After all we're a democratic country, right? We're not about to let our system of laws be dismantled in favor of Islamic religious laws. Right?

"About three-quarters of the 900 taxi drivers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport are Somalis, many of them Muslim. And about three times each day, would-be customers are refused taxi service when a driver sees they're carrying alcohol.

"It's become a significant customer-service issue," said Patrick Hogan, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, on Thursday.

Now the airports commission has a solution: color-coding the lights on the taxi roofs to indicate whether a driver will accept a booze-toting fare. The actual colors haven't been decided on yet, but commission officials met Thursday with representatives of the taxi drivers and the Minnesota chapter of the Muslim American Society to continue working on the plan.

Hogan said taxi starters at curbside will look for duty-free bags with bottles or other obvious signs of alcohol and steer riders to cabs whose drivers don't object to booze."

Got that? 3 out of 4 taxi cab drivers out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport are Muslims and they've decided they won't accept fares who violate a particular air of Islamic law. Rather than barring them from collecting fares, the Airport Commission has put out procedures implementing Islamic law around an American airport, checking whether customers are violating Islamic law.

Muslims now control a major part of access to a major airport and have demonstrated they will use it to control who can and can't be transported from it. Forget an Arab company running our ports, this is much bigger. Islamic law has defacto been implemented and accepted by civil authorities. Where does it go next?

Buzek said her treatment goes against American values."I came to this country and I didn't expect anybody to adjust to my needs. I don't want to impose my beliefs on anyone else. That's why I'm in this country, because of the freedom. What's going to be next? ... Do I have to cover my head?"

The real answer, is of course yes, by stages. Muslim cabbies can begin with alcohol because there's already a suspicion of it in Western societies. It's a short step from barring passengers with alcohol to barring passengers with ham sandwiches. According to Islam both are forbidden after all. Then transport to women they consider immodestly dressed, to Israelis, to people sporting crosses, etc. There's a lot of things Sharia, Islamic Law, forbids after all.

When people lack the will to stand up for their rights and for their Constitution, they will find it replaced by an Islamic will and an Islamic law. You can email your protest here publicaffairs@mspmac.org or write to

Metropolitan Airports Commission
6040 28th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55450
612-726-8100

It can't happen here, right?

Another Woman and Girl Rescued from Arab Village (Arutz Sheva)

The story began several years ago when an Arab man from Tul Karem met a Jewish girl from Ashdod, and it was "love at first sight," according to the Arab. The Jewess has a different version, however; she says he first fooled her into believing he was Jewish - and neglected to mention that he was already married with children. In fact, when the two later married and moved to Tul Karem, the first wife and five children lived nearby, without her knowledge.

The Jewish woman said her husband forbade her to go outside and beat her, and also later beat her daughter, born five years ago. After a while, the woman went to visit her mother in Ashdod, taking her daughter with her. A few days later, she informed her Moslem husband that she was not returning. The man was willing to accept his second wife's departure, but not that of his daughter - and he traveled to Ashdod and snatched her back to Tul Karem.

The reunited mother and daughter are now in an undisclosed location, planning the legal battle to allow them to stay together. The father, for his part, has filed a complaint with the police of both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

A spokeswoman for the group said that the rescue was a last-resort mission, "after we turned to all the relevant authorities and were not answered, and after we saw that there was a definite threat upon the girl and others." She noted that two Arab women had recently turned to the group for help as well, "and we helped them happily."

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Palestinian girl taken from Tulkarm (JPost)

Judea-Samaria Police were investigating Friday morning whether a Palestinian girl abducted from Tulkarm and taken to Ashdod Thursday night was, in fact, Jewish.

The girl's Palestinian father claimed Israelis disguised as police officers had come to his house Thursday night and taken both him and his daughter. Afterwards, the father was released, and the girl vanished...

As of Friday morning, Ashdod police were attempting to locate the girl in the city.

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(Can you spot the enemy publication?)

The first indictment resulting from the police riot at Amona has finally gone to trial. Today on the 28th police officer David Edri will be tried for his assault on Yehuda Etzion.

Edri rode down Yehuda Etzion (seen above) on horseback, struck him with the horse knocking him down and trampled him under the horse's legs. The indictment states, Etzion "hit his head on the ground, and was caused many bruises on his entire body, including internal bleeding in his right foot and a cut in his skull... Edry attacked Etzion illegally and caused him genuine injury."

This is the first case from the Amona police riot to go to trial despite numerous photos and videos showing horrendous brutality, thus far it took this long to get one to trial. Meanwhile policemen in uniform have been attending the trial during work hours (some with nametags removed) to support Edri. This sends an ominious message to the victims and to the judge.

Edri's lawyer has stayed that his client's behavior was reasonably controlled. By contrast mounted police expert Amir Dufdivani testified that when a horse's bridle is release it does not race towards people, but that Edri forced it towards Etzion. Etzion has already won a civil case against Edri winning an award of 23,000 NIS.

Rivka Friedman-Feldman is presiding over the current trial which is a criminal case.

Melanie Philips reported at August's end;

"The bridge over the railway on Mill Road in Cambridge has just had its mural redone. The theme is the wonderful multicultural neighbourhood we live in. On one side of the bridge this is represented by many national flags and there was an Israeli flag among them. This has now been painted out."

The JTA reports that the mural was redone after repeated graffiti attacks. The Israeli flag wasn't just painted out. It was painted out and replaced by the Lebanese flag.

Did the police investigate the graffiti? It wouldn't have been very hard to do or require much policework, just Google since the vandal openly took credit for it in a September 11th post on a Cambridge forum to generalized approval.

"what do you think of the new work of art .i painted over the isralei flag as i found it to be offensive.a couple of days later it was painted back.ahh i thought this is war,armed with my trusty pot of paint and my dodgy brush i descended the railway bridge to do forces with the castle project and the art teacher from colleridge school.much to my surprise the flag of israel had disapeared and was replaced by the flag of the lebbanon.many thanks go out to this right minded soul.

Published by bigmal at 2:19am on Mon 11th September 2006."

The comment you will note was posted on the anniversary of the September 9/11 attacks. And here emerges the West's relationship with Islam.

The West preaches multi-culturalism. Muslims decide what it is that offends them, including other cultures like the Jews. What multi-culturalism really comes to mean then is whatever Muslims decide is permissible is allowed and everything else is deleted. Thus when a Muslim vandalizes a Jewish flag, the flag is ethnically cleansed to be replaced by a Muslim Lebanese flag. In time it will be replaced by a Hezbollah flag too and the British will nod and like it.

Whether it's the Pope's statements, Danish cartoons or German operas or the Israeli flag, multi-culturalism rapidly becomes uniculturalism, the dominance of Islamic culture over all others enforced by a fusion of political correctness and outright violence. Multi-culturalism paradoxically winds up being harnessed as the means to suppress all other cultures and no one dares object.

There is a long list of things besides Jewish flags and Popes and German Operas, Muslims find offensive. They include Churches and Synagogues that are taller than mosques. Any religion that denies Mohammed is the final Prophet, freedom of speech, women with uncovered hair, ham, chess, cats, most contemporary music, kite flying (I wish I was making this up but I'm not), alcohol and any country with Muslims living in it that isn't being ruled by Muslims under Muslim law.

Rather than ushering in a new utopia in which different cultures learned to co-exist in harmony learning from one another and appreciating one another, multi-culturalism functioned like a virus suppressing the cultural immune system nations had developed over time that defined their identity and allowed them to resist colonization and occupation by foreign cultures; and instead opened up an anarchic struggle for cultural dominance. Islam is winning that struggle because Muslims are willing to kill for their culture and religion to emerge supreme and no one else is.

While people are being murdered in the name of the Islamic colonization of Europe and America, commentators and pundits wail and throw up their arms condemning the Pope, the Danish cartoonists and the President and anyone and everyone for constantly offending Muslims. They've turned our societies into a hall of mirrors whose morality dictates that the beaten wife constantly apologize to her husband for provoking him with the smug approval of the press looking on and nudging, "Apologize, apologize more. You haven't apologized nearly enough. If you apologize right, maybe nobody else will have to die."

But they will have to die and they are dying and they will keep on dying until we say enough is enough and begin fighting back. We are facing a cultural war of which the war on terror is but a shadow. The Clash of Civilizations is here and we're endlessly giving ground.

We have learned to accept as normal a state of affairs in which offending Muslims results in violence and murder. Like every battered housewife and abused child, we as a society must unlearn that view. We must be taught again to stop blaming ourselves, to stop apologizing and to stop treating abuse as normal. Multi-culturalism paints Islam as noble, therefore we come to believe that when it is not, it is really we who are ignoble. Political correctness repeatedly tells us Islam is non-violent, therefore when it is violent we decide in the classic pattern of the abused spouse, that we must have done something truly horrible to provoke violence from such 'good people.'

Muslims have created artificial lines we dare not cross and we've accepted those lines. From the moment we accepted them, the lines began to shrink tightening further and further around us. Freedom begins with breaking those lines. It begins with demonstrating that we can ridicule Mohammed and Islam. With waving the Israeli and American flags. With saying what we like and believing what we do and fearing no great-grandsons of illiterate desert bandits to stop us.

We carved out that freedom the first time against British bayonets and grapeshot and showed the British themselves the way to a free nation. We'll have to carve it out again, against Arab suicide bombers and knives and teach them the way all over again.

