"The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

Al Bukhari, quoted in the Hamas Charter

Let there be no mistake about it. This is about genocide. This is what it has always been about generations back, when Hamas forefather, Hassan al Banna was writing fan letters to Hitler.

A Non-violent Gaza Flotilla Activist

This in a single paragraph is Hamas. This is what it stands for. And this is what anyone who talks about "the People of Gaza" really supports. The "People of Gaza" is a euphemism for Hamas which won the last PA election and rules with popular support in Gaza. Israel responded to this takeover by a genocidal terrorist group by closing its border with Gaza. Hamas cynically responded by lying and claiming to be out of power and starving. That allowed their supporters to try and pass off their pro-Hamas agenda as a humanitarian agenda.

But real humanitarians don't sympathize with only one side in a conflict where civilians on both sides are dying. Real humanitarians don't bring guns and knives on a humanitarian mission. And real humanitarians don't chant calls for the murder of Jews calling themselves "The Army of Mohammed". That's what the pack of racist Islamist killers hiding behind their Western useful idiots did. And the Western useful idiots conducting a propaganda mission on behalf of a terrorist organization are no better than the murderers who exploited them.

The Hamas charter begins with a quote from Hassan al Banna calling for the destruction of Israel. Hassan al Banna was an ally of Hitler whose movement distributed Arabic translations of Mein Kampf to its followers. Al Banna's organization, the Muslim Brotherhood, played a key role in creating Hamas and Al Queda. The guiding idea of Hamas, like every other arm of the Brotherhood, is to impose a totalitarian Islamic state by force. The Gaza Flotilla was as cynical an expedition as if a bunch of Nazi supporters had gotten in a boat to bring supplies to Berlin in 1944.

The Hamas supporters on board the Gaza flotilla called themselves the Freedom Flotilla. A brilliantly Orwellian name, considering that they were headed to support an organization that had eliminated what little freedom there had been in Gaza. Hamas had banned music, outlawing the piano, the flute and the violin because they weren't in the Koran. It banned mixed sex music festivals and jeans. It imposed a curfew on public gatherings It banned male hairdressers and women riding on motorcycles. Its morality police have carried out brutal murders of women they decided were immoral. The lack of freedom in Gaza had one common denominator. Hamas. And the Anti-Freedom Flotilla were there to give Hamas a propaganda victory.

Israel sent aboard soldiers armed with paintball guns and stun grenades expecting token resistance from entitled Western left wing protesters. Instead the Westerners were serving as beards for Turkish Islamic radicals. The IDF force functioned under strict rules of engagement that prevented them from defending themselves until the situation escalated so badly that soldiers were suffering serious injuries including gunshot wounds. Only then did the Israeli soldiers return fire with live ammunition. Long after any military or police force would have done so.

Hamas leader Haniyeh speaks under Turkish flag

Turkey's Islamist regime of Erdogan which recently vowed to repeat the Armenian Genocide, if the Armenians continued to protest about it, lost no time in staging protest rallies and delivering self-righteous condemnations. Over a violent encounter that their own people deliberately staged with exactly this intended outcome. And the hypocritical double standard of a world community that gave Erdogan a pass for openly threatening ethnic cleansing, even as he seeks to join the EU, will now begin their usual howls of hypocritical outrage. "Massacre". "Genocide." "Human Rights."

The truth is that there is hardly a regime in the Muslim world that could spell "Human Rights" if those magic words weren't a useful weapon against those damned infidels. Turkey's Erdogan in addition to his genocidal threats is busy jailing opposition politicians, raiding synagogues and imposing religious and racial segregation. And Turkey is still one of the freer countries in the Muslim world. What would Iran, which jailed Western backpackers for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, have done to a ship filled with radicals trying to kill its soldiers? What would Saudi Arabia do, which doesn't even allow Westerners into Mecca unless they're there to suppress a domestic uprising? Both countries are Hamas backers. And this is how Hamas treats resistance. By throwing them off roofs.

But genocide and massacres don't even merit a sigh when carried out by Muslim regimes. But when those countries arm and fund a genocidal Islamist group inspired by the Nazis, the liars and phonies demand that Israel open up its borders to its terrorists. And when Israel intercepts a ship carrying out a mission of propaganda for Hamas, those same liars and phonies start shrieking, "Massacre," "Genocide" and "Human Rights". You want to see massacres, genocide and human rights-- take a weekend trip to Tehran, try to buy a bus ticket to Mecca, run for office in Ankara or try to be a Christian in Karachi.

Turkish group on Flotilla burns US flag

This is about genocide. The Muslim massacre and ethnic cleansing of Jews. A history that goes back to Mohammed, who ethnically cleansed Jews from the Arabian Peninsula. When the "non-violent killers" on board the flotilla chanted, "Remember Khaibar, Khaibar, Oh Jews. The Army of Mohammed will Return!", they were invoking an ugly history of over a thousand years of Muslim oppression and butchery of the region's Jews. Those non-Muslims on board were collaborators in the latest phase of that genocide.

There is no such thing as the non-violent murder of Jews. Supporting the murder of Jews is not a "humanitarian mission", unless your ideas of humanitarian mission match those of Hitler, Hassan al Banna and Hamas. This is indeed about our freedom and genocide. Our right to be free of those who carry out their fanatical dreams of mass murder, whether they happen to be Austrian painters, Hamas politicians or Irish Nobel Prize winners. The State of Israel will not serve the same purpose that Jews have always served for 2000 years, to be the whipping boy of hypocritical moralists. Nor will we apologize for refusing to be murdered. And if you want to kill us, expect us to fight back. Fight us with words, and we will fight back with words. Fight us with knives and guns, and we will do the same. We will not be murdered. We will not be driven into the sea. We will not die. Get used to it.

Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim
That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him
’Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back
And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac

Neighborhood Bully, Bob Dylan

Over the last two weeks, a liberal scholar and pundit named Peter Beinart got a lot of attention by arguing that liberals could no longer be pro-Israel because the country and its people had moved too far to the right. The reality however is just the opposite. In every way, from national defense to the role of religion in public life, Israel has actually watered down its principles and liberalized. But it could not and cannot keep up with the pace at which liberals have slid far to the left.

The key factor in falling liberal support for Israel is not inside the country, but outside it. As liberals have become more radicalized, what used to be the left is now simply liberal. And the delegitimization of Israel is part of a larger package of radical beliefs which extends across the spectrum into every area of domestic and foreign policy. For example the anti-Communist liberal who was not at all hard to find in 1967 when Israel fought the Six Day War, is nearly extinct today. And liberals who support the War on Terror are an endangered species. And if they can't even support America's national defense, it's not surprising that they don't support Israel's own national defense.

Beinart like other left-wing Jewish critics insist that Israel needs to go further to accommodate their support. But how much further is there to go? Israel has worked for 17 years to cut a deal with the Muslim terrorist gangs who employ a constructed identity as Palestinians to leverage international support for their killing sprees. It has withdrawn from large amounts of territory, provided weapons to their militias and even lobbied on their behalf. Will the left suddenly begin supporting Israel, if after offering East Jerusalem to them, Fatah and Hamas still refuse to make peace? We know better than that. No offer Israel could make would suffice to demonstrate its goodwill and the intransigence of the terrorist gangs.

Beinart himself suggests that only when the Palestinian terrorists are happy, and Israel is transformed into an oasis of social justice, (and presumably all conservative parties are banned and the Russian immigrants who voted in Lieberman are deported back to Russia) will his compatriots possibly get on board with supporting Israel again. Which really means that their support for Israel is conditional on the Palestinian terrorists accepting Israel. That is not the way that people who actually ever have any intention of supporting Israel talk or think. It is the way that people who trying to strengthen the terrorists' hand argue. And of course that is the real aim of the left.

