Friday Afternoon Roundup - Obama, Osama, Kosovo and Israel

With the final lap in the Democratic race approaching, Obama's triumph in Texas seems likely, which means that a racist who hates America and Israel is set to be the candidate of choice for the Democratic party, completing that party's degeneracy into the fifth column of America's enemies. Obama exceeds Jesse Jackson only by his Muslim sympathies and affiliations, which is the equivalent of electing a member of the Bund President during WW2. That is just how far the Democratic party has sunk.

Jewish Democrats who continue to carry water for Obama, who apologize for him and defend him, even though in many cases they are doing so reluctantly, are behaving in a blatantly depraved manner in helping to bring to power a man who has the deaths of their brothers in his heart. One might ask them, as G-d asked of Kayin.

Israpundit has been extensively covering the Obama mess with a lot of must read articles and this latest Bill Levinson one is decidedly included. Along with this viral email to distribute.

Subject: Barack Obama Enables Racism, Hatred and Contempt for Jews and Catholics

In fairness to Barack Obama, I must say up front that I have never heard or read of him personally speaking a word against Jews, Catholics, or white people in general. It is his failure to understand, or more likely failure to care, that his public appearances with and endorsements of professional bigots and hate organizations enables racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism that makes him unfit for any office of public trust or responsibility.

(1) Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Ronald Reagan (R-CA) and Lou Barletta (D-PA) were all offered endorsements by hate organizations (Independence Party, Ku Klux Klan). None of them had to be asked to reject these endorsements without hesitation, qualification, or equivocation. Barack Obama, in contrast, refused to use the word “reject” in connection with support from Louis Farrakhan, the racist and anti-Semitic leader of the Nation of Islam, until Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton cornered him like a rat during the February 26, 2008 Democratic debate. Only when they asked him three times to “reject” Farrakhan’s support did Obama, with obvious reluctance, do so. Farrakhan is on record as calling the Pope the Antichrist while saying that white people are “potential humans” who “haven’t evolved yet.”

(2) Barack Obama has made public appearances with, promoted, and endorsed Al Sharpton and his National Action Network. Sharpton’s long record of inciting hatred of white people and especially Jews includes the Tawana Brawley scandal (1988), Crown Heights riots (1991), and Freddy’s Fashion Mart incident (1995) in which one of Sharpton’s deranged followers burned a Jewish-owned store with the loss of seven innocent lives. In the latter incident, the National Action Network, which Obama praised in the highest terms, shouted epithets like “bloodsucking Jew” and “see that the cracker suffers,” to which Sharpton personally added “white interloper.”

(3) Barack Obama has solicited and received the support of MoveOn.org, which published not only a vicious insult to General David Petraeus but also a derogatory photomanipulation of Pope Benedict waving a gavel in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. This “Catholics are taking over America” picture was entirely consistent with the anti-Catholic, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Evangelical, hate speech that MoveOn.org welcomed on its now disgraced Action Forum. Contrary to MoveOn’s assertions that the Action Forum was an “open forum” for whose content MoveOn was not responsible, MoveOn’s moderators were exercising complete editorial control by deleting material they found disagreeable. The hate speech against Jews, Catholics, Evangelicals, and others was allowed to stand, along with conspiracy theories that blamed the U.S. Government, Jews, and others for 9/11.

(4) Barack Obama is a member of an arguably racist church whose pastor, Jeremiah Wright, said “white America” got a “wake up call” on 9/11. Wright also accompanied Louis Farrakhan on a visit to Moammar Khadafy, and the church recently honored Farrakhan with a Trumpet Award.

In other news, Olmert's government is now toying with the 'unthinkable' a Gaza operation to end Hamas rule. I have little confidence of follow through and I would like to see a new military command and reforms put in places first to avoid the kind of failures of command and equipment shortages that characterized the Lebanon operation, but it may be better than nothing... though I see little point in Israel expending lives and resources to reclaim Gaza only to turn it over to Fatah. It's the equivalent of defeating Hitler only to hand over Europe to Stalin, something FDR and Truman very nearly managed to do.

Meanwhile in Kosovo, the State Department has hypocritically refused to consider the "partition" of Kosovo into Serb and Kosovar Muslim areas.

Burns has joined the European Union's new special envoy for Kosovo, Pieter Feith, in flatly rejecting any partition of the former Serb province. But in remarks to foreign reporters in Washington, reflecting Vienna comments earlier Thursday by EU diplomat Feith, Burns said the United States will not tolerate or support any move toward partition be it informal, creeping or de jure.

Burns, the State Department's third-ranking official, said the argument of Jeremic and others is hypocritical and overlooks Serbia's brutal record in Kosovo

So it's perfectly alright to forcibly partition Yugoslavia but not alright to partition the partitioned piece of it. Where does the difference lie? It can't be in the so-called brutal treatment of a minority, because the Muslims are guilty of that more than the Serbs and the lip service regarding the protection of Serbian minority rights is meaningless.

So the real difference is that you can partition territory on behalf of Muslims but you can't partition Muslim controlled territory. For the same reason the territories Israel reclaimed in the Six Day War couldn't be partitioned, only turned over. Meanwhile Muslims are never under any obligation to partition their territory, no matter how badly they oppress minorities or the Coptic Christians would have their own homeland too under the threat of NATO guns and bombs. Those same weapons that have remained silent in the Sudan.

Amerisrael meanwhile reports on the ethnic cleansing being proposed by CMEP or Churches for Middle East Peace

There is however no misunderstanding of CMEP's postition. They favor the "ethnic cleansing" of hundreds of thousands of Israelis from their historic land of Judea, Samaria, and other parts of Israel! That they have no problem with!They applauded the forcefull uprooting and expulsion of thousands of Israelis from Gaza and northern Samaria in August 2005.

In the CMEP's newsletter of June 1st, 2005, Corinne Whitlatch, the Director of CMEP, wrote that the Gaza withdrawl must only be the first step toward a Palestinian state. In other words, CMEP favors the uprooting and forced relocation of thousands of Israelis. "Ethnic cleansing."

Meanwhile in domestic terrorism news, Right Truth reports on efforts to track the man who may well be the next Mohammed Atta

Lemon Lime Moon meanwhile writes about Ted Kennedy's antics
(above photo courtesy of Lemon)
And so ends another week at Sultan Knish . Till next week folks

Conservatives and the Mainstream Consensus

And so what happens now?

The fundamental problem of conservative leadership is that while conservatives win elections, the liberals have won the culture war leaving a thin pale imitation of conservatives as the opposition. By successfully changing the consensus, conservatives have been split into moderates who have watered down the conservative message until it is crowd pleasing but virtually meaningless and radicals who have no hope of being elected and whose very existence is exploited to further batter the moderate conservatives into further watering down their message.

America, Israel and England teeter on the precipice of new elections, yet as dissatisfied as we are with our current leadership, the potential conservative opposition that has made gains in the polls offers little hope. Perhaps that is because John McCain, Benyamin Netanyahu and David Cameron are a long way from what either of the three countries really needs. They excel at rhetoric but the primary reason that actual conservatives and patriots would vote for them is that they are the alternative to the liberal side, however pale that alternative might be.

They are all compromise candidates who fear to genuinely address the real problems their countries face, but the compromise is not within the party, but the national political cultures. In a system where campaigns are increasingly won by seizing the middle ground and credibly is earned by one candidate out-"moderating" to other candidate, conservatives have learned to speak softly and keep the big stick in a closet somewhere out of sight and take it out occasionally at election time or dinners to reminisce fondly about the way things used to be.

Today even conservative political victories are primarily toothless because they rule in the shadow of a social consensus crafted by the left, one which makes certain views and policies unacceptable. George W. Bush spent a major portion of his administration being demonized for such innocuous things as using military tribunals to try captured terrorists while Netanyahu was all but brought down by opening a tunnel to tourists that enraged the Muslim hordes. Both represent the way in which conservatism has been backed into a corner by the shrill hysteria of the political terrorism of the left.

Liberalism has insisted on crafting its own social consensus out of thin cloth and has succeeded by imposing that consensus on the country with the consent of a terrified conservative political class more interested in winning short term political victories than securing a long term political future.

Conservatives have successfully marginalized liberal candidates only by accepting liberal positions as mainstream while portraying their opponents as radicals for taking positions that are further to the left. But like the mirage of an oasis in the desert, the radical positions of yesterday become the mainstream positions of today, as each such attempt by conservatives to seize the middle ground, legitimizes yet another wave of liberal positions, once again redefining the social consensus to make the formerly radical, mainstream.