Exclusive from the Jerusalem Post: President Katzav Eats Babies

by Dan Izenberg and Kadima Staffer No. 3

Just as the latest round of accusations against Katzav were being investigated and judged in the press, now comes a new round of accusations that President Katzav has been eating babies. Three unnamed people who reportedly worked with Katzav have come forward to say that they frequently saw the President walking around chewing sandwiches filled with parts of babies.

"It was awful," Woman No. 7 said. "He would go around every day at lunch chewing on babies and no one said absolutely nothing."

Immediately reporters were generously driven in government limousines to promptly file new stories on Katzav's baby eating habits.

"Don't pay any attention to that war I lost or all the dead soldiers or the fact that I left behind soldiers in enemy hands," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said. "Forget the disaster that was Disengagement, the criminal investigations and that commission I tried to appoint filled with my pals, PRESIDENT KATZAV EATS BABIES."

Some right wing extremist conspirators who will probably soon be jailed expressed the belief that the entire Katzav affair is a charade meant to leverage Kadima's political power by destroying the President and distracting attention from Olmert's disastrous reign. However a government spokesman promptly whispered to the media that they had strong evidence President Katzav was really Jack the Ripper.

Thank you for reading the Jerusalem Post. No we're not a Kadima mouthpiece. Why do you ask?

8:29 AM (BBC)

In preparation for the holy time of Ramadan, the holiest time in the Muslim calendar apart from International Eat-A-Goat Day, leading Muslim clerics have announced a new plan to bring peace to the world by killing everyone who isn't a Muslim.

"In observing these world events," said Sheikh Jihad Al-Mujahid, "we can clearly see that conflict emanates from all regions where Muslims are in contact with non-Muslims. From this one can only draw one conclusion, that all problems are caused by the continued existence of infidels or those who have not accepted Islam. In the name of Allah the Most Merciful to bring world peace, we have decided to kill everyone."

As part of a joint proclamation with top Shiite and Sunni clerics, the decision has been made to peacefully begin killing everyone on September 28th. This announcement has been met with some concern.

France has sent a diplomatic letter asking for clarification as to what is meant by this plan to kill everyone and whether it really means "zhey will keel everyone." The EU representatives speculated that this was due to a lack of progress in the Middle-East peace process and announced a new peace plan that would turn over 100 percent of Israel to the Arabs and kill 95.5 percent of Jews living there.

Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert angrily countered that Israel could and would never accept such a plan. "Israel is willing to make great sacrifices for peace," Olmert said, "we can offer to hand over 99 percent of Israel and allow the killing of up to 75 percent of the Jewish people but absolutely no more. I am completely firm in this regard."

President Bush in Washington D.C. called on the world to embrace the "Democratic means of resoluting discussions" and "abandoning evildoms for progressing through hopeful measurings" and warned against any outbursts of Islamophobia. "Today a billion and a half people around the world met and democratically decided to kill everyone different from them. While we disagree with their decision, we respect the democratic means they undertook to reach it and we wish them well as they scale new heights of democraticisity."

In London there have been nervous tensions and the British government has speedily responded by dispatching large numbers of police officers to protect Mosques and Muslim stores against any possible outbreaks of anti-Muslim vandalism. Prime Minister Blair met with the heads of the Muslim Council of Britain and while the Prime Minister stated that he continued to differ with the council on their position of killing everyone, he had learned a lot from their exchange of ideas.

Reacting to the crisis the Archbishop of Canterbury sprang into action announcing that every Church in the Church of England would henceforth be open all day.

"In such a troubled time people of faith are searching for answers and the Church of England as always stands ready to provide them," said the Archbishop. "Our Churches will be open all day and will be holding seminars on Buddhism and globalization allowing our parishioners to meditate on their sins against the third world before they are brutally hacked to death. We have already made arrangements with our Muslim brothers to wait until after the screening of Ken Loach's latest film before they murder us all, as part of our well-deserved karmic atonement for using to much petrol in our BMW's."

Back in the United States, the Reform Council of Judaism, the Conservative Synagogue Alliance, the Reconstructionist Federation and the Wiccan Jewish Alliance of America have already announced their top priority legislative agenda, ensuring that married lesbian couples will have equal access to abortions.

In a dissenting statement the Agudah representative Rabbi Shmuel Herschel said the following, "ve are immediately calling for a yoym tefila vur der gantzer klal as dis svere catastrophe hut gekummen zu uns as die froyen zey geyeh in die untzniusdike kleider as it says in die shir ha'shirim, ani schehora veyofya, vus meint sechora ven alle veisen as yiddishe froyen sind nit keine schwartzes, es meint zei geyen bekleidet in schwartz vun fis zu kopf vie die musselmanische froyen geyehn und dos ist yofye as es zogt kol kvoydoh bat meylech penima, ven alle yiddische froyen vellen geyen bekleidet vie musselmanische froyen, vellen mir zeihn an am kodeysh un a mamlechet koyhanim as die menner vellen hoben night mer keine interes in die froyen nur in lernen blatt gemore."

His statement however was generally ignored since no one could tell what he was talking about and he quickly digressed to a discussion of whether washing the bugs in lettuce with the bugs in tap water would cause both sets of bugs to eat each other, thereby nullifying themselves.

Schools and libraries around the world meanwhile are meeting the emergency by sponsoring a special "Learn About Islam Before They Kill You Day," which will teach average Americans and Europeans the proper way to convert to Islam, the proper positions for being beheaded and to avoid eating any pork products for at least a day before being killed, so as as not to defile their murderers.

The city of London in cooperation with the Muslim Council of Britain has announced a program of designated killing areas through the city where those who refuse to convert to Islam can report to for a quick beheading.

"This," said Mayor Ken Livingstone soon to be Mayor Abu Khalid, "will prevent inconvenience to Britons of the Muslim faith from having to hunt you down and kill you and then mutilate your corpse. It will also limit damage to both public and private property.

"With your cooperation all this unpleasantness will be concluded shortly.

8:30 AM - This is the BBC

Demonstrators burn an Israeli flag during a protest against Pope Benedict's remarks on Islam after Friday prayers in Tehran September 22, 2006. Some 300 people chanted 'Death to America' and 'Death to Israel' as they burned U.S., British and Israeli flags, witnesses said. REUTERS/Caren Firouz (IRAN)


Proving Once Again that Muslim Hatred of Jews is Completely Deranged Muslims burn an Israeli flag to protest against the Pope. What did the Pope move to Israel or convert to Judaism when I wasn't looking? Are we now responsible for what the Pope says too?

Or do they have no Vatican flags or New Testaments to burn and a surplus of American and Israeli flags? I think when they were protesting the Danish cartoons they burned Israeli and American flags too presumabely since the world is after all controlled by America which is controlled by the vast Zionist conspiracy which is controlled by Mr. Herschel Dingheim who lives at 85 W35th street and every day from his black rotary dial phone gives marching orders to all the leaders of the world.

I halfway suspect there's a huge factory somewhere in the middle-east that does nothing but turn out Israeli and American flags.

"Hello Habib, yes we need 200 Israeli and American flags to burn tommorow. Can you fill the order, good? By the way do you happen to have some kind of Pope flag since we're really against the Pope. What, no? Never mind. Just send the Israeli and American ones over and we'll just burn them as usual anyway."

Of course every time there's a protest emergency rooms across Pakistan quickly fill up with protest related burn and gunshot injuries.

"Get Abdul over there to emergency, another case of burns from an American flag, damn those cheap polyester flags! And move Mohammed over to 1B, they were firing guns into the air to protest the Zionist regime doing something or other and there was a ricochet. Oh now, now the Pope said something. We'll have more rallies. Move all the patients up and out of the beds. We'll be getting hundreds of injured now!"

But this serves as a concise reason to liberals who keep demanding we reason out why they hate us. Why do they hate us? Because they're bloody lunatics. The Pope criticised Islam and they're burning American and Israeli flags! It would be as if we got upset at Iran and went out and threw tomatoes at the Swedish embassy. What does one thing have to do with the other.

This does remind me a little anecdote though. President Wilson was trying to negotiate between various European countries in the aftermath of WW1. The Polish delegation came to him insisting on their right to a particular corridor of land. "If the Polish people do not get what they want, they will be enraged and go out and beat up the Jews," they warned Wilson, knowing that Wilson had been concerned about pogroms in Eastern Europe.

So President Wilson worriedly consulted a Jewish advisor who told him not to worry. "If they don't get the corridor they will be angry and go out and work out their anger by beating up the Jews. If they do get the corridor they will be happy and go out and celebrate by beating up the Jews."

The moral of the story, they just plain hate us. Trying to reason with thugs, bullies and lunatics is a waste of time and appeasing them only feeds their appetite and demoralizes us tricking us into a Stockhold Syndrome pattern of trying to please the enemy and taking his side in order to relate to him better.

You can't fix the kind of deranged irrational hatred that brings Muslims to burn Israeli flags in response to something the Pope says. Israel has nothing to do with the Pope and the Pope has nothing to do with Israel. Just as Muslim hatred for Jews and Israel is not grounded in any kind of reasoned injustice that can be resolved with X, Y or Z; but Jews are simply a general resevoir for all their hatred and resentments.

So there is Abdul happily burning an Israeli flag for the photographers. He'd happily burn a Jew too and he will if we give him the chance.

Offer your caption

Like a general in search of troops, Olmert gathered 2000 of what were supposed to be his Kadima loyalists for a New Year's Ball and began delivering a string of self-congratulatory platitudes that distinctly suggested he was living on another planet from the rest of us. With a poll showing that only 7 percent of Israelis still want him to be Prime Minister (and most of that 7 percent probably live in Tel Aviv and rarely venture out of cafes), Olmert delivered a delusional speech full of quotes such as;

"Kadima is today the most important political force in the country...Kadima has had no major failure in the last Knesset...the public's feelings towards the war do not reflect its real achievements...the nations of the world understand the great achievements of this war."

