In 2008, Elliot Dorff joined Rabbis for Obama in their claim that Senator Obama would be a “leader in the fight against serious threats to Israel.”

Dorff, a Beverly Hills based clergyman, showed a deep grasp of geopolitical issues when he claimed that because of President Bush, “now the Taliban inhabit Iraq, where they never used to be.” This would have come as news to both the Taliban and Iraq. But Rabbis for Obama kept Dorff’s testimonial up because no one there seemed to know any better or know anything except how awful Israel is.

Like many of the Rabbis for Obama, Dorff was a left-wing radical who could be counted on to sign any letter attacking Israel. In 2010, he joined the unofficially nicknamed ‘Rabbis for Hamas’ by signing a letter demanding that Israel end the blockade of the genocidal Islamic terrorist group.

Elliot Dorff had also signed an earlier letter praising the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Gaza, which led the area to be taken over by Hamas. But this was only to be expected from a member of J Street, serving on the anti-Israel group’s Rabbinic Cabinet Executive Council.

Now Elliot Dorff, who has never tired of being destructive and wrong, has signed on to yet another bad letter. After Rabbis for Obama and ‘Rabbis for Hamas’, he has signed on to ‘Rabbis for Iran’.

The letter in support of a deal that Obama admitted will give Iran zero breakout time to a nuclear bomb, is signed by many of the same Dorffs who had signed on to Rabbis for Obama and Rabbis for Hamas.

John Friedman of the Rabbinic Cabinet of the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, another left-wing anti-Israel group, signed all three letters. The “Alliance”, also known as Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, called on Israel to recognize Hamas, condemned Israel for taking out the co-founder of Hamas and described Muslim terrorist massacres of Jews as “resistance”.

Friedman had even participated in the “Fast for Gaza” in support of the Hamas-ruled territory.

Five of the vice chairs of Rabbis for Obama and nearly half its members had signed an earlier “Alliance” letter urging President Bush to conduct "constructive engagement" with Hamas.

Many of the Hamas Rabbis have returned to sign the letter in support of Iran’s nuclear enrichment deal. They include Sharon Kleinbaum, another radical member of J Street’s Rabbinic Cabinet Executive Council, who faced a member revolt over her extreme anti-Israel views which included reading the names of dead Hamas terrorists alongside Israeli casualties from the pulpit.

Sharon Kleinbaum supported providing space to Queers Against Israeli Apartheid and had also participated in the Fast for Gaza.

Burton Visotzky had signed on to Rabbis for Obama, Rabbis for Hamas and Rabbis for Iran. He was the National Co-Chair of Rabbis for Obama 2012, another member of J Street’s Rabbinic Cabinet Executive Council and had worked together with ISNA.

Visotzky (along with Dorff) even joined ISNA, an organization linked to funding of Hamas, in a letter in support of Obama’s pressure on Israel. Two other signatories of that letter, Paul Menitoff and Peter Knobel, had also signed on to Rabbis for Hamas and the current Rabbis for Iran letter.

Paul Menitoff had already become infamous for his 2002 letter to Bush calling for US troops to occupy Israel and demanding full scale sanctions on the Jewish State in support of a Palestinian Muslim terror state. While leftist clergy might be against the occupation of Iraq and the Israeli blockade of Hamas, some were disturbingly enthusiastic about an American occupation of Israel.

Menitoff is a co-chair of J Street’s Rabbinic Cabinet and was one of the 2012 Rabbis for Obama.

Jill Jacobs, the executive director of T'ruah (formerly Rabbis for Human Rights), yet another establishment left-wing anti-Israel group, has signed on to the Rabbis for Iran letter as well as the Rabbis for Hamas letter. She is another co-chair of the Rabbinic Cabinet of J Street.

Jacobs insisted that Jews needed to “repent” before Muslim terrorists and whined last year that her fellow liberal clergy were afraid to attack Israel “because they get slammed by their right-wing congregants”. She has accused Jews living in Jerusalem of being “settlers” and advocates an apartheid that excludes Jews from living in those parts of the Holy City which were under Muslim occupation.

Jill Jacobs does not advocate against Muslims living in Jerusalem. Only against Jews living in Jerusalem.

Rachel Mikva, the daughter of Obama crony Abner Mikva, as one of the Rabbis for Obama claimed that, “Anyone who looks at Sen. Obama's record will see that he has been and remains a staunch supporter of Israel.” She insisted that, “God has graced us with an exceptional candidate for the presidency”.

It’s unknown who Rachel Mikva’s god is, but it’s a safe bet that he isn’t the G-d of Israel. It’s likely that the name of Mikva’s god is Arnold Jacob Wolf, a close friend of Obama and militant enemy of Israel.

Wolf had signed the Rabbis for Hamas letter as part of a long career of advocacy against Israel.  He was the co-founder of Breira, one of the establishment anti-Israel groups, and worked with Pol Pot genocide denier Noam Chomsky on another anti-Israel group. He was a Vice Chair of Rabbis for Obama and a board member of the "Alliance". Wolf however died before he could sign the Rabbis for Iran letter.