In this way, election after election conservatives have won office and lost their values, held onto power and lost their beliefs. It is no wonder that Churchill is thought to be a mythical figure when living in an age when no party leader would dare speak or think the way that he did. By their political cowardice, conservatives have created a world order in which Sherlock Holmes is a more plausible figure than Churchill.

Deterrence Only Works When They're Not Shooting at You

The revelation that the Iron Dome system can't protect Sderot is only the latest bad card played by the Olmert government as it goes through all its options for dealing with the problem of rocket attacks from Gaza, except the only one that will actually work-- reoccupying Gaza.

Month after month, Hamas has made the political and strategic case for reoccupying Gaza. Yet even with Israeli soldiers being held hostage in Gaza and Sderot continually under fire, it's the one card off the table as far as the Olmert government is concerned. And that is why Hamas has boldly made the case for reoccupying Gaza, because it knows this government is too weak to actually do it.

The pursuit of passive solutions was always futile, the Separation Wall to Disengagement to Iron Dome are all part of the same dead end, the attempt to find an alternative to engaging the enemy. But there is no alternative to engaging the enemy and the Iron Dome's inability to defend Sderot only highlights the nature of the problem. Iron Dome was intended to counter rockets from four kilometers away but the enemy is simply too close and breathing down our necks.

It isn't that pursuing anti-missile systems isn't a good idea, but until those systems are capable of effectively functioning on a large scale, the value of such systems is primarily as a deterrent. With SDI or "Star Wars", Reagan was pursuing a system whose value was not simply in its ability to deflect Russian ICBM's but in creating a loophole in MAD that left Russia naked to American ICBM's. The strength of SDI was that it not only promised to strengthen America's defenses but that it strengthened America's potential offensive capabilities. What really terrified the Russians was the prospect that America could hit them but that they would not be able to hit America back.

The Anti-Kassam systems Israel is developing have no such function. They're meant only to fill a gap in Israel's vulnerability to Kassams, just as the wall was meant to block suicide bombers. The problem is that closing one door, even if effective, allows the terrorists to pursue another strategy. If they couldn't get through the wall, they shot over it. If they can't shoot conventional rockets over the wall, they'll embrace a third strategy and Israel will once again find itself scrambling to catch up with hundred million dollar programs while exposing its citizens to harm.

SDI made sense as a form of deterrence because the Russians were not in a shooting with the United States. Once you're in a shooting war, worrying about deterrence falls into the category of "too little, too late". Israel is under fire and when a country is under fire, its only real choice is to put out the fire by fighting back.

Deterrence may seem more moral but in fact it's amoral, because it needlessly prolongs the violence. Jordan ended the Palestinian Arab Intifada in a handful of bloody days when it first began. Israel fired rubber bullets and tear gas. Today Israel has been carved up and a Palestinian Terrorist state is bombing it from inside its own borders. And yet the fundamental lesson still goes unlearned, it's better to brutally settle the question than to draw out the debate in order to maintain some illusory high ground.

Obama is not a Candidate but a Performance

Sunday's Oscar night awards handed out its awards to movies that hardly anyone saw and to obscure actors and actresses, none of them Americans. Americans responded by not watching the Oscars which are estimated to have received the lowest ratings in history, down 21 percent from last year when identifiable actors and movies were featured there.

The Oscars represent the fundamental culture gap between ordinary Americans and the cultural elites. Following the usual pattern, the more the cultural elites take something over, the less relevant it becomes to ordinary Americans. We have seen that pattern in modern art and poetry, in literature and now we are seeing it in movies. Increasingly the foreign box office has become more definitive than domestic ticket sales, as Americans continue to ignore movies that don't meet their interests.

Call it Blue State vs Red State or John Edwards' Two Americas, but it could just as easily be Two Englands, Two Irelands or Two Israels, it's the split between the worldview of the cultural elite and that of ordinary people.

The worldview of the cultural elites is based on destroying boundaries while that of ordinary people is based on preserving them. The worldview of the cultural elites embraces the gruesome, the shocking and the taboo, while that of ordinary people prefers the life-affirming, entertaining and exciting. Entertainment is where the two sides meet, as the elites try to subvert the tastes and morals of the public. Yet doing so requires understanding public tastes and repackaging their subversive agenda in a populist package.

Sunday's Oscars demonstrate what happens when Hollywood stops bothering to posture as populists and embraces its natural affinities. The Obama campaign demonstrates what happens when the cultural elites understand the need to package a subversive agenda in a populist package.

The core of Obama's support came from Hollywood all along and that is no surprise because Obama exemplifies everything that Hollywood stands for, a blank empty package dressed up in rhetoric and crowd manipulation bordering on that exhibited by the propaganda of totalitarian regimes.

At times manic and yet showcasing that phony humility which was once a staple of Hollywood leading men and still remains on display at just about any awards show, Obama is a leading man, a candidate running on an entertainment rather than a political platform.

As Hillary Clinton flails about trying to attack Obama, she repeatedly fails because while she is running a political campaign, he is running an entertainment campaign, complete with dancing Obama girls, shadowboxing displays, acting performances and hollow policy positions read from cue cards.

Obama's backers have not even bothered running a true political campaign, instead they've packaged a radical left wing and pro-Muslim politician in a saccharine Hollywood image of America. You can't debate Obama anymore than you can debate Harrison Ford's, Bill Pullman's or Michael Douglas' portrayals of Presidents in movies. There is nothing to debate. You can only applaud or boo and the people behind the cameras have already decided that only the applause will be heard, except where the boos will make their candidate more sympathetic.

Consider Spengler's ominous depiction of Obama in his own Asia Times piece, while I don't agree with much of it, it partakes of a nightmarish vision.

Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.

There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.

America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice of forethought, he has sought out their sore point. Be afraid - be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself.

Spengler of course speaks in terms of entertainment and that is what Obama is but that does not mean that he can be underestimated. Those politicians who have run against him as politicians continue to lose, because while they play by tangible rules, Obama plays by intangible ones. He is not out to win an argument, but to charm the crowd. He offers uplifting rhetoric devoid of content but inside the empty box of his own rhetoric is a man with an agenda and it isn't the one he speaks out loud.

To defeat Obama, we must understand the rules he plays by and defeat him on those terms. Rather than a platform Obama has a plot, that of the plucky underdog, the idealistic candidate who speaks for youth, the reformer bringing back hope and change in line with American values. That is the movie plot that has been laid out for him, but in committing himself to that script, Obama and his handlers have failed to realize the plot twists that can occur in such a script.

And plot twists come from the revelation of the secrets that the hero is hiding, the lines of cocaine on the toilet lid that give him the manic grinning energy before every performance, the past he is hiding, the naked hypocrisy of his political involvements, the real agenda behind the charming smile. And in the end there's nothing more than an audience loves than a good plot twist when it is convincingly delivered and once the plot twist changes the story, there is no going back.

Both the likely candidates in the race, Barack Hussein Obama and John McCain, won not on their records, but on their personalities and their personal stories. This is far from unprecedented in American politics, but it is troubling nonetheless and candidates who win based on their personalities can only be defeated by destroying their public image. And that is what the election will truly come down to once it is fullly underway.

Socialism, the Greatest Obstacle to Resistance Against the Jihad

Those who are baffled by the failure of so many countries and governments to offer any meaningful resistance to the Jihad must begin looking at the root causes of the mindset that makes appeasement and concessions seem so much more appealing than resistance.

When the US first proposed action against Saddam, the unanimous condemnation was led by a single word, "Unilateral". That same word, "Unilateral" typically winds up in criticism of any Israeli action taken against terrorists. Reasonable people found themselves baffled as to how a relatively neutral word such as "Unilateral" had become a epithet. But for a bureaucracy there is no uglier word than "Unilateral". Bureaucracies pride themselves on achieving consensus through meetings and committees, nothing made Bush more hated than his willingness to take "Unilateral" action.

Let's examine another key epithet in the politically correct lexicon. "Extremist". Extremist literally means representing an extreme, not necessarily a good thing, yet seemingly undeserving of the kind of vitriol that has become attached to it. But in a bureaucratic culture, "Extremist" has the same meaning as "Unilateral", operating outside the consensus.

Why does this matter? Because as Orwell knew, words have meaning and words describe the mindset of a culture. Every political culture creates its own Newspeak and the Orwellian Newspeak of our bureaucratic culture values a comprehensive consensus and abhors individuality and individual thinking and action.

When 1984 came around, so many self-congratulatory articles were penned to point out that Orwell's future had not come to pass. They blindly were unable to see that not only had it come to pass, it had come around long before 1984 and by the year 1984 most of the nations representing industrialized human civilization were living under one form of a bureaucratic socialist state or another. The same journalists penning those same articles were paying out more of their taxes than ever to the state and subject to more regulations than ever. Like the proverbial lobster being slowly cooked in the pot, they were immersed in boiling water and didn't even know it, because like most change it had crept up slowly on them.

