Showing posts from April, 2007

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A Society Always Needs Enemies

A society always needs enemies. Or rather a political cause does. A society that pursues peace with a former enemy, usually does so at the cost of finding new enemies, usually enemies at home. The left which believes itself above this kind of politics, in fact vigorously practices it. When the progressive camp preached against Red-Baiting, it was not because they sought a different kind of politics than one premised on demonizing your opponents and conducting smear campaigns against them-- but because they felt there were worthier enemies at home to demonize and conduct smear campaigns against. With the Cold War over and the Democrats in power, the Clinton Administration did its best to convince us that the real threat to America came from the Militia Movement-- and possibly right wing talk radio. In Israel this was paralleled by the "Peace Process" in which Israel set up a Palestinian terrorist entity within its borders and declared that a New Middle East was here-- and the

Five Decades of Failing to Learn from MacArthur

General Douglas MacArthur had fought in the first and second world wars and then in Korea. He had served as General of the Army. The transition from WW1 and WW2 to Korea marked a transition to a different kind of war, from the massive collision between the vast armies of industrial nations to a proxy war fought between the armies of an industrialized nation and guerrilla and insurgent forces supplied and trained by its enemies. Korea was the first test of such an engagement that would shape the nature of the wars America fought throughout the twentieth century. After much bloodshed and loss of life, the allied nations managed to keep South Korea free, in a prolonged and bloody campaign. The Vietnam War would follow the Korean War, a war in many ways not too dissimilar but one fought by a generation that had seen its culture and its elites heavily infiltrated by the ideology of the Communist enemy. The War in Iraq we are fighting today is a repetition of the same fundamental problem, a

Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in Israel

The JTA is finally reporting on the rising Anti-Semitic attacks and the Neo-Nazi presence in Israel thanks to the Jewish Agency policy of bringing in anyone and everyone so long as they claimed to have a Jewish relative somewhere and there were certainly no shortage of Russians interested in what they thought was the good life in Israel. Once they got there however they quickly discovered that the economic situation might be better than in Russia, but it was certainly no buffet. Ari Ackerman, a student from Switzerland, was walking home along the Tel Aviv beach after a late-night swim when he and a friend were jumped by a gang singing Nazi songs and displaying swastika tattoos. The perpetrators, a group of Russian-speaking teenagers, eventually ran off. Ackerman and his friend, their faces bruised and bloodied, set off to the closest police station only to have their case shrugged off. In recent years, sporadic acts of anti-Semitism have hit Israel, most of them carried out by disaffec

A Note from the Author

This week my op-ed piece, "Librescu Repudiated The Cult Of The Victim" appears in the Jewish Press. Additionally I've been nominated for the Jewish and Israeli Blog awards in several categories. Readers who like can vote for me here for Best Current Events Blog and Best Right Wing Blog here Thanks to all who nominated for me and voted for me, particularly Lemon Lime Moon and Linda of Something and Half of Something . Mr. Bagel meanwhile has a cartoon rendering of the JIB's.

Boris Yeltsin Dies, LePen Loses

For all his belligerence and incompetence, Boris Yeltsin was the rarest of creatures in the phylum of the Russian ruler, a democrat and an idealist. He fell, as democrats and idealists tend to fall in the gullet of the Russian state. But he defied the monster, the beast of the totalitarian Soviet bureaucracy of death and stabbed it in its dying throes and stood upon its bleeding corpse with sword raised high and celebrated thinking the monster dead. The monster of course does not die. It coiled its ugly self around the Empire of the Czars as over the Empire of the Premiers. It returns now in the form of a grim skeleton, a KGB chief with dead eyes who rules the land again and stretches out his hands across Europe and the oceans beyond. Dragons are hard to slay and if Boris Yeltsin was a poor dragonslayer, he did not lack for courage and in a land filled with dragons and too few men to slay them, he raised his sword and stood his ground for that golden shining moment in the sun. For all

Yom Hatzmaut - The Redemption of Israel - Part 2

For two thousand years, the two world religions that had taken their inspiration from the religion of the Jews did their best to grind the very people into whose well of beliefs they had dipped their buckets-- to dust. For a thousand years the voices of the world that weren't advocating ghettos and Pharaoh's whip and the Inquisition's stake, whispered eagerly that the only possible way for the Jews was assimilation. To mingle with the rest of the world and vanish forever. Arnold Toynbee proclaimed that the Jewish people were the fossils of history. And then the fossils rose again. The cemeteries disgorged their dead. A nation composed of farmers and Holocaust survivors stood off the armies of the Jordanian Legion and that of five Arab nations, each of which was many times larger than Israel. And at the end a blue and white flag waved over a new land. Within a decade that land was bursting with productivity and industry. With settled cities and great works. With toil and