As Olmert was addressing the crowd claiming that Israel is stronger than ever under him and Sharon's Disengagement plan made it that way, a number of IDF Reservists and parents of dead soldiers began to disrupt his speech raising banners, chanting protests and demanding he resign.

In the video you will see the father of a dead Golani soldier holding up the Golani flag and saying that Olmert doesn't care and doesn't know what he's doing, while another father shouts that Olmert should resign; as a Kadima party member attempts to violently assault them.

Slogans are chanted especially.

"Olmert Habayta. Olmert Go Home."

While the cameras turn to the audience ignoring Olmert's speech, Olmert breaks into his speech to say that, "this is a democracy and I recognize there are many different opinions but the majority agree with me."

(A somewhat better video which I've been unable to download is available here after the commercials... )

As it turns out many of the supposed Kadima faithfull were elderly Russian Jews who had been bused in, without being told where they were going, and began to leave once the shouting began making the evening even more of an embarassment.

(While the material has been extensively covered in the Israeli Hebrew language press, very little of it seems to be appearing in the English language press aside from brief articles describing them as hecklers, which I find rather odd. Where the Hebrew language Arutz Sheva has a video and a detailed story, the english language one just seems to have a brief mention describing them as 'hecklers' but then A7 has gone increasingly downhill for the last year or so.)

The reporter's question in tone hinges on the downright anti-Semitic demanding to know which of his ancestors was Jewish and where that ancestry ended. Allen responds with a rambling diatribe about freedom of religion and refuses to answer the question dodging the issue by talking about religion, avoiding the issue of ethnicity. That response alone screams to most people that she was indeed Jewish and that Allen is playing dodgeball.

The reporter's question was offensive but Allen's response is downright pathetic. If there was no basis to it he could have directly answered, "No that's not the case and the question is inappropriate because etc... etc..." or he could have answered in the affirmative and still delivered his 'freedom of religion' speech. Instead he chose to wrap himself in the constitution and give a rambling incoherent response to the specific question.

In the past a number of politicians from John Kerry to Madeline Albright and Wesley Clark 'rediscovered' their Jewish roots when they were on the national stage. Whether or not Allen has any, he's clearly deeply uncomfortable with the issue alone which is sad. If anything that exchange should show that Jewish roots remain a matter of tension for many people who may have had Jewish ancestors.

Postscript: Allen released an even more jumbled statement on his website saying;

"Yesterday, I found it especially reprehensible that a reporter would impugn the attitudes of my mother, as Ms. Peggy Fox did in her first question...My mother and father both taught me to abhor bigotry, and Ms. Fox’s suggestion to the contrary was deeply offensive."

This is a rather strange opening since Fox's question is certainly offensive but it's confusing to see how it suggests his mother was a bigot. Yet Allen seems to keep associating the whole subject with bigotry, even when it's not Fox doing the asking but just the subject itself.

"I was raised as a Christian and my mother was raised as a Christian. And I embrace and take great pride in every aspect of my diverse heritage, including my Lumbroso family line’s Jewish heritage, which I learned about from a recent magazine article and my mother confirmed..."

Again his constant repetition that he and his mother were raised Christians really moves into the pathetic range. No one is questioning he's a Christian and goes to Church. The question was about his family background. The constant need to clarify that he's a Christian is downright strange.

"Some may find it odd that I have not probed deeply into the details of my family history, but it’s a fact. We in the Allen household were simply taught that what matters is a person’s character, integrity, effort, and performance – not race, gender, ethnicity or religion."

When the issue is raised Allen seems to repeatedly descend into this kind of ridiculous 'liberalspeak.' There's a difference between judging someone by their race and knowing their race.

He seems to be clear on what his mother's religion is, so much so he keeps telling us over and over again she was raised Christian, so 'religion' was important. Presumabely he knew what his mother's gender was. At least I have to hope he did. So really it's only her 'race or ethnicity' that's utterly unimportant. Is who your grandfather was really 'unimportant'?

"And so whenever we would ask my mother through the years about our family background on her side, the answer always was, ‘Who cares about that?’"

In a word. Sad.

"My mother has lived a long and full life, and I hope and pray she will enjoy many more years. She deserves respect and she also deserves privacy, especially where painful memories are concerned. I sincerely hope that simple decency will be respected.”

And now stranger than ever. This time Allen conflates any question about his mother's roots with a 'painfull background.' For goodness sake it's possible to discuss her roots without bringing up the Holocaust, unless it's the Jewish origins themselves that are a painfull memory, an impression Allen is distinctly leaving us with.

Meanwhile the Democrats are playing a hypocritical game, making Allen's ethnicity a campaign issue and then damning him for being 'ashamed' of it. This is a game Democrats often play with minority conservative politicians. In this case they're trying to 'out' him the way they would a gay politician and hoping that the more conservative state population will have a bigoted reaction, even as they taunt him over it. In other words the so-called liberals are exploiting and banking on racism.

The real question that should be asked is would this question have been raised if it was a matter of Italian roots or Irish roots and would Allen have reacted in such a convulted defensive way if he'd been asked about Irish or Italian roots.

(Sometimes there are moments when the pathological stupidity of the liberal whose only solution to everything is to appease their enemies and throw themselves on their mercy reveals itself with shining clarity and can only be gaped at... I present now for your inspection....)

'Talking to the neighbors: It's time Israel embraced the Mideast' -

Avi Azrieli - International Herald Tribune

Israelis now speak of the Arabs' hate as a chronic disease that Israel is destined to live - or die - with. To revive its hopes, Israel must dare to consider a change of paradigm: transform itself into a Middle Eastern country... A change of paradigm for the intensely besieged Israeli society would not be easy, and embracing the culture of the enemy could be confusing, if not outright repulsive. Yet it is necessary and possible.

The immediate effort should center on language. Few Israelis speak Arabic, even though it is one of Israel's two official languages, alongside Hebrew. The government should fund a campaign to teach Arabic to every Israeli. Fluency in Arabic should be a condition for a high- school diploma, for a government job and for a professional license of any kind. National television and radio stations should offer parallel Arabic programming. All government and business documents should be written in both Hebrew and Arabic, all laws adopted in both languages, and agencies should be ready to serve the public in Hebrew and Arabic. ....

Nothing in modern Zionism contradicts an acceptance of Arab culture. Some Jews have always sought to understand their neighbors better. My great-grandfather and namesake, the rabbi of a farming community on Mount Carmel a century ago, learned Arabic in order to converse with his neighbors. (Unfortunately, he and his family were massacred while visiting relatives in Hebron during the 1929 Arab riots.)"


To analyze liberal insanity is to understand that liberals always assume that the conflict is really our fault and that the enemy would accept us if we just changed. When just making territorial concessions doesn't work, they offer up all our culture and language to the enemy. There's nothing they won't sacrifice in the increasingly delusional belief that if they can just bid high enough, they can buy peace. No matter what the Arabs do, it does not change this formula it only raises the bidding price.

If the Arab pulls a knife, he must be upset and offer him a villa. If he pulls a gun then he must really be upset and offer him a state. If he kills you, offer to become an Arab or a Muslim just like him certain that his hatred is legitimately based and that you can bribe him enough to dispell it in the name of tolerance and botherhood. Plan A was to give up land to the enemy. Plan B is to give up our language and culture. Plan C is probably to convert to Islam. What will they have left as a Plan D when they've anhilated everything and the enemy still waits with bared knives?

Had any normal Governor appointed a completely unqualified man as the state's Homeland Security Advisor who was a foreign national and couldn't even get FBI clearance thus preventing him from having access to classified material. He would surely have been criticised for endangering the lives of millions.

Had he additionally then given him a meaningless title and the same salary and no job responsibilities, this would be a clear example of corruption. Had on top of this, this individual turned out to be the Governor's lover, this would have been a thundering case of malfeasance and abuse of office that should have ended in a trial and convinction.

There's only one reason it didn't. The Governor in question preempted the issue by announcing that he's gay and doing the usual routine about how tormented he was by his supposed 'homosexuality.' Poor Governor McGreevy. Apparently he'd been taught to feel bad about his sexual desire for other men and he's gone on Oprah to be enabled as a victim.

It is of course not the citizens of New Jersey who are victims of a Governor who used their tax dollars to give his unqualified lover a job. It is not the citizens of New Jersey whose lives were endangered when in a state that has nuclear reactors and one of the largest populations of Arabs in the country who had in the past planned and carried out attacks from New Jersey; the Governor tried to turn over the job of Homeland Security Advisor to his unqualified lover. It is that same corrupt Governor that is somehow the victim because once upon a time people made him feel bad about being gay.

Had any normal male political figure been caught turning over a crucial security position to a man whose only qualification was that the political figure found him attractive, he'd have faced a storm of condemnation, rather than sympathy. Had he admitted that he was having an affair at the time his wife was giving birth, any normal person would be thoroughly repulsed. Yet with Governor Jim McGreevy, this entire disgusting narrative is supposed to win our sympathy and transform a criminal into a hero, purely because it was part of his "Coming Out Journey", a journey motivated purely by the fact that the Governor was being sued by that same former lover.

It's safe to assume that no questions will be asked of him about the allegiations that he had used his office to sexually harass other state employees. It's safe to assume that instead of holding him to any responsibility for his actions and gross malfeasance, he will instead be treated as a hero of the gay rights movement for abusing his office, abusing his employees, abusing an entire state and then whining about his feelings on national television. No thieving televangelist's TV confession can even begin to compare to the sheer repulsive chutzpah of this.