The radicalization of liberalism also meant the growing legitimation of terrorism (particularly of those groups backed by the USSR and its left allies) and the delegitimization of those governments resisting them. The left routinely couches its political attacks on those governments in the language of human rights-- but human rights has nothing to do with it. The left hypocritically assails Columbia's Uribe on human rights, while giving Castro, Chavez and the rest of the Marxist gang a pass. Just as it assailed the condition of workers in the US, while giving Lenin and Stalin a pass on an agricultural and industrial system built on the murder of millions. Similarly the left jumps on every Israeli soldier who stops a suspicious Muslim at a checkpoint, while ignoring not only Fatah and Hamas' murder of Israeli civilians, but even their murders of their own citizens.

None of this matters because the left doesn't believe in human rights. It doesn't care about human rights. It never has. Not when Stalin was paving roads with slave labor, nor when Saddam's minions were entertaining themselves in rape rooms. Anyone who seriously thinks that the left is actually outraged about Abu Ghraib because they care about the dignity of man, rather than because they are congenital liars and hypocrites who exploit any misstep by their enemies for propaganda purposes, has not been paying attention. The majority of regimes that the left wing has supported were non-democratic and routinely violate basic human rights. The left not only doesn't give a damn, it defends every one of their crimes.

So let's put to rest the farce that there is anything Israel could do that would win over its left wing critics. The same people who control the dialogue in the press and the melding of minds at universities. To them it is not about justice or doing the right thing or human rights. Those are just words that they use as weapons. Paying attention to those words and trying to demonstrate your innocence only makes you weak and vulnerable. And then they redouble their efforts to cut you to pieces with them. That is what happened to America. It is what is happening to Israel. It is what happens to anyone who stands in the way of their red handed allies.

Of course the left does have a special animus for Israel. And that animus came to the surface when liberalism gave way to the radical left. Because while liberals have been Zionist, the left has been notoriously anti-Zionist. The split goes back to 19th/20th century Europe, where left wing organizations competed with Zionist groups for Jewish support. Both had very different visions of the future. The left wanted to see Jews join in working to create Communism and Socialism in their home countries, before assimilating into them. The Zionists wanted a separate Jewish state. When the left won in Russia, they made Zionism into a crime and the entire Hebrew language was banned as "counterrevolutionary". Possession of a Hebrew dictionary could mean being sent to the Gulags.

The USSR organized and armed entire Arab armies to attack and destroy Israel. And like Nazi Germany had done before it, the Commissars fed Anti-semitic propaganda to their allies in Europe. To their credit, some resisted. Even many French Communists who had seen what the Nazis did to the Jews were disgusted at being given cartoons and messages strongly suggestive of Nazi Germany with orders to incorporate them into their own newspapers. But that resistance is mostly history now. Left wing politicians in Europe think nothing of claiming that Jewish cabals control the government, refusing to publish the papers of Jewish Israeli colleagues and supporting genocidal Islamic groups and countries that vow to wipe out the Jews. That their behavior is an ominous echo of the Hitler era means less than nothing to them. Just as it meant less than nothing to the Nazis.

The left's opposition to Israel has nothing to do with human rights, but with its insistent belief that Jewish separatism is illegitimate and diverts recruits from their effort to build modern socialist states. Beinart indirectly makes the same case, insisting that support for Israel's survival must be subsidiary to the country's compliance with the left's political values. Because of course the same people who agitated against any overthrow of Saddam, when it comes to Israel make their support conditional on passing an impossible test, in which Israel either commits suicide to win their support, or survives and loses their support. I will only love you if you kill yourself .

The left is determined not to allow any redefinition of Israel as legitimate. Its hijacking of liberalism means that once again it feels driven to win Jewish recruits by destroying any independent national and religious identity that they may have. By forcing liberal Jews to choose between their political allegiances and Israel, they are setting up a difficult choice for them. Having the Obama Administration attack Israel was only one of the many forms of strain introduced to create that breaking point. Even while pundits like Joe Klein and Andrew Sullivan relapse into rants against Israel that the editors of Der Sturmer would have run on the front page.

This was what the left wanted all along. Consider the following "forecast" of a perfect socialist future from H.G. Wells

And yet between 1940 and 2059, in little more than a century, this antiquated obdurate culture disappeared. It and its Zionist state, its kosher food, the Law and all the rest of its paraphernalia, were completely merged in the human community. The Jews were not suppressed; there was no extermination... but under the Tyranny there was never any specific persecution at all; yet they were educated out of their oddity and racial egotism in little more than three generations. Their attention was distracted from Moses and the Promise to Abraham and the delusion that God made his creation for them alone, and they were taught the truth about their race. The world is as full as ever it was of men and women of Semitic origin, but they belong no more to “Israel”.

To understand Beinart and why the left really hates Israel, read that paragraph very carefully. This is why left wing anti-zionism is anti-semitism. It isn't that they want to wipe out six million people of semitic ancestry. They just want Israel and Jews gone. They would rather do it bloodlessly, with no "extermination" or "specific persecution", but if the Jews don't cooperate, they still intend to fulfill their goals.

People who think this way are not going to be reassured that Israel is a good little country. To them Israel is unacceptable. It is unacceptable because they reject the idea of a separate Jewish national identity. And that robs them of manpower and ties in with all sorts of religious ideas they would like to get rid of, among both Jews and Christians.

And so they delegitimize Israel as a country that has no right to exist. That has no right to defend itself. That has no right to survive. That always does everything wrong. That is an oppressor, that steals organs and is the neighborhood bully. An unjustifiable monster disrupting the entire world. If it sounds familiar, it should. The Nazis used those same arguments to justify a progression of persecution that eventually culminated in genocide. The left is using them today. And it may lie to itself about what its ends and means are, it may even believe in its claptrap about human rights, but blood always tells the truth in the end.

George Bernard Shaw, that corrupt old socialist scribbler, said it simply enough: "Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race... can go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being Jews and start being human beings." The Beinarts still unconsciously echo Shaw like a dog howling for its deceased master. And the message remains the same, that a real world Jewish state is incompatible with being a liberal Jew. Liberal Jews can support the rights of any and every people to a state (assuming that the left approves of them) including that of the entirely mythical Palestinian people-- just not the Jews.

Liberals betrayed Israel by allowing themselves to be taken over by the left. Not against their will, but all too often they allowed their own political radicalization to occur without considering the long term implications. The further they went to the left, the more they turned on their own country, and other countries the left considered its enemy, such as Israel. And the left is busy indoctrinating their children against the homelands.

The left does not hate Israel because of Ariel Sharon, but because of Moses and Abraham and King David. It wants Jews to forget that they are not merely cogs in a socialist state-- to forget that are the descendants of kings and warriors. The sons and daughters of the people who faced down Assyrian chariots and Roman legions, the children of a great civilization in a sea of barbarism that changed the world.

They want us to forget, because a people that does not know its own power is already enslaved. In the last century, we remembered that we were the descendants of kings and warriors. Of queens and prophetesses. Sailors and scholars. That we had a better destiny than to escape prejudice by subsuming ourselves into the left's great dream of a universal socialist state. We remembered and we started to become those things again. The left fears this exodus from their power, as that ancient Pharaoh feared the loss of his Hebrew slaves. They want us to forget. To sink down again. To accept their brand of liberalism that denies our rights in the name of their ideology. Their lies are chains around our feet. Those who choose to be slaves will wear them proudly as iron badges of honor. Those who choose to break them will be forever free.

Last week, just in time for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, Apple decided to ban iSlam Muhammad, an app that featured some rather revealing passages in the Koran. Meanwhile Apple chose to leave in place BibleThumper, an app that attacked the bible. Of course those very same Koranic quotes can be found in the numerous Koran apps created by Muslims. But the double standard doesn't stop there. Before that Apple had decided to ban a campaign App by California congressional candidate Ari David, which criticized his opponent, Congressman Henry Waxman, for being "defamatory". But naturally you can find Robert Gibbs' latest "defamatory" statements on the White House App.