When bureaucracy became the new democracy, the first world substituted the rule of the bureaucrat for the rule of the people and democratic republics became bureaucratic republics and socialism was at the heart of it all. Where peoples had once rebelled against monarchs who had cast themselves as the protectors of the people only to exploit and oppress them, socialism invited the monarch back inside through a back door, gave him a desk and a rule book and then appointed 50,000 like him to serve as protectors of the people. The short name for this is socialism.

To idealists and activists, socialism was and is meant to be the ultimate political and social system, the monarch subdivided into a vast bureaucracy meant to protect the people as democratic elections cannot. When the Divine Right of Kings gave way to Form 180x-60C, the transition was made from one tyranny to another, but socialism is a tyranny based not around a single tyrant but around the tyranny of consensus. Democracy in its pure form preserves the right of the individual to dissent, to build and produce; while socialism treats the dissenting individual the way a hive treats a rogue bee. If the political debate is the anthem of democracy, the consensus hum of the hive is the hymn of socialism.

How does all this come around to the war on terror? True democracy encourages individual initiative, socialism discourages individual initiative. A single drone can't defend the hive and a drone who tries to do so is behaving "Unilaterally" and being an "Extremist."

After 9/11 the primary message broadcast by the government was not patriotic, it was "Go back to your normal lives. We know what we're doing." And people trained by an increasingly socialist system to do what they were told, went back to their lives and waited for the government to take care of things.

In Israel while rockets are falling on Sderot, the government reassures the public that it knows what it's doing and warns against any individuals taking unilateral action. No one believes the government, but no one can do anything either. Socialism breeds apathy in the public who feel helpless to do anything because they have been taught that only the government is potent and so emotionally disconnect from the situation and abandon hope to deal with the situation.

Across Europe the collision with growing Islamic populations is leaving behind a trail of the wounded, raped and the dead. Intimidation continues to creep through every sector of society, but the governments take some halfway measures and assure the public that they are in charge while the situation worsens and the bureaucratic socialist state reigns triumphant over its own dead.

Socialism breeds learned helplessness, its very fundamental premise is that people cannot care for themselves and their families. More so, socialism thrives on helplessness, on perpetuating the helplessness of the public and actually breeds through that helplessness. The worse a problem gets, the more the bureaucracy spreads like an infection spreading around a wound.

At the heart of socialism is the bureaucracy and at the heart of the bureaucracy is consensus. Bureaucracy treats the individual as a peg meant to fill a slot. One person means nothing. A hundred people mean nothing. But a million people mean everything. That is one major reason that bureaucracies continue to defer to Muslims, because Islam appears to represent a vast consensus and while bureaucracies ignore individuals, they integrate consensi.

When faced with a problem, bureaucracy either suppresses it or accommodates it. If the problem cannot be browbeaten out of existence with a handful of forms and quoted regulations, bureaucrats adapt to it. And so across the West, bureaucrats have adapted to Islam and are creating new regulations to accommodate it.

By their very nature bureaucracies are incapable of successfully resisting a sizable threat without strong leadership at the top. That is because bureaucracies cannot actually solve problems. A bureaucracy would rather have an unworkable consensus than a unilateral solution and so across Europe, the EU has created an unworkable consensus. It does not matter that it is unworkable, its very broadmindedness is what makes it more appealing than individual nations and individual solutions.

Meanwhile for the citizens living under a socialist bureaucracy, long before they have been turned into strangers in their own neighborhoods and a strange religion is imposing its arcane rules on them, they have already lives their lives as strangers in their own country, browbeaten into submission by the arcane rules of a vast soulcrushing bureaucracy. Even before Dhimmification turned them into second class citizens in their own country, socialism had already begun the job. The transition from socialism to sharia is merely a passage from one incomprehensible tyranny to another.

The bureaucracy recognizes no nation, pledges allegiance to no flag and holds no loyalty to any law but its own myriad rules and regulations. Bureaucracy represents its own god and its own kingdom, one that swallows the rights and lives of the citizens who live under it. Socialism is the ultimate expression of bureaucracy, one that absorbs individual initiative and breeds learned helplessness as a way of life. The queue, the form, the surrender of income and individuality, the constant inability to comprehend your obligations joined with the constant fear of having somehow stepped on the wrong side of one is our Sharia.

Serfs cannot defeat the barbarians at the gate, only citizens can. Socialism reduces citizens to serfs forever waiting on line with their paychecks held out in one hand for the bureaucracy and their own empty hands held out in hopes of receiving their benefits. Serfs pass quickly from one lord to another, even if the new lord's name is something foreign like Mohammed or Ahmed, it matters little in the end. After all lords come and go and why fight for what isn't yours anyway?

The greatest crime of socialism, of the myth of a global consensus filled out by international treaties and dreams of a single world government, is the dispossession of the individual, the deprivation of his natural feelings of patriotism for a land and a people drawn from a sense of ownership over it.

Socialism has exchanged that feeling of ownership for membership in commonwealths, alliances and treaty groups and the citizen becomes a smaller and smaller mote within a global consensus that has no room for owners, only for serfs. He learns helplessness, he learns to take orders, to give up what is his for the greater good, to feel endlessly guilty and unworthy and when his freedom vanishes, he no longer even realizes that he is no longer free.

Socialism is the death blow to nationalism and patriotism, something that had been intended all along by the progressive "idealists" who pioneered it, envisioning the erasure of borders and nationalities blurring into one single colorless globe. Yet this is not human destiny and socialism has left civilization broken into nations filled with bureaucrats who are as courageous as lions when confronting taxpayers and as cowardly as mice when confronting terrorists and prosperous serfs equipped with all the latest gadgets yet devoid of the will to break the consensus, to take that most unilateral and extremist of steps and rise up to speak in defense of their countries as free men and women.

There can be no victory against the Jihad except by individuals, by free men and women speaking and fighting for the defense of the nations, their national identities and their cultures. Socialism and the Jihad represent a common enemy, the first an enemy of the spirit and the second an enemy of the flesh. To defend the flesh, the spirit must first be free.

George Washington's Rejection of Tolerance

One of George Washington's more famous letters is his letter to the Newport, Rhode Island synagogue famously remembered in Longfellow's poem, "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport". Of that letter the most famous line quoted is Washington's statement, "the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance" yet it is another line in the letter that is far more important.

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts.

Washington's wording is often confusing to modern ears and as a result, "it is now no more that toleration is spoken of" is often glossed over, yet it is at the heart of Washington's statement, his rejection of tolerance.

The idea of George Washington rejecting tolerance in a letter dedicated to promoting civic and religious freedom while rejecting bigotry seems odd to modern minds too attuned to political correctness, yet Washington was expressing an important idea that we have forgotten.

We have been taught that tolerance is a virtue, yet tolerance is no virtue, as Washington rightly wrote. Tolerance is an indulgence, the very word meaning that it is something that a superior class extends to another. Instead in his letter Washington laid out a vision of a nation based not on tolerance but on an equality based on the good republican virtues of civic participation.

When George Washington rejected tolerance, he was innately rejecting a system of inequality and that is exactly what today's emphasis on politically correct tolerance is. Washington rightly described tolerance as something the superior do to the inferior and behind all the liberal platitudes, it is precisely the inherently bigoted attitude behind today's modern tolerance fetish, for to tolerate people, they must be both unequal and odious, so that you must excuse their fundamental defects because of their inherent inequality.

That racist attitude is exactly what stands behind affirmative action in America or behind the willingness to "tolerate" illegal aliens, so long as they are a minority. It is the very attitude behind the "tolerance" for Islamic violence and terrorism. Behind the tolerance stands the intolerant idea that they are our inferiors and therefore we accept from them what we would not accept from each other.

Oppression and claims of inequality are typically used to justify the need for tolerance, those old standbys of class warfare, predating even Marxism and dating back to the violence and terror of the French Revolution when revolt became mob terror, all of it justified by inequality and oppression.

When George Washington wrote his letter to the Newport Synagogue it was 1790 and the French Revolution was beginning to prove unworthy of its ideals. Meanwhile his liberal opponents led by Jefferson were conducting a vicious campaign in support of the French Revolution and against Washington, for his increasing increasing detachment from the events abroad.

George Washington was rejecting unequal classes of people, seemingly privileged by "tolerance", yet in reality relegated to second class status by the political elite, who were happy to use them as a violent mob and yet were unwilling to grant them true equality. Washington instead laid out a quite different vision in a few brief lines for America, a vision of true political equality based on citizenship, not on tolerance by the political elite.