But this is the liberal's post-moral American, the Age of Victimization, in which a liar and thief becomes a martyr by merely associating himself with some protected victim class. In the West Bank the children of idiotic liberals wave AK-47's alongside their terrorist hosts as their fathers and mothers did with Black Panthers. In Afghanistan the son of a Jewish hippie musician preaches Jihad for Al Queda and the press describes him as an activist. Evil is good so long as it hides itself beneath the cloak of some aggrieved minority and responsibility is excess baggage as long as you're willing to sink to the depths of social and political depravity along with the rest of liberalism's Titanic still playing another chorus of Pete Seeger as the boat sinks.

McGreevy is certainly not the Captain of that boat. That honor is likely left to Bill Clinton but he is one of the junior officers whose job is to drill more holes in the hull before the iceberg that is Islam's worldwide Jihad even gets here.

Just after insisting that he was being misrepresented as associating with Neo-Nazis and that Neo-Nazi sites were printing his materials without permission, Chamish has been announced as a speaker at the AFP's 2006 conference alongside the wife of prominent Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel who runs his website, Holocaust denier Jurgen Graf who was convicted of Holocaust denial in a Swiss court and sentenced to 15 months in prison and fled sentencing to become a fugitive.

Also there will be Chamish's longtime friend and head of Australia's Adelaide Center Fredrick Toben, whom Chamish begged to write a letter disawoing their ties, which unfortunately for Chamish was posted on the web. Toben's center is a clearinghouse for Holocaust deniers in Australia.

The conference is sponsored by The Barnes Review, a Holocaust denial publication run by Willis Carto, founder of the Institute for Historical Review, before he was booted out of even there. It isn't just Holocaust deniers though who will be attending this witch's Sabbat. There will also be the Neturei Karta's own Rabbi Yisroel Weiss along with several Muslim anti-Semites and a basketfull of 9/11 deniers and other Holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists.

As seen above the notice bills Chamish as an Israeli Anti-Zionist, a far more honest characterization of Chamish then he's willing to admit to. No doubt Chamish will have plenty of material to sell them too. Chamish most recently appeared at a 9/11 Denial conference in New York in time for the anniversary of September 11th and he's published an article with a new theory for the 9/11 Deniers linking Israel as being behind the 9/11 attacks.

While Chamish will no doubt try to lie his way out of this again and claim he's going to debate the Neo-Nazis (when has he ever debated them?) he has one reason for going and that's to sell his books. For the Holocaust deniers Chamish offers his theory on how the Jews via the Rothschilds and Sabbateans were really behind the Holocaust. For the 9/11 Deniers he has a theory on how Israel was behind 9/11. For the Anti-Israel crowd he has theories on how Arab terrorism is really carried out by the Mossad and the Neo-conservatives are behind the terrorism while the Arabs are really our friends.

In other words Chamish is a one stop shopping center of Anti-semitic conspiracy theories for Anti-semites, a function he's happy to serve so long as it sells books.

(Since lately Muslims and their Jewish apologists have been repeatedly claiming how Muslims 'protected' Jews under their rule... an example of that protection)

c. 1853: E.L. MITFORD from "Appeal in Behalf of the Jewish Nation"

"I will narrate a case which took place at Tangier, and with which I was, therefore, well acquainted. The individual sufferer was an interesting Jewess, of respectable family, residing at Tangier; and much is it to be regretted that our Consul-General had not influence--or, if he did possess any, that he did not exert it--to avert the horrid catastrophe.

This young creature was summoned before the Cadi, by two Moors, who deposed to her having pronounced their confession of faith. This, however, she utterly denied, but in vain; and the Cadi had no alternative, even had he possessed the inclination, but to decree her conformity to Islamism, on pain of death. I was never able to obtain correct information as to whether the witnesses were actuated by sinister motives, or whether the poor girl really did repeat the fatal words in jest. There is, doubtless, much friendly intercourse between the Jews and the better-disposed Moors, in which gossip and jesting are sometimes carried beyond the verge of safety...

Again, in a scriptural language like the Arabic, in which the name of G-d so constantly occurs, there are many ejaculations repeatedly uttered by the Jews which approach very near to this formula, and might, therefore, be mistaken for it. Be this as it may, the affair was of too serious a nature to be passed over lightly by the Jewish community, who at least deserve the credit of uniting for mutual protection, and, consequently, every exertion was made, but unsuccessfully, by influence and money, to crush it in the bud. It had, however, become too public not to reach the ears of Malai Abderahman, to whose decision it was, therefore, referred, and the parties repaired to Fez for that purpose.

Whatever might have influenced her accusers, there could be no doubt of the motive of the Sultan in enforcing the decree, which was, to obtain another plaything for his harem; in fact, so well known was his character in that respect, that, from the moment of her being ordered to his presence, no one expected any other result--for few possibly imagines, not did the Sultan himself, that she would have courage to brave the alternative, rather than abandon the faith of her fathers. Such, however, was the case...

The Jews came forward with offers of immense sums of money to save her, but her fate was irrevocably decided, and the only mercy the baffled tyrant could afford his young and innocent victim, was to allow of her being decapitated, instead of being burnt alive. I had an account of the closing scene from an eyewitness, who was one of the guards at the execution--and although, as a body, there is nowhere a more dissolute set of irregular soldiery than the Morocco Moors, yet he confessed to me that many of his vice-hardened companions could not restrain their tears, and that he himself could not look with dry eyes on a sight of such cold-blooded atrocity.

This beautiful young creature was led out to where a pile ready for firing had been raised for her last couch, her long, dark hair flowing disheveled over her shoulders, she looked around in vain for a heart and hand that could succor, though so many eyes pitied her; for the last time she was offered--with the executioner and the pyre in all their terror before her--her life, on condition of being false to her G-d; she only asked for a few minutes for prayer, after which her throat was cut by the executioner, according the barbarous custom of the country, and her body consumed on the fire."

(please note none of these photos have been photoshopped. Sadly.)

Another anniversary comes and goes. Life has many anniversaries. Modern life has many more. We remember deaths, we remember births. We remember life. We remember death.

The anniversary of 9/11 splits down those remembering into two camps. I do not include those who rejoiced when the planes struck or who claimed it never really happened. Like the wicked son at the Passover Seder, they are entirely outside the community.

Instead the split is between action and commemoration. It is a split between those who see 9/11 as a tragedy and those who see it as an atrocity.

There are many tragedies that happen in life. People suffer. People get sick. People die. We call those tragedies the cycle of life. Everyone who lives will experience them and the only thing to do is cope with them. Indeed coping is really the modern theology. In a culture whose goal is self-esteem, coping with tragedy is one of the bumps on the road to maintaining your self-esteem.

What salt was to the ancients and blood to the human body, self-esteem is considered the desired state, the 21st century nirvana which the enlightened upper middle class college education dweller of our present American age aspires to much as people once aspired to know God.

Self-esteem is the vital fluid, the blood in the veins of a complacent culture seeking nothing more than temporary stability. Like a vehicle's oil it must be constantly checked and its level maintained. Tragedy disturbs that level and the bestiary of therapists, psychiatrists and unlicensed busybodies with advice collumns or TV shows promptly recommend doing whatever it takes to restore it, whether it's medicating yourself until you no longer feel, group meetings, talking cures and the long slow journey to recovery.

To many that was exactly what 9/11 was. A shock. A tragedy. A shocking tragedy. Something people have to learn to cope with, go through all the stages of anger and bargaining all the way to acceptance until 9/11 is just something more to cope with, something to commemorate one day of the year and forget all the rest. Our angry responses to it are 'understandable' in the same clinical condescending way we may pityingly understand the response of our friend who has lost a loved one, but it just a bump in the road of the psyche to be paved over with saccharine cliches and the mnemonic entropy of time.

Indeed the extent to which we commemorate something is often the extent to which we fail to do anything about it. Rituals of grief are rituals after all. They show respect. They soothe us. They teach us to remember yet forget, to know and yet do nothing.

For anyone who doubts this consider the scale of the commemoration efforts of the Holocaust. Yet what practical thing has come out of it. The very core issue of the Holocaust, to never again permit its repetition, was quickly thrown away. A decade ago with the support of much of the Jewish communities in America and Israel, Israel signed an agreement with the enemies plotting its anhiliation. And people cheered as if it was the Anschluss all over again or Chamberlain holding his black umbrella proclaiming, Peace in our time. Never again? More like, Not Today Please.

Indeed most Democrats would like nothing better than for us to turn 9/11 into yet another Holocaust commemoration. An event narrowly focused on the tragedy of it but not on the perpetrators , its history speedily universalized and distorted until it has been rendered utterly meaningless. A perfect commemoration.

Every year the Jewish people commemorate over and over again the destruction of the Temples, the fall of Jerusalem, the Exile. We weep. We mourn. We pray for a return. But when Israel was being created, how many Jews actually went there. The majority chose the Galut. Lest anyone protest that this is because the rebuilding of Israel was secular rather than religious, consider Ezra and Nehemiah. Certainly their religious credentials couldn't be faulted. Nor could Mordechai's. They came not to build a 'Treyfeh Zionistische Medine' but the second Beit Hamikdash. And yet the majority of the Jews remained behind in Babylon. In exile.

Commemoration without action yields only sorrow and apathy. The energy that could have been directed towards meaningfull action instead goes towards rememberance, towards turning inward and floating amidst the turbulent sea of one's own emotions. History's winners do. History's losers commemorate.