This shouldn't be particularly surprising as Apple does have Al Gore as one of its board members. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is a Democratic donor who has contributed to Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi. Apple fields one of the largest lobbying efforts among computer companies, spending 1.5 million over the last few years. Not only is Apple not politically neutral, it's decidedly left of central. And it controls one of the largest mobile platforms. Its ability to censor a political App from Ari David, but not from Barack Obama is a thing that has decided implications for the future of an open marketplace of ideas.

Apple's Developer License Agreement gives it the power to censor "offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind" or any "other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod Touch users." Apple has been known to disable or "Brick" the iPhones of users who attempt to bypass its control. And now that Apple is aggressively getting into the book and magazine business with its new iPad, the troubling idea that Rahm Emanuel's donor and Al Gore will be deciding what people can or can't read takes on new meaning.

So when Apple decided that the following statement in Ari David's app, "(Waxman) Supported Cap & Trade legislation that would have brought us $7 a gallon gas and as President Obama has stated would make electricity rates “necessarily sky rocket” was defamatory, it was passing judgment on political speech. And determining what political content would be acceptable and what wouldn't be. Robert Gibbs' regular put downs will apparently pass. Ari David's policy oriented criticism of Waxman won't. Similarly anti-war radical Adam Kokesh's App was allowed through, even though he's running as a sham Republican. Or perhaps because of that.

The problem is not limited to just Apple. Facebook responding to the boycotts and death threats coming out of Pakistan, by pulling the Facebook page for Everybody Draw Mohammed, proving that while it may be a useful organizing tool, it is also highly vulnerable to being censored. The same goes for YouTube which has taken down many videos, including Michelle Malkin's and videos questioning Islamic violence. There are numerous similar examples of political censorship, whether out of fear or bias, no one but those on the inside can even begin to say. The larger problem is that the censorship does indeed exist.

Many of these same companies very badly want the government to step in and protect their business model with Net Neutrality, yet while they believe that the government should compel cable and other broadband providers to give them open access to their customers and data sources, they don't have any intention of returning that same favor to their users. This inconsistency between actions and demands also makes it impossible to trust them.

If Apple cannot tolerate a campaign App which criticizes a congressman for wanting to make vitamins, over the counter only, what sort of political speech can it tolerate? With something like 30 million iPhone users out there, the question is both timely and troubling. The technology we use today has empowered a New Media, but if large companies such as Apple insist on turning their platforms into gated communities, then the same old struggle has to begin again.

Ayatollahs and Mullahs don't need to cross out the Bill of Rights and draw the Sharia code of Islamic law over it, if Facebook and YouTube will willingly do it for them. Selective censorship of political speech means that the censors, both the actual censors and those who demand that they do the censoring, control the nature of the speech, closing the door on an open marketplace of ideas, and turning back the clock on the same top down media environment in which we have the right to listen or hit the OFF button.

Yet these same companies which have benefited from an open environment, both that of ideas and free enterprise, might wish to reconsider going down the same dead road that their media predecessors followed. Censorship lock those who censor into an inflexible mode, as by shutting down contradictory ideas, they also kill their own ability to react, adapt and change in response to new information. In essence they destroy the very elements that allowed them to be creative and succeed in the first place.

Update: Apple has conceded and has approved Ari David's app. But the questions raised here still remain.

With the Ground Zero Mosque approval, it seems timely enough to run this satirical video of the Palestinian Minister of Uncontrollable Rage visiting the Great Muslim City of New York.

Meanwhile America's greatest actual Muslim, after steadily avoiding any association with that giant mess in the gulf you may have heard of, Obama waited until the company he maligned seemed likely to fix it, to roll out his big "Savior of the Gulf" tour. This was cynical posturing from a man who spent so much time passing the buck that he even got called out for it by party loyalists like Chris Matthews and James Carville, who now wanted to get the credit for a solution he had nothing to do with.

But this was also typical behavior from a man surrounded by PR people who had cut their teeth on spinning modern corporate failures. Rule 1 is to avoid being associated with the scandal, Rule 2 is to be associated with the solution.

It's the same reason why Obama avoids the military, whether it's ducking out on Memorial Day or delaying a visit to Afghanistan for as long as possible once in office. Egotists only want the credit, never the blame. And the kind of people who surround Obama think in terms of "branding" not responsibility. But a year of this kind of game has made it a little obvious. The press corps over getting ignored. And even party loyalists can see that Obama doesn't do anything without expecting a PR payday. Forget Harry Truman's The Buck Stops Here, Obama's motto is, The Buck Stops Here, the Blame Stops Somewhere Else.

But Obama's tour was not only ill timed, because the solution was not quite as instantaneous as his crew had been expecting, but because it seemed to be as much about ducking the Sestak accusations, as about plugging the hole. The dubious achievement here was that Clinton had managed to get involved in a political scandal without even being in office. But there's only so far this can go. The primary source for the claim is a Democrat wannabe Senator, who isn't about to bring down the Obama Administration just because they tried to suppress him in the primary. He may be bitter, but mostly he's maneuvering in an environment in which Obama has lost his golden halo, and has to hold off the possibility of an independent bid by Arlen Specter. Like a surprising number of Democratic Senators, he doesn't seem to mind screwing over Obama, but neither is he about to do any real damage there.

But you can spot the return of the words Clinton + Scandal by the media as US News and World Report wonders "What Constitutes a Bribe?" Media Matters trips all over itself with one of its more convoluted headlines to date, "Right-wing media absurdly declare false Sestak "bribe" allegations "Obama's Watergate". Meanwhile the Washington Post helpfully informs us in an editorial that; "Ethics laws do not seem designed for this circumstance." Which is convenient of course. If only Gore were here to remind us that there's no legal controlling authority.

So far the only winners here are Sestak and Issa, both of whom have leveraged this to raise their profile. But the Obama Administration has suffered another embarrassment, and each one serves to undermine its standing, not only with the general public, but with its own supporters. Even the Washington Post is being forced to argue that its whitewash of Sestakgate was complicated by the White House's lack of transparency. This reflects the underlying frustration of an MMS that wants desperately to give Obama favorable coverage, but is being shown a brick wall instead.

But Republicans should be worried. As public frustration continues to grow, it won't just stop with the Democrats. Particularly if the Republicans score recognizable victories in 2010. There are troubling poll shifts in some elections already.

Thomas Del Beccaro at Big Government argues that local races need nationalization, but that too may be a fundamental mistake. Critz didn't beat Burns on national issues, but on local issues. Just as Bill Owens beat Doug Hoffman on local issues.

Senate races can be fought and won on national issues, but congressional fights are local. And trying to fight national battles locally is how NY-23 was lost. Critz won because he connected himself to Murtha's legacy, such as it is, trotted out his widow, and pretended to be fairly conservative on issues that mattered locally. Most voters just want someone to represent their community, and the Democrats have their majority thanks to the fraud of Conservative Democrats who pretend to believe one thing while doing another.

But over in New Jersey, Governor Christie is teaching a master class in how to win locally by applying national conservative principles to local matters. Christie never has to mention Obama or a national deficit. Instead he attacks liberal arrogance and entitlement directly with common sense challenges. It's what Reagan did so well and had McCain done that, we wouldn't have Obama in office right now. And any Republican Presidential candidate who wants to run in 2012 had better master doing it now.

Right now the Republican party does not have its house in order, and the Rand Paul and Haley Barbour messes are not helping. The only winning Democratic strategy has been to focus on Republican scandals, which is a win because they have a tame media in their corner. They played that card effectively enough once before. They'll be happy to do it again to sabotage a Republican congressional takeback.

The Democrats have realized that focusing on tarring Tea Party activists directly is a losing hand, and they're slowly backing off that strategy, which only helped build the Tea Party's populist appeal. And so they're shifting for another go at Republican politicians. Rand Paul's win was a major victory for them, as it allowed them to put an ugly face on a movement by associating it with a politician who had little to actually do with it. Between the Paulestinians and the liberal media, the trap was neatly sewn together for Republicans by these two groups. And with the Maddow interview, plenty of them fell into the trap of defending Rand Paul. Which is the old strategy that Dick Morris formulated under the Clinton Administration.