In Washington's America, there was to be no political elite that would extend "tolerance", instead there would be those who would choose to be good citizens and those who would not. That vision was subverted early on, first by Aaron Burr who helped form Tammany Hall, a corrupt political order that was based on political patronage and organized crime disguised as tolerance. The modern day democratic political machine politicians who preach tolerance are linear descendants of the New England and Southern political machines which would co-opt entire populations promising them tolerance.

But tolerance is an illusion, a smiley face drawn over inequality that corrupts the country and those who are "tolerated". Violence, hatred and poverty are bred in the shadow of "tolerance" because tolerance is ultimately a justification for failing to demand the same standard of conduct and commitment from everyone. And when a danger arises, tolerance demands that we shut our eyes to it rather than address it.

I close with one more line from Washington's letter.

If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and happy people.

Parshas Ki Tisa - The Wisdom of Rock

Ki Tisa contains some of the more baffling events in the Torah as the Jewish people, shortly after hearing the ten commands, proceed to create an idol and worship it. Various explanations have been given for what happened but I think it is instructive to explore the mindset behind these actions.

It is Moshe's failure to return on time that encourages the construction of an idol to take the place of Moshe saying, "Rise and make us a god who shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what is become of him." The statement contains two admissions, that Moshe is a man and yet that he brought them out of Egypt.

If they simply wanted another man to take Moshe's place, they would have elected a leader. Clearly while they believed that Moshe was a man, they did not believe that he was merely a man. At the Sea, it is said, "Vayaminu Be'Hashem U'Be'Moshe Avdo", "They Believed in G-d and in Moshe His Servant". When Moshe first set out to reveal his prophecy to the Jews, he brought signs to cause the Jews to believe in him. Then with many of the plagues, Moshe or Aaron took an action followed by a miracle. It is not unreasonable that some had come to believe in Moshe, but not quite in G-d. While Moshe repeatedly spoke of G-d, what people hear is not the same thing as what they are told.

At the sea things changed, for Moshe began to pray and was cut off. Instead the miracle came as the Jews advanced into the sea. Their own reliance on G-d brought the miracle and afterward, they believed in G-d and Moshe only as his servant. Yet at Sinai they heard G-d and were unable to stand it and instead chose to receive the commandments from Moshe. As the lawgiver and with his departure, Moshe came to seem coequal with G-d or an aspect of G-d.

The phrasing of the demand for an idol is telling, "כִּי-זֶה מֹשֶׁה הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר הֶעֱלָנוּ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם, לֹא יָדַעְנוּ מֶה-הָיָה לוֹ" "For this Moshe, this man who led us out of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him." The emphasis is on Moshe as only a man, a form that was apparently in their minds as inadequate to contain divinity. So they replaced him with a more supernatural form, gold in place of flesh, animal in place of man.

How do we know that the worship of Moshe himself was a problem? For one thing, his tomb was hidden, fairly unique when the tombs of great men even predating him are accessible. Secondly Moshe was never allowed to enter Israel. The presumed sin for which he was forbidden to enter the land involved a repetition of a miracle involving bringing water from a rock. The first time Moshe struck the rock while the second time he was commanded to speak rather than strike it. What difference does this make?

Moshe was chosen as the most humble of all men. Why in particular was humility a choice virtue? Why not one of his other positive traits? To be humble means to displace yourself in favor of your ego and Moshe had been chosen to perform the greatest miracles in history, feats that could easily be construed to demonstrate his own divinity. As the humblest man, Moshe was to be the least plausible candidate for being construed as a deity, let alone presenting himself as one.

In striking a rock, Moshe was functioning as superior to the rock. Yet by being told to speak to it the second time around, Moshe was to demonstrate that even when dealing with a rock, he would show a humility so great as to address it, rather than to hit it, so as not to set himself above even the rock.

Many years earlier, Moshe had carved the second set of commandments out of rock and shattered the first, in response to an idolatry that had been rooted in the perception of him as a deity. Yet the rock that he struck the second time was a failure to set aside that humility and for this he would not lead the second generation that had not known the calf into the land.

After the events of the second tablets, the light from Moshe's face shone so brightly that he was forced to wear a mask except when he taught, for then the light of divine inspiration could clearly be seen, reflecting the divine light on his face. By contrast when facing people who so easily might fall into thinking of objects and men as gods, he instead wore a mask to cover the light.

Friday Afternoon Roundup -Burning Embassies, the Oriental Imagination and the Jihad

The US embassy has been evacuated in Belgrade after a Serbian mob attacked and torched the embassy. Considering that Clinton had ordered the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, with fatalities, the principle of the non-combatant status of embassies went out the door some time ago. I certainly hope that no Marines were or will be injured in the course of this, the diplomats however are the ones who caused all this in the first place, they have brought down America's work in liberating Iraq, they determined to create a Muslim Albanian republic by force and they've backed terrorists around the world from Kosovo to Gaza to Afghanistan to Kashmir to Thailand. As such I have no sympathy for the diplomats, not that any appears to be needed.

Had a Muslim mob rampaged again, the press would no doubt be blaming us for it. The only positive side of this mess appears to be that the press had found a rampaging anti-american mob that they won't get behind.

At home the leader of our own Muslim mob, B. Hussein Obama is getting closer than ever to the Presidency while conservatives remain complacent about it, in part out of disappointment and in part apathy, two attitudes that can combine to give us an enemy President in office.

In the news roundup, two articles from the Jerusalem Post. The first article by Shmuel Katz, a spry 94 and still editorializing, contains one important quote that should be read by everyone.

What is commonly called the Oriental imagination has long been recognized. It is only in our day, however, that it has played a striking part in shaping world events. The amplifying effects of modern communications media - Internet, 24-hour cable news - and the willing involvement of powerful world interests have presented the Oriental imagination with unprecedented influence.

The use of lies in our time as a primary weapon of state policy by the two most powerful totalitarian states the world has known - Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union - did, moreover, set an example. It also introduced techniques whose application sharpened the Oriental imagination into a highly effective political weapon.

Al-Ghazzali, the great 11th-century Muslim theologian, wrote: "Know that a lie is not haram [wrong] in itself, but only because the evil conclusions to which it leads the hearer, making him believe something that is not really the case… If a lie is the only way of obtaining a good result, it is permissible.… We must lie when truth leads to unpleasant results."

Caroline Glick meanwhile raised the question of whether Mughniyeh had been killed for the attacks he was planning.

It is quite possible that terror master Imad Mughniyeh was not killed Tuesday night in Damascus for his past crimes, but to prevent him from carrying out additional attacks in the future.

On January 30, French security services raided a Paris apartment and arrested six Arab men. Three of the men - two Lebanese and one Syrian - were travelling on diplomatic passports. According to the Italian Libero newspaper, the six were members of a Hizbullah cell. Documents seized included tourist maps of Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin and Rome marked up with red highlighter to indicate routes, addresses, parking lots and "truck stopping points." The maps pointed to several routes to Vatican back entrances.

Libero's report explained that the "truck stopping points" aligned with information the French had received the week before from Beirut. There, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah had convened a conference of his senior terror leaders where he ordered them to activate Hizbullah cells throughout Europe to kidnap senior European leaders.

All of the feared terror attacks against French and European targets have the classic earmarkings of Hizbullah operations chief and Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the pioneer of embassy bombings and high-profile kidnappings.

Most of the reports of his death treated Mughniyeh as a has-been. Coverage was devoted to his attacks against American, Israeli and Jewish targets in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet at the time of his death, Mughniyeh remained one of the most dangerous and prolific terror operatives in the world.

Meanwhile for anyone who still thinks Kosovo's independence is a good thing, the following article by Ali H. Alyami, Executive Director of The Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia is a must read. Kosovo bought and paid for by Saudi Arabia

Why isn’t the International community up in arms about “Kosovo” becoming independent and declaring its Independence when Kurdistan has legal precedence and it seems no one gives a damn for its Independence but the Kurds? Simple, because the House of Saud and other feudal rich Sheikhs are behind the move for the independence of Kosovo. It’s a Sunni Wahhabi enclave now.

And just to remind those arguing that Albanian Kosovo will be a moderate Muslim state, via the Green Arrow blog, the Memri Blog has a look at what happened to two Turkish girls who had acid thrown on them for wearing short skirts.

Meanwhile via USA Partisan, IPT has a great column by famed terror investigation expert Steve Emerson on New York Times Soft Pedaling Radical Islam as moderate.