The meaning 9/11 holds is not in the commemorations. We must remember the heroism and sacrifice of that day and of the great evil of our enemies but not in commemoration but in imitation. At its core the past represents lessons telling us what to do and what not to do. Commemoration all too often bypasses those lessons in favor of appealing to our raw emotions and then layering them over with the warm comfort of ritual seeming to give us something in place of what we have lost. When in truth it leaves us with nothing.

Unlinked from action commemorations become a facade. A comforting ritual. A way to forget. Joined with action commemoration becomes a triumph overcoming tragedy and robbing death of its laurels. When rememberance truly becomes a rallying call for the present, then life arises from death, and loss is resurrected into purpose. In the parlance of self-help culture such ideas are a crutch. In the parlance of eternal reality, it is self-help culture that is the crutch. The best way to commemorate the losses of the past is with the gains of the future.

Comparisons have been made for the last 5 years complaining of all the attention lavished on 9/11, on the dead, on the survivors, on the catastrophe itself. They roll out tabulated charts comparing annual deaths by cancer, collisions, heart attacks to make their points.

In the late 20th century increasing numbers of Americans hold dual citizenship, in the country of the United States of America and citizenship in the country of victimization. Everyone strives to present a passport certifying that they are a victim, a survivor. Even 9/11 represents an inability for many people to call a halt to this jockeying.

9/11 is a break from the shifting maze of victimhood identities, black, latino, white, asian, gay, cancer survivor, abuse survivor, drug survivor; for a chance to unite as Americans and understand that we had a chance to stop being survivors and to become fighters. To stop being the hyphenated victims of pet causes and to rise to the occasions as citizens of a great nation, a waking giant towering over the world.

There is a lot that people go through whether it's disease or personal tragedy and we should care about those things and combat them but they are in a different category altogether. Disease cannot be likened to terrorism and to a global war against all of us. It's not only a slap in the face to the United States and the victims of 9 11 and other terrorist attacks but a failure to understand that the usual post-modern liberal ways of thinking about tragedy have become irrelevant and it is time to understand that.

Comparing disease to war and terror is nonsense but, a very liberal left-leaning point of view to be sure. More people die of disease than war. Yes most people.. huge numbers die in their sleep. Perhaps a war on sleep is necessary? A war is not merely a struggle, we have assigned Wars on Poverty, Wars on Disease, Wars on Hunger. We've become isolated enough from the reality of war that we've come to use it as a metaphor for any social problem. But war at its most basic is a struggle for the very existence of a people and a nation. That is what we face now and today and that is the test of our nation, whether we can rise above our citizenships in the multitude of countries of victimization and become Americans standing together or perish as victims apart.

For all the time liberals spend going on about what a moron Bush is and yet Lauer comes off looking like nothing so much as a moron. A liberal moron.

Whenever election day comes around American liberals in the form of the Democratic Party begin assuring Jews of their friendship for Israel. They drag out old hoary anecdotes describing of their long love and adoration for the State of Israel. Former President Bill Clinton claimed that his dying family priest had told him to protect Israel. Presidential candidate John Kerry spoke of Masada and along with fellow Presidential Candidate Wesley Clark rediscovered his Jewish roots. But true friends as always are discovered in need and in deed.

On Wednesday the 6th, prominent Democrats led by Senator Patrick Leahy of the State of Vermont and Diane Feinstein of California, who despite her last name is Catholic rather than Jewish, attempted to introduce an ammendment that would prohibit the use of Cluster Bombs near civilian areas and apply those same conditions to any country they are sold to, particularly Israel.

The cluster bomb scandal is the latest attempt by Israel's political enemies and Terrorism's allies to pin an atrocity on Israel. After the Qana bombing was exposed as a deliberately staged incident using planted corpses and disabled children. After repeated photos of Beirut turned out to be fradulent and Israel's supposed rocket attacks on a Reuters press car and a Red Cross ambulance both proved to be hoaxes; rather than retracting anything international organization, the UN and the media have quickly moved on to the next manufactured scandal of the cluster bomb condemning Israel for using cluster bombs near civilian areas. Of course the fact that Hezbollah terrorists were operating from civilian areas in the first place leaving Israel no choice is not a matter that ever entered their consideration.

The State Department, which is typically so pro-Arab that their viewpoint is virtually indistinguishable from their opposing numbers in Arab governments, had begun an 'investigation' of Israel for using cluster bombs near civilian areas and the Democratic Senators joined in. The measure would have undermined US-Israel defense pacts which had been kept secret and would have opened the door to Congress limiting Israel's ability to defend itself and by extension allowed any left wing Anti-Israel group to begin a campaign lobbying congress to prevent Israel from using any and every weapon they object to until Israel was left fighting the war with paper airplanes.

The United States Senate wound up rejecting the measure by a vote of 70 to 30 but the contrast in those votes is striking. The votes for the measure came overwhelmingly from Democrats beginning with the Democratic Majority leader Harry Reid. In July Senator Reid had put on a fantastic show of hypocrisy lambasting Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Makli for not condemning Hizbullah and little more than a month later he voted to make it difficult for Israel to defend itself against Hizbullah. Most of the other Democrats who had raised a hue and cry over it did the same thing too.

Former and future Presidential candidate John Kerry who once waxed poetic and will again, of his love for Israel, voted for the measure. Jewish Senator Joseph Lieberman who was hounded out of his own party for supporting America's War on Terror opposed the measure, by contrast Jewish Senator Russel Feingold was more than happy to toe the Democratic party line and vote for the measure. Joining him were former Klu Klux Klan member Senator Robert Byrd and current celebrity Senator Barack Obama last seen taking an AIDS test in Africa along with Senator Ted Kennedy, compulsive drunk with a talent for driving women off bridges and leaving them to drown.

Truly it's said that friends in need are friends indeed and genuine support from true friends is worth far more than all the rhetoric in the world. When these same politicians come calling on Jews again as they soon will, professing their adoration and undying love for us like a straying husband returning as if nothing had happened, hopefully their audiences may be a trifle the wiser.

Deuteronomy 25:17 Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way as ye came forth out of Egypt.

Deuteronomy 25:19 Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.

The foundation of all morality begins with a rejection of evil. There can be no morality without a rejection of evil, only vapid self-righteousness. Without rejecting evil there is no good, there is only lip service and rhetoric because without separating good from evil, good becomes contaminated by evil. Becomes contaminated by moral equivalence, by excusing evil, by tolerating evil and in the end defending it.

To secularists, liberals and an entire generation raised in the shadow of the cultural values they have erected, this entire passage seems vicious, genocidal, nationalistic and otherwise repugnant.

"So," they will argue, "Amalek attacked the Jews and killed some people. The thing to do was to reach an understanding with them and find a way to live in peace with them. Why hang on to a grudge let alone blot out a people. That's not the way civilized people behave."

The greatest plague of our time is an inability to comprehend and confront evil. We live in an era that styles itself as the most moral, yet has no clue about the very basic nature of morality.

All morality begins with a rejection of evil. The modern West cannot reject evil and has become infected by it and the more we tolerate evil the more degraded our societies become. The more our political and religious leaders lose an ability to distinguish between good and evil, the more they collaborate with evil in our foreign policy, our culture, our values, our policies and our basic concepts of right and wrong.

Zachor. Remember. This is the basis of rejecting evil. To remember that it is evil. When we forget that it is evil, we no longer know what to reject. How do we remember that it is evil, by remembering the evil it has done. How do we remember that fire burns. We remember because we were burned by it or we saw others burned by it. How do we remember evil, the same way. Trying to remember evil as abstract formulas doesn't work, it isn't strong or enduring enough. Abstract formulas quickly grow hazy, morality based on abstract theorizing is easily susceptible to manipulation and equivocation. Only a remembrance based on the evil deeds themselves endures.

Remember what Amalek did to you. Only when you have done that are you equipped to blot out every part of evil, at the last even the remembrance itself. Remember every aspect of evil. Remember that he attacked the weak, that he cowardly attacked those who lagged behind. Remember because this is his nature and because he will do it again.

On 9/11 Muslim Terrorists murdered more than 3000 Americans. It was neither their first attack nor their last. It succeeded because we had forgotten that we had enemies and we had forgotten to blot them out.

We are still forgetting. 5 years later the eradicators of memory have been hard at work. The liberals have never stopped crying that the war on terror is brutal and misguided. The 9/11 Skeptics, their name itself derived from Holocaust deniers, are gaining prominence arguing that it never really happened, that the Muslims never did it. To all of them we answer, Zachor, we remember. We remember what happened and who did it.

Zachor. We remember those who danced and cheered. We remember those who killed. We remember our enemies and remembering them is the first and foremost line to fighting them. As has been proven in Iraq and at home, we cannot properly fight the enemy if we do not remember who they are. If we forget that they are Arabs and Muslims, not a few extremists, but multitudes who hate us and seek our destruction.

After the Holocaust the Jews swore to remember, they swore Never Again, but we forgot. We let the Holocaust be diluted, Hollywoodized, universalized, turned into a history lesson about right wing tyrants and finally a weapon for the very butchers of the Holocaust in Germany and across Europe to use against us as we fight off the next generation of Amaleks seeking to destroy us. We gave in to the tributes and the Hollywood premieres. Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful, Paper Clips. While we watched the reels of the past, we forgot that remembrance is not for the past but for the future. Remembrance is not a cemetery but a door. The past becomes the future again when the cycle isn't broken. The evils of yesterday quickly return to haunt tomorrow in another shape.

