Sultan Knish

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.

What Muslims Owe America

2009-11-16T22:44:00.004-05:00

If you listen to the outraged wails of leftists and Muslims, you might reasonably be under the impression that the United States is in the business of persecuting Muslims. The reality is radically different. If anything American policies should have made us the Muslims' best friends.

Before 9/11, the United States had fought two wars on behalf of Muslims, the Gulf War under George Bush Sr. and the Kosovo War under Bill Clinton. In fact during the second half of the 20th century, the only wars that the United States fought that were not against Communism or Nazism-- were fought on behalf of Muslims. That is not a fact that you will glean from any of the usual media portrayals of the United States foreign policy as hostile to Muslims. In fact US foreign policy was about as helpful to Muslims as you can imagine.

Until 9/11, the United States had never invaded and occupied a single sovereign Muslim country. The closest it came was the First Barbary War in 1801, in response to piracy against American vessels and the liberation of North Africa from Hitler's Vichy allies in WW2. And of course the misguided attempt at participating in a peacekeeping force in Beirut.

Not only that, America had developed much of the oil wealth that would keep the Gulf States in gold, skyscrapers and slave labor. And when the leaders of the Gulf States seized American oil companies, the United States government did not fight a war, as England did when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, instead the US government paid oil companies to take the loss... out of taxpayer money.

The fear of a Communist takeover helped turn America into one of the biggest patrons of Muslim countries, from the Middle East to Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan. America willingly closed its eyes to Indonesia's genocide in East Timor, and even supplied them with weapons. America provided the weapons and funding that Pakistan would channel into the Taliban. And naturally we ignored Turkey's pesky little genocide of the Armenians and avoided ever discussing the issue.

So by 9/11, not only had America repeatedly sent soldiers to fight and die for Muslims in two wars... but it had robbed its own taxpayers rather than challenge them over the nationalization of the assets of American companies, and had proved willing to aid and even overlook the genocides of Muslim regimes. So naturally by the warped logic of leftists and Muslims... American foreign policy was "oppressive" to Muslims.

The root of the leftist critique of American foreign policy typically rests on two planks. The first blames America for supporting dictators in Muslim countries. This would be a more legitimate critique if there were any free and democratic Muslim countries around. As it was, America simply supported whoever was in power and wasn't allied with the USSR. This might have been an immoral policy, but during the Cold War it was a continuation of the same kind of thinking that caused the US to ally with the USSR against Nazi Germany.

The left's implication was always that by supporting dictators in Muslim countries, the United States was preventing the rise of more legitimate governments. It is not clear where these legitimate governments were or how they were ever supposed to arise. Syria is a dictatorship without us ever supporting Assad. Egypt was a dictatorship when it was allied with the USSR under Nasser. It is still a dictatorship now that it is allied with us under Mubarak. When the Shah of Iran was overthrown, the left wing appeasement corps working for Jimmy Carter decided not to interfere. The result was not a democratic government or even a leftist one, but a radical Islamist one under the Ayatollahs.

The second plank is of course Israel. The United States did decide to finally cultivate Israel as an ally back under JFK in the 60's. This was in sharp contrast to far longer US ties with the House of Saud or the Eisenhower Administration's willingness to destroy England's economy in order to protect Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal. And the United States has provided Israel with billions in aid. As well as providing billions in aid to Egypt and Jordan. Not to mention the aid given to Turkey and Pakistan. Or the cost of the first Gulf War undertaken to liberate Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein.

As a matter of fact the US relationship with the Saudis has been far more uncritical and generous than with Israel. At no point in time has the US tried to force the Saudis to stop treating half their population like cattle, end their dependence on Southeast Asian slave labor... or even done much of anything for US citizens who find themselves in Saudi jails on trumped up charges.

There is of course no doubt that US arms sales to Israel have angered Muslim nations, just as US arms sales to Taiwan have angered China. But at the same time there is also no doubt that the same general sense of hostility would exist in both cases, even if the US is able to sell out Israel as successfully as it sold out Taiwan.

In any case, to argue that American support for Israel oppresses Muslims, is to argue that American support for any country that Muslims have a grievance against-- which at latest count includes a sizable portion of the globe, oppresses Muslims. As such the United States would not be allowed to have any allies that have not first been approved by Muslims. Which would turn over American foreign policy to Islam.

If America is forbidden from allying with both Muslim countries and non-Muslim countries, that Muslims oppose, then American foreign policy would be in the hands of Muslims. Which is exactly what Muslims and their American spokesmen accuse Jews of.

Furthermore, the countries hostile to Israel are the very same Arab dictatorships that we are being hypocritically assailed for supporting. Which means that this plank also resolves itself into one of those arguments that we can't win. If we support existing Muslim governments, we're oppressing Muslims. If we interfere with them, we're oppressing Muslims. If we support non-Muslim governments in countries that have Muslim minorities... you guessed it, we're oppressing Muslims.

When the tide of logic passes, it becomes quite clear that both these planks are hollow and rotten. They represent Catch 22 arguments in which America loses no matter what it does. If we support Arab countries, then we're upholding their tyrannical regimes. If we fail to support them, then we're hostile to the Muslim world. If we create a Palestinian Arab state, then we're to blame because it's not big enough. If we wash our hands of the whole affair, then we're isolationists.

The bottom line is that there is absolutely nothing that we can do that will not lead to accusations that we are oppressing Muslims, followed by terrorist attacks.

But the fact of the matter is that the United States has done more for the Muslim world than anyone else. When Afghanistan was invaded by the USSR, no Arab country stepped forth in their defense. Instead they all remained silent because of their own Soviet ties. Instead it was the United States that sent arms and advisors to the Mujahadeen.

After the overthrow of the Shah, the United States could have provided legitimacy to any one of a number of factions, instead Carter decided to legitimate the Ayatollah Khomeni. The result was the first Shiite Islamist regime in the world. And it would not have happened had the United States not undermined the Shah and then treated Khomeni as Iran's future under the Green Belt Strategy.

When Saddam invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia, it was the United States that led a coalition to liberate Kuwait and back Saddam down. When Yugoslavia tried to preserve itself against Kosovar Albanian Muslim terror, it was the United States that bombed Yugoslavia, and handed the Muslim Albanians their victory. And after decades of Soviet backed terrorism by Arafat had failed to destroy Israel, it was the United States that stepped in and muscled Israel into providing him with a state.

Indeed the rise of Islamism can be credited to American foreign policy. While the USSR tried to back Arab Socialist states such as Saddam's Iraq, or Assad's Syria or Nasser's Egypt-- the United States embraced Islamist tyrannies such as the House of Saud and General Zia-ul-Haq in Pakistan. We backed the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan over the Soviet puppet regime. We continued funding Arafat's Fatah, even as it became one of the world's leading innovators in suicide bombings and martyrdom. With Kosovo, we helped create the first Muslim state in Europe, and a direct route for smuggling slaves and drugs into Western Europe, as we fought on the same side as Al Queda and Iran... against our former Serbian allies.