That history matters. The Muslim Brotherhood, an 80-year-old social and religious order established in Egypt, seeks a global Islamic state governed by Shariah law as its ultimate objective. Its guiding ideologues have served as the inspiration for virtually all Sunni terrorist organizations from Hamas and Islamic Jihad to Al Qaeda.

Other exhibits from the HLF trial, dated in the early 1990s, show Muslim Brotherhood members in the U.S. saw their role as a "grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions."

And while MacFarquhar writes of the MSA, "That past has given the associations a reputation in some official quarters as a possible font of extremism," he immediately undercuts that by adding, "but experts in American Islam believe college campuses have become too diverse and are under too much scrutiny for the groups to foster radicals."

And yet he makes no attempt to cover the fact that MSA's routinely invite radical Islamic speakers who justify suicide bombing and make virulent anti-Semitic and anti-American statements. We are just simply to believe there is some kind of "debate" going on concerning "inclusion."

Meanwhile over at the Fiery Spirited Zionist, European leaders and the usual suspects are doing their part to water down terrorism

He said that in recent weeks he received reports that the French government was reexamining its attitude toward Hamas. Senior EU officials had been heard denouncing Israel’s actions in Gaza, and a number of decisions on the issue had been passed in various European parliaments.

In the last week, a number of Israeli ambassadors in European capitals sent classified telegrams about the meeting’s contents, some of which reached Haaretz.

Serry criticized Israel at the outset of the meeting. “We are deeply concerned over the situation in Gaza, especially from the humanitarian perspective,” he said. “We must find a fast solution to this situation.”

Welch, who joined the criticism of Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip, said the United States was not comfortable with Israel’s approach to Gaza, and presented the American goals regarding the Israelis and Palestinians. “First we must not allow the suicide bombing in Dimona and shooting on Sderot to affect the negotiations,” he said.

“It is also important to us that neither the Palestinians in Gaza nor the Israelis in Sderot are hurt. Also, we must continue to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad.”

Welch added that the Quartet must demand that Israel open the border passes with the Gaza Strip.

The Open Borders problem just never ends, even when the borders are open to the terrorists, not just illegal immigrants.

Meanwhile at Atlas Shrugs, an interesting look at the Jihadi Islamic Dominionist terminology of CAIR.

Sheikh Ahmed Kutty of Toronto, Canada states: "I think it is not only permissible, rather it is also imperative that we do give our zakah to organizations like CAIR…" Your donations to CAIR are also tax-deductible.

Seems nobody is paying attention to the term Kutty used, "Fi Sabilillah", which I think speaks volumes about CAIR's agenda -- seeing as they post this fatwa on their site.

Maybe their tax status downgrade is behind their attempt to enhance their zakat bona fides: CAIR is campaigning for zakat contributions under the Islamic classification of "zakat fi sabilillah" (or "fi Sabil Allah") here.

And so ends another week at Sultan Knish

Just 4 Years

Some conservative commentators led by Ann Coulter who are arguing that it's better to accept a hypothetical 4 years of Hillary Clinton or Obama than 4 years of McCain.

Here's how Coulter breezily puts it;

If Hillary is elected president, we'll have a four-year disaster, with Republicans ferociously opposing her, followed by Republicans zooming back into power, as we did in 1980 and 1994, and 2000.

Just that easy.

This "Only 4 Years" nonsense is wishful thinking from the same people who were sure Hillary Clinton would never get this far. Hillary won two Senate terms in New York and her husband served two Presidential terms. The odds are that once Hillary is in office, she'll be there for eight years and her VP will be an incumbent in the next race with good odds of turning 8 years into 16. Only one Democratic incumbent has lost an election in the 20th century and that was Jimmy Carter and he was running against Ronald Reagan.

But let's take that 4 years for granted. What can a President do in 4 years? Let's ask Jimmy Carter.

Carter's term lasted only 4 years and ended 27 years ago. There have been 4 Presidents since him. And yet today many of our problems can be traced back to the Carter Administration.

Within only 4 years Carter surrendered the Panama Canal and did his best to remove US troops from South Korea. Had he succeeded there would likely be no South Korea today and Kim Jong Il would have had all of South Korea's resources at his disposal.

The Carter Administration weakened the Shah and opened the door for his overthrow. With the Shah overthrown, the Carter Administration favored the Ayatollah Khomeni under Brzezinski's green belt policy (Brez is back as Obama's foreign policy advisor) and his failure to react usefully to the hostage crisis solidified Khomeni's power. The Iranian threat today and the rise of Shia terrorism can all be traced back to the Carter Administration.

Brzezinski and Carter also began backing and funding Islamic terrorists in Pakistan via ISI. Indirectly this led to the growth of Islamic terrorism operating out of Pakistan, that continues to be a second home for Al Queda.

Look at another intervention by a Federal Judge in a terrorist case on the side of the terrorist and then look up his or her biography and you'll find that the odds are the judge was a Carter or Clinton appointee. Those same judges have given terrorists a free ride and cultivated a welcoming atmosphere for their lawyers and remain a serious stumbling block on the War on Terror.

Carter pressured Rhodesia into removing the country's elected leader Bishop Abel Muzorewa and were instrumental in replacing him with Mugabe, who had been excluded from the election. Today Mugabe continues to rule as a brutal tyrant who has engaged in ethnic cleansing and whose misrule has caused starvation.

With a single stroke of a pen in signing the International Covenant on Human Rights, Carter bound the US to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (This once again demonstrates how much irrevocable damage a President can do in 4 years or even 4 days.) The Covenant applies down to the individual level and forbids any activity meant to interfere with its own statutes.

The precedent for Global Warming agitation was set by Carter, before there even was a Global Warming, when Carter used the Presidential soapbox to warn people to turn off their lights and carpool to save energy. When Al Gore travels the world telling people they need to turn off their lights and drive a bicycle, he's following a pattern put into place by Carter.

I could go on for pages and pages but mostly of you already know this. All this happened despite the fact that Carter faced a hostile Congress even within his own party, was widely unpopular with the public and attempted to present a conservative facade to the nation. If you want to gauge the full extent of a President Hillary Clinton or President B. Hussein Obama nightmare, multiply Carter's 4 years and keep multiplying.

When you're not happy with the election, turning in your weapons and welcoming the enemy to march in and take over in the hopes of radicalizing your own population to throw them out is not a sane or responsible strategy. I'm sure a Clinton or Obama administration would be a gold mine for Ann Coulter's book sales and a global disaster that would cost countless lives, jobs and freedoms.

It's supposed to be the left that thinks in terms of undermining their own to radicalize the population. And if you think their strategy is so great, look back at the last eight years and at the Democratic party ripping itself apart between the True Believers and the Power Brokers heading toward a brokered convention. Does anyone really want that for the Republican party?

Coulter may breezily wave her hands and treat 4 years of President Hillary Clinton or President B. Hussein Obama as nothing, but imagine the price our children will be paying for that kind of folly. But we don't have to imagine, all we have to do is tote up the consequences of the Carter administration in only 4 years.

Just 4 years.

Kosovo and Islam's Balkanization of the World

Even as the world rushes to embrace the newly manufactured Kosovo as a country, the rise of a splinter Muslim country in Europe can't help but give hope to Islamic terrorists fighting to create breakaway states in Thailand, the Philippines, Israel, India and Kenya among many others.

Balkanization, or divide and conquer, has always been a key element in bringing down countries and with a global Islamic war, each country with a Muslim minority, natively converted or imported, is on the same track as Yugoslavia.

What Hitler did with the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans, across Eastern Europe, his former Muslim allies are doing across the world with Muslim populations. With the Volksdeutsche, before a single soldier of the Reich even set foot in a country, the Volksdeutsche would radicalize and foment unrest that would either carve up the target country or justify military intervention to "liberate" them. When the country was conquered, the Volksdeutsche would quickly become occupation forces.

With Islamists from the Muslim Brotherhood to the Ayatollahs either being direct allies of Hitler or influenced by Nazism, it's no surprise that Muslims have adopted Nazi tactics and Kosovo and its Muslim population that had formerly collaborated with the Nazis, is their greatest victory, a Muslim state carved out of the heart of Europe through ethnic cleansing, with the world's approval.

Whether in Gaza or the Paris riots, Kosovo or Kashmir, Balkanization is Islam's greatest weapon. Lacking a Nazi Germany to invade on their half behalf, Muslims practice violence and terrorism combined with manipulative publicity aimed at the world to convince them to take their side. And time and time again it has worked.

Kosovo and the Palestinian Authority are both triumphs of terrorism, victories by racist nationalists whose aim has always been religious and ethnic cleansing who have nevertheless managed to portray the countries they have torn to shreds as racist nationalists practicing ethnic cleansing.