Zachor. On July 4th, on September 11th, on December 7th, on the 27th of Nissan, the 14th of Adar, we do not merely remember the past, we fight a war. A war of memory. We fight a war against the destroyers of memory, against the erosion and entropy of remembrance by the passing generations. On the days of remembrance we rise up to defy these forces, we rise to defy evil and grant to our children a legacy of remembrance and a commandment to continue the fight for us when we are no longer here.

The war is fought not only on those days. It is fought every day, fought against denial and deception, against propaganda and deceit. Today we fight against those who claim that the terrorists had just claims to kill us, against those who claim the best way to fight terrorism is to give in to their demands, we fight those who claim the attacks never happened, that the terrorists never carried them, we fight against those who claim it is counterproductive to remember what happened, that the best way is to move on. We fight against all these and many, many more. Zachor.

May God, our Father in Heaven, Commander of the Hosts, lead us in these and all the other wars we fight daily so that good may one day prevail on this earth.

It is the end of summer at South Street Seaport Pier 17. August is ending, September is beginning and the cold wind is already here. The sky is overcast yet in places piercing glints of light still shine. By the water along the deserted pier a rock band is playing to an audience of a handful. A middle aged couple, man and wife, stand leaning on each other, swaying back and forth, their hands in each other's jeans pockets. The band begins another sets. They aren't good but they aren't bad either.

Above Seaport and its mall gulls circle the American flag hanging on its roof like vultures. Grey clouds drift closer. A thin trail of smoke pours from the greasy kitchen of a luncheonette. 2001 is ending but it is also beginning and in the air there hangs the sense that all the good times are ending now.

Ending.


* * *

I am heading to midtown. The planes have hit and the buildings have burned. There are elderly relatives with breathing problems who I need to get as far away as possible from the air.

At Union Square NYU Students are scrawling peace messages on sheets as behind them downtown burns. Further up at 23rd street the park is deserted. A homeless man sits on a bench by a stone table with a chessboard set empty of chess pieces playing a radio broadcasting mingled static and updates of the situation. Behind us, behind us, oh God behind us the sky is white and smoking.

It isn't Welles' New Jersey or Wells' England but the War of the Worlds is here.



* * *


It is early, too early. It's the day after New Year's. It's the first day of a new year. The first day of a new millennium. January 1st 2000. I walk through Times Square through a litter of glitter, empty cups and 2000 glasses, masks, banners, confetti. The city is quiet, at peace and everywhere lie the scattered hopes of a new future.

2000, a magical title. A series of zeroes headed by a 2 which when attached to any device or appliance bespeaks the future. 21st century. A new era. A shiny of time ruled by technological advancements and the spread of freedom around the world. The Cold War is done. The Soviet Union is fallen. The spread of the internet seems to herald the beginning of a brave new world.

I step on brightly colored confetti and though it seems foolish I bend down and gather a few to take with me. Souvenirs of a future yet to come. Fragments of the day we crossed the threshold from yesterday to tomorrow. It is the end of history and the beginning of the future.

On the way home, downtown, bird shapes fly overhead, intersecting and then falling apart, flying away. I walk home thinking of the future.

In a further sign of the extent to which left-wing radicalism and hatred of America is becoming mainstream, the Australian History Channel will be airing the 9/11 Conspiracy video 'Loose Change' as part of their 9/11 Marathon. Presumabely for their Holocaust commemoration they'll be airing films made by Holocaust Deniers as well. Dutch, Swiss and Belgium Public TV will be following suit.

For anyone who wants a brief lesson in what the human garbage responsible for 911 Loose Change represent, these are audio recordings of Dylan Avery who made 911 Loose Change on the radio. Hear Avery crack jokes about passengers having their throats slashed and laugh at it, hear him suggest a father deliberately sent his son off on the plane to die as part of the conspiracy and if you can stomach it play it all the way to the end where a cop who was actually there confronts this loathsome filth.



This is what 9/11 conspiracists are. This is the real face and it's a true testament to the kindness and generosity of New Yorkers that whenever they appear in public they aren't grabbed and beaten with whatever objects come to hand.

As the Jerusalem Post notes, this is the 60th anniversary of the production of the play, A Flag is Born. Behind the history and the praise is the interesting legacy of the playwright, Ben Hecht.

Ben Hecht was a self-taught Chicago journalist, playwright, screenwriter behind such classics as Scarface, The Front Page, Gone With the Wind.; a member of the Algonquin Round Table, a reporter who mingled easily with the gangsters, ladies of the evening and killers and corrupt cops of Chicago's underworld before going abroad as a foreign correspondent in post WWI Germany exposing the seamy side of German reconstruction and serving as a personal eyewitness to the Moabit prison massacre, which would set the stage for Nazi atrocities.

He was a professional writer who mixed hearty doses of cynicism towards authority with idealism for the human race, a Jewish Mark Twain who was an unsuccessful if critically praised novelist, a thoroughly assimilated Jew who spearheaded a campaign for Europe's Jews being massacred in the Holocaust and then for a Jewish state before turning his back on it all.

A lifelong liberal who fought fiercely for civil rights, even as he fought against the Roosevelt Administration and the Liberal Jewish elite on the side of Jabotinsky, the Irgun and Lehi backing them against the socialist Labor Zionists. A Hollywood screenwriter whose stand against Britain's role in the Holocaust earned him a nationwide boycott by the British government so that many of his later movies had to be done under pseudonyms.

An agnostic who came to believe in God on his own terms and a man whose career embraced everything from Chicago's worst prisons to Broadway and Hollywood, to foreign affairs, activist, his own column and finally his own tv talk show on ABC quickly canceled due to its controversial content; Ben Hecht remained a paradox of quickly fading memory.

Hecht prefaced Perfidy with the notation, A Man Stood Up In Israel. He meant it to refer to Shmuel Tamir, but it could far better refer to Hecht. He was certainly not the sort of man anyone would have expected to emerge into the moment, yet in his surge of activism he managed to help bring together a wide range of figures from Rabbi Eliezer Silver to Marlon Brando to Dorothy Parker and Walter Winchell and Will Rogers; a collection of people equally as unlikely as he.

Hecht was born when the 20th century was new in a far more independent America in which the individuals was still considered preeminent over government. The individual was Hecht's theme as he lived to see the era of FDR seize on the great depression to reduce American liberties to government handouts from a spiraling bureaucracy. This was where Hecht broke with his fellow liberals who splintered into Communist and FDR camps supporting a socialist reconstruction as the solution, while Hecht remained an individual battling fiercely for individualism.

It was that individualism which allowed him to break from the mass whether it was when he stood out from the rest of the correspondents and their packaged story when he was in Germany reporting on the first wave of atrocities of the Ebert\Noske government, or when the Germans had resumed their atrocities and the Roosevelt-worshiping Jewish leaders of America were satisfied to lick the great cripple's boots waiting for another type of handout while millions died. It was an individualism that shattered the consensus by pointing to what was right and what was wrong.

Most people live or die by the consensus. Most people believe by consensus as well. It is this crippling servitude that leads men to cry out for strong leaders whether it is a king or a president or a prime minister who will solve their problems for them, not realizing how fundamentally misguided that is even when their leaders prove useless and corrupt. The will of a people is inherent in individuals, when individuals don't have it, then the nation doesn't either. When one man can't point to a wrong and denounce it and oppose it, then the nation can't either. And so we see today's American plodding behind the propaganda that Islam is a religion of Peace and today's Israel making concession after concession to the terrorists.

The great men of Jewish history were individuals who defied the consensus beginning with Avraham, the Ivri who stood on the other side Al Ever Hanahar, of the entire world. One man who spoke of a faith in one God. Yaakov, hounded and persecuted by the world, who founded a nation. Moshe, raised in the house of a Pharaoh, turned his back on it all and seeing an Egyptian beating a Jewish slave, struck him and killed him. Cut away from his people, taught to identify with the Egyptian ruling class, he was able to toss all that aside and stand for what was right.

Moshe began a long tradition of prophets, often isolated, persecuted and standing against the consensus and the will of Kings, who nevertheless were determined to speak the truth. Hecht identified himself with that legacy of prophets, with that individualism which stood against a world of idolatry and defied it. In his time Ben Hecht took a hammer to his own share of idols from corrupt politicians and gold-gilded statues of Presidents to a self-serving Jewish leadership both over here and in Israel. He wielded that hammer with the talent of his pen writing columns, articles, plays and speeches. He was a man, among few, who stood up in Israel.

With him were those of the Peter Bergson group, himself a nephew of Rav Kook, Jabotinsky who warned that the Holocaust was coming while most refused to listen and died before he saw it come about, the fighters of the Lehi and Irgun, sneered at by British anti-semites as the Stern Gang, who nevertheless drove the British out of Israel. They were all men who stood up and as the Holocaust raged, more stood up in Europe and American, Jewish and non-Jewish, resisting the tide.

Today the history is whitewashed and sandbagged, villains have become heroes and heroes have become villains. The Likud which was the last remnant of Jabotinsky's legacy, such as it was, was smashed to bits with the creation of the renegade Kadima party. The children of former heroes grew up to be corrupt sell-outs like Olmert and Tzahi Hanegbi. But there are still men in Israel, just not in the places you expect them to be.

There is Tzafri Ronen, an irreligious Kibbutznik, who led protests and did far more to fight Disengagement, then any of the so-called Yesha Council or the Rabbis and endless article writers. Like Hecht, he does not come out of the consensus, but from outside it as an individual opposing a clear evil.