Yom Hatzmaut - The Redemption of Israel - Part 1

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves, Close by the street of this fair seaport town, Silent beside the never-silent waves, At rest in all this moving up and down! But ah! what once has been shall be no more! The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again. The Jewish Cemetery at Newport - Longfellow The hand of the LORD was upon me, and the LORD carried me out in a spirit, and set me down in the midst of the valley, and it was full of bones And He said unto me: 'Son of man, can these bones live?' And I answered: 'O Lord GOD, Thou knowest. Then He said unto me: 'Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off. Therefore prophesy, and say unto them: Thus saith the Lord GOD: Behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O My people; and I will bring you into

Nili at Amona

The Jerusalem Post story showed photographer Oded Balilty celebrating his Pulitzer Prize win by gleefully opening up a bottle of champagne. The Jerusalem Post, which in the post-Lord Black era, has come to serve as an uncritical mouthpiece for the Kadima party and which repeatedly published lies and distortions about the police riot at Amona, focuses on Balilty's achievement. There is no doubt that Balilty took some extraordinary and important photographs at Amona. Many of the photos I have showcased in the Amona section of this blog come from him. But there is no understanding either from him that the photo is not an occasion for celebration, but for mourning. That is entirely absent in the cheerful tone of the Jpost article . Nili herself, the 15 year old girl in the photo states, "In the press they wrote proudly of this award to the photographer that allegedly has brought honor to Israel. But this is not honor, the picture is an embarrassment to the nation of Isra

Muslim Sudanese Workers Squeeze Out Gush Katif Refugees

As Israel continues importing large numbers of mostly Muslim Sudanese refugees, at Kibbutz Yad Chana and other Kibbutzim this squeezing out Gush Katif refugees living in tent cities and resulting in the firing of Christian and Buddhist Thai workers, who in contrast to the Muslim Sudanese are generally Pro-Israel. The large scale immigration of Sudanese Muslims into Israel has largely gone under the radar and then became a series of heartwarming stories about Sudanese refugees finding shelter in Israel. While there is no doubt that what some of them experienced in the Sudanese civil war is tragic, the majority of those refugees are not the persecuted African Animist and Christian African Sudanese who have been nearly wiped out, by Sudan's Arab Muslim rulers, but Sudanese African Muslims. These Sudanese Muslims in turn spend a lot of time in local Arab villages with their fellow Muslims. By opening the doors for them, old line lefty Kibbutzim which have found themselves losing the yo

Virginia Tech Shooter Cho Seung-Hui Father was in Saudi Arabia

Cho Seung-Hui's father, Cho Seong-Tae spent ten years working in Saudi Arabia as a construction worker. A decade spent in Saudi Arabia would have given his father an extensive Islamic background. Hui's own sister works for the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office in the State Department. A fact that may or may not be relevant. Hui Chinese are a Muslim ethnicity and are present also in Malaysia and Korea.

Librescu at Virginia Tech: The Cult of the Victim and the Tribute of a Hero

The Cult of the Victim and the Tribute of a Hero At the Munich Olympics, when the Palestinian terrorists broke into the rooms of the Israeli athletes, Yosef Gutfreund threw his weight against the door giving others a chance to escape through the windows. That legacy was alive when Virginia Tech Professor Liviu Librescu blocked the door with his own body so that his students could escape through the windows. The 76 year old man held the gunman back long enough to allow all but two of his students to reach safety. And then he died on the same classroom floor his feet had paced energetically for so many years. One escaping student, in a letter sent to Professor Librescu's wife, writes of looking back at the professor through the other side of the window from the ledge. "I saw your husband still standing there. He was holding the door closed and looking over his shoulder to make sure everybody else was safe. It was the bravest thing I have ever seen and I will always remember his

