, Syria Palaestina. Today Obama and the State Department seem determined to do the very same thing. By calling a Jerusalem neighborhood, a "settlement", Obama is actively attacking the right of Jews to live in Jerusalem. If Jewish Jerusalem is a settlement, then effectively every other part of Israel where Jews live is a settlement too.

When even even liberal US news outlets such as CNN have described Gilo as a Jewish neighborhood, in contrast to radical left wing British outlets such as the BBC and Reuters, who branded it as a "settlement", Obama's shift is a deliberate one. Helpful as always, UN Secretary General Ki Ban Moonbat stepped in to denounce Gilo as a "settlement built on Palestinian land that undermines efforts for peace”. Considering that Gilo already holds a population of 50,000, the land was privately owned and the Jewish presence there goes back to the Book of Joshua, but the facts are no obstacle to the lies.

In Time Magazine, the increasingly unhinged Joe Klein claimed that Gilo "would be the capital of Palestine", with presumably a Hadrianiac or Jordanian style ethnic cleansing solution for the 50,000 Jews who live there right now. Not that I imagine that would stop him in the least, so long as he had someone else to do the dirty work for him.

But finally what is the basis for calling the Gilo neighborhood a "settlement"? The land on which Gilo was built was bought and owned by its Jewish residents. That land was occupied and seized by Jordan in 1948, until Israel liberated the territory in 1967. To call Gilo a "settlement", recognizes the Jordanian invasion and seizure of the land as legitimate, while treating the Jewish presence there as illegitimate.

And that is the real basis behind all this madness. The reason why a Jewish home in Jerusalem or anywhere in Israel is a settlement. To speak of "settlements" is to claim that the Jewish presence in Israel is illegitimate. And while some Israeli leftists may fondly imagine that settlers are religious Jews who live in caravans, as the case of Gilo once again demonstrates, all of Israel is a settlement.

And that is why as far as the world's diplomats are concerned, an Arab terrorist has more right to open fire on a Jewish family driving down the road, than the Israeli army has to shoot that same terrorist. And by giving in to US pressure to negotiate directly with the PLO, by signing the Oslo accords and by repeatedly agreeing to talk peace with Arafat and Abbas, the door was opened to greater and greater delegitimization of Israel.

Israel's global diplomatic position is far worse than it was 17 years ago. Israel's strategic position is far worse than it was 17 years ago. The most rabid bigotry and the ugliest incitement has become the norm, the sort of language you would once hear in Ridyah or Damascus has now become cocktail party chatter in London, Paris and Washington D.C. All of Israel's concessions have combined to put a gun to Jerusalem, and then to the rest of the land for a great going out of business, everything must go sale.

The case of Gilo is one more wake up call that not only our terrorist "peace partners", but even the so-called honest brokers of the world community do not believe that Jews have the right to live anywhere in Israel. Their backing of a Palestinian state has nothing to do with peace, as the fact that peace has failed to emerge over 17 years has not in any way dampened their ardor and enthusiasm for the project. Nor is it about a Two State Solution bringing regional stability. Even the dimmest paper pushers in the State Department and Foreign Ministry know that even were a Palestinian state to be created, the result would be more regional instability, not less. Only a One State Solution can succeed, and that solution is an Arab state and no Israel. The "Peace Process" and the "Two State Solution" are an incremental approach to bringing about that final solution.

The men and women who toiled and worked the land, who turned swamps and desert into farmland and cities, understood that if there was no room for Jews in Israel, there was no room for Jews anywhere. Palestinian Islamic terrorism in turn is driven by the national and religious imperative to destroy the only non-Muslim country in the Middle East. And while America and Europe decry Israel's capital as a Jewish settlement, Muslim settlements are springing up in their own capitals. While the cocktail party chatter is that serving up Israel on a platter to the beast will keep them safe, the violence is already in their streets. The same violence that Israel was built as a refuge against. And if Israel falls, they will be the next item on the menu.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - A Shot Fired in a Russian Church

2009-11-20T16:00:00.000-05:00

The roundup begins with what might be Russia's own Fort Hood Massacre as a Russian priest, Daniil Sysoyev was gunned down in his own church. While there is still no word on the killer, but Daniil Sysoyev had made his reputation by preaching to and trying to convert Muslims... and had received many death threats over it.

34 year-old Daniil Sysoyev was shot at least four times at in the head and chest in the Church of St. Thomas Thursday night by a masked gunman, according to the Prosecutor General's Investigative Committee. The assailant also wounded the church's choirmaster, Vladimir Strelbitsky.