If anything the Muslims of the world should be getting down on their knees and thrusting their asses into the air five times a day to thank us, not Allah. Allah did not provide the Stingers with which to shoot down Russian aircraft, or fund the ISI's terrorist factories and back a regime which all but legalized the rape of women. Allah did not send thousands of aircraft to bomb Serbian civilians until they finally gave in and signed on to the Muslim rape of Kosovo. Nor did Allah's tanks protect Mecca and more importantly Ridyah from coming under the jurisdiction of Uday and Qusay Hussein.

Finally America provided a hospitable home for Muslim immigrants, giving them profitable employment, letting them bring along their entire clans and not asking too many questions about the money they sent to "charities" back home. And for all this, we were repaid with 3000 dead in a single day. Nor for this alone, but also because we had helped liberate Afghanistan and protect Saudi Arabia. For all the countless billions spent and the lives lost protecting Muslims, for being an open people willing to take in the stranger and ask no questions, four of our planes were hijacked (a feat previously held by Arafat's goons, who had already received a state from us) and aimed at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the White House.

And afterward did Americans react by going out and beating random Muslims or rounding them up in stadiums... as leftist feverish fantasies would have it? No. Instead America embraced Muslims as never before. We fought two wars, the bulk of which we spent trying to rebuild infrastructure, put up generators and supply food, water and medicine to two hostile Muslim countries. We taught tolerance to each other until it was coming out of our ears. We reassured ourselves that every religion has a few or a few hundred million bad apples. We made a point of getting to know a local Muslim family. And of course we assured them that we didn't hold it against them.

Just as we're doing right now. Over and over again. When a Muslim screaming Allah Akbar opens fire, we assure ourselves that most Muslims are good people. By contrast when a Muslim gets a flat tire, he blames the CIA. Despite everything that America has done for Muslims-- our only reward has been hatred and ingratitude. Maybe instead of thinking of what America owes them, it's time that Muslims everywhere thought about what they owe America.

Obama in China and Twilight for America

2009-11-15T22:37:00.000-05:00

The first year of Obama has seen America retreating on all fronts. The country that once pressed back the Russian bear, has instead pulled up the missile shield and sent the signal to Moscow that the former Soviet Republicans can no longer count on US aid to insure their independence. On China, Obama has switched to a policy of "Strategic Reassurance", which is a fancy way of retreating and saying "Nice Doggie", without actually even bothering to hunt for the stick. Not only has Obama become the first President not to meet with the Dalai Lama, but what "Strategic Reassurance" really does is hang out Taiwan and Japan on the line, assuring China that America will not interfere with its expanding sphere of political and military dominance.

Robert Kagan and Dan Blumenthal, two prominent foreign policy analysts, described the policy as follows.

"'Strategic reassurance' seems to chart a different course. Senior officials liken the policy to the British accommodation of a rising United States at the end of the 19th century, which entailed ceding the Western Hemisphere to American hegemony. Lingering behind this concept is an assumption of America's inevitable decline."

That assumption is of course the engine behind the White House's policymaking that consists of selling out allies to enemies in the hopes of stability. This was the sum total of British foreign policy before and after WW2, a policy that gave us an Arab Socialist Middle East, a Southeast Asia in turmoil and Africa under the boots of murderous dictators. And Obama is now working to replicate that same policy on a far larger scale.

Obama's international tour of bowing only highlights his weakness. His global popularity is as shallow as that of any celebrity, and only serves to signal America's weakness. Each of Obama's fumbling speeches has failed to achieve any tangible result except to express America's helplessness and willingness to concede on every front. Buzzwords like "New Relationship", "Multilateralism" and "Strategic Reassurance" are the ways in which Obama and his foreign policy minions phrase their "New Incompetence".

America which once served as a global shield, is being transformed into a paper tiger. And the result is emboldening both old enemies, such as Russia and China, as well as smaller but more aggressive genocidal regimes, such as North Korea and Iran, who have begun pushing a new wave of confrontations with American allies.

Obama has sold out every American ally to every American enemy, from Latin America to Eastern Europe to Asia to the Middle East. The message repeated over and over again is that not only can America no longer help free nations, but that the people in power in D.C. will actively sell out free nations to tyrannies in the name of multilateralism, and to buy ourselves some time before the implosion comes.

The New York Times article on Obama's visit to China describes his visit as, "assuming the role of profligate spender coming to pay his respects to his banker" and sketched an image of American domestic policy having to gain approval from China.

In a July meeting, Chinese officials asked their American counterparts detailed questions about the health care legislation making its way through Congress. The president’s budget director, Peter R. Orszag, answered most of their questions. But the Chinese were not particularly interested in the public option or universal care for all Americans.

“They wanted to know, in painstaking detail, how the health care plan would affect the deficit,” one participant in the conversation recalled. Chinese officials expect that they will help finance whatever Congress and the White House settle on, mostly through buying Treasury debt, and like any banker, they wanted evidence that the United States had a plan to pay them back.

It is a long way from the days when President George W. Bush hectored China about currency manipulation, or when President Bill Clinton exhorted the Chinese to improve human rights.

Obama's socialist spending spree does not simply come at the expense of America freedoms, it explicitly puts China in charge of American policy. The price for universal health care will not simply be paid by Americans, it will be paid for by American allies in Asia.

Furthermore as the United States continues to borrow from China in order to fund Obama's deficit spending, much of the interest paid back will in turn go to fund China's military machine.

Unfortunately, that is not the reality in Asia. Contrary to optimistic predictions just a decade ago, China is behaving exactly as one would expect a great power to behave. As it has grown richer, China has used its wealth to build a stronger and more capable military. As its military power has grown, so have its ambitions...

Yet the new head of the U.S. Pacific Command, Adm. Robert Willard, noted last month that "in the past decade or so, China has exceeded most of our intelligence estimates of their military capability. . . . They've grown at an unprecedented rate." Defense Secretary Robert Gates recently warned that China's military modernization program could undermine U.S. military power in the Pacific.

Which means that the next naval war in the Pacific will see the US Navy coping with a Chinese Navy paid for by US tax dollars used to pay off Obama's debts and made of US scrap metal resold to China.

Meanwhile North Korea has become emboldened enough to stage raids on South Korean waters. Kim Jong Il's new confidence in the inability of the US to do anything about his depredations is obvious enough, and comes right down to Obama. Iran in turn is doing the same thing, feeding a civil war in Yemen that has now dragged in Saudi Arabia, while openly taunting Obama about its nuclear arsenal.

