"Harris-Lacewell said such expressions of distrust toward whites will not hurt Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries, which are dominated by liberal voters. “To win the Democratic nomination, he’s got to get a part of the progressive, anti-war, white folks,” she said. “And those white folks tend to be suspicious of any black person who wouldn’t be suspicious of white people.” -Washington Examiner - Jan 30, 2007


Now putting aside the Obama race issue itself for a moment, let's consider this statement and what it says about the relationship between white liberals and minorities. We've seen Democrats go after Black Conservatives and even moderate to liberal figures like Colin Powell in extremely racist ways when they didn't toe the party line.

The conventional racist is suspicious of black people because he holds a racist stereotype of them in his head. The progressive racist holds a racist stereotype in his head too, one in which black people are fundamentally hostile to white people, and is suspicious of any black people who don't fit that stereotype.

The conventional racist is simply a racist. The liberal racist demands that Black people be racist and feels free to act in an outwardly racist manner to any Black people who don't fit his racist stereotype. It's not reverse racism, it's meta-racism. A racism that demands racist behavior on the part of your subject. It also sheds some basic light on how liberals see their relationship with minorities.

The "progressive" folks being discussed here prize Black people as a source of 'opposition' to the American system. Their value is in being oppressed and acting out the rebellious Black Power fantasies of the liberals. Any Black people who don't want to go along with this are "suspect" which is just a euphemism for targeted and smeared. They don't want to hear from the owner of his own home in the suburbs who built up his own business and has moderate political views. They want to hear strictly from the Al Sharpton demographic.

Racial acceptance in those circles becomes premised on acting out inherently racist stereotypes. It's not Amos and Andy anymore but an afro and a clenched fist, which winds up standing for nothing because in the end it's just another tool of another branch of the establishment. The liberal establishment, which has nothing to offer but failure and misery. Those same racist stereotypes create self-fulfilling prophecies of failure.

Liberal social platforms are not meant to cure ills but to perpetuate them in the name of an endless list of grievances and endless revolutions.

The War on Poverty is not meant to end poverty, but perpetuate it to create a class of dependent, frustrated and miserable people feeding off a government bureaucracy and endlessly demanding more.

Sexual education in schools isn't meant to prevent sexual activity in teens, it's meant to increase and legitimize it creating more demand for abortions, more single parents and lowered standards of social morality to follow a particular vision for American society.

Affirmative action is not meant to create equality but to perpetuate inequality and segregate based on a racial caste system denying people the chance to achieve on their own. Diversity isn't meant to broaden America, but to narrow it into those same racial castes in which people define themselves by race and are defined that way by every institution from the government on down.

Black people who aren't racist, who aren't "suspicious" of white people, are violating this setup. One which requires building racial mistrust to segregate people. The Democratic party only wants Blacks who think White people are the enemy and at the same time makes sure to stigmatize any other political options. The result turns Black people into tools of a fundamentally racist agenda and a racist mindset.

Segregating people divides them and weakens them. If you can reduce a person to a member of a caste and make voting a particular way a part of the character of that caste, then you've created an effective slave population that always votes your way. The Democratic voting tolls repeatedly show that to have been a success.

(Note the shameless ducking of the issue of Fatah's terrorism and the dismissal of Abbas' call for killing Israelis as "internal politics", which has been a longstanding White House line to dismiss Arafat's calls for violence as just "internal" and not relevant when it came to describing him as a partner in peace and demanding more concessions from Israel)

Q Thank you, Tony. Two questions. First, WorldNetDaily's Jerusalem correspondent reports Secretary of State Rice telling reporters that the United States will ensure that weapons and the $86 million provided to militias affiliated with Fatah will not be used to attack Israel. My first question, how does the President believe this is possible when the military wing of Fatah is al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which together with Islamic Jihad has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing in Israel in the past two years, including the killing of U.S. teenager Daniel Wultz?

MR. SNOW: I believe Hamas has been fairly actively engaged, Les, in acts of terror. The other thing is --

Q I agree. So has Fatah.

MR. SNOW: Prime Minister Abbas has made it clear and guarantees what we think are sufficient and clear that it is his desire to try to be able to negotiate with Israel effectively toward a two-state solution. And as you know, the United Nations right now is providing humanitarian aid that is supposed to be used, and is guaranteed to be used by audits and other follow-ups strictly for humanitarian purposes. That's how we would expect this aid to be spent.

Q How can the Bush administration, which says it is opposed to terrorism, give $86 million, plus weapons, to any organization led by Abbas, who just told a rally in Ramallah that Palestinians should stop shooting each other and "direct our guns against Israeli occupation," who funded the 1972 Munich massacre of Israel's Olympic Team and wrote a thesis denying the Holocaust?

MR. SNOW: Again, Les, if you'll take a look at developments in recent days and conversations, the real key is to look for folks who are going to be committed to negotiating with the Israelis. And the Prime Minister has been -- I'm sorry, the President, President Abbas, has been -- well, I'm not going to get into the internal politics because that's the sort of thing that can get misquoted.

Q Do you think he has changed in the last week, since he --

MR. SNOW: I think that it is important -- we believe that President Abbas is somebody that is determined to try to work toward peace in the region, and we're going to try to facilitate that.

Three people were killed and two others were critically wounded Monday morning in an suicide bombing attack that rocked a shopping area located in Eilat's Izidor neighborhood. Two Palestinian groups, the Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades - the military wing of President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction - claimed joint responsibility for the attack.

The Bush administration reportedly will grant $86.4 million to strengthen the Fatah forces, including Force 17, Abbas' security detail, which also serves as de facto police units in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The U.S. aid is meant to bolster Fatah, which the U.S. considers moderate, against Hamas.

Rice announced U.S. military envoys in Israel created "a plan for security forces that can be part of the solution, not part of the problem. And this plan is not just to equip them and train them, [but] it is also to professionalize them, to unify them, to put them under a single command."

Fatah's strongman in Gaza, Mahmoud Dahlan, has been tasked with leading the effort to create the unified Fatah security forces.

On October 20, 2000, “Dahlan was behind the October 18 bombing of an Israeli bus in Gush Katif."

On November 16, 2000, “members of the Preventive Security Force in Gaza, headed by Mohammed Dahlan, were involved in a series of attacks on Israelis in Gush Katif and Netzarim.”

We've got an election coming up and as per usual that means we'll see Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives, both casting themselves as defenders of the ordinary man. Debates will be conducted over health care, minimum wage increases and tax breaks. And the hypocrisy will flow like wine.

The simple reality is that both sides like to cast themselves as working to make life better for the average American, some may even believe it. In practice what occurs is a tug of war between two extremes.

Democrats propose to address the inequities of a capitalist system by replacing it with a totalitarian one, Big Brother with a bureaucratic face by using government programs to fill those gaps.

Government programs can certainly help people but government agencies and bureaucracies represent their own motive force. Programs that sound good in theory quickly create a massive spiraling bureaucracy full of fraud and abuse. The people they are meant to help quickly become divided into beneficiaries of the aid who wind up perpetually on the dole and those who increasingly have to pay for the programs themselves. And if they can't afford it, the programs are open to them too as soon as their income drops enough.

(It's why Democrats bitterly oppose tax cuts but support minimum wage hikes. The tax cuts some off their end. The minimum wage hikes aren't a problem because they get a percentage off the top.)

The more the war on poverty is fought, the worse it gets because the money that might have gone into allowing people to have a better life, is being sucked up into taxes to fund those programs, both at the income level and at the business level. And the degradation of basic humanity and loss of rights that grows as a free society gives way to a regulatory bureaucracy insures a populace unwilling and unable to raise itself up anymore.

Socialism creates serf states, sometimes with populations taxed worse than serfs were, where people are earning a little but making very little. Two income families become the norm. Women marry later and have less children. The birthrate drops, which worsens the problem of finding a tax base for the growing bureaucracy, which pushes taxes higher.

Immigrant populations are brought in to replace the worker shortages which further strain and expand the government bureaucracies. The government programs have by now come to resemble a Ponzi scheme and the whole thing teeters on an imminent collapse. Take a look at just about any country in Europe if you want to see a living example of once great nations facing extinction by becoming devoured by their own bureaucracies.


And then there's the Republican side of the coin. There's usually a lot of talk about small business and the American worker. But the real policy is to let big business do anything it likes. That means outsourcing of workers. It means legalizing massive amounts of illegal aliens. It means supporting terrorists who come here on HB-1 visas to fill the tech industry's appetite for skilled workers with low pay expectations. It means shipping American industry and jobs to Mexico and China.

At home it means letting big corporations monopolize and crush small businesses and workers out of existence and subsidizing those companies with tens of billions of dollars, even as they continue their disastrous business practices while their CEO's walk away with 170 million dollar golden parachutes. The complete hopelessness of subsidizing failing businesses never seems to make any impact on them.

This is of course hardly limited to Republicans, most Democratic politicians are just as bad. But it's a philosophical defect of Republicans to believe that deregulating business is a universal good, when it was Theodore Roosevelt, the second greatest Republican President, who fought corruption and reined in monopolies and abuse business practices that the Democrats had winked at. The corruption fallout in the previous Republican Congress came about because the party chose the legacy of Ulysses S. Grant over that of Theodore Roosevelt.