Sysoyev routinely denounced Islam and actively reached out to Muslims and various religious sects to convert them. In a recent interview with a Russian newspaper, Sysoyev boasted that he had baptized 80 Muslims.

"They've threatened to cut my head off 14 times," Sysoyev told Komsomolskaya Pravda in the interview. "The FSB [Federal Security Service] got in touch with me a year ago to say they had uncovered a murder plot against me."

He told a television interviewer in February 2008 that he considered it a sin not to preach to Muslims, according to the Interfax news agency.

Sysoyev was originally from Russia's republic of Tatarstan, where a large majority of the population is Muslim. He published books titled "An Orthodox Response to Islam" and "Marrying a Muslim," which were critical of the faith and drew fierce responses from Muslim organizations.

There is as of yet no word on the killer, but in Russia a masked shooting usually means the mob or the FSB\KGB. Neither are terribly likely in this case, though the same parties who rise up to defend Chechen Muslim terrorists will likely claim that it was a KGB operation.

But in a largely religious country, the murder of a priest in his own church is all but certain to touch off a firestorm of anger. However Islam in Russia occupies a peculiar position.

While Muslims are on track to become the majority in Russia, for now much of Islam in Russia is controlled by the government, in the same that the Saudis control America and European mosques. As such this government controlled form of Islam is free to preach radicalism and terrorism... so long as it is directed at foreigners, particularly Americans, Europeans and Israelis.

But at the same time the killing of Sysoyev may be another demonstration that Putin's grip on Russia's growing Muslim minority is slipping. Since the Russian press is also government controlled, a good way to see the "party line" on the Sysoyev killing is to examine the Russian press's position.

Pravda blames Muslims and provides more details of the killing. RussiaToday however ignores any mention of Islam. The Moscow Times by contrast writes a fairly careful story that nevertheless mentions Sysoyev's conflict with Islam.

Sysoyev was from Tatarstan, a predominantly Muslim region of Russia on the Volga river. He was threatened after preaching to Muslims and Christians from other denominations.

Russia is home to Europe's largest Muslim community and Islam is the country's second-biggest faith, something which Sysoyev criticized.

"Islam is far from being a religion in the way we understand it," he said in one of his video lectures posted on YouTube

"Islam can be rather compared with projects like national socialism or the Communist Party seeking to create God's kingdom on Earth using humanly instruments," he added.

ITAR-TASS, which I believe remains an official agency of the Russian government, however fails to mention Islam.

The mixed signals suggest that the Russian authorities have not yet decided how to deal with the matter. It is also a strong sign that this was not an intelligence operation, as the Russian media would be running with a regular story. And since the Russian police tend to make arrests for political reasons... we may never know the real story behind the Sysoyev killing.

Adding to the complexity is the fact that both the Russian Orthodox Church clergy and the official Islamic mosques are controlled by the Russian government. While Russia has fought aggressively against Islamic separatists, it has also banned criticism of Islam at home, with one editor threatened with jail for running the Mohammed cartoons. For now Russia is determined to keep a lid on any conflict, and it is entirely possible that even if this was a Muslim attack, the authorities will never admit it.

Jawa Report provides me with a hat tip on the story

Meanwhile back in America, over in Chicagoland, an American woman is facing 3 years in prison for tugging on a Muslims's headscarf in what is described as a "hate crime".

A suburban Chicago woman has been charged with a hate crime for allegedly yanking the head scarf of a Muslim woman in Tinley Park two days after the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas.

Valerie Kenney, 54, a bank teller from Tinley Park, appeared at the Bridgeview Courthouse today and was released on $5,000 bail. If convicted of the felony, Kenney faces up to 3 years in prison and a $25,000 fine. She is due back in court Dec. 3.

...

Amal Abusumayah, 28, told police she was shopping at a Tinley Park grocery store Nov. 7 when a middle-age woman passed her in the aisle and made a loud reference to the killings at Fort Hood.

"She said, 'The man that did that shooting in Texas was from the Middle East,' in a really loud and angry voice," Abusumayah told the Tribune last week. Minutes later, while Abusumayah was paying for her groceries at a self-checkout, the woman approached her from behind and tugged hard on her blue and beige head scarf, she said.

"I turned around and looked at her, and she walked out of the store," she said. "My scarf didn't come off because it was on very tight, but my head was tugged back."

Let's be clear about this, Valerie Kenney is facing 3 years in prison for TUGGING on a Muslimette's head scarf. The madness here is completely incredible.