Time and time again, Muslims continue to transform nation after nation into Czechoslovakia, convincing the world that there will be peace if a country is carved up and they are given a peace. Yet even as Western Europe itself is being balkanized, its leaders give little thought that tomorrow's Kosovo is Paris or London or Oslo. That the sacrifices for tomorrow's peace will come from their own territory

The Balkanization track follows the same pattern.

Stage 1: Political Grievance - In the first stage of Balkanization, the Muslim population is increased if it's not native and radicalized if it is. Political organizations are set up and claims of oppression and discrimination become constant to set the grounds for future action.

Stage 2: Violence - Terrorist groups begin operating in conjunction with political groups offering the authorities a choice, either comply with their political demands or face violence.

Governments commonly fall for this trap believing that they can resolve the problem by empowering the moderate political groups and in doing so weaken the terrorists, little realizing that it's like giving competing in a wrestling match and giving in to your opponent's right hand to weaken his left hand. The political groups serve to shield the terrorists while cooperating with liberal organizations and turning them into a fifth column. The terrorist groups serve as the stick forcing a surrender to the political groups.

Stage 3: Secession - With political and terrorist groups operating now, governments belatedly attempt some sort of half-hearted crackdown. This only serves to justify greater violence and extremism on behalf of the terrorist and political groups. Claiming discrimination, they begin to demand either secession through autonomy or outright rule. Falling into the same trap all over again, governments begin seriously pondering autonomy refusing to realize that both choices lead to the same place.

Stage 4: War - With or without an autonomous state, the violence drastically escalates into the next phase of Mao's phases of guerrilla warfare, with armed militias in the field. While these militias pose no serious threat, they tie up large numbers of government troops and carry out atrocities against the civilian population. Meanwhile any response by the government troops quickly becomes a propaganda moment and is broadcast around the world along with cries for intervention.

The government's attempts at moderation accomplish nothing except to cause the guerrillas to believe in their own immunity and give them time to regroup after every defeat. Government action typically contains enough force to make for good propaganda but not enough to actually make a difference. The civilian population grows weary of the fighting, international organizations call for intervention and peace talks and the government begins to defer to their wishes.

Stage 5: Surrender - Peace talks begin slowly carving up the country on the enemy's terms which are promptly accepted on behalf of the country by various superpowers. If the country resists, it's bombed. If it gives in, it's constantly accused of dragging its feet. The autonomous territory becomes an independent state. The native population becomes dispirited and loses hope. The country's academic and media circles accept defeat as inevitable and welcome the coming peace.

Stage 6: Conquest - The war continues this time from the independent state. Ethnic cleansing is used to purge non-Muslims from Muslim territory while any territory within the country with a Muslim minority is added to the list of demands. Atrocities and terrorism become habitual. Any government response is condemned worldwide as brutal and warmongering. Backed into a corner the country may try to fight for its survival, but it has spent too long being undermined and its bravest and brightest have learned apathy and its new generation only wants to leave. The result is a complete surrender followed by a butchery.

Stage 7: Misery - The country is carved up and renamed by its former minority and its identity ceases to exist. The former terrorists are typically corrupt and incompetent, vital services decay, crime soars, ethnic cleansing destroy the most productive elements of society and the place becomes a miserable sinkhole under a tyranny whose prime purpose is to support the terrorists who are doing Stage 1 or Stage 2 in the country across the border.

This is what we are now facing today. Yugoslavia and Israel are both teetering between Stage 5 and Stage 6. Europe is well into Stage 2 and well on the way to Stage 3. Thailand and the Philippines are in Stage 3 and moving toward Stage 4. America is between Stage 1 and Stage 2, though if Obama becomes President I imagine we'll be skipping a couple of steps. In the end though the trajectory is all the same and unless something is done, country by country will fall.

Muslims command two great weapons, a potent birthrate and the ability to lie and believe their own lies. The former is less significant but the latter is quite powerful indeed, as a short glance at the evening news will quickly show you.

And they're carving up the world country by country, land by land and territory by territory. Hitler's opening gambit has become Islam's opening gambit. Kosovo is the sordid triumph of imagined human rights by carving up a country and turning it over to Muslims who have made it their own by ethnically cleansing Christians, Jews and Roma (gypsies) from its borders.

Around the world the moral authority has fallen into the bloody hands of the terrorists of Paris, London, Ramallah Riyadh, Tehran, Damascus, Kashmir, Oslo, Kosovo and Beslan -- because the moral and culture decay of civilization has left it unable to reason or resist.

Balkanization is the tool of the rats in the walls of our countries gnawing through the mortar by by bit, knowing that undefended, even the mightiest structures must fall. Knowing that the only thing that might stop them would be if the mortar was renewed and the walls stood strong again.

5 Lies About Israel, Fatah, Hamas and the Peace Process

Lie #1: Fatah and Abbas represent a moderate Palestinian faction we must negotiate with while Hamas represent an extreme faction we must alienate.

Since Hamas came to power, the vast majority of terrorist attacks on Israelis have come from Fatah. The last several terrorist attacks including the twin suicide bombing in a cafe in Dimona was carried out by Fatah. Hamas has been shelling Israel from Gaza, but it is Fatah which has been waging a terrorist campaign inside Israel.

Hamas has been concentrating on Egypt meanwhile because it is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood which hopes to come to power in Egypt. That is why America views Hamas as dangerous and extremist, because it represent a regional threat to America's Arab allies, while Fatah is considered to be a threat only to Israel. That is why America has taken a hard line against Hamas but continuously forces Israel to negotiate with Fatah. Hamas is viewed as regional Islamic while Fatah as nationalistic Palestinian, when Israel is told that Fatah must be propped up against Hamas, this is not in Israel's interests, it is in Mubarak's interests.

As far as Israel is concerned, the only substantial difference between Fatah and Hamas is that Fatah is willing to engage in blackmail at the negotiating table while Hamas has no interest in playing the negotiating game at this stage.


Lie #2: Only negotiations can bring peace, even in conflict, negotiations are the best path to bring about an end to the hostilities.

Peace negotiations only work when both sides are prepared to end the fighting because they recognize that it isn't working. But the fighting is working for the Palestinian Arabs and has been since Day 1. The refusal to understand this is at the root of every single lie told about the fraudulent peace process. Terrorism has been the only negotiating tool the Fatah side has ever used and it is the only one that they ever put on the table. There is no reason for them to give up terrorism because it is their best card and it keeps working and they have never been continually penalized for playing it.

Peace works when two weary adversaries decide to give it a rest in their own best interest. But contrary to the media portrayal, this is a struggle between one weary adversary and one deluded and vicious adversary. That is why the negotiations continue to go nowhere. The Palestinian Arab side has never concluded that it is in its own interest to stop the violence. That is why the violence continues, often cloaked by completely implausible denials and self-victimization. The peace process has always led nowhere because Israeli demands for an end to the violence as a precursor to negotiations have been discarded even by Presidents like Bush who once gave lip service to them.

You cannot bring an end to the violence when one part has nothing to lose and plenty to gain by continuing the violence. For 15 years it hasn't worked and it never will work.


Lie #3. A negotiated settlement is possible if we work hard enough to achieve one based on territorial concessions

A negotiated settlement in a zero sum game simply isn't possible. Since 1948 the struggle between Israel and the Arabs has been a zero sum game with the Arab side set on the destruction of Israel. Despite that fact Israel has made repeated territorial concessions, even though Israel's own territory is the smallest piece carved out of the territory of the Palestine Mandate that had been set aside after WW1 for the creation of Israel.

Despite numerical superiority and vaster land and populations and a record of starting wars with Israel, at no point in time has any Arab state ever ceded land to Israel. By contrast Israel has ceded land to Egypt and Jordan, proposed to cede land to Syria and it has ceded a sizable portion of the land within its territorial borders to the terrorists who had been attacking it and it has proposed to cede even more land to them, including portions of its capital.

To gain peace Israel has ceded land equivalent to 3 times its own current size (not counting the Palestine Mandate which was 6 times Israel's current size.) And the Arab world demands that Israel continue giving up land even though over 7 million Israelis live on a piece of land smaller than New Hampshire with a population density that is the 37th largest in the world, barely behind Japan at 32nd, Rwanda at 37th and denser than Haiti at 42nd. When eliminating islands, city states and principalities from the list, Israel actually has the 10th highest population density in the world behind India, Japan and Rwanda.