Winning requires being smart. Because it's very easy to be stupid. It's very easy to get bogged down in internal politics and rivalries, or sabotaged by people who seize the advantage to exploit the political chaos for their own benefit.

Because of the media imbalance, Republicans will need to go forward with a clean house. If they can't do that, things will get very ugly, very fast. And the public will decide that both parties are hopeless, and that it doesn't matter who wins.

Turning to the Ground Zero Mosque, Walid Shoebat has an article in which Imam Feisal admits he wants to bring Sharia law to America.

Is Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf – founder of the hugely controversial Ground Zero Mosque – lying to the American public?

We have uncovered extraordinary contradictions between what he says in English and what he says in Arabic that raise serious questions about his true intentions in the construction of the mosque.

...

Only two months before, on March 24, 2010, Abdul Rauf is quoted in an article in Arabic for Rights4All entitled (from one of his responses) “I Do Not Believe in Religious Dialogue”.

...

In the article, the Imam said the following of the “religious dialogue” and “interweaving into the mainstream society” that he so solemnly seems to advocate in the Daily News and elsewhere: “This phrase is inaccurate. Religious dialogue as customarily understood is a set of events with discussions in large hotels that result in nothing. Religions do not dialogue and dialogue is not present in the attitudes of the followers, regardless of being Muslim or Christian. The image of Muslims in the West is complex which needs to be remedied.”

But that’s only the beginning of what we learn from the Rights4All piece. When asked his view regarding an Islamic state, Abdul Rauf responded that “Throughout my discussions with contemporary Muslim theologians, it is clear an Islamic state can be established in more then just a single form or mold. It can be established through a kingdom or a democracy. The important issue is to establish the general fundamentals of Shariah that are required to govern. It is known that there are sets of standards that are accepted by [Muslim] scholars to organize the relationships between government and the governed.”

When questioned about this, Abdul Rauf continued “Current governments are unjust and do not follow Islamic laws.” He added “New laws were permitted after the death of Muhammad, so long of course that these laws do not contradict the Quran or the Deeds of Muhammad…so they create institutions that assure no conflicts with Shariah.”

...

In yet plainer English, Abdul Rauf’s goal is the imposition of Shariah law – in every country, including the U. S.

He made that even clearer in an interview with Sa’da Abdul Maksoud that appeared on the popular Islamic website Hadiyul-Islam on May 26, 2010 – one day after his article for the New York Daily News.

In the Hadiyul-Islam article, Abdul Rauf reiterates that an Islamic state under Shariah law with no separation of church and state can be established even when the government is a kingdom or a democracy.

...and we are letting it happen.

But never fear the Federal Government is keeping up its war on terrorists. Wait, no not on terrorists, on people who infiltrate and expose terrorist organizations.

The Department of Homeland Security is trying to deport the son of a Hamas founder who told of his conversion to Christianity and decade of spying for Israel in a New York Times best-seller.

Yousef said the DHS informed him Feb. 23, 2009, he was barred from asylum in the U.S. because there were reasonable grounds for believing he was "a danger to the security of the United States" and "engaged in terrorist activity."

An incredulous Yousef said the U.S. government's belief he is a terrorist is based on a complete misinterpretation of passages of his book in which he describes his work as a counterterrorism agent for the Israeli internal intelligence service Shin Bet...

Meanwhile in Peru, convicted terrorist Lori Berenson has been freed and her parents are working hard to get her "deported" to the US. Despite the fact that a Peruvian court convicted her of participating in terrorist activities. While the hard left has tried to turn Lori Berenson into another Rachel Corrie, a suffering martyr, the fact is that Berenson hates America, just as much as she hates Peru.

Her own words are her best indictment

More than a year ago, the world witnessed the inhumane transfer of Taliban prisoners of war to the US military base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and, of course, no one really knows what they may be suffering, as is the case of the many detained in jails across the US after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It reminds me of life in Peruvian jails where, for many years, the public could not find out what happened to prisoners in jail, much less what happened in the army or police headquarters during interrogations designed to extract information. Being a political prisoner myself, I have first-hand knowledge of what it is like to be in the hands of a system that not only detests prisoners (especially political prisoners or prisoners of war), but also regards them as being something less than human.

and again...

President Bush insists that we won’t let terrorists destroy our way of life. Remembering the suffering experienced in the aftermath of Katrina and the blatant indifference many politicians demonstrated to the people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, one should wonder why anyone would want to defend that way of life.

Lori Berenson is a hardened radical. She does not belong in the United States. She belongs in jail. People like her aid terrorists with the aim of bringing down all of society into ruin and rubble, and creating their own perfect dictatorship. And the people who have been taken in by her, who wrote letters on her behalf asking for her release made a terrible mistake. And before you say anything about her parents, her mother wrote a book about Lori Berenson. The foreword to it was written by Noam Chomsky. The afterword by Ramsey Clark.

Whether it's Rachel Corrie or Lori Berenson, the enemy knows quite well that we are vulnerable to the sight of what seems to be innocent young girls suffering. But they are not innocent. They chose to affiliate themselves with evil. With murder and atrocity. They do not deserve any pity whatsoever.

In the UK meanwhile Muslims are continuing their campaign against Jewish rights to our own history and identity

A Muslim campaign group has written to the new Education Secretary Michael Gove to object to state-aided Jewish schools promoting Zionism.

Mohammed Asif, the chief executive of Engage (not to be confused with the antisemitism monitoring group of the same name), said he was "more than a little surprised" to see Zionism included as part of the ethos of several Jewish schools.

Mr Asif cited a number of Jewish schools professing explicit support for Zionism, including Manchester's King David High School, Broughton Jewish Cassel Fox Primary in Salford, and Simon Marks Jewish Primary School in Hackney, north London.

He wrote that he understood the Jewish nature of the schools, but that he would "contest the place of Zionism in the school's governing ethos".

A spokesman for the Department of Education said it had not yet had time to respond to the letter. Jon Benjamin, chief executive of the Board of Deputies, commented: "There is nothing at all remarkable or contentious in a Jewish school stressing the spiritual and historical connection of Jews to the land of Israel, and the centrality of those connections to our faith. It is those who attempt to characterise Zionism as an anathema to Judaism who are trying to score political points."

King David's website, explaining the aims of its Jewish studies programme, states that the school has "a strong Zionist ethos and all students are given the opportunity to visit Israel. A love and appreciation of Israel is woven into the curriculum."

Of course no one is demanding that say Muslim schools stop mentioning their claims to Jerusalem or Mecca.

And a Muslim demand to remove Israel from the values of a Jewish school is a direct attack on Judaism and the Bible, which is after all the story of G-d and the Jewish people as defined by the Land of Israel. There is no way around that.

Square Mile Wife has her own take on my Liberalism's Obesity Obsession piece.

Health and fitness are all about class. In the UK (where a class system is still rigidly in place) people of a certain social strata will refuse to shop at certain grocery chains because in their eyes they are not up to snuff. If you tell people here you work-out, they will immediately ask you what gym you belong to and based on your answer will try to estimate your income level and social position.

The number of responses to Beinart's smear continues to grow. Noah Pollak had the definitive response at Commentary, Ted Bromund has an interesting conclusion as well. (Via Love of the Land)

For Beinart is not really writing about Israel at all. For him, and for the thousands of allies this lonely man possesses, the real issue is that, as Ben points out, Israel was born of a 19th-century nationalist impulse. At the time, that was not illiberal. On the contrary, support for national self-determination, as long as the people in question were capable of founding and sustaining a legitimate, sovereign state, was the essence of liberalism. The only difference was that the Jewish people, instead of being oppressed by one foreign power — as the Poles were by the Russians, or the Greeks by the Turks — were being oppressed by many.