Nidal Hassan was able to openly deliver lectures inside the US Army supporting and defending terrorism. That was not considered a hate crime. He massacred 13 US soldiers, and that is not considered terrorism or a hate crime. But don't tug of a Muslim woman's headscarf. For that you'll go to jail for 3 years.

Of course if Valerie Kenney were to claim PTSD, the same media talking heads like Dr. Phil, Joe Klein and Larry King, who rushed to proclaim that Nidal Hassan was the innocent victim of Pre-PTSD or PTSD by Proxy, would never accept that. The difference of course is that like so many Americans, Europeans and Israelis, she actually was traumatized by Islamic terrorism.

While the only thing Nidal Hassan was traumatized was by the hate for Non-Muslims embedded in the pages of the Koran.

Someone should start a legal defense fund for Valerie Kenney, because she's likely to be made a target by Chicagoland authorities looking to establish proof of equivalence between Muslim terrorism and American oppression of Muslims.

Sure Nidal Hassan murdered 13 US soldiers, but look Valerie Kenney in Chicago tugged on a Muslimette's headscarf/symbol of oppression.

But of course some types of bigotry are more acceptable to the left than others. Case in point, radical left wing director Ken Loach who in response to statistics showing the rise of anti-semitism in Europe stated, "If there has been a rise I am not surprised. In fact, it is perfectly understandable because Israel feeds feelings of anti-Semitism."

Naturally dislike of Muslims is not "perfectly understandable" in response to Muslim terror. But anti-semitism is "perfectly understandable" in response to Israel defending itself against Muslim terrorism.

Ken Loach has pushed for a boycott of Israel in the past and defended himself against charges of anti-semitism by screaming that "From the beginning, Israel and its supporters have attacked their critics as anti-semites or racists". Which is a charge that on Ken Loach's case has an obvious basis.

Oily's Onions responded to Ken Loach thusly

Ken Loach should be ashamed of himself. He, as a film director, should understand more than most why rubbish films like High School Musical 3, or anything with Tom Cruise, anger decent, law-abiding, liberal people. And if the entirely understandable anger of those people at, say, a Robin Williams movie were to cause them to punch Mr Loach in the face, we at Olly's Onions would not condone that violence, but we would understand it. For he is a film director, and Patch Adams was also made by a film director. So was the new Pink Panther film. And if cinema enthusiasts scream in his face, "Why can't you leave Inspector Clouseau ALOOONE? Don't you realise that Steve Martin is JUST NOT FUNNY ANYMORE?!" while burning effigies of Mr Loach, and boycotting his films, and daubing obscenities on his house, and beating up his children, can he blame them? We certainly could not. If Mr Loach complains that these attacks are unjustified, that is merely a distraction from the fact that he is an idiot.

We look forward to Mr Loach's next film, which is expected to "understand" discrimination against black people because of all the shitty things African governments do.

Ken Loach's support for Islamic terrorism however is not purely constrained by his anti-semitism. There was Ken Loach's contribution to 11' 09" 01, a collection of short films about the attacks, arranged by the French. So what's coming next can't be too much of a surprise.

The most forceful contribution is by Ken Loach, a letter to the relatives of the Twin Towers victims from the exiled Chilean singer Vladimir Vega, the star of Loach's Ladybird, Ladybird. It consists of newsreel material of the vicious coup, arranged by Kissinger and the CIA, that overthrew Allende's socialist government on 11 September 1973 and put Pinochet in power. Loach's message is that the Americans had it coming or, as he has puts it in a production note: 'This was a symbolic attack on a power represented by the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.'

Sadly Ken Loach has yet to meet Larry Clark for a friendly lunch, the way Tartan Metro boss Hamish McAlpine (yes that's a real name) did, and was left with a broken nose after suggesting that American had 9/11 coming.

In Commentary Magazine, the always excellent Jonathan Tobin writes that Obama’s Stand on Gilo Gives Palestinian Snipers a Moral Victory

Though the administration has backed off a bit on its determination to pressure Israel into a total settlement freeze — a policy that only incited Palestinians to be even more intransigent than before — Obama made a point of personally opposing the construction of 900 new apartment units in the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. Obama condemned the new housing in an interview with Fox News during which he stated that the apartments could embitter Palestinians in a way that was “very dangerous.”