As Obama cuts back on defense spending, while going deeper into debt to pay off his Wall Street and Union backers, America begins to increasingly look like a failed state. And while China is happy enough to lend us every dollar we ask for, that is only because it brings America one step closer to becoming a Sharecropper Society.

We took the first steps toward the Sharecropper Society by exporting the means of production abroad, particularly to China. Shortly afterward Chinese companies began selling cheaper versions of our own products back to us, turning those same US companies into their distributors. Now China has begun buying American brand names such as Hummer, thereby cutting US companies entirely out of the loop. Very soon about the only thing that China will need from the US is ad agencies and superstores like Wal-Mart to shove the cheap Chinese junk down America's throat.

Americans will no longer be working for themselves. Instead Americans incomes will go to buy Chinese products and pay taxes, which will in turn go to China. As American corporations are taken over by China, Americans will essentially become Chinese serfs. The process is well underway and Obama's deficit spending is bringing it closer every day.

China has already won its economic war with America. Every product made in China, every Wal-Mart and every number in the trade deficit is a PRC flag planted on American soil. Now China is pursuing a quiet political war with America, and putting us in their debt amounts to a boot planted on Uncle Sam's grizzled neck.

Obama's policy of "strategic reassurance," amounts to an admission that the US can no longer stand in China's way globally. Which is perfectly timed for China's growing expansion as it completes its ethnic cleansing of Tibet, expands its slave labor empire across Africa, and uses "Soft Power" to spread its propaganda globally through its state owned media. Taiwan's day is coming, and for all of Japan's fussing about nuclear arms, it is now in an invisible arms race with North Korea. And the only way out is through China.

America let this happen, and while Obama is the worst incarnation of this policy, his treason is only the latest link in the grand chain of bad policy that helped turn China from a backward starving Communist dictatorship into a world power. Meanwhile on the Russian front, Obama has retreated from even the relatively weak stand that the Bush Administration took over Georgia. "Strategic Reassurance" toward Russia means exactly what it does toward China, selling out to Putin all of the former Republics whose freedom we prided ourselves on. The only difference is that instead of cheap products and our national debt, Russia's leverage on us comes in the form of energy.

If Russia can help drive its Iranian ally to lead a Shiite revolution in the Middle East, and its Latin American allies to lead a Marxist revolution right below us, it will have a lock on much of the world's oil, and in turn enjoy a great deal of leverage over North America and Europe. Which will help force us to recognize its territorial claims to the former Warsaw Pact states of the USSR that Russian nationalists are aching to reclaim.

With a Shiite Middle East, a Chinese Asia, a Marxist Latin America and a Russian Europe-- America in twilight will once again stand alone.

Are We At War or Aren't We?

2009-11-14T19:33:00.000-05:00

By banning any talk of a "War on Terror" and bringing through a civilian criminal trial for the mastermind of 9/11, Obama and his fellow liberals are doing their best to whitewash Al Queda as nothing more than common criminals. This refusal to accept that Al Queda has made war on America, rather than carried out a few lone attacks which we should all get over with, has been at the heart of the Clinton Administration's misguided approach to terrorism, as well as the ongoing liberal furor over Bush treating Al Queda as an enemy, rather than a bunch of hoodlums who need to be put on the usual legal treadmill to nowhere.

There is little doubt that despite the forthcoming antics from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's lawyers and the usual circus that takes place when terrorists and their lawyers get to put on a show, Mohammed will likely spend the rest of his life behind bars. At least unless he ends up being traded for a few American hostages, which considering that Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom all freed major terrorists in exchange for hostages or financial incentives is not outside the realm of possibility. The difference is in how we define what is happening in the world around us. The question is, are we at war or aren't we?

After WW2 the decision was made by the allies to try key Nazi officials in a military setting. They were not routed into civilian criminal courts. They were not sent to New York Federal court to await trial. Similarly the German saboteurs brought here on a submarine were rapidly routed to a military tribunal and executed in short order. The only real difference between Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and top Nazi officials is time. Had Al Queda been able to take over Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Iraq, would we have been able to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a military tribunal then?

The absurdity of the whole thing is obvious, as liberals propose to take Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a man who is not an American citizen or resident alien and route him into a US criminal court system for attacks that both he and the US government at the time considered acts of war.

In his speech to congress at the time, Bush identified the attacks of September 11th, as an act of war, saying, "On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country". Obama has retroactively withdrawn that recognition of the attacks as an Act of War, itself an unprecedented act, as if JFK had suddenly decided that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was no longer an act of war.

However trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian criminal court based on evidence extracted by military interrogators through waterboarding that is not itself admissible in a civilian court, is a further absurdity. The attempt to funnel Al Queda and Taliban terrorists into civilian courts creates a legal Frankenstein's monster that does not hold together. But the proponents of moving terrorists into civilian courts don't care if it holds together or not, because they don't care whether the terrorists are convicted or not, or whether those convictions can be thrown out by some of Obama's Federal Judges and Supreme Court appointees in a few years from now.

Let us look at what routing terrorists like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed through the civilian court system, rather than military tribunals really accomplishes. First of all it virtually nullifies their intelligence value. When a captured terrorist can stop talking to you just by asking for his lawyer, as is the legal right of any defendant in a criminal court system, the only possible leverage for getting any intelligence is a plea bargain deal. And even if we find any Al Queda terrorists willing to accept a plea bargain deal, we would essentially be faced with letting terrorists who have killed Americans walk, in exchange for intelligence. This is obviously a much less reliable and much more morally outrageous process for anyone who cares more about American lives, than those of Islamic terrorists.

Furthermore moving the terrorists onto American soil, gives their comrades targets in America itself. Part of the reason for the original World Trade Center attacks was to force the release of other Muslim terrorists in New York jails. Keeping Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a major American city, turns it into even more of a terrorist magnet than before. If that city is New York, Obama and his liberal backers have given terrorists yet another reason to target New York City.

And if any of those terrorists are freed on some technicality, they will once again become an American responsibility leading to the possibility of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed moving in within blocks of the new site of the World Trade Center. The outrageousness of that is self-evident. The best case scenario would be that the planner behind the mass murder of thousands of Americans would have to be palmed off on some tropical nation at the cost of a few million dollars.

Nor do the crimes of terrorists or the threat they pose to Americans cease once they are behind bars. Just ask Louis Pepe, a guard at the same prison where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is headed today. Pepe was stabbed in the eye by one of Osama bin Laden's top aides, beaten and nearly raped. That was almost 10 years ago when there were only a handful of Al Queda terrorists in US prisons. Bringing in a larger critical mass of terrorists will only increase the risk.