The Wussy Mystique of Keith Olbermann

The New York Magazine article that was supposed to lionize whiny MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann as a "Limbaugh for Leftists" and the hero who brought down the Republican congress, instead displays Olbermann dredging up new depths of wussiness. There's almost too much material. I give you Keith Olbermann, liberal action hero . "I got beat up by girls all the time,” says Olbermann. “They literally posted a sign-up sheet and would take turns. I think that’s why I’ve always been such a fan of Mencken’s line, ‘Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.’ I’ve been afflicted.” Graduating at 16, Olbermann shipped off to Cornell as the school’s youngest freshman. It wasn’t much fun. His parents went to extreme lengths to make his dorm room the only one in Ithaca with cable TV. Between tearful calls home, Olbermann sat alone and watched the tube. “Thank God for Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” says Olbermann. “Or I might not have made it.” “Of all the people I’ve known ins

The pathetic disgusting saga of Scott Ritter continues

Ritter had achieved fame as a crusading UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq, making a name for himself by condemning Iraq's obstruction of inspections and delivering testimony during a stormy session of Congress calling for action against Saddam and confronting Senator Joe Biden, demanding that the inspections be backed by the threat of force. In Scott Ritter's congressional testimony in 1998, he charged the Clinton Administration with appeasing Saddam and not allowing the inspectors to do their jobs. In an angry exchange with Senator Biden, Biden accused Ritter of wanting the ability to go to war whenever his ability to conduct inspections were denied. By 2002 Scott Ritter had sunk well into being an Iraqi stooge, penning op-eds like this, which claimed that Biden was actually the one who wanted to remove Saddam while Scott Ritter wanted to protect Saddam's regime. "Given Sen. Biden's open embrace of regime removal in Baghdad, there is a real risk that any such hearings

Friday Afternoon Roundup 4/13/07

- "The criticism came a day after House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos told reporters in San Francisco he has been trying for 10 years to obtain a visa to visit with leaders in Tehran. "Speaking for myself, I'm ready to go," said Lantos (D-Calif.). "And knowing the speaker, I think she might be." Pelosi, standing next to Lantos at a press conference, said that while she finds Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks "to be so repulsive that they're outside the circle of civilized human behavior," the willingness of Lantos, a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust, to meet with Ahmadinejad "speaks volumes about the importance of dialogue." New York Post I wish papers would constantly stop referring to Congressman Lantos as a Holocaust survivor. It smacks of clumsy reporting at best and of exploitation at worst. In reading a dozen articles about Lantos, this is constantly brought up where it has no relevanc

Yom HaShoah - Remember the Past and Plan for the Future

Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day is approaching now. A day is of course too narrow a period to do anything important justice. Yet we set a single day aside for independence, for mothers, for fathers, for wars and presidents. In recent memory the only major event that could be said to have happened in a day was 9/11. While the Holocaust was going on, news and discussion of it was mostly suppressed or outright ignored. Major Democratic party leaders, most prominently Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK and RFK, who delivered a speech warning Jews against any public statement or response. Joseph Kennedy had himself said, when the first reports came in of Nazi persecutions of Jews, "they brought it on themselves." Even after the war discussion and commemoration was distinctly stifled. The USSR suppressed any discussion of the particular murder of Jews, treating everything as the murder of Soviet citizens. The United States under Eisenhower and Israel under Ben Gurion were pursu

Sheep in Wolves Clothing - Beware of Phony Conservative Saviors

Ariel Sharon was one. So was Richard Nixon. France's De Gaulle and South Africa's Botha. They have some things in common. They usually posses a gruff no nonsense outward manner that appeals to the public, while disguises a massive ego within. Inside they're selfish, paranoid and often corrupt. If they served in the military they have a history of insubordination behind them. Being self-centered, they refuse to follow anyone else's orders. They can strike patriotic poses and stand passionately for causes and take big risks in the process, but those are just vehicles to fulfill their own ambitions and serve their own egos. To their supporters they appear to be paternalistic figures reminding them of their fathers and embodying virtues such as loyalty, traditional values and decisive leadership. In truth they have no loyalty to anyone but themselves and will discard people the moment they cease being useful to them. They use many people but they trust no one. They may pla

Caryl Chessman and the Triumph of Evil

"Telephone callers from Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and Australia have importuned Governor Brown to spare Chessman's life. Brown has received save-Chessman pleas from Belgium's Queen Mother and from the Social Democratic members of Italy's Chamber of Deputies. Secretary of State Christian Herter told his press conference last week that the Chessman case had stirred up "quite a surprising amount of interest" in South America. In Brazil, circulators of a save-Chessman petition claim more than 2,500,000 signatures. In The Netherlands, record dealers are profiting from brisk demand for a new platter, in Dutch, called The Death Song of Chessman. The London News Chronicle recently editorialized that "the great American nation is humiliated because of the agony of Chessman," and the London Daily Herald added that the day Chessman is executed "will be a day when it will be rather unpleasant to be an American." Buenos Aires' Critics c