Uncontrolled deregulation simply leaves the workers, consumers and small businessmen naked against a never ending list of abuses. Nor is what's good for GM, good for America. What's good for GM is outsourcing labor and government subsidies. None of that is good for America. It pumps America and Americans dry while the multinational corporations move on to greener pastures in Mexico or China.


Without controlling taxes and spending, both Democrats and Republicans continue the same destructive course. The Bush Administration has plenty of economic successes to claim but it's competiting against the moribund socialist states of Europe, who actually thought the falling value of the Dollar was a national triumph for them, instead of a national disaster.

The real struggle should be the struggle of Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican President, who fought for Free Power over Slave Power. Slave Power does not merely mean the enslavement of a particular race. It means an economy based on slave labor. Slave labor can come in the form of slaves of an overwhelming bureaucracy or slaves to an uncontrolled corporate system.

Free Power encourages the rise of the individual over conglomerates, corporations and bureaucracies. Democrats and Republicans both talk that talk, but few are really willing to put the regulations where their mouths are. The best hope for America's survival is to return to the values of Free Power, of small business and commerce, of significantly lowered taxation and deregulation, without deregulating so far as to give big businesses a free hand to abuse their power.

Free Power means recognizing that the strength and economic survival of America is and has always been in the individual. We cannot compete against the slave power of China or Mexico, states with low incomes and not particularly democratic governments. America will stand or fall on the individual.

There's always a price for everything or as they say in certain circles, TANSTAAFL, or There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Politicians though increasingly build their promises on a government bureaucracy that will give you a free lunch. Of course the government bureaucracy isn't free and there's a hell of a tab to pick up for the lunch too.

The problem with offering pie in the sky though is someone has to pay for it. Medicine is justifiably a human right, but when doled out by the government comes packaged with a massive bureaucracy to implement and distribute and manage it. While the governments promised a lot, reality interferes naturally. Drugs and doctors don't grow on trees.

Socialized medicine may give away a lot, but it has to stagger carefully what it gives away and lower the quality. Americans may go to Canada for cheap drugs but Canadians will go to America because America offers the procedures they need, without having to wait months for them. Wards in England are a national disgrace and a nightmare with nursing shortages, mixed sex wards and severe cleanliness problems. France's broken health care system is climbing the ranks of election campaign issues.

For parts of the 19th and most of the 20th century, civic medicine has made great strides. Health care and hygiene came to the slums, diseases were fought and conquered. Much of what was accomplished was toted up as yet further evidence that government programs when applied to social problems could create an ideal society.

As social prosperity increased, lifespans increased and birth rates fell. In America they fell somewhat, in Europe they fell drastically. So drastically that Europe from the English coastlines to the Russian tundra is facing the loss of millions of people and the depopulation of entire areas. This would have been a severe enough problems in and of itself, but a system in which younger worker's pay is leveraged to provide social services for them and for retired citizens cannot survive a gap in the birth rate any more than you can build a building with a missing two stories in the middle.

Immigration was meant to make up for that but of course immigration only makes things worse. On paper immigration seems like an easy way to make up for a birth rate shortfall. But immigration is not some sort of clone factory stamping out fresh new young workers to take their places at the desks and counters of tomorrow. Immigration meant importing entire families, often in three generations, from the third world, most with health care needs vastly outweighing those of the natives. And then there are the social problems.

Using immigration as a stopgap solution for the birth rate was a lot like a thirsty man at sea drinking salt water. It made things a good deal worse and placed massive stresses on socialism's free lunch pail. This wasn't so much a problem for the government bureaucracies though as for the nation's citizens. The bureaucracies were perfectly happy with the infusion of third worlders as it meant more jobs for them and expansions of their programs. The bonus crime, diseases and social unrest was manna from heaven for them. The worse things got, the more funding they could demand for their departments.

For the Western nations as a whole though it was a horrific disaster that undermined their social fabrics, created war zones in formerly peaceful small towns and of course gave them a whopping huge bill for the whole thing.

But still the squeeze was on and immigration only made it worse. You could squeeze it by cutting off social services for deadbeat immigrants, at least for the illegal ones, but no municipality in Europe and America would hear of that. It's not only racist but it's equivalent to taking away a farmer's milk cows just when he expects years of use from them.

That leaves squeezing the elderly and the disabled through euthanasia. And that's exactly the situation where disabled patients in England sue to not be disconnected from life support and are denied. Euthanasia is declared to be a human right, but it is not only applied to those who actively wish to die, but to those whom the bureaucracy decides should die.

The resource shortfall has to be made up from somewhere and the elderly are no more use to anyone as far as the bureaucracy is concerned and there is a whole lot of them about. As immigration further strains the health care system, choices are made. Alfred has to die, so Mahmood can get treated for three diseases that had formerly been eradicated in the Western world.

It's not only Europe. It's America too. A family friend recently passed away in no small part because the hospital he was in decided he should die. His feeding tube was disconnected and not reconnected for days despite pleas for his wife. Doctors pressured her repeatedly to disconnect him from life support and would not respond to her questions about his condition. She stayed by his bedside but in the end they got what they wanted.

Another acquittance some years back found that her uncle had been disconnected from life support without her authorization leading to his death. When she demanded answers, she was told, "He lived his life."

He lived his life, is the epitaph of a lot of elderly men and women dying under socialized medicine or perhaps being outright murdered. Eugenics today is a dirty word, but the distinction between eugenics as practiced by the Germans or practiced under socialism today, is the definition of "Life Unworthy of Life." The Germans applied it to the mentally ill, the disabled and a variety of categories including the Jews. Today it's often applied to the disabled, babies and the elderly, whose "Quality of Life", a euphemism that could proudly be translated into the German, is measured, found wanting and disposed of.

Peter Singer, one of the moral and ethical authorities of modern medicine, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne, has endorsed killing disabled newborns and mentally disabled elderly. Singer isn't some obscure crank, he's the leading inspiration of the animal rights movement.

Singer premises the right to life on "the ability to plan and anticipate one's future." In a bureaucracy of course no one has much ability to plan and anticipate one's future and accordingly have no right to live. Like Nazi eugenics, such selection targets the weakest and most vulnerable people in a society by the government.

The most common reasons for disapproving of eugenics have been racial, rather than the moral argument that murder is simply wrong. Modern eugenics instead of targeting racial minorities, targets the weakest people on behalf of minorities. The selection is made to prioritize social services for third world immigrants, over the nation's own disabled and elderly citizens. The resource gaps created by socialized medicine have to be balanced and the scales weighed. Alfred must die, so Mahmood may live.

Getting the Navbar out of your beta blogger
How to get rid of navbar for beta blogger

It was well known over the years that Jimmy Carter hated Jews. Nevertheless he had no shortage of Jews who associated with him, protected him and defended him because of his liberal politics and activism. At last Carter went far enough that some of those Jews are backing away from him and speaking out and more importantly the media is actually listening to some who had been critical of him before but were silenced by the press consensus, both the general media and Jewish publications, that a Democratic President is untouchable.

In addition to the revelation that Carter had intervened on behalf of a Nazi war criminal, we have this latest revelation which demonstrates just how conventionally Anti-Semitic Carter's bigotry was. It was never about Israel. It was always about the Jews.

"Former President Jimmy Carter once complained there were "too many Jews" on the government's Holocaust Memorial Council, Monroe Freedman, the council's former executive director, told WND in an exclusive interview.

Freedman, who served on the council during Carter's term as president, also revealed a noted Holocaust scholar who was a Presbyterian Christian was rejected from the council's board by Carter's office because the scholar's name "sounded too Jewish."

Freedman says he was tasked with creating a board for the council and with making recommendations to the White House on how best to memorialize the Holocaust. He sent a memo to Carter's office containing recommendations for council board members. He said his memo was returned with a note on the upper right hand corner that stated, "Too many Jews." The note, Freedman said, was written in Carter's handwriting and was initialed by Carter.

He said at the behest of the White House he composed another board consisting of more non-Jews. But he said he was "stunned" when Carter's office objected to a non-Jew whose name sounded Jewish.

"I got a phone call from our liaison at the White House saying this particular historian whose name sounded Jewish would not do. The liaison said he would not even take the time to present Carter with the possibility of including the historian on the board because he knew Carter would think the name sounded too Jewish. I explained the historian is Presbyterian, but the liaison said it wouldn't matter to Carter."

It's not much of a revelation that someone as frenziedly determined to go after Jews as Jimmy Carter had demonstrated himself to be, also harbored this level of bigotry. After all Carter supported the PLO even writing actual speeches for Arafat. Some put this down to his liberal politics, but as is often the case with bigots, the 'politics' were just a cover for the bigotry underneath. And lest anyone find this shocking Carter still comes off mild compared to President Truman not that long before him, whose wife wouldn't even permit Jews in the house.