The problem today is not that the peace process has failed or that this reveals the failure of the liberal vision. All that is true enough. The problem is that the liberal vision itself has changed. Not all liberals reject the nation-state, but suspicion of the nation-state as the organizing unit for the world does stem predominantly from the left. In view of the importance that the left attaches to the state as the provider of welfare benefits, this is both ironic and contradictory. But it does not change the fact that one reason liberals (especially those of a European persuasion) have fallen out of love with Israel is that it — along with the United States — was founded on and persists in maintaining a democratic and nationalist vision.

This is why the liberal critics bracket Israel and the U.S. They claim they do so because the U.S. supports Israel. Actually, they do it because they reject the worldview on which both nations are founded, the worldview that has motivated the U.S. to support Israel. For the critics, democracy and nationalism must ultimately be in conflict. Hence the importance of the EU and transnational initiatives like the International Criminal Court. This is a worldview founded in the European reaction to the Second World War. The fact that this war led to the destruction of the European nations and the rise of the Israeli one is another reason for anti-national liberals to look upon it with scorn: to them, Israel appears to be resisting the lessons of history.

There is a good deal of truth to that, but there is one complication. Liberals are enthusiastically in favor of some states. They want a Palestinian state. They supported Saddam's right to massacre his own people. What they oppose are states that represent a particular set of values. Not merely nationalism, but the nationalism of civilized countries.

And another addendum vis a vis a different foreign policy approach for Israel

This foreign policy will succeed if it drives a wedge between liberal, Western democracies and the Arab world by exploiting the biggest point of weakness of that peculiar alliance. Namely, the fact that Arab demand that Jews be expelled from their homes, violates deep seated Western values and legal traditions. Furthermore, this foreign policy will succeed by demanding that the West adhere to its own democratic values by demanding that Arab nations grant to their own people those civil rights routinely granted by Western societies. The objective is to drive a wedge between Arab totalitarianism and Western liberalism.

This new foreign policy will make demands of the Arab world consistent with Western values, by demanding Arab states grant their Arab inhabitants basic civil rights, such as citizenship for Palestinians living inside the Arab world. It will force the West to deal with Gaza not as a “humanitarian crisis” caused by Israel but as a totalitarian state oppressing its own people, allied with Iran. The objective is to drive a wedge between Arab totalitarianism and liberal Western governments.

To close wit , Rahm hears some truth, Noam Shalit still ready to sell out to Hamas in any way to get his son back and Caroline Glick on the importance of reclaiming our language from the left.

Chomsky has repeatedly defended Holocaust deniers while accusing Israel of being the ideological heir of Nazi Germany. When he hasn't been too busy championing the Khmer Rouge and Josef Stalin, and attacking the US as the Great Satan, Chomsky has devoted much time and energy to calling for Israel's eradication and defending Palestinian and Hizbullah terrorists.

IT WAS the government's job to point this out. But instead, faced with the leftist onslaught against its right to control its borders, the government crumpled. Instead of explaining that Chomsky is an enemy of Israel and an abettor and defender of genocide, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's spokesman Mark Regev apologized for the unpleasant reception Chomsky received at the Allenby Bridge. Regev also promised that if Chomsky returns, he will be granted an entry visa.

The government's cowardly handling of the Chomsky incident is testament to the Left's success at intimidating Western leaders to the point where instead of standing up to leftist propaganda and lies, they accept them as truth and even collaborate in disseminating them.

One of the more stunning bits of insanity to come out of 2008 is that during an economic crisis caused by "Buy Now, Pay Later" fiscal planning, a candidate whose entire economic philosophy was built on "Buy Now, Pay Later" was voted in. The difference is that Obama's "Buy Now, Pay Later" plans weren't there for capitalism, but to fund socialism. And now with the national debt tripled, and his approval rating lower than a skunk's at an aromatherapy session, he's pushing out ObamaCare's "benefits" ahead of schedule. Still Buy Now, Pay Later.

Buy Now, Pay Later had already done a stunning job of undermining the basic financial competence of large numbers of Americans over the years. What had been a country where people understood the value of saving money, because a country of consumers who were talked into running up credit card debts and taking out loans they couldn't afford. But this was a mirror image of what they saw happening in government at every level, with their leaders spending money non-stop, without any serious thought of when the bill would come due. Companies not only seduced customers into abandoning common sense, but they threw their own financial accountability overboard. Debt became Detroit's real commodity, not steel or muscle cars. Debt became Wall Street's best investment. And as the national debt grew, debt also became America's biggest export to China.

And while liberals continue preaching against the sins of Wall Street, they display a flagrant hypocrisy in ignoring the fact that their own policies are based on even worse financial planning. Furthermore major industries now assume as a given that if they're too big to fail, then they can make whatever missteps they like, and Johnny Taxpayer will be there to bail them out if it all comes crashing down around them. Buy Now. Pay Later. Keep passing the buck and forwarding the bill, without any real thought of who's going to pay for it all. Now the world economy is tottering because so much of it turned out to be a fraud, which in turn is being held up by the fear that if any part of it collapses, so much more of the fraud will become apparent, bringing it all crashing down.

And so the US government spends like mad and sells the debt to China, which buys it with the proceeds of its own giant financial scamming, and is now terrified that our house of cards will bring their house of cards down. Europe bails out Greece to protect the Euro, whose collapse would expose the house of cards of the EU. The US intervenes to help save the Euro with more taxpayer money which is added to more debt which is sold to China, which hopes the whole wobbly mess will be righted before Dubai's own royalist house of cards goes down for good. The big achievement of Globalization is that now everyone is too big to fail, so we all have to keep passing the monopoly money around the world table as part of a consensus in which everyone pretends to believe everyone else's lies, if they believe theirs. The sheer scope of it makes Madoff look like a shoeshine boy pinching nickels.

And the only way to play at every level of this three-ring circus is to keep spending money. If you assign imaginary values to counters in a global pyramid scheme, you have to constantly keep moving more of the counters to keep up the charade. And that means spending money. From the consumer loading up three credit cards to the big developer borrowing hundreds of millions to spend on a grandiose project to a company with no business plan making a public offering of overvalued shares to the government announcing another huge spending package-- the counters always have to stay in motion. And someone else always has to get the bill. Until everyone realizes that there's no money and no one to take the bill.

That hasn't happened yet, but sooner or later it will. What we think of an economy is actually a tremendously persuasive scam built on maintaining a buzz of activity, but creating no actual value. And people like George Soros who understand that there is nothing beneath the economy but a tissue of mutual deceptions, have profited enormously from their financial terrorism. From causing limited financial catastrophes in the knowledge that everyone else will have to limit the fallout, while pushing to centralize economies further on the "The Bigger They Are, The More Profit There Is In Toppling Them Over" scheme of piratical rewards. Because socialism can be profitable, so long as you set it up and then bet against it. Meanwhile liberal court jester economists like Paul Krugman who put his Enron experience to good use, by encouraging politicians to think that non-stop debt based spending is actually more beneficial than cutting back on spending. And the genuinely terrifying thing, is that like medieval witchhunters, they probably even believe what they're saying.

What all this adds up to is socialism. Since once a government becomes the financial reservoir for its country's businesses, the end result is that the companies will use it as a safety net, passing along its own failures, while the government attempts to control the economy-- resulting in a government run economy. Which naturally makes them into an even bigger target for financial terrorism and economic hit men. Because there is no such thing as too big to fail. Everything can fail. It just fails bigger. And the bigger it fails, the more it takes down in its wake.

The more an economy runs through the government, the more vulnerable both government and economy are due to their intertwined state. Government authority feeds corruption and waste, opening the door to a cycle of diminishing returns in which more centralization produces less product and profit, which when combined with a Culture of Entitlement can leave a formerly productive country looking like the USSR. But that very same culture also seduces citizens with Buy Now, Pay Later. Entitlement builds hidden debts, which are passed along from generation to generation, until the interest outweighs the principal. Until the debt itself becomes an asset. Until everyone realizes that the emperor has no clothes.