They Used To Call Me Al

They used to tell me I was a shoo-in For the Presidential spot Where there were crowds to wow Or chads to tear I was always there Campaigning at every stop They used to tell me I was a shoo-in With Presidential glory ahead Why should I be standing in line Just waiting for a Cafe Au Lait? Once I built the Internet Made it run Made it race over a DSL line Once I built the Internet Now it's done Brother can you spare a dime Once I made a movie about the sun Said global warming is a crime Once I made a movie Now it's a rerun Brother can you spare a dime Once in Big and Tall Men's Suits I used to pompously strut With Tipper hanging on my arm Carbon footprints had to be cut They were causing planetary harm And I was the one with the plan Say don't you remember? They called me Al It was Al all the time Why don't you remember? I'm your pal Say buddy, can you spare a dime? Oh don't you remember They called me Al It was Crazy Al the time Why don't you remember? I&

You've Come a Long Way, Baby: Nancy Goes To Syria

The double irony of this photo is not merely Nancy Pelosi, who had billed herself as the most powerful woman in America, subjugating herself for entry into the Umayyad Mosque. What Nancy Pelosi is doing is looking at the supposed head of John the Baptist, a looted Christian artifact, displayed in a Muslim mosque. That isn't a notion that would ever enter Pelosi's head, but it's certainly one that's apparent to any Muslim who views the spectacle of one of the political leaders of a Christian country smiling and nodding along at the theft of one of her religion's holiest relics. The Umayyad or Omayyad mosque is built over the ruins of a Christian Church dedicated to John the Baptist that was torn down by Muslims and replaced with a mosque. When Muslims talk about Jews, Christians and Muslims living in peace once, that is the kind of "peace" they mean. A peace where domestic Christians, Hindus and Jews are persecuted, their holy places torn down and replaced

Hateful Protests at Wayne State University

FOX News reported on a Wayne State Rally by an Anti-Israel group that featured Swastikas combined with Israel and shouts of "Go Home Jews." Two days before that same group had conducted a similar protest at a Jewish Civil Rights event against Anti-Semitism. The Group Anti-Racist Action has in the past praised Hizbullah at its rallies and is pushing for "Divestment", an extension of the Muslim boycott of Israel into the United States. Wayne State University is adjacent to Dearborn and its large radicalized Muslim community. ARA groups around the country have advocated the destruction of Israel and the United States and the murders of police officers and soldiers.

Two Nations: Two Attitudes to Iranian Terrorism

Now as we're seeing the situation unfold in which British troops allowed themselves to be captured without a fight, read confessions on television and the British government has all but ruled out military action and is preparing to apologize, it's worth taking a look back at how US soldiers handled an Iranian abduction attempt . "U.S. soldiers from the 5th Squadron 73rd Cavalry 82nd Airborne were accompanying Iraqi forces on a routine joint patrol along the border with Iran, about 75 miles east of Baghdad, when they spotted two Iranian soldiers retreating from Iraqi territory back into Iran. A moment later, U.S. and Iraqi forces came upon a third Iranian soldier on the Iraqi side of the border, who stood his ground. As U.S. and Iraqi soldiers approached the Iranian officer and began speaking with him, a platoon of Iranian soldiers appeared and moved to surround the coalition patrol, taking up positions on high ground. At that point, according to the Army's statement, t

So It's Been Two Years

Two years ago I first began this blog. I'd like to say that I had a grand plan, but the reality was I simply thought it would be a good place to write. It's been a long and turbulent journey. The blog has gone through multiple templates, been designed and redesigned within an inch of its life. I've been linked to, delinked, made enemies and friends in the blogsphere. Posts from this blog have become op-ed pieces in newspapers, gone around the world and back. I've also offended public relations personnel, political parties, the UN and various liberal Rabbis. I've been a factor in a libel suit, have been threatened with several more and accused of being a Vietnamese virus sending Communist. As this blog has become more political, the personal photos I take have been spun off into the New York Minute blog. Videos from this blog have been spun off into J-Channel . Two years have passed and life goes on. To all my readers thank you for sticking around. To all my fellow