Still it makes things increasingly unambiguous for the remaining Jewish Carter Center members and his Jewish supporters, they can no longer continue to hide behind the fiction that Carter is just expressing his passionate liberal activism. They've dug themselves in this far and they have the choice between breaking free or continuing to defend a bigot.

Postscript - Thus far from the google news roundup it doesn't appear as if mainstream American media have picked up on this story. I don't know that they will unless it appears in numerous letters and editorials.

As Pharaoh's resistance begins weakening he begins making compromise offers to Moshe. Among them he offers Moshe to have the adult men go to worship G-d leaving the women and children behind.

If the plagues are a 'struggle' for sovereignty between G-d and Pharaoh, Pharaoh is now offering a compromise, what might be called Terms of Assimilation. A portion of the Jewish people may dedicate themselves to G-d, namely the adult males, while everyone else will remain as Egyptian property.

To understand this viewpoint it is important to note that for Pharaoh this seemed very reasonable, because the adult males as he saw it, were really the only valuable part of any society. It was the males Pharaoh had ordered killed, not the females. Pagan religions were very often gender specific, men's religious and women's religions. Pharaoh was conceding that this religion was 'important' and could have the adult males.

Moshe's reply was that G-d was not limited to a group of people who chose to participate, but that it was total and it consisted of the entire Jewish people down to their possessions. This is why Moshe would insist on taking the cattle with them and why G-d would command the seemingly selfish and greedy act of requesting items from the Egyptians to take along. The entire Exodus was a demonstration of G-d's total dominion over the most powerful nation of the era in the natural, domestic, biological, religious and economic spheres.

G-d was not and is not optional. A religion that is limited to men is one dominated by men and owned by them, rather than owned by G-d. Pharaoh's view of the worship of G-d and that of some men still today, is one in which the important people belong to. Yet the entire Exodus was a demonstration that people who had been seemingly reduced to the most worthless people on earth, were the ones who would be chosen from among the nations to serve G-d.

Pharaoh overlooked this as the previous Pharaoh had as well, when he enslaved the males but not the women and ordered the killing of male babies but not female. And yet it was women who time and time again thwarted him. First the midwives who refused to kill the children, the women who maintained family life despite the state of slavery, Miriam who watched Moshe's basket and reunited him with his mother, the daughter of Pharaoh who saved him and raised him and Tzipporah who saved Moshe's life on his return to Egypt.

An entire gender whom Pharaoh had overlooked played a key role in thwarting him because Pharaoh could only see value in importance and prominence. And so G-d sent him Moshe as a Prophet, who suffered from a speech defect. And sent him plagues rising from frogs and lice and locusts. All in the cause of redeeming a people Pharaoh thought worthless slaves. Rather than learning any lesson from this about falsely presuming on what is despised and worthless, Pharaoh continued attempting to treat with G-d on those former terms. And when all was done all that Pharaoh had continued worthwhile was taken from him, from his first born son, to his army and the prosperity of his nation; all because he had regarded a people as worthless.

As we sweep around the globe from sea to sea and ocean to ocean... coastlines recede... mountains rise out of the air... cities appear filled with glowing motes out of the dusk side of the night side...


In America - Like the greedy boy who put his hand in the cookie jar but can't get it out and doesn't want to let go of it, Democrats are full of schaudenfreunde about Iraq and unsure what to do about it.

They make a good deal of noise about wanting to leave Iraq but leaving Iraq is the last thing they would possibly do. With the 2008 election coming up Democrats firmly believe that their best chance of winning the Presidency is for American soldiers to be dying in the streets of Baghdad while the polls are open. That means keeping the troops where they are while firmly keeping the blame on the Republicans. It means fighting Bush enough on Iraq to make a public statement but without actually forcing a complete withdrawal before election day.

Democrats, whose leadership is heavily composed of baby boomers who started out as college activists like Bill Clinton, are grounded in Vietnam and they very much want Iraq to serve as another Vietnam they can point to.


In Israel - As the net draws tighter around Olmert and his gang, the Katsav trial moves into motion. The only purpose of the phony trial of Israel's President is to desperately create a distraction for the public. Where Bill Clinton bombed to keep attention away from a sex scandal. Kadima has organized a presidential sex scandal to keep attention away from the failed bombing of Hizbullah.

While the Ramon and Katsav sex scandals have garnered sensational attention at home and abroad and redirected some attention from Olmert, they can't hope to really divert the public from the disastrous failure of his government. All they can accomplish is to put on a circus, that will at once further blacken Israel's name internationally... but that is nothing something the Kadima Mafia have ever cared about.


In Russia - "Evidence" of who was responsible for the prominent murders of Putin opponents is unsurprisingly pointing at Putin's opponents, as the current incarnation of the KGB would have you believe. This is a typical Soviet gambit. A typical purge by Stalin would begin with the murder of one of his political enemies, such as Kirov, followed by a show trial which would indict other political enemies for the murder he himself committed. As the former head of the KGB Putin is following in the prominent footsteps of great KGB murderers before him.

More troubling is the great rise in Russian espionage around the world. Arrests of Russian agents have occurred in numerous countries within the last few months alone. They aren't occurring in the US mainly because law enforcement authorities are focused on Islamic terror and ignoring the large scale Chinese industrial espionage that is allowing Chinese companies to clone our products and fuel their booming commercial transformation and the large scale Russian infiltration of America via companies, particularly in the energy industry. Putin's experience running both international trade and the FSB (KGB) positioned him to leverage Russia's energy resources to draw an iron collar around the world turning Russia into a Slavic OPEC.


In Europe - Tension balances on end as Europe approaches its point of destiny. The EU and a massive moribund bureaucracy to be toppled by an encroaching Islamic population or a right wing revolt resulting in a host of nationalist regimes. Both are happening and both are possible as the continent poises on the verge of toppling one way or another. Neither way will be particularly pleasant for the Jews but the Islamic alternative means certain annihilation for Europeans and Jews.


In Asia - The new Muslim ruler of Thailand is taking the Putin approach blaming the overthrown legitimate government that was actually fighting Muslim terrorism for the bombings. After a Muslim general who had been appointed to fight Muslim terrorism overthrew the Thai government with a commitment to "negotiate", the inevitable was of course coming.


..And so the world goes... nations hang in the balance... the planet turns and tomorrow is uncertain and the day after that less so... and so it goes

The Clint Eastwood directed companion piece to his flop Flags of Our Fathers; Letters From Iwo Jima has been nominated for a best picture Oscar. This is a movie that treats the mass murderers of the Japanese military that were responsible for atrocities that stagger the mind and ethnic cleansing, as noble men and heroes.

Here's how the LA Times described it:

"Eastwood had planned to focus solely on the American story and its aftermath, but as he was developing his film version of the bestselling book by James Bradley and Ron Powers, he became intrigued with the plight of the 20,000 Japanese soldiers who had burrowed into the island's volcanic rock to await their fate at the hands of the invading Marines. That group, left on the island in hopes that they could forestall an invasion of Japan, was subject to some of the most savage fighting of the war. When the 39-day battle was finally over, fewer than 1,500 are thought to have survived."

The LA Times and Eastwood practically drip tears for their "plight" as they "await their fate" and are "subject to savage fighting" (as if they were passive actors) and tragically those evil "invading marines" won leaving only 1,500 of them alive.

While these 20,000 Japanese soldiers awaited their plight they massacred and tortured captured Marines. Some were eaten alive so their fellow Marines could hear them screaming. The meat from the butchered soldiers was put into tins as rations for the Japanese troops.

Love Letters from Iwo Jima is basically a love letter to General Tadamichi Kuribayashi. As the movie's scriptwriter Iris Yamashita tells it,

"The first document I looked at was a compilation of letters from Gen. Kuribayashi to his family during the time he had been a military envoy in the United States. Most of them were addressed to his son when he was a toddler. As I read them, I was hit with the same impression that Clint must have had when those letters had inspired him to make the movie. It was hard to believe that this soft-hearted, loving father was the commanding general of the Japanese forces on Iwo Jima. The letters were filled with doodles and caricatures and humorous sentiment. You could tell that he adored and missed his son."

Funny thing yesterday I was reading the paper and it described how a cop killer's sister took the stand to offer testimony on what a loving and caring human being he was... this was before he shot two cops who were begging for their lives.

Now we have some lovely letters from General Kuribayashi to his son and wife, which shows he loved his family. I'm sure you can find plenty of letters like that among the Nazi high command as well. There are no shortage of lovely letters written by murderers, rapists and child molesters in America's jails to their loved ones. Evil people are perfectly capable of being sentimental and loving. They're not some sort of creatures apart from human feelings and emotion. If they were we couldn't hold them accountable for what they do.

Hitler really loved his dog. He went into mourning when it got sick, even as he was murdering millions. General Kuribayashi wrote lovely letters to his son, even as his men tortured and brutally murdered captured American prisoners. Before Iwo Jima, General Kuribayashi commanded a regiment in Manchuria and a brigade in northern China. He served as chief of staff of the Twenty-third Army during the capture of Hong Kong.