Socialism competes with capitalism for resources. Its philosophy demands that people invest in a government that will take care of them, rather than in pursuing their own economic destiny. Put the American Dream on the shelf and say hello to the Nanny State. That's the general idea here. But Buy Now Pay Later Capitalism and Buy Now Pay Later Socialism are partners in passing the torch from the former to the latter. Authentic free enterprise is built on hard work. Buy Now, Pay Later Capitalism however sold people on the idea that they could buy now, and pay whenever. Entire advertising campaigns were built on luring people into piling up debt. Banks began banking on the financial incompetence of their customers, turning penalty fees into their major revenue source. Debt was resold. Detroit began selling credit instead of cars. And all that debt had to stop somewhere. And that somewhere was always the government.

Where the America of generations past understood that there was no free lunch, a new America forgot that fundamental lesson and began putting it all on a card. And from the individual shopper to the halls of the United States Congress, that became the way it was done. War or no war. Recession or prosperity. Rain or shine. It didn't matter anymore. And thus began the era of the world's most expensive free lunch. Liberals offered free entitlements with very huge back end price tags that had to be paid in taxes. Free this and free that. All of it more Buy Now, Pay Later.

Now the huge cost of putting Obama where he sits has to be paid for with the biggest Buy Now/ Pay Later package that Americans have ever seen. Socialism in all its sordid glory. Free everything that you and your children's children will have to pay for through the nose. Bailouts and takeovers. Rivers of regulation, all formulated to benefit the regulators, not the regulated. Enough people have woken up to the lies. Enough families recognize that their children will be in debt for generations to pay off just the debt that has already been accumulated. And despite all the calls of "Don't Worry" and "The Experts are on the Case", they're worried and they're angry. Because buying socialism now, means we'll have to keep paying for it forever.

The media is having a field day mocking J.D Hayworth over his statement about WW2. The truth as usual is a lot more complicated than can be encompassed in a soundbite fed out by talking heads who think Pearl Harbor is a jewelery store at their local mall.

To begin with, Hayworth accurately pointed out that the US entry into WW2 faced similar criticism that the present day of War of Terror does. Both FDR and George W. Bush were frequently accused of an Imperial Presidency and of overstepping their bounds. Both men were also accused of conducting an illegal war.

Before WW2, Roosevelt's critics frequently claimed that the administration was dragging America into a war.  Lindbergh, the most prominent spokesman against the US entry into WW2, expressed that belief in a speech several months before Pearl Harbor.

The Roosevelt administration is the third powerful group which has been carrying this country toward war. Its members have used the war emergency to obtain a third presidential term for the first time in American history... And they have just used the war to justify the restriction of congressional power, and the assumption of dictatorial procedures on the part of the president and his appointees.

Lindbergh was arguing that the United States was already unofficially involved in WW2. There was certainly some truth to that.

In his Navy Day Address, around the same time, Roosevelt said:

Our Army and Navy are temporarily in Iceland in the defense of the Western Hemisphere. Hitler has attacked shipping in areas close to the Americas in the North and South Atlantic.

Many American-owned merchant ships have been sunk on the high seas. One American destroyer was attacked on September 4. Another destroyer was attacked and hit on October 17. Eleven brave and loyal men of our Navy were killed by the Nazis.

We have wished to avoid shooting. But the shooting has started. And history has recorded who fired the first shot. In the long run, however, all that will matter is who fired the last shot.

...

For this-and all of this-is what we mean by total national defense.

The first objective of that defense is to stop Hitler. He can be stopped and can be compelled to dig in. And that will be the beginning of the end of his downfall, because dictatorship of the Hitler type can live only through continuing victories-increasing conquests.

Obviously this was a statement made by a President who was talking as if he were already at war with Germany. FDR was responding to the attacks on US ships by German submarines, including the Greer Incident. In response Congress repealed Section 6 of the Neutrality Act which allowed for the arming of merchant vessels shipping materials to the Allies. To opponents of the war, the Greer Incident played the same role as the Gulf of Tonkin incident would in Vietnam.

To get back to J.D. Hayworth's statement, the US did eventually declare war on Germany, however this was in response to Germany's own declaration of war on the United States, which was in response to the US declaration of war on Japan. Under the Tripartite Pact-- an attack on one of the signatories, required the others to assist them. Which meant the US declaration of war on Japan, was also an indirect declaration of war on Germany.

In Hitler's own rambling declaration of war on the US, he cited the obligation of the Tripartite Act and the Greer Incident. This prompted Congress to pass a formal resolution declaring that a state of war exists between the US and Germany. The same process was conducted for Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania, the other signatories to the Tripartite Act. By declaring war on Japan, the United States produced a chain reaction series of declarations of war by Tripartite Act signatories.

It's possible to go into far more depth on the subject, but suffice it to say that US participation in WW2 did not begin with a formal declaration of war. It began when we worked to support our European allies and to try and contain the spread of Nazism. Months before Pearl Harbor, the US was engaged in naval hostilities with Nazi Germany. We had a naval base in Iceland. And the President was talking about what we would do to stop Hitler. The formal declarations of war were the official stamp that recognized the inevitable reality.

What implications does this have for the present? Hayworth was responding to an apparent Paultard who  trying to argue that the War on Terror was an undeclared war. In response he showed that even WW2 had a sketchy history when it comes to declarations of war. While he was wrong in saying that there was no formal declaration of war by the US against Germany, that declaration was a formal response to the reflexive German and Italian declarations of war against the US that is little better known than the US declaration of war on Bulgaria (yes there was one), The real war between the US and Germany did not begin with a declaration. It was a shadow contest between American vessels and law enforcement, Nazi submarines, spies and propagandists operating on American soil. With Nazi organizations working openly in the US that have obviously parallels to the Islamist groups today that work to aid the terrorists waging their own undeclared war against us.

In WW2 time, we are still stuck somewhere between 1939 and 1942, fighting our own equivalent of the Bore War. We are not prepared to declare war on the Hitlers in Saudi Arabia and Iran, and so we go on fighting the shadow war. And in that shadow area, we have not true wars, but jockeying for position, fights against ghosts and abortive invasions. That shadow area is not a new thing. We have been in it for a very long time now. We were in it for nearly 70 years with the USSR, for much of that time we tried to remain ignorant of it, and we paid for that dearly. We were in that shadow area for several years with Nazi Germany, until the formality of war unleashed a tide of blood and settled all questions. Today we linger in the shadow area with Islam.

Critics of the Second World War could argue that the Roosevelt Administration had deliberately brought the country into the war with Nazi Germany through indirect and direct conflict, and eventually an indirect declaration of war against Japan. These same people also argued that Pearl Harbor was a response to US foreign policy, a duplicate of the argument made today by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright or Ron Paul that 9/11 was "blowback" caused by US foreign policy. But the reality is that for all the things it got wrong, the Roosevelt Administration understood then, what few Democrats can seem to understand today, that you prepare for war before it happens, not afterward.

The US understood then that war with the Axis was inevitable, and chose to meet it on our terms, rather than theirs. Even so the results were catastrophic, but they would have been far more catastrophic if we had been fighting a Germany and Japan who safely controlled Europe, Asia and the Middle East, along with their resources and energy supplies. There was a brief window after 9/11 when it seemed that we "got it", but after years of nation building and peacekeeping, our leaders quite clearly showed that they didn't get it after all. And so we are stuck fighting the shadow war again. Soldiers coming home in coffins, victims of global Islamist groups funded by the very people who stole our oil, nationalized our companies and who employ those profits to murder us.

We have not named the enemy, but we are still taking casualties from him every day. McCain has been against giving the US military the full resources needed to hold and interrogate terrorists. J.D. Hayworth supports waterboarding and keeping Gitmo. These Hayworth gets it and Obama doesn't. And the liberals and paultards playing Gotcha with Hayworth are doing it deliberately to obscure his larger point. That we have an enemy that we need to get serious about fighting.