The president’s decision to speak as if this part of Jerusalem was a “settlement” where Jews had no right to live and build is not just a provocative escalation of the administration’s hostile attitude toward Israel. It also gives the Palestinian terrorists who made the apartment complexes in this neighborhood their personal shooting gallery throughout the second intifada an unexpected boost. Palestinian Authority–backed snipers based in the neighboring Arab village of Beit Jala regularly shot into Gilo during that conflict. Gilo also became more than just a middle-class Jerusalem neighborhood. It assumed the role of a symbol of Israeli tenacity and courage, and the area became a regular stop for visitors to the city. At the time, the United States condemned the attacks on Gilo. The presence of Jewish homes there was not an issue. Even media outlets that were far from supportive of Israel, such as the New York Times, were wont to describe it as a Jerusalem neighborhood, as this report from 2001 by Clyde Haberman during the height of the fighting illustrates. The word settlement is never used once in the article. Today, however, the Times used that word to describe Gilo in the headline of the story about Obama’s broadside.

Though I doubt the White House even thought of it in this context, Obama’s decision to treat as illegitimate Gilo’s existence as a Jewish community is, in a very real sense, a moral victory for those al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade killers whose goal was to make the neighborhood a place where Jews could no longer live. So just as visitors who wanted to bear witness to the determination of Israelis to not yield to terror needed to go to Gilo in 2001, anyone wishing to see just how far the United States has drifted from a position of support for the Jewish state must today go to the same place.

Meanwhile New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind condemned Obama as the real "Obstacle to Peace".

In defiance of President Barack Obama’s demands that Israel cease building in sections of Jerusalem annexed following the 1967 Six Day War, New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind (Dem.) laid the cornerstone for the second phase of the Nof Tzion neighborhood near Jabel Mukabar. Together with Likud MK Danny Danon, Hikind spoke with reporters about the Jewish right to build in Israel’s capital city. Hikind explained that banning Jews from building in a neighborhood was segregation. He expressed wonder that an African-American president should endorse such a policy in the 21st century

Meanwhile the increasingly deranged Joe Klein, over at Time Magazine's appropriately named Swampland blogs, used the occasion for blatant Jew baiting and double loyalty accusations.

Dov Hikind is not only a U.S. citizen, but also a member of the New York state legislature...and he wants to buy property in an illegal Jewish settlement, in an East Jerusalem neighborhood that the U.S. government considers a disputed area where no additional construction should be taking place? Indeed, it is an area that would be the capital of Palestine, if and when we achieve a two-state solution.

The news that the Gilo neighborhood, home to 50,000 Jews would be the capital of the Palestinian Authority, would be news to its residents, the Israeli government and just about everyone else, but as had been established previously, Joe Klein has a track of just making stuff up at this point.

Joe Klein then tops himself by delivering a lecture accusing Hikind of being unpatriotic and an enemy of the United States.

Therefore, Dov Hikind is acting against the best interests of the United States, as defined by Presidents of both parties over the past 40 years. He has, of course, every right to disagree and campaign against those policies. But I wonder, as an American citizen, what it means when he acts against our national interests, by seeking to buy property in a Palestinian area.

Now the same party that insisted for the last 8 years that dissent was patriotic and that questioning anyone's patriotism was the same thing as McCarthyism has suddenly gotten very enthusiastic at the idea of branding anyone they don't like, an ENEMY OF THE STATE.

Somehow it's apparently in the interests of the United States to ban Jews from living in Jerusalem. But somehow I don't think that had an American President said that supporting South African Apartheid was in America's best interests, that Joe Klein would be climbing on that bandwagon.

Furthermore has Joe Klein laid similar charges at the door of Jimmy Carter who travels around the world supporting the likes of Iran and North Korea? Or the anti-war activists who have openly campaigned with the likes of Hugo Chavez?

Joe Klein's cynical Jew baiting while trying to masquerade a left wing agenda as a patriotic agenda is simply sickening. And shows that we have no shortage of Loaches of our own.

Meanwhile Carl at IsraelMatzav looks at the numbers if Giuliani chooses to go for the New York Senate seat.

Giuliani has passed up a shot at the Governor's mansion, so it's the Senate or nothing. Despite the generally poor opinion of Gillibrand, it will not be as slam dunk as it looks, since the White House is likely to take a guiding hand, and we'll be rolling in voter fraud. But then again if the Democrats lose a supposedly safe Senate seat in New York, it will be an even worse blow.

And of course watching the heads of liberals and 9/11 Truthers swell and explode with rage at the prospect of Giuliani in office again, is worth the price of admission alone.

In other news in the roundup, Brazil's left wing mini-Chavez, Lula will welcome Ahmadinejad.