In Ben Hecht's time the world faced the vast collective evils of Nazism and Communism, today we face the collective evil of Islam. As we did under FDR, the solution proposed is to expand the government, subsume the individual into the mass and defeat it that way. What eventually worked in WW2 won't work now. The power of a nation is in its individuals and the US government has spent decades perpetuating a massive bureaucracy incapable of actually solving any problems while subsuming individual initiative into collective committees, organizational charts and focus groups. The army isn't allowed to fight, the air force isn't allowed to bomb and law enforcement isn't allowed to do its job. Instead of fighting the war the nation winds up held hostage by factionalism and the decaying rhetoric of defeatism.

As airlines and the press are discovering, there is no way to keep the public safe from terrorism, except by individual initiative. There is no technological system that can spot every explosive device, no level of security that can stop every terrorist threat. The power lies not in bureaucracies but in individuals. As Flight 93 showed, it is not the government that is the first line of defense but the individual, those men who too stood up and refused to sit and wait while they and hundreds of others were murdered by terrorists.

It is this attitude that is a desperately needed antidote to a modern society taught to sit and wait for the police to handle it. For the last 5 years we have been sitting and waiting for the 'police' to handle it and listen as they pat themselves on the back for all they've accomplished even as the Islamic terrorist threat continues to spread and grow.

On reporting on Sweden's plague of Muslim rapes, a friend of mine Lemon-Lime Moon asked where all the Swedish men are. The answer is they're citizens of a socialist state to which most of their income goes and which they expect to care for them from cradle to grave and they expect the authorities to handle it. Men who would never have tolerated such things a century ago, today sit placidly waiting for someone else to care of it, because much as Communism has crippled the ability of the Russian to work honestly for a living, socialism has crippled the ability of the European and increasingly of many Americans to take action on their own.

When the society takes precedence over the individual, the only two paths for a nation are stagnation and decadence or tyranny and dictatorship. The West has chosen the former, it may in time choose the latter, but either way Europe and America will remain crippled societies until there is the resurgence of the individual. Not phony individualism like the flower children of the 70's dancing to the beat of a single drum, the mass consumerism of the 80's and the dot.com social networking and isolationism of the 90's and 00's.

The return of the individual means a return to a society with more risk in it but also more possibilities. It means the creation of a society with frontiers to push and borders to expand. It means choosing to live rather than choosing to shop. A society whose two great pillars are consumerism and government bureaucracy is a static society waiting to fall, a society willing to make any compromise and concession to its enemies in order to maintain its placid way of life. There is no room in the world for such societies except as victims for the next generation of the world's civilizations, such as they may be.

Ben Hecht's outcry was the outcry of the individual against injustice. As was Theodore Herzl's. As was Jabotinsky's and a thousand others who made a difference by being individuals, far from perfect, who stood up against everything their milieu believed and fought for what was right. We may not have prophecy with us any longer but the voice of the prophet still rings in the man who proclaims for right against wrong. To those who wonder what the answer is, the answer is in us. To those who wonder what they can do, who look for a strong leader, the answer is in the words of the Prophet Yoel. On these words the Jewish people were founded, on these words the state of Israel was rebuilt. On these words it and its sister nation the United States will stand or fall.

Bring forth the mighty men, let them press forward,, let them rise up, beat your plowshares into swords and your pruning hooks into spears, let even the weak man say I am a mighty warrior.

"One of the tragedies of the recent war is that Haifa University was not razed to the ground by Hizbollah. We can only ask them to aim better in the next round. You see Haifa University is home to the mass libeler Steven Plaut. And he just disgraces the "good" name of the school on a daily basis. I am one victim of his favorite slander." - Barry Chamish

Yes it's another week and another edition of the Barry Chamish follies. There's probably some depth of egotism in hoping that terrorists destroy an entire university because someone he doesn't like works there. Luckily Barry himself was far away sitting out the war delivering lectures in Messianic Churches while Israel was under fire. While Haifa was actually being bombed, Chamish himself continued his old tradition of penning pieces defending the Arabs and claiming the whole war was a conspiracy of another critic of his, Daniel Pipes.

In 2003 already Chamish's op-eds were appearing in Al Jazeera as well as numerous neo-nazi outlets. With his move back to North America, Chamish resumes marketing himself to the same conspiracy New World Order crowd he got started with back when he was writing books about UFO's. Except this time he comes parading himself as a victim of the 'Israeli' government who he claims tried to kill him repeatedly.

Somehow it's hard to imagine why the otherwise efficient Israeli intelligence network had so much trouble with a middle-aged Canadian who always looks like he just woke up off a three week bender; but I guess you don't have much credibility with the 'Conspiracies 'R Us' crowd unless intelligence agencies have tried to kill you. (The Canadian Mounties have tried to assassinate me on numerous occasions with loaded moose but luckily I survived and I'm here to expose their evil ways to you! Buy my book!)

Meanwhile this leaves Chamish' junior partner David Rutstein to manage the Israeli side of the operation. Chamish who ironically enough accuses just about everyone of being agents and informants has a better half who admitted on video to being a government informant who spied on right-wing Jewish groups. Which just goes to show you that as the old saying goes, the more the pot throws around accusations, the blacker it really is.

Chamish and Rutstein hit on the legally dubious tactic of spamming people with emails supposedly coming from Yitzchak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres and Yigal Amir and others. For a while I was getting barraged every day with these emails promoting their latest stunt. But you can't keep a bunch of good shlockmeisters down.

Chamish and Co. had previously hijacked Jonathan Pollard's site and turned it into their own blog and when asked to stop by Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu's office, Chamish responded by accusing Rabbi Eliyahu of being a 'Sabbatean.' Now they've done it to Jerusalem Post columnist Calev Ben David, with a fake blog attributed to him and spam emails supposedly originating from him.

Never one to miss a trick, the blog comes complete with links to Chamish's and Rutstein's own advertisers so he can smear a man and financially profit from it too. And there's lots of spam supposedly originating from Calev Ben David too popping up in mailboxes. The most obvious thing about these kinds of tactics is the sheer pettiness. A Haifa professor debunks Chamish and Chamish wants to see Hezbollah bomb an entire university to the ground. A Jerusalem Post columnist tells them they can't exploit an event to promote themselves and so they create a fake blog and spam smearing him.

The second most obvious thing is that the sort of people who rely on tactics like this are the sort of people who have nothing tangible to offer besides hysteria and enemy lists and personal attacks and the targets of their outrage are inevitably credible established journalists. Impersonating Calev Ben David in a way reveals the jealousy behind their motivation because in the end Chamish and co. would like to be Calev Ben David but aren't capable of actually doing what it takes, sticking to the facts rather than working to create a cult of personality around themselves. So instead they aim for publicity and do whatever it takes to get it.

As Chamish now delivers rambling addresses claiming everyone is out to get him, the sad truth is he's the one out to get himself.

The four Arab heads of Christian Churches in Israel; Catholic, Lutheran, Syrian Orthodox and Episcopal have drafted and signed a statement titled 'Jerusalem Statement on Christian Zionism' that is full of some of the most mind-boggling hypocrisy imaginable.

The statement does little more than parrot the Arab position on every matter. They accuse Israel, the United States and Christian Zionists of "imposing their unilateral pre-emptive borders and domination over Palestine," a statement full of redundant and senseless propagandist rhetoric.

It's full of repetitive statements accusing Christian Zionists and by extension Israel of 'militarism, occupation, colonialism, racial exclusivity, perpetual war, apartheid, empire-building' and all such good stuff. It's not clear what empire is being built exactly. Israel withdrew from Gaza and its territory which is already smaller than Rhode Island is only dwindling. But reality has never stopped Arab propaganda before and the statement is just warming up as it goes on to accuse Israel of every crime under the sun.

There's a paragraph inserted stating, "We call upon Christians in Churches on every continent to pray for the Palestinian and Israeli people, both of whom are suffering as victims of occupation and militarism," but the rest of it goes on to rant how Israel is creating Palestinian ghettos surrounded by settlements with no recognition of what the Israeli people's suffering consists of or that Israel has already withdrawn from Gaza and even Hamas admits it has only made things worse for the Palestinian arabs living there.

But discarding the usual left-wing, Arab and pro-terrorist rhetoric there are some interesting nuggets in their statement of principles.

"We affirm that Palestinians are one people, both Muslim and Christian. We reject all attempts to subvert and fragment their unity."

This is a rather odd statement for the heads of Christian Churches to make. It's not a Christian statement but a patently nationalistic one that opposes any separate discussions of rights for Christian Arabs ; essentially the heads of the top four Christian churches in Israel just signed away their own parishioners who are being persecuted by the Arab Muslim authorities. It's not a statement being made by the heads of Christian Churches but by prominent Arabs who prioritize Arab nationalism over Christianity.

The irony is that just above the statement had said, "We reject the teachings of Christian Zionism that facilitate and support these policies as they advance racial exclusivity and perpetual war rather than the gospel of universal love, redemption and reconciliation taught by Jesus Christ." ...only to now proclaim their support for 'Racial Exclusivity' on the basis of a mythical Palestinian nationality and to deny a universal connection between Christians in favor of racial Arab nationalism.

They follow up that hypocrisy in their very next paragraph with, "We call upon all people to reject the narrow world view of Christian Zionism and other ideologies that privilege one people at the expense of others." The fantastic irony of that is that their entire statement is an Arab nationalistic creed that privileges Arabs over Jews, so much so that they're endorsing a system that privileges Muslims over Christians, their statement consists of nothing except a defense of Arab grievances against Israel with no statement at all about terrorism and the sufferings of Israelis; and yet here they are lecturing Christian Zionists on "racial exclusivity and privileging one people at the expense of another." Truly the hypocrisy is mind-boggling.