To put that into perspective, some of the worst Japanese atrocities took place in Manchuria and the capture of Chinese cities occasioned some of the worst of the Japanese wartime savagery. Soldiers held competitions for how many Chinese they could shoot. Mass rapes of women, from little girls to old women, took place everywhere. When the soldiers were done the victims were mutilated and finished off in a way I don't even want to describe. The lucky ones were forced into prostitution for the Japanese Army. There are photographs of the unlucky ones lying in ditches.

One Japanese soldier described smashing a baby's head against a wall and feeling proud that he did it for the Emperor. That was the reality of the Japanese military, true allies of the Nazi Third Reich. These were not the random acts of individuals. These were orders passed down from the Japanese military to soldiers. The murders and rapes did not happen at random, they were mandatory. That is not a reality you will see in this repulsive movie that poses the monsters responsible for these acts as tragic heroic figures.

Here is a brief excerpt from the testimony of a British soldier of what happened during the capture of Hong Kong. General Kuribayashi was the Chief of Staff for the Twenty Third Army during the capture of Hong Kong.

"Early in the morning of Christmas day the Japanese captured St Stephen's Coll-ege outside the walls of Fort Stanley. On their arrival at the Ed Cross hospital, and without one word of peace-parlay, they immediately shot and bayoneted the two Medical Officers, Dr George Black and Captain Whitney of the Royal Army Medical Corps. Captain Whitney had been walking towards the Japanese Officer in charge and was carrying a white flag plus a Red Cross flag, they were still wearing their white hospital clothing and Red Cross armbands. The Japanese entered the hospital, and amid the screaming, they ripped off bandages and field dressings from the wounded. They then proceeded to bayonet 60 of the 90 severely wounded laying helpless in their beds, one young Chinese nurse was bayoneted along with her patient when she tried to protect him.

Later, four Chinese and seven British nurses were put in one room, about one hundred orderlies, doctors and stretcher bearers were herded into another room. During the afternoon the male captives were taken out, two or three at a time, and were dismembered limb from limb. They chopped off fingers, sliced off ears, cut out tongues, and stabbed out eyes before they killed them, some were allowed to escape in order to tell the Fort Stanley defenders what was happening. In the other room the nurses were screaming, they were tied down on beds of corpses on which they were raped.

At some time in the evening the four Chinese nurses and then the three youngest of the English nurses were put to death by bayoneting. About then negotiations with the defenders at Fort Stanley began to progress, the last four of the elder British nurses were locked in a room and left alone. During the night Fort Stanley surrendered, and in the morning British prisoners were brought into the hospital to clean up. It was then that they released the four surviving, gibbering nurses. The people cleaning up waded in blood as they gathered the corpses from the execution room to prepare them for burial. They carried away an hysterical British Lieutenant who was the husband of one of the three British nurses who had been abused and then killed. For the first of the Allied war captives, the years of imprisonment had begun, and for some of the surviving nurses, years of brothel duty for Japanese soldiers began.

Sadly this is not the end of the horror Christmas Story, there were other hospitals, and a Convent, involved in similar atrocities by the Japanese invaders. i.e. Silerian Mission: The Ridge at Wong Nei Chong Gap: Eucliffe Castle: Repulse Bay and the Jockey Club at Happy Valley."

This was the brutal horrific reality of fighting the Japanese in WW2. While Japan has spent the decades since WW2 wrapped up in revisionist history treating the war as an atrocity against them committed by the Americans and endlessly commemorating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the average Chinese and Korean thinks two atom bombs weren't enough. But liberal filmmakers like Clint Eastwood are happy to portray any enemies of America as noble heroes all the while portraying the American commanders in Flags of Our Fathers as cynical and exploitative.

To achieve this goal of smearing America they will whitewash any atrocities no matter how unimaginably horrific. That's what Eastwood has done here. That's what Hollywood political film making is all about. Whether it's the Communists who are routinely treated as heroes in Hollywood particularly if they ever had to *gasp* testify before Congress on whether they were actually Communists or not. Whether it's Arab terrorists who turn out to just be protesting injustice. Whether it's the Japanese in WW2 or the Indians in the 19th century; any enemy of America is welcome.

The movie I'd like to make would be Science Fiction. It would show Clint Eastwood slipping through a hole in time back to Iwo Jima where he's captured by the Japanese and they can find out if there's any good eating on liberal Hollywood directors after all.

Yesterday I won an award. Or so I found out when I got an email from a friend telling me I'd won the JIB "Best News\Current Events Blog" award. This was news to me. I didn't even know I was nominated. Apparently though I hadn't won the JIB award, it had been renamed to the People's Choice award after a very civil falling out between Isreallycool's Aussie Dave and the IsraelForum. That's why last year's nomination button and this year's victory button look rather different.

Then just because things weren't soap operatic enough it seems another blog put out a press release claiming they won my category and then got suspended for apparently cheating. I don't name names, not to protect the innocent, but because that blog was clearly doing what a number of blogs on IsraelForum are, which is transparently fudging the voting. Go to the archives of one or two of the blogs that always end up on top of the listings and you suddenly see their posts climbing into the 300's range (No not the Frank Miller movie about the Spartans) not a rating you ever saw on the main page.

Really I don't name names, because when you get a few people together on the internet, whether it's a BBS, a board, a chat room, a group, a forum, a bloggers associations; in no time you see explosions of petty behavior as everyone wants to be in the charge of the virtual treehouse. Consider the big boys and the Pajamas Media fallout with lizardoids flaming Ann Althouse and Dennis 'I Know Real Live Muslims!' the Peasant ranting to beat the drum. It doesn't get any better at any level.

I have no talent for promoting myself. I pretty much anti-promote myself. I don't comment much on other people's blogs. I never solicit link exchanges. I don't host things and my one email conversation with a fellow blogger recently was quite unpleasant. I don't join groups. Mainly I concentrate on putting out a single post a day, often large and long and not all that easily digestible. The fact that I have the readers I do and the incoming links I do is a bit of a minor miracle that suggests there's a higher power watching over bloggers, than google bots.

So the award is nice, though I don't for a moment believe I beat Isreallycool or Atlas Shrugs which get my monthly readership in a single day. The big blogs which usually win these things will no doubt win them next year again and ignore this year as if it never happened. For now though some of the little guys won.

Politicians though increasingly build their promises on a government bureaucracy that will create an ideal society for it. This was a somewhat foreign approach to America where independence and self-reliance had always been considered primary virtues but a natural one in Europe where there had never been any real freedom, only a choice of overarching governments determined to intervene in every aspect of human life.

Where the American revolution went from a weak colonial government that rarely interfered much with their business to distant state and federal governments that rarely interfered with their business (indeed it had been the prospect of a colonial government that would interfere with their business that was the overall reason for the American revolution)

Europe made the transition from one unwieldy form of civil government under a monarchy that controlled every aspect of their lives to a republican form of civil government that controlled every aspect of their lives. Socialism was nothing more than an extension of the monarchy, the belief in the supremacy of the state as the solution for all national, social and individual problems.

Where monarchies operated through divine right with the King as the protector of his subjects, socialist tyrannies, whether it is the French Revolution's Assembly, FDR's New Deal or Huey Long's Louisiana or modern day Europe or the Democratic party, operate by 'right' of aiding the oppressed and dispossessed.

It is no real surprise why socialists and liberals support terrorism. Terrorism operates on the same principle as socialism and liberalism... by taking its moral justification from the defense of the oppressed for which any act is justifiable. Look back at the massacres of the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, when the middle and upper class progressive politicians set the mob and secret police loose in the name of social reform and aiding the 'oppressed masses'. It is little wonder why the socialists and liberals of today take the Palestinian Arab side disregarding their mass murderers, because they operate by the same principles.

If you read or listen to the news you might get the impression that the Democratic party nomination race is down to Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, despite the likely presence of such heavyweights as John Kerry, John Edwards and possibly Al Gore. Candidates whom the average American, whatever the polls might say, would be far more likely to vote for than either of the two human grotesques now being touted by every major media outlet.

Let's take a closer look. Hillary is a new Senator midway through her second term. Obama was only elected to the Senate in 2004. Less than halfway through his first term he's already running for President. Absurd and insane fails to capture it. Hillary had never held elected office prior to wedging her way into the Senate on her husband's name. On the basis of sheer experience alone, Obama and Hillary are the least experience and least qualified candidates in the race. Compare them to John Kerry who has been in congress for over 35 years and over 20 years in the Senate.

Yet Hillary and Obama have been touted for the Presidential spot all along. Obama was given a keynote speech at the Democratic convention in 2004, before he was even elected to the Senate. Hillary supporters were promoting her for President using the Senate as a stepping stone, before she even won the Senate seat. What was going on was painfully clear along.

We have two candidates who are genuinely repulsive. We have Obama, a former cokehead and likely Muslim, who has gotten by on his warm smile and his ability to deliver speeches. Then we have Hillary, who's vastly disliked and has only gotten where she has because Rudy Guliani fell ill and the Republicans were unable to muster any real candidates to run against her. (Which is yet one more argument for horsewhipping most of the New York GOP party leadership) Neither candidate could get far on their own but they can get far by running against each other.