MSNBC's Ed Schultz is giving Keith Olbermann some competition in the race for the craziest MSNBC talking head by suggesting that Wall Street banks were deliberately losing money because they were racist and wanted to see Obama fail. In Schultz's defense, he's not a crazy liberal elitist, he's a crazy local radio personality who's trying to adapt his rhetoric to fit liberal propaganda, part of the devil's bargain that saw him make his transition to fame and fortune.

The liberal goal was to get a local radio personality to switch sides and bring someone on board their payroll who can appeal to the "common man". How's that working out for you guys?

Breath of the Beast views the new breast cancer regs as Progressives for Breast Cancer: A Preview of the Medical Gulag

Ok now picture a stage in the middle of the field. As the lights dim and the applause fades, a spotlight beam centers on the thin, serious figure of the future President of the United States and he lifts the microphone and pronounces his words very carefully.

“Ok, now, I have something to tell you that is very upsetting and I don’t want you to panic or get hysterical. Thirty-six of you women here tonight, and we don’t know who you are yet, are going to agree to reduce your chance of living for another five years by 72%. That means instead of 33 of you living at least five more years, only 9 of you will live. Not only that, you are going to give your consent to putting your self through a comparable amount more suffering and pain than you would otherwise have to endure. Also you will be saddling your husbands, parents, friends and children with infinitely more sorrow and desolation than they would have had to bear if you had not come to support my presidency tonight.”

In his usual style, the President is actually understating the case by a factor of ten. An astute friend of mine has pointed out that the 1900 to one ratio is a "yearly" crop of diagnoses based on yearly screening. so the actual loss of early diagnosis will be multiplied by the ten years of delay in receiving mammograms. This makes the actual death toll from that fateful rally more like 270 women.

It sounds like a non-starter doesn’t it? Do you think he would have gotten any of those women's votes that night? But the fact is that those 68,756 women (including the 36 doomed ones) have already been hoodwinked in to agreeing to that deal. Because, if Obama has his way and forces the single payer system down our throats, government then recommendations like these will assume the force of law for all but those are so wealthy that they can pay for medical services out of pocket.

These new recommendations are draconian, not just because it reminds us of how cold and callous a bureaucracy can be in its disregard for medical prudence and the value of an individual’s life but (even more) because it has given us an ominous forewarning of what the Medical Gulag of single payer, government run health care system would look like if the Blue Dogs and Republicans in congress don’t come to their senses soon and stop Obama’s high-pressure sales blitz for his “health care reform package”.

The entire thing is worth reading.

Meanwhile there's a conflict over a mosque's loudspeaker, this time in the Bronx.

A Bronx mosque that had sought a sound permit to amplify its morning call to prayer has quietly rescinded its application.

But the Jame Masjid mosque's revocation of the proposal didn't hush its neighbors, since the mosque plans to resubmit its request to play the undulating ribbon of Arabic invocation, or adhan, through a loudspeaker during four of five daily prayer times.

Residents called the plan, which was unveiled in October, an imposition on the daily lives of a diverse community. The idea of prayer booming through the streets also touched off cultural resentments.

"When in Rome do as the Romans do," said Gerri Lamb, who lives a quarter mile from the mosque. "If you're not in your own country, in your own culture, then you can't force me to be a part of it"...

The comment, made during a Community Board 9 hearing on the issue (though the proposal was off the table at the moment), seemed to sum up neighborhood tensions. The local advisory board had asked residents to avoid that type of commentary while testifying, but Lamb received uproarious applause.

For those who live around the Virginia Avenue mosque, the daily din threatens their quality of life. Over the course of a year, a muezzin will have sung the call to prayer 1,460 times.

Residents frowned upon the constant disruption. They envisioned life with the incessant sound filling their living rooms. They pictured school lessons pausing as it permeated through local classrooms. They said the prayer would be equally piercing to local businesses.

The mosque has omitted the first in the daily sequence of five prayers. That first prayer is said around 5 a.m. -- a predawn hour that would probably would have provoked a greater outcry.

But locals criticized the need to amplify the call at any time, especially in this technological age where alternatives like an iPhone application with daily prayer time reminders can be used. "Why do we all have to hear it?" asked Gwendolyn Brown, a 20-year resident. "That's imposing their religious beliefs over ours."

Some worried that an approval for this mosque's sound system could set a precedent for other religious institutions seeking permits. "What are you going to say when the next mosque comes?" one reverend asked.

If you're wondering why the article doesn't come packaged with complaints about Islamophobia and bigotry, that would be because most of the area residents are Black and Latino.

And if you can't even get a mosque loudspeaker approved in the Bronx...