Twice Israel has expelled its own populations in acts of self-ethnic cleansing virtually unparalleled in history. These precarious withdrawals have put more of Israel's own population on the firing line than ever resulting in Hizbullah and Hamas shelling Israeli towns from Lebanon and Gaza. Rather than bringing peace, these withdrawals have only made the situation more dangerous and unstable and Israel is running out of land to give up. Israel can only carve itself up for so long before nothing is left.

Bush has made it clear that the return of refugees, the classic Arab demand, is now on the agenda, which means forcibly creating an Arab majority in Israel, the ultimate conclusion of the zero sum game.


Lie #4 - A solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict will stabilize the rest of the Middle East

The middle east is a stew of tribal, ethnic, political and religious conflicts, the vast majority of which do not involve Israel. Israel represent an infinitesimal portion of the region in both land and population and has virtually no political influence in the Middle East.

Sunnis are not about to embrace Shias, Islamists will not embrace secularists, tribes will not cease their blood feuds, dictators will not become democrats, Muslims will not learn to tolerate Christians, countries will not cease squabbling over their borders regardless of what happens in Israel. The Middle East has only been stable when it has been ruled by a strong leader or empire.

Israel does not cause the Middle East's instabilities, they predate the modern State of Israel by many centuries. The inherent cause of domestic instability is a lack of strong central governments that can control the instability within their own borders and the cause of regional instability comes from strong central governments with an eye on seizing neighboring countries. This paradox makes the Middle East along with much of the world, inherently unstable. Browbeating Israel will not change human nature of move the Middle East ahead in time by three centuries.


Lie #5 - America's support for Israel has caused resentment and terrorism toward America which Israel is obligated to address

America's role as a superpower is what causes resentment toward America, of which its support for Israel is only a subset. America did not fight Saddam for Israel but for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Israel only got the blame for for a war that began when Saddam invaded a bunch of Sheiks with ties to the Bush Administration. At no point in time has America ever fought a war in defense of Israel. It has however fought two major wars in defense of Arabs (three wars in defense of Muslims) as American soldiers continue dying every week to keep Iraqis safe.

Israel cannot make Arabs and Muslims like America, especially when even America can't make them like America. Europe, which is generally hostile toward Israel, is suffering from a terrorist epidemic greater than that suffered by the United States. Dozens of countries are facing serious Muslim terrorist problems, some of which don't even have diplomatic ties to Israel.

Arab hostility toward America is multifold and would exist even if America had never developed close ties with Israel. Instead the reality is that America developed close ties to Israel because it was unable to develop close ties with any major Arab country. Arab government after government that the US has tried to befriend has either been overthrown or like the Saudis have continually stabbed America in the back. None of this is Israel's fault and the diplomatic frustration that is being directed at Israel will not fix the problem until the US takes a long hard look at the Middle East and the Arab nations it is trying to befriend.

As a Non-Muslim superpower unwilling to simply hand out weapons with no questions asked, the way Russia does, the US will never be popular in the Middle East. But Russia's popularity nor even its hostility to Israel has not kept its citizens and cities from being blown up by Muslim terrorists either. It would seem that being popular still won't keep the terrorist wolf away from your door .

Reclaiming a Civilization's Dreams to Save its Soul

The surest way to destroy a people is to kill their dreams because when you destroy a people's dreams, you also destroy their sense of self-worth, their ambitions, their principles and their goals. Men and women are not animals that need nothing but survival and creature comforts, yet the surest way to destroy a people's soul is to reduce them to just that, to gluttons chasing after creature comforts and finally rats living in the walls of their own society struggling to stay quiet and survive.

If you think this imagery is farfetched, consider that it is already a reality. Where nations like America, Europe and Israel once lived by dreams of the greatness they could achieve and went out and achieved it, today they walk the edges of their own shrinking frontiers trying to understand how to justify their existence to their own people.

While Australia apologizes to the aborigines for its existence, the Archbishop of Canterbury accepts the inevitability of Islamic law in Britain. American pundits wonder whether America has a right to exist and puts forward three candidates who think it does not even have a right to control its own borders. Canada persecutes critics of Islam while protecting Islamic terrorists and Israel dithers in the face of Islamic terrorism from Gaza, the very territory it forcibly ethnically cleansed Jews from in order to make room for the terrorists. All across the oceans and the seas, the oasis' of civilization are faltering as their peoples bow their heads in apathy and confusion to the knife.

How did it get this way? Part of the answer is that when their dreams died, these nations dried up and became husks without the lifegiving virtue of faith in their own destinies. America no longer believes in Manifest Destiny, Britain has given up Empire for the New Britain and Ireland has embraced the New Ireland, Israel no longer believes in Zionism and all across the continents the peoples that have carved out great nations out of desert and trackless wilderness now apologize for the dreams that brought them to transform those lands into civilizations.

The human spirit by its very nature must expand or contract, seek out new horizons and broader destinies or wither and shrivel up. But there are no frontiers left and on all sides the frontiers of civilization shrink in the face of a great southern tide of immigration. The rear guard action being fought by anti-immigration and anti-Jihad activists are not nearly enough because they can never hope to rouse these nations by without reviving their spirits without restoring their dreams.

How do you restore a nation's dreams? It isn't enough to shout about perils and warn about invasions, such things do not move a people that has learned to be apathetic, to grasp after a handful of material comforts and hold its place in the great bureaucratic queue that is the new placeholder of civilized societies, that great endless line at which paltry social benefits are distributed and taxes are collected. And this is why conservatives who fail to articulate a national vision all too often flail about when trying to connect with voters.

To revive a nation you must give it something to believe in, something to strive for and something to truly fight for beyond survival. If you can rally a people to believe in itself again then the threat of rogue barbarians quickly becomes something petty and paltry to be brushed off. If you do not, then building tall walls and isolating yourself only walls in the rot and the declining birth rates and culture will take care of the rest, as Japan is amply demonstrating for us.

What then are these dreams that a nation must dream to truly live? There will be different opinions on this matter, but they are in the doing of great deeds, in the bending of frontiers and the transcendence of merely human limitations. Only in the shadow of heroes and great men can a civilization flourish and only a people that truly believes in its own greatness can be happy and free.

I give you the following quotes, the echoes of national dreams, the dreamstuff of the mythos of nations that truly believed themselves to be great.

"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

"If you will it, it is no dream."

"Our greatest glory is not in never failing, but in rising up every time we fail."

“Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checked by failure...than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

We live in that gray twilight now that Theodore Roosevelt spoke of above, in civilizations swallowed by the gray twilight there is neither true defeat nor victory, instead a long aimless drifting toward futility. In the first quote JFK was speaking of voyaging to the moon, but it is a quote that applies equally to any great endeavor. Great goals make great men because they provide great challenges to measure them against.

The Dhimmitude and decay that has filled Europe and North America, Australia and Israel, the absence of morale, the falling birth rates and the sense of confusion and hopelessness are all natural enough when you consider what happens to men who cease to move forward, they inevitably grow weary and lazy with decline. If we are to survive, we must do more than fight for survival, we must recapture a great destiny again. No party that merely shouts alarms in the people's ears will succeed, by now most of the residents of the civilized world have developed extremely effective ways of tuning out what they do not want to hear. Only a party that can offer a great dream, a great destiny can capture the hearts of people.

Tens of millions of young people across the world hunger for a dream and instead find only apathy and cynicism. They reach for fraudulent mockups of the real thing, for politicians who offer hopeful rhetoric and the set dressings of optimism and destiny but no true vision. When those shams stand revealed and all their allure is stripped away by betrayal and disappointment, apathy and cynicism rule in the ruined houses of their minds and spirits. They learn to distrust everything, to display contempt for their country, to believe any snide remark about their own civilization and beliefs and embrace it, thereby triumphing over the pain of their betrayal. Yet within them they still carry the flickering embers of a betrayed faith, one that now becomes displaced onto terrorists and killers.

Saving our civilizations will take more than winning an argument or ringing the warning bell, it will mean restoring a dream and raising it high so that there stands a clear choice between the appeasers and the defeatists of the status quo and those who strive to see the nation rebuilt in all its glory. Let the dream fly on the wind.

The Koran and the Flag: What's Really Sacred?

American liberals have traditionally bemoaned the idea of creating a constitutional amendment against flag burning, arguing that freedom is more important than the flag. The death knell of that argument came however when Muslims rioted against the Danish cartoons of Mohammed and the liberal American press, all but unanimously refused to display the cartoons. The decision had been made, the Koran was sacred, the American flag was not. It was not about freedom, it was about a matter of priorities and the media has chosen the Koran over the flag.