A civilian trial will also allow both the terrorists themselves and their lawyers, many of whom like Lynne Stewart are clearly sympathetic to the Jihadist ideology of their clients, to turn an American courtroom within a few blocks of the site of the attacks into a forum for the promotion of their ideology, for condemnations of America and justification of those attacks themselves. This is exactly what took place during the trials of the 1998 US Embassy bombing Al Queda terrorists. And history is all but certain to repeat itself again.

Finally giving up on military tribunals is a sign of weakness, a demonstration that the United States no longer believes it's at war and is willing to roll out the red carpet of civil rights and criminal defense attorneys for its worst enemies. And there is no better incentive for terrorists to seize on that weakness both at home and abroad. By forgetting that we are at war, we make it all too obvious to our enemies that we are blind to their plans and that we do not take them seriously. And that brings the next 9/11 that much closer to home.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Hassan Show and Political Correctness Kills

2009-11-13T16:20:00.000-05:00

In the weeks, months and years leading up his Fort Hood Massacre, Nidal Hassan did everything possible to let his superiors know that one day he was going to kill a whole bunch of Americans in the name of Allah.

He posted praises for suicide bombers on the internet. He gave lectures in military facilities calling the War on Terror, a war against Muslims. He even put Soldier of Allah on his business card.

It's not clear what if anything else Hassan could have done that would have gotten him away from his position as a security risk. It appears that his superiors were willing to overlook anything and everything he was doing in the name of political correctness.

Nidal Hassan is the final and ultimate test case proving that political correctness does kill. For all the complaints about profiling Muslims, not only was Hassan not profiled, he was anti-profiled with openly hostile behavior toward America and signs of Islamic fanaticism getting ignored in the name of accommodating Muslims in the military.

As a result the injured soldiers Hassan saw were put at risk. And finally when Nidal Hassan went on his killing spree, he engaged in a form of behavior that seemingly could no longer be covered up. Except it was and it is.

From initially pushing Hassan's case as being some sort of mystical variant of PTSD that can occur before the trauma happens or can be passed on from people who actually have PTSD through the ether, to the latest reports that treat Hassan as the victim-- the politically correct cover up of Nidal Hassan continues.

While it was a criminal act to cover up Hassan's behavior before the attacks, continuing to cover for him after the attacks ranges somewhere in the equator between madness and treason.

Hassan who became death incarnate in accordance with the teachings of Jihad is also a symptom of the politically correct madness of a liberal approach toward Islam that allowed him to kill in the first place.

And still the cover up continues. And that means throwing in loads of distractions of course. Such as Joe Klein ranting about Jewish extremists after a Palestinian Arab gunman murdered US troops in the name of Allah, while condemning any talk of Nidal Hasan's Islamic beliefs as Islamophobia.

Joe Klein, who has lately lost whatever remained of his reason, penned a Time Magazine rant calling Martin Peretz (who is himself a liberal and had endorsed Obama) a Jewish extremist and going off on Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir.

There are today several odious attempts by Jewish extremists, like this one by Martin Peretz and this one by La Pasionaria of the Neocons, to argue that the massacre perpetrated by Nidal Hasan was somehow a direct consequence of his Islamic beliefs as opposed to a direct consequence of his insanity.

Joe Klein characterizes a conclusion held by 70 percent of Americans, and the FBI, as "odious". He characterized a liberal editor as a "Jewish Extremist". And Klein himself presumes to claim that Hassan was insane, without any actual evidence of that.

There was, for example, the lunatic Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein, who opened fire on Muslims praying at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994, killing 24 and wounding more than 100. There was also the lunatic Jewish settler who assassinated Yitzak Rabin. I can't remember many Jews calling these effusions of violence as a natural consequence of devout Judaism. They were acts of psychopathy, as was Hasan's bloodbath.

Klein here pens a paragraph with so many errors that it's hard to parse them all.

Let's begin with the fact that Klein has to reach back to 1994 to find his example of "Jewish extremism." Furthermore neither Goldstein or Amir were ever found to be insane or mentally incompetent. That is Klein's own bizarre insertion. Finally Israeli leftists have been making the argument that these are natural consenquences of devout Judaism. This makes Klein wrong on every single claim he mentions in this paragraph.

If Time Magazine had any standards, it would have shown Klein the door for this alone.

Do extremely religious people tend to be more psychologically damaged than less religious people? I doubt it, but it's not a bad question: Do any readers have access to polling or academic studies about the incidence of violent insanity among the devout?

Klein cowardly suggests that religious people are mentally ill, while backing off on this assertion enough to put it out there.

In the meantime, we should identify the notion that Hasan's act was somehow a consequence of his religious orthodoxy for what it is: anti-Islamic bigotry.

With this conclusion, Joe Klein now makes the assertion that any claim that murders are carried out due to Islamic religious beliefs... is itself Islamophobia.

That kind of view has been the underground motivator behind much of political correctness, but I had not yet seen any liberal willing to come out and state it so openly.

But this is exactly where we are headed. The more political correctness seeps into the joints and nerves of our culture, the more we become unable to tell fact from fiction and truth from lies.

At the New Ledger, Benjamin Kerstein takes Joe Klein apart in a piece titled Is Joe Klein Nuts

As noted, Klein’s rampaging orgy of stupidity and inaccuracy can only be accounted for by one of two things: ignorance or lying. It is certainly possible that, like many liberals, Klein simply cannot bear to face the possibility that the world may not conform to his ideological preferences, and may consider lying to be a small price to pay for reassuring both himself and his readers that there is no elephant in the living room. The fact that justice, truth, and journalistic integrity will have to suffer as a result is, naturally, of little concern in such a desperate situation.

One is inclined, however, to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt, and conclude that he suffers from another common liberal affliction: the need to engage in moralistic exhortations on subjects about which he knows absolutely nothing. Throw in a heady dose of wishful thinking, and even the most pedigreed establishment mind would be reduced by this to the kind of slathering, bug-eyed hysteria to which Klein appears unfortunately prone.

Indeed, this might well have qualified as an exonerating circumstance were it not for Klein’s apparently all-encompassing need to use his ignorant pseudo-moralism to slander, defame, and demonize other people. Whether this is the origin of his shocking ignorance or a product of it is not really relevant. One expects nationally published columnists, even at Time, to be slightly more mature than a five-year-old child dropping f-bombs to shock his parents. Unfortunately, Klein appears to have carved out a tidy living for himself throwing illiterate temper tantrums; so we will likely have to wait for him to grow up in order to present him with his award. I fear that the wait is likely to be a long one.

Indeed. But Klein's tantrums have been winning public attention for his showdown with The New Republic's James Kirchik.

During a hallway confrontation after the panel was over, according to Kampeas, Klein called Kirchick a "dishonest prick."