Hillary has aligned herself with the conservative wing of the Democratic party to appeal to the more middle of the road Democrats and the old party leadership. Obama will increasingly play to the progressive left wing. The result will find that Democrats will be voting against Hillary and against Obama, more than for them, but that amounts to the same thing. Once one of them makes it to the primary, they can bring the other one on board as V.P. likely resulting in a Hillary-Obama ticket.

The same political and financial interests that have pushed them this far aren't about to let go now. The resulting ticket will be meant to unify the Democratic party behind one banner. While it isn't likely to win and the people touting it are vastly out of touch with ordinary Americans, if the Republican candidacy is properly sabotaged, then it can. How likely is that? Consider how Hillary won both of her races. She did it by running against no one. That would be the trick for winning the White House too.

For both her terms Hillary Clinton has done her best to be inoffensive and unobjectionable completely departing from her own political positions and attitude. All she was waiting was the big chance at the White House. Now she's about to get it.

Wajid Khan is going on a second fact finding mission to Muslim countries after returning from his previous fact finding trip to the middle east. Referring to Wajid Khan's report on his trip, which no one has seen despite it costing the Canadian taxpayers thousands of dollars, a Canadian government official stated, "there was some good advice in there and you are likely to see some of that advice be reflected in what the government will be doing in the future."

So who is Wajid Khan? Wajid Khan is a former Pakistani military officer who moved to Canada and opened a top automotive dealership and through some dubious financial machinations got into politics and got himself elected a member of parliament. After fallout in the Muslim community from the arrests of terrorists and Prime Minister Stephen Harper's support for Israel during the Lebanon campaign, he was offered a position as special advisor to the Prime Minister on the Middle East and Afghanistan crossing over from the Liberals to the Tories.

What does Wajid Khan's advice consist of? Well his report is being kept under wraps but not long ago Wajid Khan assailed the Canadian government for "unqualified support for Israel's military actions" and criticized the extension of the Canadian military force in Afghanistan. He argued for
building diplomatic relationships with Iran and Syria.

Now Wajid Khan will be working to shape Canadian foreign policy.

One of the most often asked questions regarding Parshas Vayeira is how G-d could interfere with Pharaoh's free will and yet punish him. Or so that is what appeared to have happened to many people.

The Parsha states that G-d hardened or alternately strengthened Pharaoh's heart. The heart is the seat of emotion, differing emotions. Pharaoh and his people could have had one of two possible responses to G-d's message and his plagues.

One of course was fear, and indeed we see in this Parsha that some of Pharaoh's servants experience the fear of G-d's word and direct their slaves and animals indoors. Pharaoh himself experiences fear at times and accedes to Moshe to some degree.

The second would be love. Odd as this may seem. The plagues initially began as wonders that did not kill but served to warn and shock. Like the burning bush Moshe saw, they contained the message of the supremacy of G-d which Pharaoh had denied, over man, animal, water, sky and earth. More than that they contained the justice and mercy of G-d, a justice that punished evil and a mercy that showed forbearance to evil even permitting it numerous chances to repent.

Strengthening the heart for Pharaoh induced courage that held off fear. A strong heart is a courageous heart. But a strong heart is also one that is capable of love. Strengthening Pharaoh's heart did not prevent him from repenting, it simply gave him the courage so that he would not surrender out of fear and yet empowered him to repent out of love.

At each turn of the road the Egyptians had chosen the evil path. Rather than learning from the famine that G-d is the ultimate master of existence, they turned all the more strongly to idol worship. Rather than learning from the Jews who were among them, they enslaved and oppressed them. Rather than learning from G-d's warnings, they persisted in their ways.

As a man raised among Egyptian nobility who was at once descended from a noble Jewish line, Moshe was the perfect prophet to convey Egypt's last warning, quietly but firmly. And when love failed and fear prevailed, the ending had already been written.

Corrupt political structures are like a medieval fortress with layers of fortifications protecting the interior, exterior fortifications are sacrificed to protect the interior.

The first response of Olmert to the Lebanon disaster was to begin tossing out scapegoats that had nothing to do with the issue by creating phony sex scandals aimed at President Katsav and Justice Minister Haim Ramon. The scandal against the President, who had never been an ally of Olmert and Ramon who remained a rival to Olmert's ally, Defense Minister Amir Peretz was pushed as far as it could go. As a tactic it failed and is now mostly out of sight.

The next tactic of Olmert was to try and move on and hope the public forgot what had happened. Vaguely conciliatory statements were made opposing unilateral withdrawal combined with rolling over prone for Rice's peace proposals. This didn't work either.

With the outer defenses breached, it was time to begin sacrificing the people who actually were responsible for the disaster. The outer layer is always the military which has the least political influence and the most accountability. The ground had been prepared for this by leaking Halutz's stock options buy early in the game, sending the message that he would be the first to go. While Halutz initially played games stating that he was "taking responsibility by remaining in office", which was initially Nixon's idea of taking responsibility as well, now Halutz is gone.

Halutz was the first of three figures. The second and next on the list will be Peretz, who is already under siege and the Labor Party has all but been handed over to Barak. The first and last is Ehud Olmert himself, around whom the investigations are beginning to deepen. A lot of major political players staked their political fortunes on Kadima and they're not about to let Olmert drag them and their new party down with him. Sharon might have managed to hold on, but it is altogether likely that the political and most especially the business interests behind the scenes will decide that Kadima needs a new ruler and then Olmert will go the way of Halutz as has Peretz before him.

This should not be met with any particular rejoicing though because what we are fighting is not an individual or individuals but a corrupt political culture that has seized power with a death grip and is destroying the country. There will be replacements found for Olmert and Peretz all too easily and more political generals will be found from the old boys club. Replacing Olmert with another Olmert is no victory. (No more than replacing Olmert with Avigdor Lieberman or Ehud Barak) Only reforming its leadership can change and save the nation.

And so the game of twelve little indians goes on.

As the evolution or rather devolution of Jewish identity in America continues we are approaching a crossroads leading to two paths.

The first path is the original understanding of the Jewish people as a people and a nation following a covenant with G-d. Orthodox Jews remain closest to this, though they often tend to be weak on the nation part.

The second path is that of a Post-Jewish ethnic identity, which is to American Jewish identity what Post-Zionism is to Israeli identity. It disposes of any real Jewish identity in favor of a universalized Jewish identity. It is what we see being adopted among secular and liberal streams of American Jews.

To understand this second path it is necessary to look at the nature of ethnicity and race in America. For a long time race in America was defined as a contrast between black and white. These were not real categories but artificial ones created by the dominant culture of the time.

A wide variety of peoples usually but not always originating from Africa were classed under one category for the convenience of the Arab and European slavers who trafficked in them. Many of these peoples hated each other and had very little in common. By the 20th century many of them were mixed with White and Indian and other groups. Some in these categories were actually whiter than those officially considered White. Black or rather Negro was a convenient category for the dominant culture to class everyone they considered other.

Much the same thing has happened with the various Latino/Hispanic categories which piles in people who are Indians, Europeans, Africans and often a mix of the three into one box. Modern day Indians are quite often mixed up with Africans and Europeans creating altogether artificial tribes for financial benefits.

These categories were not originally based on the real identities of these peoples, but out of ignorance and a convenient way to file them all into one category. As the 20th century hit its latter half, they began reclaiming their identities, trying to turn negative identities into positive identities. These identities as Black, Indian or Hispanic, were just as much artificial constructs as before. These were not real peoples but chaotic conglomerations classed together out of ignorance.

The devolution of liberal streams of Judaism began with embracing secularism, deemphasizing a unique identity and destiny and seeking to universalize Judaism and the Jewish experience. To their shock of course they discovered that they couldn't take that course and still avoid intermarriage. Facing the choice between changing course to preserve their part of the Jewish people and liberalizing further, they liberalized further. Reform Judaism has taken the tack that intermarriage is perfectly normal and should be embraced in the hopes of getting the non-Jewish partner and their children to come to Temple too. Federation surveys only ask whether the person has some form of Jewish identity or connection to their roots.

Reform Judaism shows enough growth to prove this approach bears some fruit but all it really does is usher in the Post-Jewish era in which being Jewish is no more real an identity than Black and no more authentic than the Indian Tribes of the Great Casino. Jewish stops being a national covenant and becomes a matter of anyone who has some Jewish roots or is married to someone Jewish and sorta kinda considers that they might want to come to Temple some time. Jewish identity becomes optional, something you choose if you feel like it and discard if you don't.

It's a small step from there to simply tossing out any ethnic and national identity altogether and universalizing liberal Judaism into another liberal Christian denomination, something that was pretty much the goal of Reform Judaism all along. You can only toss out so many things in the name of reform, before you have nothing left except vague slogans and a borrowed identity.

And that doesn't work anyway. Unlike being Black which is designated by the perception of skin color, Jewish appearance isn't all that definitive. Unlike the Indians or any other minority for that matter, there's no real financial benefit to being Jewish. When you discard religion, the only appeal for remaining Jewish is to try and make Jewish identity seem hip or cool. And that can work for a bit but not for very long because being Jewish for real is more a painful reality than anything else. And without religion to define the context for all the hatred of Jews and discrimination and violence directed at Jews, the entire thing becomes the sort of meaningless horror that drives people to self-hatred or philosophy; two common occupations among Jews.