"We are committed to non-violent resistance as the most effective means to end the illegal occupation in order to attain a just and lasting peace." What that commitment exactly consists of besides a charade of moral superiority is unclear. The prior Greek Orthodox Bishop who had been caught smuggling weapons to the PLO in the trunk of his car didn't sign it at least.

"This is where we take our stand. We stand for justice. We can do no other. Justice alone guarantees a peace that will lead to reconciliation with a life of security and prosperity for all the peoples of our Land. By standing on the side of justice, we open ourselves to the work of peace - and working for peace makes us children of God."

Of course by justice, rather than some objective idea what these clerics actually mean is justice as a synonym for every Arab demand there is, including ones that lead to the destruction of Israel while warning "No enduring peace, security or reconciliation is possible without the foundation of justice. The demands of justice will not disappear" ...in other words the terrorism will continue.

Translated from the rhetoric this is just a restatement of Arab positions, no end to the conflict without more and more Israeli concessions. Justice eventually meaning an eradication of Israel. Even as they lecture Christian Zionists on supporting Apartheid and Empire Building, in practice they are supporting the construction of another Arab state on the ruins of Israel as part of a larger strategy of Arab nationalism. In reality the empire building is their own and the accusations they level at Israel are actually true of themselves.

"God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation." (2 Cor 5:19)

Oddly enough there is no actual reconciliation to be found in their statement. Not reconciliation towards their fellow Christian 'Zionists' or towards Israel or Jews. All their document does is heap unproven accusations on Christian Zionists and on Israel, most of which they don't even bother citing any supporting evidence or examples for, backing purely nationalistic Arab demands for territory and borders without ONCE condemning or even mentioning terrorism and then smugly closing the statement with a quote on reconciliation and describing themselves as 'workers of peace' when all they're doing is restating the nationalistic demands of one people against another without any mention or acknowledgment that there might be more than one side to the story.

"Patriarch Michel Sabbah, Latin Patriarchate, Jerusalem

Archbishop Swerios Malki Mourad, Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate, Jerusalem

Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal, Episcopal Church of Jerusalem and the Middle East

Bishop Munib Younan, Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land"

Predictably this is what happens when Christian Churches in the Middle-East wind up being arab run, they become nothing more than mouthpieces for the Arab authorities, in this case Syria, Hamas and the PLO, all of it dressed up as religion when the reality is they're betraying their own co-religionists by handing them over to Hamas authority and endorsing an Arab nationalism that was once the purview of Anti-Christian Marxists like the PLO or the PFLP and today is the purview of Anti-Christian Muslims like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Another one of the Neturei Karta freakazoids goes on Arab TV to call for the release of Hamas terrorists and the dismantling of Israel, and slips calling Mohammed a prophet. A Torah True Jew or a Koran True Muslim? You decide.

Shortcut to Victory 1: A coherent battle plan which is flexible enough to be modified in response to enemy actions with specific goals and objectives.

Shortcut to Defeat 1: A purely reactive battlefield presence in which troops are sent rushing off on whatever whim strikes the general staff and are put out into the field with little more to do than try to defend against whatever the enemy does.

If you're wondering which one of these Israel did in Lebanon and you guessed the second one, well you're right. An incoherent battle plan is the quickest way to waste your troops and waste your advantage and walk into a meat grinder. In Lebanon the objectives continually appeared to change, troops were deployed and then redeployed again. This gave the appearance of indecisiveness to the enemy and to our own troops. It's also a likely symptom of too many cooks in the soup with civilian politicians pushing their own plans, replacing generals and undermining any chain of command.

Shortcut to Victory 1: Knowing the enemy, predicting his moves and countering them.

Shortcut to Defeat 1: Ignoring the enemy's plans and focusing only on your own firepower certain you will smash him to pieces.

Again in Lebanon Israel did the latter. The lessons of the original Lebanon campaign, the lessons of Jenin, the lessons of Iraq were ignored. Instead amateur generals deployed assaults believing the enemy could be crushed with firepower alone. Troops, tanks, planes blundered through Lebanon accomplishing something but also wasting lives, time and momentum.

Much as in Vietnam, when America and Israel face guerrillas they respond as western military minds reflexively do with showy displays of firepower. This accomplishes something but it's like trying to kill a fly with a cannon. You might hit him, most likely you won't. Understanding Hizbullah's military doctrine as it was set by Iran's Revolutionary Guard would have been a good deal more useful, and it took large scale casualties and setbacks before the IDF began doing what it does better than any other Western army, engaging in counter-guerrilla warfare.

Shortcut to Victory 1: Attack unexpectedly with overwhelming force.

Shortcut to Defeat 1: Attempt to use your superior surveillance and air power to scout for 'strategic' targets beforehand and carry out selective strikes using troops to 'probe' the enemy.

Again Israel had failed to learn the lessons of the US in the early days of the Iraq campaign, war isn't a sniper hunt. Strike what targets you have right off, terrorists and guerrillas are mobile and can quickly move from one location to another. Most have entire networks of safe houses to fall back on in civilian areas. It's better to overrun the enemy than to try and pick off their bases, especially since using Western air power that way has a high failure rate as witnessed in Bosnia and Iraq. Military planners are enchanted with the satellite and strike capabilities now at their disposal but they are vastly overrated.

While the strategic strikes had their effect, much of the Hizbullah side of the war was being fought from Iran anyway. Committing troops right after air power could have allowed Israel to overrun Hizbullah, instead Israel flushed Hizbullah troops out of their bunkers and gave them time to redeploy and be ready to ambush Israeli troops who tentatively entered Lebanon.

Shortcut to Victory 1: When civilian casualties occur continue fighting as before despite the outcry, leave the military out of it and let your public relations handle the fallout. Civilian casualties are an unfortunate part of wars and an isolated incident is not representative of who is to blame.

Shortcut to Defeat 1: When civilian casualties occur, pull back on the fighting, launch investigations, expend vigorous energies defending yourself thus demonstrating to the enemy that you are vulnerable and will panic when civilian casualties occur giving them an incentive to create scenarios where they will.

Little needs to be said about that since we all know the events after Qana. The reality of war is that collateral damage is a fact of life. No serious war is going to be fought without it. Hezbollah used civilian areas to fire its rockets from. That makes civilian areas into valid targets and Hezbollah responsible for any civilian deaths. End of story. Collateral damage should never interrupt military operations or place soldiers and pilots under any kind of limitations, unless the damage is indeed caused by a grievous errors.

Shortcut to Victory 1: Use air power to prepare the battlefield destroying available targets and serving to support the troops on the ground.

Shortcut to Defeat 1: Trying to win the war with air power without committing your troops.

Whenever I am talking to people and the conversation turns to war, as lately it inevitably does, people regularly have one recommendation. Bomb them all. It's not surprising that they do, to most people particularly of an older generation the transformation of war and the superiority of Western arms comes through air power. They remember the blitz, the bombardment of German cities, the firebombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. In later wars air power is often the flashiest element, jets flying through the sky seem majestically godlike.

The problem is that air power, like most Western military tactics, is most effective against organized militaries and functioning countries. Against terrorists and guerrillas, air power has limited effectiveness. Without an industrial machine to assault, armor to destroy, ground divisions to scatter; air power is mainly useful to destroy what terrorist infrastructure and fortifications do exist, for surveillance and for ground support and evacuations.

Defeating the enemy requires returning to the square root of war, wars are ultimately won by the side that holds on to the territory. The arabs understand this, all too often Israel does not. It doesn't matter which side has the flashiest weapons, has the best kill ratio or looks the best in the press. Those are all means to an end. The end and the only thing that matters is actually holding on to the land. Israel's generals and politicians of an earlier age who had come out of Kibbutzim and Yeshuvim, who had grown up farmers who settled the land patrolling it against Arab bandits understood this. The latter generation taught instead to focus on urban centers as the center of Israel often seem incapable of grasping this, orienting themselves in a post-modern world where diplomacy and intangibles are more important than something as crude as land.

It's precisely that attitude that got us Oslo and Peres' New Middle East and Lebanon and the disasters of the last two decades, because the only thing that truly matters is the land. The leftists and some on the right who assail the settlers for only caring about the land think they are showing off their sophistication when they are only showing off their ignorance. Land is what determines whether a people remain on it or become exiles and refugees as Jews have been throughout most of the last 2000 years. That means buffer zones, it means territories, it means not giving up land without getting something tangible in return, like other land.

Yet Israel is still looking for shortcut solutions, for trading land for intangibles in a market devalued by the stupidity of Prime Minister after Prime Minister. Even when it comes to war, Israel looks to diplomacy and international organizations to do the actual work of holding the land for them and maintaining security. That will of course never work.

Hezbollah because it held on to the land by virtue of Israel leaving. That is why Hezbollah always knew it would win, because they knew Israel would leave surrendering the field to them again. That is why Palestinian terrorists repeatedly trumpet their victories because they are certain that no matter what Israel does as a response to their terrorism, the IDF will leave and let them continue possessing the land. While Israel fights a war of intangibles trying to find some other means than occupying land to insure its security in a modern day version of the alchemist' quest to turn lead into gold, the Arabs stick to what they know. And for once they're right.

Air power won't win wars. It can only soften up the enemy. War and security are gained by boots on the ground. By soldiers and farmers living on the land and protecting it and driving back the enemy and taking his territory. This is not some doctrine, it is the history of human civilization from the very beginning. It's a history Israel needs to return to before it's too late.