Kampeas said that during the discussion, Kirchick repeatedly accused Klein, of having called neocons traitors. In response, said Kampeas, Klein asked the audience: "Can you believe the shit that he's saying?" Klein later told the Post he's never used the word traitor in regard to neocons. "I've said, at times they put the interests of Israel above the interests of the U.S., " he said.

For his part, Klein, 62, kept making an issue of Kirchick's age, said Kampeas. "I'm glad that you're a college graduate, but maybe you should learn how to report,"

This is ironic because it's clear that Klein himself needs to learn how to report.

But while Joe Klein is incapable of being a reporter, he has now dedicated himself to saying crazy things in print and on television.

Moving on in the roundup,

Obama has now created more fake jobs than any American leader, but probably not as many as Soviet leaders have in the past. The task that now awaits him is to create an equal number of fake Americans to give with those fake jobs. Finally solving the unemployment problem.

In Iran meanwhile, a Neda scholarship in Oxford produces the usual chants of "Death to Britain"

But Harvard isn't going that route. Instead they let Elliot Spitzer give an ethics lecture.

The Elder of Ziyon uses the Nidal Hasan case to note the uniqueness of Palestinians in international law

The Guardian says that accused Fort Hood murderer Nidal Hassan was "the son of Palestinians from a village near Jerusalem."

The New York Times says, "His mother’s obituary, in The Roanoke Times in 2001, said she was born in Palestine in 1952."

This got me to wondering about a contradiction in the standard pro-Palestinian Arab narrative that the world has swallowed whole.

We all "know" that Israel is considered the legal occupier of the West Bank. It was declared as such by the UN and the ICJ, among others.

The definition of occupation, however, is straightforward:

"Military occupation occurs when a belligerent state invades the territory of another state with the intention of holding the territory at least temporarily."

The original definition from the Hague Conventions of 1907 states:

Military authority over the territory of the hostile state

Art. 42. Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.

The question that remains murky is, what is the state that Israel is occupying? It cannot be Jordan, because Jordan relinquished control in 1988, and the international community never recognized Jordan's annexation of the West Bank. It seems clear, from the aforementioned sources, that this "state" is "Palestine."

In other words, according to the UN and the ICJ, there is a legal entity called "Palestine" and it has existed since at least 1967, probably since 1948. This is remarkable in itself that international law is implicitly recognizing a state that was never declared or recognized. As a matter of fact, it may be against

international law to prematurely recognize a state (note 26.)

To those interested in the legal Palestine paradox, the entire thing is well worth reading

Americans living in Israel are up in arms over ObamaCare as well

The organization representing North Americans in Israel has called on its members to fight a U.S. health care bill that would require U.S. citizens living abroad to pay $750 annually for insurance they may not be able to use.

The Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel (AACI) informed its members Tuesday that the controversial bill, which the Senate proposed as part of President Barack Obama's massive health care overhaul, contains a $750 per annum excise tax for all U.S. citizens living outside the U.S.

Rasmussen reports that Obama's approval rating has fallen below 50 percent

And Michelle Obama's popularity is equally on the decline

Caroline Glick writes on Missing George W. Bush

A couple of days ago I heard the news that George and Laura Bush paid a private visit to the wounded soldiers at Fort Hood. They specifically requested that the base commander not inform the media of their visit. They came. They comforted the wounded soldiers and the Fort Hood community for a couple of hours. And then they left. And they never had their pictures taken saluting the troops or holding their hands.

When I heard the news, I felt this pain that hasn't gone away. It's a pain that I have been feeling fairly often since last November.

It hurts to hear about an American President who cares deeply and sincerely about wounded soldiers and soldiers murdered in a terrorist attack and know that he is not the American President. It isn't so much that I miss Bush personally. I had a lot of criticism about his policies - particularly in his last two years in office after he effectively abdicated his leadership of global affairs to Condoleezza Rice and the permanent bureaucracy in Washington.

But at least you always knew that Bush loved America and that he loved Americans. You knew that he valued America's allies even if he didn't always do right by them. You knew that his values were American values.

You can't say any of that about his successor. And it hurts. It hurts that Barack Hussein Obama's first statement about the massacre at Fort Hood was so emotionally cut off from what happened. It hurts that he thought the most important thing to say about the massacre is that we mustn't jump to conclusions about the motivations of the terrorist who killed his fellow soldiers despite the fact that he was screaming Allah Akhbar as he shot them. It hurts that Obama and his wife treat soldiers like losers who all suffer from PTSD and that the greatest service he can render them is to provide them with free psychiatric care and send them home from Iraq and Afghanistan without first securing victory.

Maybe I'm over-emotional, but I can't get Bush's visit out of my head. Obama will go to Fort Hood today and say something arrogant about himself. And all his fans in the media will extol his eloquence. And maybe he'll get his picture taken holding out a limp wrist to shake hands with a wounded soldier. Or maybe we'll see Michelle in a sleeveless dress embracing the wife of one of the slain soldiers.

With everything going on in the world today, it is all but impossible for me to feel safe in a world where the President of the United States is a man who would never think of flying to Ft. Hood to be with wounded soldiers - not even with the entire national press corps in tow. And so I wake up in the middle of the night, with this pain, and I feel like crying when I think of how George and Laura felt so horrible about the massacre that they paid a quiet, private visit to the post to comfort the wounded warriors.

For all that he disappointed me, I miss George W. Bush. I really do.

David Brooks at the NY Times Writes on how the Rush to Therapy ignores the possibility of evil

The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality. It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.

It denied, before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

No it isn't, but then we are no longer a morally serious nation anymore.

Meanwhile North Korea, like virtually every hostile state is becoming emboldened by Obama's weakness.

A Jew with a View points out the hypocrisy and double standard of the world giving Saudi Arabia a pass on its campaign in Yemen

David Warren warns us to Remember the Future

Debbie Schlussel says that 2012 panders to Muslims... though what movie these days doesn't.

Dr. Normal comments on the attacks on Ayn Rand

Muslims Against Sharia asks What is Behind America's PC Love of Islam?

Red State looks at KSM's upcoming criminal trial

Lemon Lime writes on Ft Hood, Choosing Death and Evil

Boker tov Boulder has a better proposal than Obama's sneering suggestion about swapping Liebermans

I have a better idea: Let's swap Husseins. I know, I know, Saddam is dead, but we could still sit his remains in the Oval Office. At least he could do no harm.

And Barack could go and take his chances in Iraq. Last I heard there was a vacant rat hole.

Linda marks Veteran's Day

Via Solomonia, What is the difference between Stormfront and The Guardian anyway?

Finally, note an article which identifies the man who sent Hassan flowers as "A religious Christian". An appellation the media can't seem to attach to Hassan who apparently isn't religious, just under a lot of stress.

A religious Christian in Florida tried to send Fort Hood massacre suspect Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan a bouquet of flowers and a note that calls him a "hero," but the man got a knock on his door from the FBI instead, according to a Florida television station.