When liberal Judaism turns Judaism into another option in a religious landscape in which they can expect the majority of their congregations to be intermarried, they cease to have any meaningful attachment to the Jewish people. To see the future of Reform Judaism, simply think Chinese.

Asian-Americans have the second highest rate of intermarriage compared to Jews. It's at over 70 percent for Japanese-Americans. 40 percent for first generation Chinese. 60 percent for second generation Chinese. Combine a high intermarriage rate for both Jews and Asians with more cultural similarities between Jews and Asians, than between most other groups, a high presence in colleges and universities and the large result of Jewish and Asian intermarriages is no surprise. Most people I suspect have seen no shortage of such couples. Even in the Orthodox world, some of the more high profile converts via marriage have been Asian.

Take a high Asian birth rate and immigration rate to America, combine it with a high intermarriage rate with a shrinking Jewish population and you wind up with a Jewish population in America that looks increasingly Asian. Then pile on the adoptions of Asian babies by liberal Jewish couples that don't want the hassle of actually having their own children. Then walk into a Reform Temple 50 years from now and don't be surprised if it looks rather Chinese.

Converts, legitimate converts who seek to become Jewish in order to be close to G-d and the Jewish people, are a wonderful thing. However conversion as a means of legitimizing intermarriage is worthless. By throwing up their hands and responding to intermarriage by treating being Jewish as an option, liberal streams of Judaism have made their own extinction inevitable one way or another. More likely both. The first way is demographic death through intermarriage and assimilation away from Judaism. The second way is through intermarriage and assimilation into Judaism until is loses all attachment to a specific people and becomes to Judaism and the Jewish people, roughly what Christianity did. An alien identity and faith distantly attached to some Jewish ideas.

Thus the future of Reform Judaism is Chinese.

Urban Outfitters announces their new line of terrorist sympathizing wear for the rich slacker activist. Dress just like those guys who kill Americans on TV while you demand the withdrawal of the troops. Don't miss your pedicure but keep your scruffy look for that street activist cred. Make vague statements about Israeli apartheid while sipping your Starbucks and be sure to ask Mommy and Daddy to sponsor your trip to Gaza over spring break. Photos against the wall included.

Don't be the last in your dorm still wearing that Che T-Shirt. Get with the times. Che was the terrorist of the past. Arabs are the terrorists of the future. Show your commitment to their cause of killing American soldiers, Iraqis and random innocent people with a keffiyah, aka Anti-War Scarf for the low low price of 19.99 at worse malls everywhere.

When reporters compared Israel's bombing of Lebanon to the Warsaw Ghetto, as they had previously compared the falsified destruction of Jenin to the Warsaw Ghetto, some might have noted the bitter irony of comparing Jews to Nazis while comparing the fanatical cult intent on a renewed genocide of the Jews which itself engages in Holocaust denial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But this is part on the ongoing trend of the exploitation of the Holocaust that has its roots in the hijacking and expropriation of the murder of six million to serve everyone's pet cause.

In 2003 the animal rights organization PETA unveiled a new campaign titled, 'Holocaust on Your Plate.' The ads for the campaign featured a photo of a Jewish concentration camp inmate side by side with a cow. Controversial campaigns were nothing new for PETA which had put up ads trying to tie New York Mayor Rudy Guliani's cancer to drinking milk and handed out cartoons to children warning them that milk would make them sick and a handbook warning children that if their father goes fishing he might decide to kill their dog too.

In 2005 PETA apologized for causing any pain but not for the campaign and shows every sign of continuing to use Holocaust images and analogies and metaphors in its propaganda literature. Other animal rights organizations quickly picked up on the idea. The National Primate Research Exhibition Hall, compares itself to the Holocaust memorial at Auschwitz. The Consistency in Compassion Campaign (CCC), a project of the Northwest Animal Rights Network of Seattle, Washington, used images of murdered Holocaust victims in a pit juxtaposed with photos of dead cows. Over half a century after the Holocaust the popular propaganda of Streicher and Goebbels which depicted Jews as subhuman and of no more worth than animals had been resurrected and lived again on the pages of popular magazines and advertising billboards across America and Europe.

PETA had a long history of vandalism, pornography and slander behind them all of it played out as publicity stunts to ensure the maximum attention from the press; still some might have thought that it had gone too far and risked alienating the urban based demographic it was targeting. This exploitation though was just the opening shot in what would become a PETA campaign against the Jews. Like their European animal rights counterparts who have in many cases successfully targeted Kosher slaughter, banning it outright in Sweden and pushing its outlawing in England; PETA moved towards its goal of barring the slaughter of Kosher meat by targeting Kosher meat plants.

Not satisfied with merely abusing and exploiting the Holocaust and comparing Jews to animals, much as the Nazis themselves had, PETA would begin a campaign targeting Kosher slaughter of animals that continues to this day. This is typical of organizations that exploit the Holocaust, which begin by denigrating the Holocaust and conclude by turning on Jews themselves because after all displaying contempt for suffering is the prelude to inflicting it.

In exploiting the Holocaust in this way PETA was following a long trend of organizations exploiting the Holocaust for their own causes. In 1997 when Scientology wanted to protest the legal restrictions placed on it by the German government, it took out full page ads in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and numerous other major papers signed by major Hollywood celebrities such as John Travolta, Oliver Stone and Dustin Hoffman comparing Germany's treatment of Scientology cult members to the Holocaust. Scientology had always had close ties to Hollywood numbering many celebrities as members including John Travolta, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise. A large publicity campaign was put out playing on the theme of, "first they came for the Communists", a notorious forged line of prose sunk into collective memory that makes the argument that any societal persecution or discrimination of anyone is itself the opening number to genocide.

The fuss faded but Scientology marched on. In 2003 again Scientology launched an exhibition in Berlin claiming that psychiatry was evil and had caused the Holocaust. "It is a cold, hard fact that psychiatry spawned the ideology which fired Hitler's mania, turned the Nazis into mass murderers and created the Holocaust," was a typical line from the display. That psychiatry was heavily associated with Sigmund Freud, a Jew, who himself faced persecution by the Nazis and whose daughter had to flee them, would be of no concern to Scientology. Himself committed to a psychiatric hospital the founder of Scientology L. Ron Hubbard had an obsession with the evils of psychiatry and viewed them as competition for his own supposed inventions of curing psychological problems using wires attached to tin cans.

The most recent scandal on this subject is a documentary put out by the Christian Coral Ridge Ministries entitled 'Darwin's Deadly Legacy' seeking to blame Darwin, Darwinism and Evolution for Nazism and the Holocaust. The ADL's condemnation of the ministry's documentary as exploiting the Holocaust only opened up a new can of worms. The ministry retorted by arguing that Hitler was an evolutionist, which may be the case but so is much of Europe and the United States. A prominent Jewish figure attached to the Christian religious right responded with an article accusing the ADL of defending Darwnism, though there is no line in their press release defending Darwin or Darwinism.

With many fundamentalist Christians enmeshed in fighting creationism vs evolution battles in public schools, evolution is to many fundamentalist Christians now the key evil, a position that must be inevitably propped up by referencing the Holocaust. As animal rights activists view eating meat as the ultimate evil and Scientologists see psychiatry as the ultimate threat, fundamentalist Christians follow the pattern by exploiting the Holocaust to fight their own ultimate threat. By co-opting the Holocaust each of these groups tries to stretch out a symbol for ultimate evil to fit their own worldview. To animal rights activists the Nazis were supremacists, to the Scientologists they were psychiatrists and to Christians they were secular godless evolutionists. What all of them agree on is that the Nazis were not what they actually were, which is the bigoted murderers of Jews. These different factions may differ on the details but all of them agree that rather than being the enemies of the Jews, the Nazis were in truth the enemies of Scientology or Christianity or all life on the planet and the Jews just happened to get in the way.

This indeed is the narrative of Christian religious historical revisionism on the Holocaust which postulates a secular godless mechanistic materialistic Nazi regime that persecuted Christians and Jews in the name of abstract rationalism. That this worldview is entirely divorced from history makes no real difference, it is a convenient attempt to avoid coming to terms with the reality that Nazi anti-Semitism was the outgrowth of a thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism.

After all if we divorce Christian anti-Semitism from Nazism, it's reasonable to ask then, why the Jews. If the Nazis were operating in a purely evolutionary realm of Eugenics, then the Jews were hardly inferiors by any objective statistical standpoint. With Jews vastly overrepresented in medical and scientific professions and even among the war heroes of WWI, it would be quite impossible for a rational scientific analysis to conclude that Eugenics mandated destroying the Jews. It is only when Eugenics was used to justify an pre-existing anti-Semitism and a pre-existing desire to destroy the Jews, that such a conclusion can be reached. Eugenics and evolution therefore becoming nothing more than rhetorical justifications, rather than ideological underpinnings for any effort to destroy the Jews.