At IsraPundit, Yoram Ettinger charges that Clinton is wrong on the demographics while Ted Belman argues that Unilateralism is Israel's Only Option

Muslims Against Sharia has Krauthammer's take on Holder
's perverse logic

KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable -- a civilian trial in the media capital of the world -- from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.

So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system, where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.

Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) "do not get convicted," asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. "Failure is not an option," replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn't the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure -- acquittal, hung jury -- is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.

Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.

Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York -- what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the courtroom, making KSM a martyr and turning the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? -- it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.

That's precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.

The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of 200 unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. "Within 10 days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum," wrote former attorney general Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, "letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered."

Lemon Lime Moon condemns all the Bowing, Scraping and Kissing

Pesky Emotional Republican passes word that Obama is quietly backing the Muslim Brotherhood

Debbie Schlussel writes on the Coldness of Barack

Religion of Peace has the latest War of the Religion of Peace news including the modern day slavery in Dubai

A Jew With a View exposes Ed Husain, another fake moderate Muslim.

Finally there's the tale of Do Socialism as I Say, Not as I Wear

A video of a Gucci- and Louis Vuitton-clad politician attacking capitalism then struggling to explain how his luxurious clothes square with his socialist beliefs has become an instant YouTube hit in Venezuela.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Pedro Carreno was momentarily at a loss for words when a journalist interrupted his speech and asked if it was not contradictory to criticize capitalism while wearing Gucci shoes and a tie made by Parisian luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton.

"I don't, uh ... I ... of course," stammered Carreno on Tuesday before regaining his composure. "It's not contradictory because I would like Venezuela to produce all this so I could buy stuff produced here instead of 95 percent of what we consume being imported."

Silence on Islam Kills, from Hassan to Honor Killings

2009-11-18T22:27:00.001-05:00

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing" Edmund Burke

As the story of Nidal Hassan unfolds, it becomes painfully clear that the Jihadi Shrink who opened fire on US troops at Fort Hood did everything but spray paint, "I Am Going To Kill You All" on the wall, before he actually carried out his attack. Not only did Hassan put a Jihadist abbreviation on his business cards, he delivered repeated lectures justifying Jihad, accused the soldiers he was supposed to treat of War Crimes and was already being investigated for contacts with Al Queda and for defending suicide bombing online.

At a time when snow globes are banned at airports and detectors are positioned in every Federal building, in the heart of the United States Army, a Jihadist like Nidal Hassan could openly and freely express his sympathies and affinity for terrorism. But the thing that Nidal Hassan had going for him, that the snow globes and baby bottles filled with breast milk didn't, is that Hassan was a Muslim, and ever since 9/11, Americans have been repeatedly warned against criticizing Islam. Told over and over again that Islam is the Religion of Peace, and that just because all our foreign terrorists happen to be Muslims acting in the name of Islam does not actually matter. Just as all those Japanese planes flying toward Pearl Harbor and the German factories producing tanks meant nothing in the 1930's.

Hassan's superiors were well aware of what he was, but none of them wanted to risk a charge of Islamophobia. And so they remained silent and soldiers died. That is not a chant you will hear from anti-war activists at the gates of the White House, but that is exactly what happened. And Hassan's case is far from unique. There is no telling how many terrorists have flown under the radar because officials were afraid to be accused of profiling or charged with racism. We may never know what reports were never paid attention to because it has become more acceptable to lose American lives, than detain a Muslim.

In the face of Islamic terror, there are endless desks staffed by good men who do nothing and say nothing. Because they have been told that it is more important to be silent, than to take action, when it comes to the Islamic Jihad against all non-Muslims. It is more important to search everyone, than to profile Muslim terrorists. It is better to have lax security, than to have good security that may make some of our friends from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan feel upset. That is how we did it before 9/11. And that is how we are doing it today, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gets his lawyers and the media does the hard work of manufacturing Nidal Hassan's PTSD by Proxy defense for him out of thin air, and the radical Imams whom Nidal Hassan came into contact with are whitewashed with the usual thin paste of the Religion of Peace.

But silence on Islam kills. It kills when we remain silent about the Nidal Hassans in our midst. It kills when people look away as honor killings among Muslim families continues to grow. It kills as Muslim gangs like the Muslim Boys in the UK form and it kills as Muslim riots claim the lives of innocent people, as they repeatedly do in Europe. But when it comes to Muslims, there is a code of silence that falls over even the most committed officials. A directive that warns them to look away, to make excuses and to blame anything and everything but Islam. To deny the truth and cover up the crime.

While Hassan is one example of the cost of silence, honor killings are another. The willingness of American and European social workers to ignore abuse in Muslim families as "part of their culture" or worse yet to recruit Muslim police officers who often take the victim right back to the abuser, is part of the same Culture of Silence on Islam.