Choosing the Koran over the Flag has become a pattern across the world and in the wake of that pattern follows the persecution of those who choose the flag. Selling toilet paper with the Koran on it caused a man to be indicted in Germany. There is no crime of course involved in printing the Jewish Torah or the Christian Bible on toilet paper. In Israel a young woman named Tatiana Soskin found herself in solitary confinement and served a prison term for drawing a cartoon of Mohamed as a pig. By contrast leftists in Israel are free and even encouraged to defame Israel itself. Across Europe, Canada and Australia criticizing Islam runs the gamut from mortal danger to criminal act, yet there is no crime or danger in attacking the countries themselves or their right to exist.

This pattern of Koran over Flag repeats itself across the civilized world and where the Koran is raised higher than the Flag, terrorism thrives and national defense and national culture falters.

Through acts of violence Islam draws a line in the sand. The cartoon riots were such a cultural line in the sand as Muslims demonstrated the penalty for criticizing Islam. To the extent that the world went along with it, Islam rose triumphant. The cartoon riots demonstrated once again that despite what the European Union and Congress and the Knesset might believe, laws are not made by bureaucrats and politicians but by those willing to enforce them with civil sanction or violence.

Those who believe in the sanctity of the Torah or the Bible by the very nature of their faith resist the Koran. Those who no longer do anything but give lip service to vague principles like the Archbishop of Canterbury cannot do anything but graciously yielded to the colonization of their own religion.

Those who believe that their countries must endure natively form a cultural resistance to the Jihad, but at the same time face condemnation for their extremism from those same liberals whose sacred principles are not rooted in religion or state but in a vision of some vast borderless utopia, to which the Muslim was supposed to be a contributor and yet is swiftly becoming a conqueror.

In Israel, the war on Religious Zionism continues, a political, cultural and economic campaign of demonization, violence and expulsion. In America, the entire cultural establishment seems geared toward diminishing the terrorist threat and demonizing and ridiculing those who speak out against it. Across Europe, the elites are determined to tear down borders, never realizing or realizing all too well, that in doing so they are also tearing out souls.

In Australia, the new nose picking Prime Minister issued an apology for his country's existence. The leaders of America and Israel prodded along by their own elites have spent decades apologizing for their own country's existence. And the more apologies were issued, the more their flags drooped, morale fell and the Koran and the sword of Jihad rose high.

A people must select what it is they value, their faith and their nation or a borderless tolerance unbroken by the darkest of crimes, the most terrible of explosions, the most brutal rapes and even the prospect of their own annihilations.

Either the Flag or the Koran must rise high for it cannot ever be both.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Obamania, Mutilation and Islamic Terror

Well it's been another long week. New York is freezing and Obama's candidacy is taking off. If Clinton doesn't stop Obama in Penn and Ohio, we're about to have a pro-terrorist candidate a step away from the White House with the media cheering him on.

Personally I find the kind of hysteria that greeted a Ron Paul or an Obama to be disturbing. This is not the response of reasoned voters trying to do their best for their country, it's the shrill insanity of people frantically grasping onto a savior. It reminds me of the mob chasing Brian once his promise of salvation is revealed to be an enigma, except cynical politicians thrive on passing themselves off as saviors and the mob is happy to cheer it on.

But people who embrace men as saviors become madmen themselves. Obama is a cipher and a disturbing one. A man whose path has been paved to power through a campaign of dirty tricks. A man with a Muslim background and ties to the Nation of Islam and a member of a racist church. A man who tries to hide his hatred for America and Israel behind a false veneer of friendliness.

Barack Obama has been very careful not to position himself as Reverend Jesse Jackson or Reverend Al Sharpton as a promoter of “The Black Cause.” He has been groomed, wisely so, to be seen more as a unifier, rather than one who speaks only for the hurt of Black people. In this, he has tapped the dissatisfaction of many Whites, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians across the spectrum, because who cares what color you are if you can save them from the mess that they find themselves in.

Minister Louis Farrakhan

As Charles Krauthammer writes (via LGF)

There’s no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: Bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns — boat, shoe, clock — by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.

And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.

As Lemon Lime Moon has pointed out

Women screaming, crying , weeping hysterically as B. Hussein Obama is said to be mesmerizing, charismatic.Those asked why have no clue as to why they cry and scream and get thrilled at a recent rally in Maryland. Screaming "I love you, I love you" while Obama yelled ," I love you back", the women had tears streaming down their faces and stood transfixed in semi-stupors just as in the days of Adolf H.

Messianic candidates are by their very nature an attack on democracy and a dangerous one.

Meanwhile Bookworm has a post on Obama and how racist ideas are being used to bamboozle people into voting for him

My 5th grader came home from school and told me that all the kids were saying that people should vote for Obama because he’s black.

I asked, “Do they know anything else about him?”

“No,” she replied. “They’re just saying [read: their parents are just saying] that people should vote for him because he’s black.”

My next question: “Should people vote against him because he’s black?”

“Oh, no,” she answered. “That’s racist.”

“Then why,” I asked, “is it any less racist to vote for him simply because of the color of his skin? Any decision we make about someone solely because of their skin color is racist. People should be voting for him based on his experience, skill, and beliefs, not because of his skin color.”

Eric at Conservative Liberal covers it further

By focusing on the race, ethnicity or gender the Left prevents these irrelevant characteristics from being viewed as irrelevant. In fact, the closest thing to government-sponsored discrimination is the Affirmative Action, so loved by the Left. Supposedly this rights some wrong that was perpetrated over 40 years ago. But as I commented, so I, as a Jew, was discriminated against in Odessa. Does this fact mean that I should condone anti-Russian discrimination in Tashkent?

At the Center for Vigilant Freedom meanwhile, more ties between Obama and Islamists, Muslims for Obama for Sharia Law

With supporters like these, will Obama also endorse shariah as a “separate but equal” legal system as part of his party platform? Because shariah’s so filled with …Hope for the Ummah? Audacity for the jihadists? But hey, it would be CHANGE so don’t worry….

Of course, there aren’t enough Muslims in the U.S. to constitute much of a voting block - 2-3 million estimated of a population well north of 300 milliion.

One percent.

Not that this has stopped Gordon England or George Bush from meeting with the leaders of Muslim Brotherhood front groups, in the name of reaching out to this miniscule constituency. And changing U.S. policy domestic and foreign to appease them.

But then that was always about pleasing media, foreign and plutocratic elites, not winning elections.

Muslims for Obama, a new interest group, is preparing their 2009 legislative calendar:

Finally over at IsraPundit, Bill Levinson lays out the case against Jewish support for Obama and the National Jewish democratic Council

Ira Forman has just set the standard that disqualifies a candidate for associating himself with values and ideologies that are repugnant to modern society... The bottom line is that the National Jewish Democratic Council said, whether it meant to say it or not, that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are unfit to hold public office. Since this comes from a Democratic and not a Republican organization, the effect should be absolutely devastating.

Meanwhile in more Islamist news over at the Maverick News Network, the Muslim Brotherhood it appears is fighting for female genital mutilation

Over at the Fiery Spirited Zionist, reports of Iranian newspapers threatening Westerners

An op-ed in the Iranian daily Kayhan by Hossein Shariatmadari who is close to Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei, threatened America and Europe that their support of Israel will cost them. He called upon muslims to attack American, European, Israeli and Jewish "sensitive centers" and stressed that civilians must be harmed in order to change their policies toward Israel.

This is effectively a call to terrorism from the Iranian government against America, Europe and Israel. Also note once again that Iran lists both Israeli and Jewish, putting the lie to the Anti-Zionist but not Anti-Semitic argument.

The Anti-Racist blog meanwhile is doing a great job of covering the so-called Palestine Awareness Week

Meanwhile to close the post, over at the Keli Ata blog is a post and video on a Kassam alert at a kindergarten in Sderot, a town under siege by Islamic terrorism.

The alarm literally gives them seconds to get into a shelter. Once inside the school some of the children scream and cry, others count down to one, and another group sings, "Exactly today, years ago, we came from the womb right to this situation."

The whole thing stops you right in your tracks, and if you're not infuriated by the whole situation then you've got ice water coursing through you veins.

Last Friday night two boys ages eight and nineteen respectively were hit by a kassam. The eight year old screamed "Save me! Save me!" Who wouldn't try to save him and others like him?

I know people say the residents of Sderot should just leave. Just leave? To what avail? So that the Palestinians can invade it and encrouch on other Israeli communities? Eventually, Israel will be reduced to a small and easily annihiliated ghetto, that's what will happen.

Yesterday I read an article on A7 in which some French official said school children shouldn't be taught about the Holocaust because "it's too heavy a burden to carry."

What kind of burden are the children in Sderot and throughout Israel carrying everyday? It's too much to ask of babies just out of their mothers wombs.

And so ends another week at Sultan Knish