With that idea discarded Christians may argue, as the Pope attempted to do, that the Nazis hated Christianity and killed Jews to get to the Christians but then one has to wonder why the Vatican remained intact and why priests sat there hearing confessions from SS men with fresh Jewish blood on their hands who with their consciences fresh, went out to kill again. Mostly one has to wonder why this novel idea didn't occur to the Catholic Church or to the American Churches during WW2, at least insofar as saving the Jews or at least speaking out against their slaughter.

Finally if the Nazis were out to wipe out Christianity they might have tried shuttering the churches, banning religion, burning all the bibles and executing all the clergy. Instead German churches continued to run praying for the victory of Germany in the war and German churchgoers continued sending millions in tithes to the Vatican, at a time when Germany was losing the war and desperate for funds. It is manifestly irrational to argue that the Nazis hatred for the Jews whom they tried to exterminate was merely a subset for their hatred of Christians, whom they did not try to exterminate and whom in any case were the Nazis themselves. To talk of Nazis hating Christians makes no sense because the two were one and the same.

Tens of millions of German Catholics and Lutherans who voted for Hitler, cheered at his rallies and served in the Wermacht and the SS and implemented the Holocaust and the conquest of Europe did not suddenly become pagans overnight. Norse altars did not replace churches during or after the war. The vast majority of Germans continued believing in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior co-equal with their belief that the Jews were an alien evil race that needed to be eradicated. There is no contradiction there since European Christians had believed much the same thing for many centuries and occasionally tried to implement it. The Nazis were subjectively no different from the Christian crusaders who massacred every single Jew in Israel and covered the German Jewish communities in blood as they marched their way to the Holy Land slaughtering men, women and children.

The new revisionist historical narrative as promoted by the Coral Ridge documentary attempts to reassign that evil from Christian hearts to Darwinian ones, even as it then blames the Jews in the form of the ADL for defending Darwinism. As with PETA and Scientology, once the Holocaust is lifted from being motivated by anti-Semitism to being motivated by Psychiatry, Darwinism, the Jews quickly then become identified with the very evils the revisionist history of the Holocaust postulates were the real motives of the Nazis. To PETA Jews are butchers of animals, to Scientology Jews are psychiatrists and to fundamentalist Christians Jews are the teachers and defenders of a godless secular morality. Not all of them, just the ones that won't stand together and join ranks with them in their act of historical revisionism and fight the real evils of hamburgers, psychoanalysis and dinosaurs.

When bombs fall on Beirut and the terrorist murderers of Jews are compared to the martyrs of the Holocaust, it is merely the logical conclusion of the intellectual processes of a world that has written off the Jewish Holocaust fragmenting it into a thousand other Holocausts to fit each ideological faction's worldview. To liberals there was no Jewish Holocaust only a universal one against racial and ethnic minorities which conveniently Jews are no longer numbered among. To conservatives there was no Jewish Holocaust only a religious one, primarily aimed at Christians, which Jews are not numbered among. To animal rights activists there was no Jewish Holocaust, only one aimed against all life on earth. To Scientologists there was no Jewish Holocaust, only psychiatry run amuck.

All these groups, opposed as they are to each other, agree on one thing, there was no Jewish Holocaust. The murder of the Jews was just a subset of a larger issue and the Jews have no right to use this universal idea of the Holocaust for any narrow religious or nationalistic claim. The Jews are allowed to commemorate the dead but not to agitate against a repetition of the Holocaust against those Jews still living. That far and no father. The Holocaust can be trotted out on behalf of Muslim Albanians, Catholic Croats, Animist Sudanese and any and every other people. It cannot however be used to defend the right of those same survivors of the Holocaust to found a nation of their own and defend its narrow borders against a fanatical ideology of 1 Billion that seeks to wipe them and theirs off the earth.

This ongoing exploitation of the Holocaust happening day by day, every time some columnist, tv personality, activist, writer, actor or random idiot flagrantly compares something to the Holocaust. It is why it is crucial to maintain the true memory of the Holocaust as an attempt to eradicate the Jewish people and not as fodder for the rhetoric of any faction with a political or social agenda. It is important to remember the dead but also the living because the dead cannot be killed again but the living can. Walk the empty streets of Tsfat and know that it can.

It was not the psychiatrists or the evolutionists or the meat eaters who came for us in 1939 but a collective worldwide ideology of whom modern Islam is merely the latest thrust. An ideology that rode with Nevuchadnezzar and Sisra, that strode confidently with Haman and Hitler, with Stalin and King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. That spoke through the mouths of Kings and Popes, clergymen and atheists, Communists and Nationalists, Crusaders and Cossacks in a voice of death. It speaks now through Mullahs in turbans and beards but it is still the same voice, the same echo ringing through history when Pharaoh and Nimrod spoke it long ago. Walk the streets of abandoned northern cities as if half a century of Jewish history had been turned back in a moment and know it still lives.

Parshas Shemos begins with Pharaoh's declaration of war against the Jewish people warning the Egyptian people that the Jewish people are a grave threat and that they must be enslaved. While this appears to set a template that will be followed by regimes and anti-Semites throughout history, there is no real explanation for Pharaoh's attitude. Why have the Jews which were once welcomed now treated as a menace and eventual targets for genocide?

Pharaoh's words give part of the answer. The Jews are numerous. They are reproducing in large numbers. This is a theme that obsessively recurs with both Pharaohs throughout the Parsha. Both repeatedly rant about the numerousness of the Jews. They set out to interrupt Jewish family life and kill Jewish babies. It is somehow the key point for the Pharaohs.

But this fails to explain Pharaoh's assertion in his speech to the Egyptian people in which he fears that when war comes, the Jews will unite with their enemies and go up from the land. There seems to be no rational reason for this belief, yet there is a revealing slip of the tongue in this. Pharaoh says, VeAlah, And they will ascend. Where the previous Pharaoh used the word Ba'ah to Yosef, Coming, to describe the immigration of the Jews from Caanan to Egypt thus putting both lands on an equal level, this Pharaoh describes the Jews as ascending, rising up from the land, as if the land of Egypt is inferior somehow.

Egypt was certainly not inferior as a country. The land was rich, the civilization was advanced and there was plenty of wealth. What factor could then create that inferiority. A moral factor. A difference in values between the two peoples explains why Pharaoh would fear that the Jews might view Egypt as deprvaded and finding they had more in common with the enemy, wish to leave the land.

The question of what that difference was, goes to the invisible question no one asks about Pharaoh's speech. Yaacov's family came to Egypt as 70 people. They multiplied amazingly but still why were the Egyptians so frightened about their increase in numbers? Weren't the Egyptians reproducing themselves? Surely an entire nation should be able to outbalance a few immigrants.

The answer lies at the core of the conflict because indeed the Egyptians were not reproducing. We are told that the new Pharaoh did not know Yosef. He did however know of the famine. An event like that which so drastically changed the country's government and fortunes could not have been forgotten. The Egyptian civilization was not primitive, it was the most advanced of the time. Its leaders could be evil but not stupid. They did not simply forget about the famine and assume that after it ended they would be safe from now on. They took action.

When we are told that the new Pharaoh did not know Yosef, this has far greater implications than the harsh treatment of the Jews. Yosef created a context for the famine. Each time Yosef emphasized the divine role in this, he was repeating the point that the famine was caused by G-d's will. It was not random chance or weather but a divine force. Not knowing Yosef also meant the Egyptian leaders did not know G-d and their view of the famine was materialistic and practical. They no doubt took various agricultural measures to prepare for future famines. But they also undertook one of the more obvious steps, which today is also repeatedly urged as a means of fighting famine in the third world. Population control.

Population control would maintain a more limited population to insure that famine would be less of a threat so the country would not outstrip its available resources. This would explain the Egyptian obsession with the growth of the Jewish population. Throughout the Parsha both Pharaohs obsessively return to the question of the size of the Jewish population, which was not controlled, in comparison to the size of the Egyptian population which was. It also explains how the Jewish population could so easily outstrip the Egyptian one. It was because the Jewish population was growing and the Egyptian one wasn't.

How did Egypt control its population? Well we see how Pharaoh attempts to control the Jewish population, through infanticide. Infanticide is a common means still today of a crude population control in the third world and has been throughout history. Egypt was no different. Pharaoh's program of infanticide aimed at Jews very likely mirrored their own program for Egyptian children. Jewish male babies are killed while female babies are kept alive, likely because Egyptians killed their female babies and kept their male babies alive, thus resulting in a deficit of female babies Pharaoh hoped to compensate for from the Jewish population. The same situation exists today in China where a deficit of 18 million female babies because of abortion and infanticide is set to create havoc when the generation comes of age.

Thousands of years later Greek and Roman writers would note and alternately praise and condemn the Jews for not practicing infanticide, precisely because it was so common in the world of the time. Even today religious families are often condemned for having many children and a value system that says aborting unwanted babies is preferable. The Jewish people however who kept to their heritage considered this an abomination in any period. Thus the Jewish midwives refused Pharaoh's demand, not for nationalistic reasons, but because they feared G-d.