Like the Hitler of the Navy Day speech, we are fighting an enemy that can only survive by expanding. And his Lebensraum already maps out Europe and the United States. Even Ground Zero, a place that should have been sacred, will have the shadow of the crescent and star cast over it. Thus the choice is clear. We can go on investing in people like McCain who want us to fight by the same disastrous rules we've been fighting war after war, or people like Hayworth who know that we have to press the enemy to retreat, instead of sitting back and hoping that he learns some table manners. We are not at war because we chose to be. We are at war because the enemy has chosen us. And our survival is once again in the balance. Then the question was whether our nation would fly the stars and stripes or the swastika, today it is whether we will fly the stars and stripes, or the crescent and the star.

The Obama Administration may have abandoned the space program and the search for life on other planets, but it is determinedly searching for moderate Islamic terrorists all across this planet. So far it has tried to identify "Moderate Taliban" (these would be Taliban who only chop off your feet, not your head) and "Moderate Hizbullah" (who only support bombing Ashkelon but not Haifa). It has yet to get around to trying to locate any "Moderate Al Queda", but we have to assume that's next on their shopping list.

If the same people running foreign policy in the US and Europe had been in charge in 1941, when Rudolf Hess, the third in the line of succession after Hitler and Goring, flew to the UK with a peace offer-- Hess would have  been wined and dined, and the Allies would have prematurely aborted the war in joy at having finally discovered a "Moderate Nazi." Instead Churchill churlishly had Hess thrown into the Tower of London, where he stayed until Germany was defeated and he could be put on trial at Nuremberg.

Of course if we overlay the present on the past, it's easy enough to imagine the ACLU rushing to offer pro bono legal counsel to Rudolf Hess, the New York Times running a series of stories planted by PR companies working for Nazi Germany detailing his plight in the Tower, and demanding that he be given his day in court, and George Clooney making a movie in which he plays Hess' lawyer. Of course all this actually did happen. Except Hess was named Hamdan, and he was Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and chauffeur. And yes George Clooney will play his lawyer.

The difference is that by 1941 there were a shortage of people who still had a weakness for Nazis. Years of brutal war had changed that. And today there is still no shortage of those in the media, Hollywood and of course holding down the polished wooden desks at the State Department and the Foreign Office who have a weakness for Islamic terrorists. And that "weakness" is a prerequisite for the pursuit of the moderate Islamic terrorist.

To understand why that's so, let's examine the logic behind the Great Moderate Terrorist Caper. What is a moderate Islamic terrorist? Boiled down to basics, it's a terrorist who's willing to sit down and negotiate with us. Which means that the only difference between an "Extremist" and a "Moderate" is that the extremist wants to cut our head off without talking to us, while the moderate wants to tell us exactly why he wants to cut our head off, and how many heads we can give him to satisfy his bloodlust.

Let's take at Hamas and Fatah in Israel. Both are terrorist groups with social welfare arms for their followers. Both teach children that becoming a suicide bomber will get them into paradise. Both are covered with the blood of the people they murdered. Both oppress even their own people, and murder anyone who crosses them. But the State Department insists that Fatah is a peace partner and Hamas is a terrorist group. What's the difference between them? Hamas refuses to negotiate any kind of peace plan. Fatah is willing to negotiate a peace plan in bad faith. That is why Fatah gets billions of dollars from the US, and Hamas has to make do with whatever Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, George Galloway, Cindy Sheehan and the good people at Code Pink can smuggle to them.

Naturally the Obama Administration has also been in the market for "Moderate Hamas" terrorists to negotiate with, but despite Robert Malley's best efforts, none have yet turned up. Even the prospects for a "Moderate Taliban" don't look good. That may be because our only criteria for "Moderate Taliban" is not based on their respect for human rights or not murdering our soldiers-- but on their willingness to sit down at a table with us and accept our concessions. Now think about the national self-image of the people who think this way and you'll see the source of their "weakness".

Churchill wasn't interested in what Hess had to say, because he knew that England was in the right, and Nazi Germany was in the wrong. Obama and his people are deeply interested in what the Taliban and Hezbollah have to say because they're not sure of any such thing at all. Their mindset is still stuck in 1933. They're still busy apologizing for everything America did wrong-- to people who think nothing of murdering their own daughters over a text phone message. It's as if Chamberlain were still in power in 1941 and was busy apologizing for causing Germany's economic problems, while London was burning around him.

Chamberlain was unfit to govern because he did not see his nation as good, and Nazi Germany as evil. By contrast Churchill was fit to take his place because he saw it exactly that way. Obama and those who work for him not only don't share Churchill's view, they don't even share Chamberlain's. They don't merely suffer from moral equivalence, they actually believe that our enemies have a just grievance against us, while we are experiencing blowback from our foreign policy-- and need to shut up about it and make our peace with the terrorists. And people who see it this way, whether it's Barack Hussein Obama or Nick Clegg or Jean-Marie Le Pen or Rand Paul, are completely unfit to govern in wartime.

That is the heart of the "weakness" that we have been talking about. A corruption of the spirit.

In the logic of appeasement, all Islamic terrorists have a valid grievance against us. They engage in violence against us because of their grievance. If we can only meet with those moderate terrorists who are willing to listen to us, and work with them to resolve that grievance, the extreme terrorists who refuse to listen to us will be marginalized, and peace will prevail. Call it madness or treason, this is exactly what they believe. And work to implement.

There are numerous examples to show that this doesn't work. If nothing else, seventeen bloody years in Israel have demonstrated that. But the Obama Administration is determined to follow its sympathies, which are ever hostile to America and its interests, and friendly to those who would destroy us. And so they go on praying for a moderate terrorist. A terrorist who will put on a suit and tie, shake their hands for the camera, accept their concessions and usher in a reign of hell on earth.

What kind of people pray for a moderate terrorist? The kind who let a mosque be built within sight of Ground Zero. Whose preferred form of American history is a list of wrongs that we committed against everyone. Who believe in a reverse form of American exceptionalism, that we are exceptionally bad, exceptionally evil and an exceptionally awful country. Who have a context for everything our enemies do to us, and none for what we do in our own defense. The kind who in not so many words, believe the terrorists have a point and that we need to work it out with them.

A moderate Islamic terrorist is most in demand by people who are looking to surrender. They just wish there was someone reasonable around for them to surrender to.



(Spanish language translation at REFLEXIONES SOBRE MEDIO ORIENTE Y EL MUNDO)

France and Switzerland are proposing a ban on the Burqa, a garment especially for women that covers the head, the body and even the face, leaving its wearer looking like a klansman who forgot to do his laundry. Belgium and the Netherlands are close to banning the Burqa. Lefty movements have responded typically enough by accusing those in favor of the ban of being bigots, arguing that the ban is counterproductive and that all women who wear Burqas do it by choice-- because all historical and global evidence to the contrary, "Muslims wouldn't dream of forcing the Burqa on anyone".

But what is really behind the Burqa? Islamists have carefully positioned this as a civil rights issue and their lefty allies are trotting along gamely trying to make the case for them. Meanwhile the Islamists have staged confrontations over women with Burqas going to the bank or trying to vote or getting driver's licenses. All of this is empty theater, when you consider that the promoters of the Burqa are using it as a tool to prevent women from doing any of these things. If you doubt that, overlay the countries where Burqas are worn most frequently with their approach to women's rights. Those are countries where women are heavily dependent on male guardians for even basic legal and civil transactions. And that is the real point of the Burqa.

A Burqa is a tool for dehumanizing the wearer. For making it difficult for them to have any individual interaction outside the home. This is not a bug, this is a feature. It depersonalizes women who wear it. It makes it difficult for them to work outside the home, to have a conversation with a stranger or to even be seen as an individual. And again, that is the entire point. Burqas are the product of a culture and religion in which women are not supposed to have any function outside the home. In which they are supposed to remain in Purdah, walled off inside the home.

Purdah is the Persian word for the physical imprisonment of the woman in the home behind her curtain. Think of an individual ghetto for the women of every family. That is the essential idea here. Purdah is also the Persian word for the face veil that covers a woman's face while wearing a Burqa. The word Purdah means curtain. When a woman walks out of the house wearing a Burqa, she is wearing a portable Purdah around herself. She carries the enforced social isolation of it with her.