The GOP, a Revolutionary Party Once Again

2009-11-11T21:27:00.001-05:00

Heading into the 2010 elections, the Republican party is best characterized by its schizophrenic structure with a complacent political leadership and a radicalized populist grass roots movement. If the Democracy party acts like it's out of power even when it's in power, the Republican party acts like it's in power, even when it's out of power. And that is unfortunately rooted in the character of the Republican party as a conservative party, a party of the status quo, even when it can't figure out what that status quo actually is.

In the wake of FDR's radical and extended administration, the GOP embraced the three piece suit moderate conservatism of Eisenhower, fusing conservative national defense policies with a fairly liberal domestic agenda. As a result the things that conservatives complain about, are just as likely to have been the work of a Republican President as a Democratic one. That is why despite the fact that since then America has been governed more by Republican Presidents than Democratic ones, the second half of the 20th century has been one long string of cultural and legal victories for liberalism... with setbacks happening only when those policies led to complete and unacceptable social disasters, notably excessive softness on crime and the welfare state.

As the party of the status quo, the Republican party has not failed to roll back liberal cultural and political victories, but has repeatedly been complicit in legalizing them and perpetuating them. Which means that if history is any predictor of the future, even if Obama is forced out of office in 2012, his Republican successor will accept his policies and incorporate them into a bipartisan consensus, as has happened so many times. And that complacency is the secret behind the liberal takeover of America, it could not have taken place and cannot continue taking place without Republican collaboration.

But the problem is not RINO's or Liberal Republicans-- rather it is the conservative worldview of the Republican party itself. Conservatism is naturally focused on conserving and preserving, it fights in defense of tradition and the way things are. The problem is that the situation in America has degraded too far and too quickly for the status quo to be worth defending. Instead the status quo being conserved is one that has already been crafted by generations of a liberal culture war against America. To actually make a difference, the Republican party needs to leave behind the armchairs of the status quo and become a revolutionary party once again.

The birth of the Republican party took place against the background of a corrupt Democratic party that bound together international businessmen, immigrants and plantation owners into an oligarchy meant to crush individual freedom. In contrast to the urban sweatshops and rural plantations, the corrupt political machines and their gangs of thugs, and the whole Democratic ideology of Divide and Conquer by race and class so that the oligarchy and the political machines could profit-- the Republican party embraced an ideology that was both conservative, in that led back to the roots of the American revolution, and was at the same time revolutionary... Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.

The Party of Lincoln did not only oppose slavery because slavery was wrong... it opposed slavery because only a nation of free people could rule a Republic, not slaves, serfs or servants. When Lincoln stated that the United States could not endure as a government half-slave and half-free, it was not simply a denunciation of the current state of affairs, but a statement that America could not survive if it becomes a nation of slaves, and thus a nation ruled over by despots. And yet that is the nation we are living in today.

A slave does not have be property of a plantation owner toiling away in the cotton fields. He can just as easily be a college educated professional who nevertheless has as little practical freedom and property as the slave. There are many different kinds of cages and many different kinds of slavery, but they all have one thing in common, they are not free. Their labor, their rights and their land has been taken away from them. They are ruled over by masters and tyrants, supposedly for their own good, in reality to harvest the fruits of their labor for themselves.

That was the political situation in the United States that the Republican party rose to confront, fighting a Democratic party rooted in slavery, whether on the plantation or the factory floor. And when the fighting was done and Lincoln was dead, his successors cut their cynical deals, and the United States continued drifting closer and closer toward slavery. The Republican party ceased to be a revolutionary party, instead in the 20th century it became a foil for the race and class warfare agitation of a reborn Democratic party that embraced socialism and turned its back on its own Jeffersonian traditions.

Obama is not the first warning sign that the end is near, but he may be one of the last. There is still a window of opportunity for the Republican party to be reborn as a revolutionary party again, challenging the despotic status quo, the oligarchy of power and politics that the Democratic party has imposed on America.

The Tea Parties and the Town Hall protests both signal that it is not the politics of the status quo that the people want, but a party that will stand up and fight for a free America. It is not enough to try and hang on to the legacy of FDR, LBJ, Carter and Clinton... against Obama. The idea of that is patently ridiculous and hypocritical, as if we are not for freedom, but only against change, and when enough time has gone by, then we grunt and accept the extra load. But that is exactly what the Republican party has been doing for some time now, bucking and kicking against every new piece of the socialist puzzle, while earnestly protecting and defending the pieces that have already been put into place.

We have had enough of responsible Republican leaders carefully maintaining the prison walls that the Democrats have erected and continue to erect around us. What we need are leaders who will tear them down. We do not need new curators of every piece of legislative bric a brac, every byzantine construction of bureaucracy and every watchtower agency that the Democrats and their Republican collaborators have filled the country with. We need men and women willing to clean them away, to give away the power that they can wield through them over the American people in the name of American freedom, so that a nation with a government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

A Preview of Obama's Future Speeches

2009-11-10T23:19:00.000-05:00

There are few things that Obama does as well as reading speeches off a teleprompter, unless it's posing for photos or deficit spending. Here's a satirical preview of some possible upcoming Obama speeches all united by one common theme. Him, Himself and He.

On the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 12 Moon Landing.

"Eight years before the Apollo 12 touched down in the cold lunar dust, in the hot summer days of the year 1961, a dimwitted hippie from Kansas and a Kenyan philanderer gave birth to a little boy at some undisclosed location. That boy was born into a far different America, an America where no one thought that a little black boy could travel to the moon, let alone become President. Today America can no longer travel to the moon, but that little boy sits in the White House... and 40 years from now when we are celebrating the 40 year anniversary of my presidency, who is to say which accomplishment will be seen as the greater one? I am. It's me. Me!"

Statement on the Great California Quake of 2010

"Let's open this up with a shout out to my good buddy Joe Crowfoot, there in the back row. Joe knows what it's like to party. Okay back to the earthquake. I've been on record before as being opposed to earthquakes. In the Senate, I voted for the "Opposition to Earthquakes and Sexual Predator Empowerment Act" that would have devoted a million dollars to earthquake prevention by sending convicted sexual predators into schools to talk to children about earthquake safety. No Republican voted for that Act. Very few Democrats did as a matter of fact. I was the only one willing to go out on a limb and take a stand. But the Republicans as usual didn't care if a lot of little kids die in an earthquake. And today that is exactly what happened. That's why it's urgent that we pass health care reform. Because Republicans can't protect you from earthquakes. For that matter Republicans don't care what happens to you in earthquake. Only my health care reform plan can stop earthquakes."