As Nidal Hassan spun his web of hate right in the faces of the men and women who were supposed to stop his kind, Honor Killings develop right in front of the faces of those who are supposed to prevent them. And both Hassan and Honor Killings share a common premise, the belief by Muslims that in the absence of Sharia, or Islamic Law, they have the right to apply Sharia and take the law into their own hands.

While it is easy to try and dismiss Islamic crimes as emotional or disturbed. To assume that a man who opens fire on soldiers or a father who kills his own daughter is crazy, that is an American interpretation of events. One that treats behavior deviating from social conventions as demonstrating psychological or emotional instability. But that presumption ignores the fact that while their behavior may deviate from American social conventions, they accord with the social conventions of many Muslim nations.

Nidal Hassan's behavior might seem deranged to Americans, but is considered normal and praiseworthy back in the mosques of Gaza or the West Bank. While to his classmates, Hassan might have seemed deranged, he was in fact a perfectly normal Palestinian Arab Muslim. The problem was that he happened to be a Palestinian Arab Muslim living and working among Americans. Yet liberals who routinely boil everything down to cultural differences can't seem to grasp that the difference between homicidal mania and religious martyrdom is in this case a religious and cultural difference as well.

Nidal Hassan did not just snap one day. Nor did he act out of anger. Instead he studied the issue. He read the Koran many times. He even tried to distinguish which soldiers were specifically guilty of death and should be killed. Hassan is a mass murderer, but he is an Islamic mass murderer, following codes similar to those used by Al Queda, Hamas and the Taliban. The codes spun off from the same Islamist teachings that have helped create generations of willing suicide bombers and willing terrorists.

The actions of Jordanian, Iraqi and Pakistani men who murder their daughters or sisters may be abnormal by Western standards, but are behaving in a way that is considered acceptable and even praiseworthy in their own cultures, where a family's honor is tied to the chastity of its women, and where individual rights are subsumed within the family and the tribe. Their behavior is wrong by objective human standards, but approved of by their culture and beliefs. And it is unrealistic to imagine that immigration is the same thing as moral transformation.

Liberals who condemn such talk as bigoted, are ignoring the fact that it is about ideology, not about race. Last week the London Times carried an interview with a British former altar boy who had gone to fight with the Taliban and was eager to kill fellow British troops. Adam Gadahn, the Al Queda spokesman, is a grandson of a member of the Board of Directors of the ADL and an editor for The Chronicle Christian. Jose Padilla started out as a member of a Latin street gang. The only thing they had in common was not race, but ideology. The ideology of Islam.

Muslims may be from any race or ethnicity, but what they have in common is a religion of death that is dedicated to imposing Islam by stealth, by deceit and by force across the world. That same ideology has infused the culture of the Muslim world, its music, its heroes, its literature and its politics. A Muslim immigrant to the West carries it along with him, and if he does not, he is likely to become a member of a Wahhabi Mosque that does.

To ignore this and to remain silent about it, is to allow for the triumph of evil. There is no telling how many men and women remained silent as Nidal Hassan moved his way up through the ranks. There is no telling how many more Nidal Hassans there are in the military, in our schools and neighborhoods and all around the country. And the curtain of silence that surrounds them gives them ample room to plot and finally to act.

Silence on Islam kills. It kills because it turns every Muslim atrocity into a surprise attack that is quickly stifled, because Islam is the Cult of Death whose name we dare not speak. And as long as we dare not speak it, evil will triumph.

Obama Goes Mao

2009-11-17T23:02:00.001-05:00

As T-shirts featuring a stylized Obama and Mao were selling like hot cakes in Beijing, and health care nationalization that Mao himself might have approved of was moving through congress, Barack Hussein Obama took the opportunity to embrace his inner Mao by predictably enough selling out the last remnants of Taiwan's sovereignty vis a vis the political successors of Mao's monstrous Communist butchers, the People's Republic of China.

"I have been clear in the past that my administration fully supports a one-China policy, as reflected in the three joint communiqués that date back several decades, in terms of our relations with Taiwan as well as our relations with the People's Republic of China. We don't want to change that policy and that approach... and it is my deep desire and hope that we will continue to see great improvement between Taiwan and the rest of -- and the People's Republic in resolving many of these issues."