Two cultures were living side by side with a profound difference in their approach to human life. The Egyptians saw a growing uncontrolled population of Jews that threatened their survival and way of life and a return of the famine. The Jews knew that the famine was the work of G-d and created by his will. This situation could not continue for very long. As the dominant power the Egyptians enslaved the Jews and attempted to control the Jewish population by interrupting family life and killing Jewish babies.

Throwing babies into the Nile, which the Egyptians viewed as a god representing fertility and agricultural success, had the form of a ritual human sacrifice. And indeed the Egyptians had been practicing infanticide in the hopes of averting a famine. The first plague that strikes turns the water of the Nile to blood. This plague is non-lethal but a warning that there will be blood to come. Like Hevel's blood crying out from the earth, the blood was the blood of the Jewish children the Egyptians had murdered.

The plagues that followed assaulted every Egyptian conception of the material world and the powers they thought were invested in it. The river, the sun, animals, the earth and everything they had worshiped and depended on turned against them. Plague by plague it was demonstrated to them that G-d was above all natural elements and in control of them. It was G-d who brought these plagues as he had brought the famine. In forgetting that the Egyptians had also forgotten all morality.

Only with the final plague was the demonstration complete with the ultimate devastating act of justice that struck at the heart of what had been the Egyptian value system. In a culture that practices infanticide, the first born males are of highest value and female children of the least value. The death of the first born destroyed what the Egyptians had engaged in mass murder to protect. As the Egyptians had selected out inferior children to die, G-d selected out those they had kept alive in a punishment not only for the Jewish children they had murdered but for their own.

The culture of infanticide that had been at the heart of the enslavement of the Jews was destroyed. It was why this and nothing else before it had broken Pharaoh's will to resist. Previous plagues had killed but none had struck so at the fundamentals of their culture. When they proclaimed, "Kulanu Meitim", they were expressing the overwhelming devastation that had left them literally dead.

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The Jawa Report

My Fellow Americans

Three years ago I together with your elected representatives and a coalition of nations from around the world made the decision that Saddam Hussein's tyranny had to end. Saddam had been responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands, he had used chemical weapons for ethnic cleansing and invaded his neighbors. The countless acts of barbarity and cruelty of his regime ranging from rape rooms to dismembering critics of his regime and murdering their children alone created an unanswerable case for his removal.

Three years later Saddam has been executed but parts of Iraq remain in turmoil and our casualties have passed 3000 dead. Our strategy was to rebuild Iraq but its neighbors threatened by an emerging democracy were determined that we should not succeed. They trained, financed and transported terrorists who killed our soldiers, kidnapped foreign aid workers, cut pipelines, bombed medical facilities and transformed the rebuilding process into an endless war. We have done our best to bring peace and stability to Iraq but that is impossible as long as outside forces continue to wage war against us.

We believed that we could take one nation and remake it as a model to the rest of the region. But Iraq cannot be a model so long as the terrorism continues. For three years we have tried to fight the terrorists from within with tremendous losses in American lives and the lives of ordinary Iraqis caught in the firefight. This cannot go on any longer. To defeat the terrorists the supply chain of terrorist must be cut. There is only one way to do that, by destroying the source.

We know who is responsible for much of the terrorism against us and against ordinary Iraqis attempting to live their lives in peace and security. We have interrogated terrorists and heard their confessions, learned who trained them and who supplied them and who funded them. As a result of this process we have gathered extensive evidence that the government of Iran is behind these attacks against us.

For many decades Iran has waged a deadly campaign against us. They invaded our embassy and held our people hostage. The man who took part in that attack is the President of Iran today who is busy developing nuclear weapons. Weapons that will be able to annihilate millions. The Iranian government funds terrorism around the world. They have been behind bombings in Argentina, France and Lebanon. They control organized crime syndicates that reach deep inside our own borders in the United States. They have been behind the murders of hundreds of our marines in Beirut. They are behind the killings of hundreds of American soldiers in the past few years alone. This must end.

In removing Saddam Hussein we also removed one of the top sponsors of Sunni Islamic terrorism. Iran is incontestably the number one sponsor of Shiite Islamic terrorism and a destructive force in the region. The terrorist groups they sponsor have gone on to disrupt Lebanon, Israel and Iraq among other countries. They are a pariah stage that relentlessly oppresses its own people, reduces women and minorities to second class citizens and maintains the occupation of South Azerbajian and the Azeri people. The time has come to end it.

Many people, particularly my political opponents in congress, expect me to call for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq and I will not disappoint them. The majority of our troops will indeed be leaving Iraq but they will not be going far. Withdrawal is another word for surrender and when you surrender you must pay the price of defeat. This country will not be defeated. We are not withdrawing, we are advancing to take on the real enemy. To take on the people behind the terrorists, behind the bombings and behind the kidnappings and murders.

A popular criticism of our invasion of Iraq is that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction. He did. Unlike Saddam though Iran is openly developing weapons of mass destruction and it is making no attempt whatsoever to hide them. While the President of Iran denies the Holocaust that happened, he is planning another one to take its place. That Holocaust may take place in Israel, it may take place in Iraq, it may take place in New York or Washington D.C. or London. We do not know where he will strike and the only way to make sure he never gets the chance is to stop him before it is too late. The primary sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East and the world today cannot be allowed to wield nuclear weapons.

Iran has murdered American soldiers and they will continue to do so. We have three choices before us. We can retreat, go home, climb under our covers and hope that the terrorists don't come after us. Like they did last time. We can keep fighting in Iraq throwing more troops into a meatgrinder where they cannot distinguish between enemies and friends on the battlefield. Or we can strike at the source of terrorism and win this war. Those are the three choices before us today. Of such choices is the nature of human courage determined.

There are no people on earth who desire peace more than the American people but peace requires the determination to withstand evil by force. At the start of our great republic, Patrick Henry warned the House of Burgesses that peace cannot be purchased at the price of appeasement and surrender. It was true then. It is true now. Our choices are to fight or to surrender. This nation was born out of the decision made by men, some extraordinary, most ordinary, that to fight tyranny was better than to give in to it. That the cause of human freedom and the defense of our nation are things worth killing and dying for. This choice is ours to make today.

In response to the murder of American soldiers by terrorists trained, financed and equipped by Iran and by Iranian military officers operating as insurgents. In response to the Iranian regime's aggressive development of atomic weapons in contravention of international norms. In response to this brutal tyranny's oppression of their own people and the threat they represent to our own citizens, I ask Congress to declare a State of War between us and Iran. This will enable the quickest and most efficient resolution of this conflict. Should Congress fail to act promptly and dawdle while the killing of our troops goes on, I am authorized as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to conduct a military campaign as a police action. This is not a matter of politics, it is a matter of national urgency which should draw out a bipartisan spirit of unity. Should Congress fail to provide that spirit of unity, I have no doubt that the American people will provide it as they always have in times of crisis.

It has been three bloody years. In three days they come to an end and a new era will begin for the Middle East and the World. God bless you and God bless America.

No sooner do I check the news than I see the media trumpeting the latest Hamas "concession" on Israel. Brace yourselves. Get ready for it.

"Hamas acknowledges the existence of Israel but formal recognition by the group will only be considered when a Palestinian state has been created, the movement's leader Khaled Meshaal said on Wednesday."

Did you get that folks? The head of Hamas has acknowledged that Israel exists. Additionally he's acknowledged that the United States exists, that up is up and down is down and the desert is full of sand. What more could Israel possibly want?

The issue was never Hamas acknowledging that Israel exists. Hamas' decades long campaign against Israel rather suggests that Israel exists. Otherwise why attack it?

The issue was Hamas recognizing Israel as a state and ending attempts to destroy it. Acknowledging that there is such a place as Israel does not remotely do this. All this latest statement means is that Hamas has made yet another meaningless statement and promises to "consider" recognizing Israel when they have even more territory obtained from Israel. A promise that is empty because Hamas has never recognized Israel, that much is in its charter, and meanwhile it plays word games.

"Softening a previous refusal to accept the Jewish state's existence, Meshaal said Israel was a "reality."

So we're a "reality" now. Oh my. Who knew. Before we were unreal. Now we're a reality.

All Meshaal is saying is that Israel is a real problem, one he intends to get rid of. That's what Hamas has been dedicated to.

"The problem is not that there is an entity called Israel," said Meshaal. "The problem is that the Palestinian state is non-existent."

Of course since Hamas believes that a Palestinian state has to be built to replace Israel, what this is really saying is akin to saying, "The problem is not that there is an empty lot here, but that it hasn't yet been bulldozed to create a shopping mall.

In other words, yet more word games the media is all too happy to fall for.

"Changing the Hamas charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel, was also a matter for the future, he said.

"The distant future will have its own circumstances and positions could be determined then," he said in a wide-ranging interview."

Oh yes the far distant future where any sort of circumstances and positions could possibly be determined and considered... except when they aren't. How wide ranging.


"Meshaal said Hamas backed Arab demands that a Palestinian state should include Gaza, the West Bank and east Jerusalem and that Israel should accept the right of Palestinian refugees to return to homes lost in a 1967 war and before."

Also known as the destruction of Israel.