Remarks on the opening of the Amelia Earhart Exhibit at the Museum of Air and Space

"Like me, Amelia Earhart was a great historic figure. When Amelia Earhart made her famous 1928 transatlantic flight, few people believed that she could accomplish that feat. Similarly when I ran for President, few people besides my billionaire backers believed I could do it. Sure I had two best selling biographies and a lot of catch phrases, but like Earhart I had to sit in the back while someone else did the flying. And even though I was never tragically lost at sea, as Amelia was, I think that to many people I represent an Amelia Earhart for the 21st century. An Amelia more representative of a changing America, more open and willing to listen to other people's experiences and eager to pass health care reform. A Bill that I truly know Amelia would have approved of and lobbied for."

Comments During the Visit of the Special Olympics Basketball Team

"Folks, let's welcome some truly superb athletes today. These special little guys are athletes with real heart and soul. Of course they can't sink a basket like I can. In a game between me and their entire team, I bet I would beat the pants off them. But that's because I have something special that they don't have. No, not just working legs. I mean real drive and determination. The same drive and determination that took me from smoking pot in Hawaii, to smoking pot with Vice-President Joe Biden in the White House. Even if some tragic accident were to somehow deprive me of the use of my legs, I bet I would figure out a way to make them work again. And then I would write a best selling book about it to teach other people how to do it too. Now that's what real determination looks like."

Speech on the Extinction of the North American Gray Wolf

"Once upon a time they hunted the wide prairies and mountainous regions of North America, fearsome predators, yet devoted and intelligent animals. Today they are no more. And there is a simple but tragic reason for that. Poor adaptation skills. I can relate to the Gray Wolf because gray is a color in between black and white. When I was growing up as a mixed race teenager in Hawaii with a confused identity and no real skills besides compulsive lying, I quickly learned to adapt to any situation. Whether I was mixing with white people or black people, I quickly learned to blend in, to repress who I really was, in order to be part of the crowd. That is a skill that the North American Gray Wolf tragically lacked. And that is why it is extinct today. Had the Gray Wolf been more like me, Barack Obama, then he too might be sitting in the White House."

Statement During the Reopening of the Smithsonian Museum

"I was pleased to be able to appropriate 100 million to the renovation of the Smithsonian, the institution which holds within its walls so much of our prized and treasured history. To walk the halls of the Smithsonian is to walk through American history and finally to stand here in my presence at the culmination of American history. The history of our nation is the story of our rise from intolerance to tolerance, and my historic election is the fulfillment of that striving as embodied in the Declaration of Independence. One might even say that I make American history meaningful and that America would be a far worse country without me. Therefore in the spirit of that greatness, I rededicate this museum to American history, to myself."

Greetings to the Visiting Delegation from the Londonderry Church of Satan

"On behalf of myself and Michelle, I want to extend my heartfelt welcome to the honored delegates from the Londonderry Church of Satan in Ireland. The Church of Satan is an honorable religious organization with a long history of promoting fellowship and goodwill among people who like to dress in dark clothes. Growing up as a fatherless boy, casting around for male role models, I found Satan to be a compelling and dramatic figure. Like me he was a community organizer bringing awareness of injustice to those around him and fighting for change. He wasn't satisfied with just being in the background, he wanted to have the top job even though he wasn't qualified for it. I'm sorry that I was never able to meet Satan in person to tell him what an inspiration he has been to me."

On the Landing of a UFO on the White House Lawn

"We are convened here to welcome earth's first visitors from outer space. This is a tremendously exciting opportunity to encounter the first lifeforms from another world. And like you, I have a thousand questions for them. What do they think of me? Have they read my books and which of them did like better? Do they find me as poised and leaderly as I find myself? What race are they? Will they be willing to lobby for universal health care. Of course they would, they're from the universe, aren't they. Can donations from extraterrestrials be accepted for the DNCC? Wait, why are they leaving? The aliens must have been too in awe of me to stay. But never fear citizens of America, our alien visitors may have departed, but I am still here with you."

Speech at the Dedication of the Abraham Lincoln/Barack Obama National Memorial

"Ladies and gentlemen, today is a great day for our country, as our collective dream has finally come true, and Congress has agreed to spend the last few dollars the Chinese agreed to lend us, in order to remember the greatest moment in history, me. Initially there was a great deal of controversy over the redesign of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate my presidency. My initial humble suggestion was to keep the focus on our second greatest President (after me) by changing the memorial to depict Abraham Lincoln sitting and reading a copy of my book, "Dreams From My Father" and being inspired by it. Some historians however pointed out to me that Lincoln died before 1995, which means he was never able to read my book. So instead the design of the monument was changed to remove Lincoln from the seat and instead depict me, reading a copy of Lincoln's Greatest Speeches.

But there was still something wrong. I had trouble figuring out what it was, until Michelle pointed it out to me. There was still too much Lincoln. So the Lincoln Memorial was redesigned once again to show me reading a copy of my own book, Dreams From My Father. And so now I give you the new Lincoln, Obama memorial. I am sure that if Abraham Lincoln were here today, he would have been proud to have his name on a memorial featuring me."

Is a Palestinian State even Possible?

2009-11-09T23:04:00.001-05:00

Last week Obama phoned Abbas, the chairman of the PLO terrorist organization and of the US taxpayer subsidized Palestinian Authority, which is run by the PLO. Obama's first phone call to a foreign leader after taking office had been to Abbas, and his latest phone call was meant to reassure the terrorist leader that despite the complete lack of progress, he was still committed to creating a Palestinian state.

There is of course no question that the United States is deeply committed to creating a Palestinian state. The United States has provided billions to the PLO's Palestinian Authority through USAID alone, and billions more through various other channels, including the UNRWA and a collection of other agencies. The first Bush Administration forced Israel to negotiate directly with the PLO. The Clinton Administration created the Palestinian Authority inside Israel, armed and trained its terrorist militias and funded them from top to bottom. Four Presidents have made creating a Palestinian state a major priority of their administrations. More so than freeing Tibet or creating a country for any particular group, not counting the Clinton Administration's war on behalf of a Muslim Kosovar Albanian state, who rewarded us with slave trafficking, terrorism and burning down every church they could find.

The question now however is whether a Palestinian state is even possible? For one thing there is no longer a single Palestinian state, but two states, one run by Hamas in Gaza, and a second run by Abbas in the West Bank, despite the fact that his term in office legally ended around the time Obama was sworn in. The Obama Administration nevertheless continues to fund Abbas, even though under the rules that the US helped set up, he has no right to hold office without an election.

For another thing, both the West Bank and Gaza are run by dueling militias composed of PLO and Hamas terrorists. Iran and Syria fund the Hamas militias, while the US and the EU fund the PLO militias. While Iran is more open about simply calling them terrorists, the US State Department calls them "police" and provides them with weapons and training. The militias work for whichever faction or sub-faction is paying them at the moment. In between they do "odd jobs" such as drug dealing, kidnapping and the old protection racket-- a major reason why all the plans for outside investment in the PA quickly collapsed into nothing.