Barack Hussein Obama, Bejing, Nov 17, 2009

To understand just what Obama did here, we would have to go back across the long tragic history of relations between America and Taiwan. Suffice it to say that after Jimmy Carter chose to unilaterally break a mutual defense treaty between the United States and Taiwan (an illegal act that resulted in a Supreme Court case filed by none other than Senator Barry Goldwater), the United States has maintained a slippery balance in its relations with Taiwan.

Before Obama, the United States has maintained the understanding that there is "One China", an understanding held by both the Communist People's Republic of China and the Nationalist Republic of China in Taiwan, who agree that there is only one government for all of China, but disagree which of them is that government. In the wake of Nixon and Carter's betrayals of Taiwan, the United States adopted the position that Taiwan is not a state, but neither is it part of the PRC. In a handful of sentences, Obama has aligned the US interpretation of the One China policy with that of the Communist PRC's interpretation of the One China Policy.

Obama first stated that he "supports" a One China policy, rather than following the traditional US formula of "acknowledging" a One China policy. The difference is that acknowledging the policy, does not mean that the US adopts it. By contrast by supporting the policy, Obama has committed the US to backing the PRC position on One China.

Even the second of the Three Communiques, a work of the Carter Administration, maintained that distinction

The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China.

The difference may seem technical, but keep in mind that entire countries have been given away based on "technical" diplomatic language. Obama knew exactly what he was saying here and what he was giving away by pledging support for the PRC's version of the One China policy.

Obama further referenced the Three Communiques as bearing the definitive American position on the matter. This sidelines the Taiwan Relations Act passed by Congress in the aftermath of Carter's betrayal of Taiwan. The significance of that is that the Taiwan Relations Act provided for American guarantees for Taiwan's defense. The Three Communiques which were signed by the US and China, cut both Congress and Taiwan out of the loop. In turn Congress has repeatedly passed resolutions to reaffirm the primary of the Taiwan Relations Act in the relationship between America and Taiwan. The latest such resolution was passed this year though the reference to the TRA as the "cornerstone" of American policy toward Taiwan was removed from it, a forerunner of what was to come. After some work the original wording was restored, only for Obama to once again undo it.

The Clinton Administration had already undermined Reagan's Six Assurances to Taiwan. Now Obama has thrown out the fifth assurance altogether. The PRC leadership certainly understands what they have gained. Hu was quick to issue a statement that Obama has recognized his regime's "One China" policy.

Chinese President Hu Jintao hailed U.S. President Barack Obama's recognition of sovereignty issues dear to China, after a bilateral meeting in Beijing on Tuesday.

"China approves of President Obama's repeated reiteration of the one-China principle," Hu told reporters.

Finally Obama stated that Taiwan was not part of China, but rather part of the People's Republic of China. This is effectively a denial of any sovereignty for Taiwan whatsoever. Obama has erased the deliberate ambiguity that the US has cultivated with regard to the position of Taiwan by stating that Taiwan is part of the PRC. This reduces it to the status of a rebellious province, a position that China has always held. And while Obama did not explicitly disavow further US arms sales to Taiwan, considering his disregard for the TRA and the Six Assurances, such a move may not be long in coming.

Obama's actions are not completely unprecedented. Nixon and Carter paved the way, and Clinton on his own visit to China in 1997 significantly downgraded Taiwan's status. The question is whether Congress will respond to Obama's remarks, the way it did to Clinton's "Three Noes".Considering the current Democratic congress, the answer is probably no.

This policy should not be seen as a complete surprise either. Rejected former nominee for Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, was openly on the PRC payroll and an apologist for its worst atrocities. By drafting the National Intelligence Estimate, Freeman would have been in an ideal position to put pen to paper and make the argument that Taiwan was no longer threatened by the People's Republic of China, and thereby drastically limit or cut off arms sales to China entirely.

Dennis C. Blair, Obama's Director of National Intelligence, who nominated Freeman and backed him all the way, served as a collaborator in the Muslim Indonesian genocide of East Timor, also got rather cozy with China, assuring the Bush Administration that there was nothing to worry about with regard to an invasion of Taiwan, until he was finally forced out by Rumsfeld. That is the character of the Obama Administration's position on Taiwan.

As a Senator running for office, Obama refused to back the sale of F-16's to Taiwan. As Taiwan's air force continues to age, it will have less ability to resist the People's Republic of China, without additional US arms sales. Obama dodged the question about arms sales to Taiwan, and it's likely that he will continue to dodge it, thereby weakening Taiwan and strengthening China.

In 1973 Mao assumed that the People's Republic of China would have to wait another century to seize Taiwan. But he had not counted on Carter and Obama who less than 50 years later, have brought the vision of that red handed mass murderer closer to being than ever.