We use the word "faceless" to describe a condition of enforced anonymity. That is exactly what the Burqa does. It renders an entire gender anonymous. Faceless. And we also connect facelessness to a lack of personal autonomy. Because autonomy is connected to identity. Someone without a face has no identity. Which again is the whole point of creating a mobile Purdah for women using the Burqa. It deprives women of individual social and legal identities, and instead assigns those powers to their male guardians. And since people have to be dehumanized before they can be deprived of their social and legal rights, that is what the Burqa is for.

Islamic cultures that mandate the Burqa also assign a woman's legal rights to her male guardian. She may only travel or conduct serious financial transactions through her male guardian. Marriages, divorces and sometimes even driving a car-- requires a male guardian. This however is not the state of affairs just in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, but also in the heart of Europe and the United States. We simply have not implemented laws enforcing this, which is another reason why the Islamists are pushing the Burqa, to do it for them. The Burqa here once again serves its purpose as mobile Purdah, removing a woman from society even while she still has the law on her side.

What is really behind all this madness? The answer is fairly simple, and it's the same answer to much of the problems in the Muslim world. Tribalism. People are not individuals, they are the means of perpetuating the family. Controlling the reproduction of the family requires tightly controlling its women, as this is culturally linked to the purity of the family. Since inbreeding is common, the daughters of a family are likely to be bred back into the family to a cousin or an uncle. And if not they are used as "coin" to buy access to good brides for the sons of the family or even additional wives for the patriarch. And if not, their marriages are still linked to the honor and status of the family. Which means that either way women are a commodity whose key value is in their purity, which is attained through Purdah or isolation from men.

While these ideas certainly did not begin with Islam, the Islamic world follows disjointed religious teachings which mix bits of stolen Christianity and Judaism, with large heapings of tribal customs. The Mohammed of the Koran already firmly relegated women to a second place status, but the Mohammed of the Hadiths made him seem benevolent by comparison. And the Islamists selectively use those Hadiths which fit their agenda of completely disempowering women, which is part of the Saudi funded process of radicalizing Muslims for the global Jihad. Because they view Muslim women as tools in their conquest of the free world.

Yassir Arafat once boasted that, "The womb of the Arab woman is my strongest weapon." Of course to use a weapon, you must control it. When you turn human beings into tools, you must first dehumanize them. You must think of them as objects for achieving your ends. The mental state of Muslim women in Gaza and the West Bank who teach their young children to blow themselves up in order to murder innocent people aptly demonstrates what such people will be programmed to become. But while the Islamist may deny it in public, to him Paris, London, Amsterdam and New York... are also Gaza.

Islamists will blame tribalism for the state of Muslim women, even as they themselves embrace tribalism in order to segregate and control their own populations. They create their own ghettos and implement purdahs in order to build an army for the conquest of the West. Their leaders see Western individualism as a weakness, but also as a seductive threat to their own people. And the pattern of tribalism remains tattooed on their throbbing brains, which insists that their honor is linked to their ability to control their own women. While of course humiliating Westerners by assaulting and degrading theirs. This is a familiar tribal pattern incorporated into Islam. To dishonor the family of the outsider, while protecting the honor of your own family. To rape foreign women, while clothing your own in Burqas.

This idea goes back to Mohammed and the Koran itself.

O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks (veils) all over their bodies that they may thus be distinguished and not molested. (33:59)

The obvious implication is that a woman who wasn't completely cloaked, would be molested. While a cloaked woman would set herself apart as belonging to a Muslim man, and would therefore not be molested.

The Hadith of Sahih Bukhari makes it clear that the problem was that even high ranking Muslim leaders, such as Umar, a companion of Mohammed and the second Caliph, had trouble leaving women alone... even when those women were Mohammed's own wives.

The wives of the Prophet used to go to Al-Manasi, a vast open place to answer the call of nature at night. 'Umar used to say to the Prophet "Let your wives be veiled," but Allah's Apostle did not do so.

One night Sauda bint Zam'a the wife of the Prophet went out at 'Isha' time and she was a tall lady. 'Umar addressed her and said, "I have recognized you, O Sauda." He said so, as he desired eagerly that the verses of Al-Hijab (the observing of veils by the Muslim women) may be revealed. So Allah revealed the verses of "Al-Hijab" (A complete body cover excluding the eyes).

Sahih Bukhari 1.4.148

The psychology of an Umar who waited around to catch sight of women he wasn't married to and then used the phony self-righteous pretext that because he recognized a woman by her height at night, that women should all be forced to wear veils-- speaks volumes about what is still boiling away in the heads of Islamists today.

Their idea of honor is irretrievably linked to control. Control over women to protect family honor and their own self-image. Control over outsiders to maintain the status of family and faith. And a constant expansion of that control is needed to reassure them of their honor. So the Jihad moves forward in the West. Women must cover their faces. And then even one eye. And there is no end to it. Never any end to it.

The Burqa is a tool of dehumanization and control. It is part of the larger Jihad, which is not just about terrorism, but about the complete subjugation of the entire world and everyone in it, to Sharia. Islamic law. In order to reaffirm Islam and the tribal honor of Muslims.

It is unacceptable in the free world because it represents the dehumanization of millions who will be forced to submit to it. And many millions more yet to come. The Islamists began their campaign with the Hijab, bribing and compelling women in Europe and America to wear them. Physical violence is part of the process, particularly in France where girls who refused to wear one were, like the wives of Mohammed's followers, vulnerable to being "molested", if one may refer to the Tournade in such delicate terms. The Hijab however was only the preparation for the Burqa, which is the next step in the enforced dehumanization of women.

Nor does this only affect Muslim women. In parts of France, non-Muslim women have learned to begin wearing the Hijab to avoid being molested. As Jewish women were forced to wear veils during their exile among Muslims. Sheikh Hilali, the Grand Mufti of Australia, laid out the stakes quite well during the Sydney rape trials.

"If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab, no problem would have occurred."

The women raped were non-Muslims, but as far as Hilali was concerned, it was their fault for not being in Purdah and wearing their Hijabs.

If Muslims continue to use the Hijab and then the Burqa as a distinguishing mark of women who cannot be molested, as opposed to women who can be molested-- as it was in Mohammed's time-- women in general will be intimidated into wearing the Hijab and the Burqa. As under the Taliban, Muslim and non-Muslim women will have a choice between agreeing to give up their rights or facing brutalization.

Those are the real stakes in the Burqa debate. Are women human beings or are they meant only to live in Purdah under the jurisdiction of their male guardians?

The rise of the Burqa means the end of legal rights for women. To prove this, one need only look at countries where the preponderance of women wear them. Opponents of the Burqa ban argue that individual abuse should be tackled individually, but they deny that these abuses are part of a greater problem, rather than individual acts. By denying the Islamic oppression of women, they reduce a growing danger to random acts of violence, just as they have done with Islamic terrorism.

Would the European Council be as casual about a religious movement pushing for the resumption of race based slavery? What if the masters brought forth some of their slaves to argue that being slaves is their right if they wish to be slaves. The answer to this, is that slaves cannot be citizens. If one truly wishes to be a slave, a depersonalized person, there are no shortage of countries where such things are normal. The Free World is not the place for it. It is not the place for those who wish to dehumanize women, to justify rape or murder their daughters if they violate their tribal sense of family honor. This is not freedom. It is slavery.

Banning the Burqa confronts a totalitarian ideology bent on dehumanizing women and depriving them of the rights of citizens, in order to centralize power within their own ideology along their old tribal patterns. If Europe allows this, its own women will have to live by those same tribal laws as well, sooner or later. Islam is not a passive ideology, it is expansionistic. It will spread through missionary work, but it will even more eagerly spread through violence. Islamic history makes this fact impossibly to deny. To ban the Burqa is to insist that no totalitarian ideology will impose facelessness on citizens of the nation. To fail to ban it is to abandon republican citizenship for tribal submission.