As of last year, the PA requested 7 billion dollars to "overhaul" its security forces to a mere 50,000 men at a rate of 23 "police" for each thousand Palestinian Arabs. That is 6 times the ratio of the NYPD. Since Oslo, the numbers have fluctuated from 40,000 to 80,000 under 14 separate police forces, which are individually loyal to different sub-factions within the PLO. And with all that "security", there is no actual law or order to be found. That is because "Palestinian Police" was how the various PLO affiliated terrorist militias were rebranded by the Clinton Administration. Most continued to operate as terrorists carrying out attacks against Israel. The rest function as the private police of various officials within the Palestinian Authority. And much as the State Department might like to pretend otherwise, all the PA police forces are not loyal to any laws, but only to those officials who pay them and give them orders.

There is no constitutional rule of law within the PA. There isn't even a legally elected head of the Palestinian Authority. There isn't even a single government ruling over Gaza and the West Bank. There is no economy. As much as 25 to 50 percent of the Palestinian adult male population is employed by the Palestinian Authority, which is its own biggest employer with as many as 200,000 people out of a population of barely 2 million in the West Bank. That's one PA employee to 10 Palestinian Arab men, women and children. It means that with 42 percent of the population under 14, virtually every Palestinian Arab family has a member who is officially employed by the Palestinian Authority. Some more than one.

And guess who pays for all this? The Palestinian Authority has never been self-supporting, it could not survive for 5 seconds without money from the United States and the European Union. The billions of dollars pumped into the PA's coffers go down the line to various officials and their families, as well as the terrorist militias who keep them in power. Often the money has a way of vanishing, as it did in 1997 when the PA reported that 40 percent of its budget just went "missing". The PA employment racket is not simply a bureaucratic blank check though. Jobs are given in exchange for support. The "employees" may not ever actually show up for work, but they are expected to use their tribal and family influence to back the PA leadership. And the remainder of that money goes to the tens of thousands of terrorists officially described as the police.

But we aren't done yet, because while the largest employer in the PA may be the authority itself, the second largest employer is the UNRWA, with a 95 percent Palestinian Arab staff. The UNRWA is dedicated only to aiding Palestinian Arabs and the vast majority of its budget comes from the US and Europe. Again. The UNRWA's employees not only overlap with those of the PLO and Hamas, but it is rife with waste spending more on Palestinian Arabs than the UNHCR does on other refugees in the world.

As for the rest of the PA economy... you just saw it. With over 50 percent unemployment in a part of the world where single income families are the norm and nearly 50 percent of the population is underage, the Palestinian economy is the American and European taxpayer. The few exceptions for the most part work in the same settlements that the world keeps demanding that Israel tear down, or across the Green Line in Israel, resulting in an unemployment spike every time there is a terrorist attack and Israel has to shut down its inner borders. There is no other economy, despite the billions invested by governments and individuals in everything from industrial parks to ready to use greenhouses, there has been no other economy, and there will be no other economy. Which should be obvious when the Palestinian Authority lists Olive-Wood Carvings and Mother-of-Pearl Souvenirs as two of its major industries. When you're listing not just souvenirs, but a very specific type of souvenir as a major industry, you really have no economic plan except to ask other people for money.

Unlike countries like Egypt, Jordan, Israel or Turkey whom the US provides some assistance that comes out to a fraction of their budget-- the United States and Europe provide all the assistance for the Palestinian Authority. That is because the PA is a sham that has done nothing but carry out terrorist attacks, deposit hundreds of millions of dollars in the Swiss bank accounts of terrorist leaders such as Yasser Arafat, and radically destabilize the region. The Palestinian Authority is not just a failure, it's a bloody and dangerous failure, and it is time for its State Department and EU backers to finally admit the truth.

There can be no Palestinian state. And there is no future for a Palestinian state. The entire idea was created as a fallback position by the USSR after its Arab allies failed to destroy Israel in a series of wars, and transformed into a key player in international Soviet backed terrorism. With the collapse of the USSR, the US and Europe perversely embraced the idea of creating a Palestinian state and amped up the pressure on Israel to make it happen. Huge amounts of amount were spent and many lives were list in the process. Israel's survival has been drastically undermined and the regional balance has been tilted toward the terrorists.

After the fall of the USSR, the formerly Marxist PLO has tried to make the transition to an Islamist terrorist group, but Hamas overtook it in the terrorism department. The PLO's PA still controls the Wesr Bank propped up by US assistance, until the day that Hamas tries to take it from them. Hamas pays lip service to the propaganda of a Palestinian State, but as an Islamist group it has never really subscribed to the idea of Palestinian nationalism. Its Islamist ideology is not interested in a Two State Solution or even one state built only on the ashes of Israel... but only as a means to building a larger superstate that would include overthrowing the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and a takeover of Lebanon too, and then perhaps merge that into a Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt for the nucleus of a regional Islamic Caliphate.

To Hamas, Gaza and the West Bank are what the Rhineland was to Hitler-- territory they want only as a starting point for a much larger expansion. To the PLO, it's a chance to create mischief and profit by it through foreign aid. Both talk a great deal about a Palestinian State, but neither care very much about it except as a propaganda tool to convince gullible Westerners to rubber stamp their demands, and convince their own people to kill themselves to restore their lost honor. The cynical game would long ago have ended if the United States and Europe stopped forcing everyone to keep playing in the hopes that all this impossible mess will somehow rearrange itself into a workable state. After 17 long years of tyranny, terror and death-- maybe it's time to finally put down the pieces and end the game.

All the Warning Signs Were There

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Kill Us and We're the Ones to Blame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday Afternoon Roundup - A Brief Shooting Roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nidal Hassan had written online

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

One wonders who exactly those scholars were.

The Greatest Scam on Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naturally of course mankind was to blame for the problem

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

And of course the world was doomed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obama Gets Run Over by the Change Bus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mayor Mike and the Root of All Evil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome Back Ahmed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Have All Our War Heroes Gone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Enjoy Sharia Law on Broadway

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is anyone even briefing her anymore?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

For the 111th Congress, the Chamber will:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

Goodbye Cambridge.

At Boker Tov Boulder, First Amendment "NOT WITHSTANDING"

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

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

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

I guess that's exactly what he meant.

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

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

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

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

Oh wait... we already are.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well clearly he had to die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can get it right here on Broadway.

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

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

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

Enjoy your Sharia law. Now on Broadway.

Soft Power is a Fancy Way of Saying Indecisive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Balance between Power and Freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voting like Episcopalians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What George Bush Thought of Mohammed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally Bush sums up the moral code of Mohammed thusly;

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

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

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

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

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

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