Rachel Mikva is part of J Street’s rabbinic cabinet; she has signed letters against Israel in the past, and is front and center on the Rabbis for Iran letter.

The most infamous figure on the list though may be Chaim Seidler-Feller, who has signed the current Rabbis for Iran letter and was also a signatory of the Rabbis for Hamas letter. Seidler-Feller had also joined Norman Lear and the director of an episode of Masters of Sex in an earlier pro-deal letter.

Chaim Seidler-Feller was a founding member of the anti-Israel group Americans for Peace Now, even if he wasn't a particularly peaceful person, engaging in angry confrontations with pro-Israel activists.

In one of the worst incidents, he violently attacked two Jewish women at UCLA, kicking and scratching one of them while trying to throw her down the stairs.

"I was saved from possible concussion by several bystanders who pulled him off me in time... He assaulted me three times in the course of several minutes, and each time I had to be rescued by helpful bystanders," the victim described.

“I saw my rabbi take swings to Neuwirth’s face and kicks to her legs," one eyewitness wrote.

"I am deeply sorry that I hit, kicked and scratched you," Chaim Seidler-Feller would later write. "By taking these unprovoked actions, I have contradicted the pluralism, peace and tolerance about which I so often preach."

But that pluralism, peace and tolerance only goes one way with the left. Toward the terrorists.

And that is what this is really about. When you read about a few hundred “Rabbis” signing a letter against Israel and for Iran, Hamas or Hezbollah, look closer and you will see the same few names.

These names are the banners of a well-funded network of anti-Israel organizations. They are united by a deep hatred for Israel and the Jewish people, by radical leftist politics and by support for terrorists.

They will put on a modicum of moderation so that their congregants don’t realize how extreme and hateful their “spiritual leaders” are, but sometimes they show what is underneath the smiles. Chaim Seidler-Feller showed his true face when he attacked two Jewish women for supporting Israel. Many of the other names on this list show their true faces when they sign letters attacking Israel.

This is who they are. This is what they are.

Now these relentless opponents of the Jewish State want us to believe that the Iran deal will be good for Israel.  Just as they claimed that Obama would be good for Israel.

Under the mask, they support Iran and Hamas because they have more than a little in common with them. They are radicals who believe in destroying America and Israel, like Judith Butler, they see Islamic terrorism as a “progressive” force that is overthrowing capitalism, patriarchy and nationalism.

These left-wing activists call themselves Rabbis, just as Obama calls himself a Christian. But they all share a common faith, not in any divinity, but in revolution and the tyranny of the left. They instinctively hate people of faith, because they have none.

They hate Israel because it is a modern outpost of civilization in a sea of savagery, but also because it is a physical reminder that the Bible has a fixed meaning, that it is not just a “living constitution” into which they can read anything they like.

They hate Israel because it obstructs their exploitation of Jews as cannon fodder in leftist revolutions and because it is a living reminder of their falseness. They are willing to be Rabbis for Obama, for Hamas and for Iran. For anything and everything, but G-d and the Jewish People.

Dear Corporate America,

I haven't written to you in a while. At least not since my television broke down, my toaster developed a taste for human flesh and my phone company ran away with my phone number to Mexico.

Rachel Maddow says we're both on the right and are really close together. But then again Rachel Maddow also says the Republican Party drinks the blood of small children. So she can be a little factually challenged on occasion.

Still I'm on the right and you're occasionally sort of, but not really, on the right. I support lower taxes. So do you. At least for yourself. I support deregulation. You only support deregulation when it suits your narrow interests, but not when it lets smaller businesses and freelancers compete against you.

What you seem to want is a country with low taxes, your preferred forms of deregulation and the population of Mexico.

These things are not compatible. Mexico is currently governed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party; a member of the Socialist International. It has a multi-generational teachers' union whose members pass on their jobs to their children and whose riots have to be put down by armed force.

When it comes to ease of doing business, the United States is ranked 4th, Mexico is ranked 48th, coming in ahead of Kazakhstan. A Comparmex report showed that companies spend 10% of their revenue on bribes.

Is this what you really want for America?

Your lobbies and associations keep pushing for amnesty for 12 million illegal aliens even while your companies keep fleeing California.

If you don't like doing business in California, which is turning into the American version of Mexico, why do you want to turn the rest of America into California?

You keep talking about how we need "immigration reform" to be more globally competitive. Are there superpower rivals desperately trying to import 12 million people whose great dream is to put their entire families on social welfare? Are there Chinese recruiting agents showing up at the border to urge the DREAMERS clambering over the fence to try Shanghai instead?

I understand why you would rather pay a Pakistani or Chinese programmer on an H-1B visa half of what you would pay a talented American programmer. And that's your choice. And paying fifty bucks for the full version of that programmer's work, instead of ten times as much on your licensed edition based on a program once created by American programmers but reassembled into an update by H-1B employees until it has more bugs than features, is mine.

That's how the free market works.

But while those H1-B employees will forward all your confidential information back to Chinese intelligence and occasionally set off bombs while shouting Allah Akbar, they don't threaten your ability to do business.

Sure one of your execs might be flying on the plane that goes down in a burst of exploding underwear and next month a bunch of programs that look suspiciously like yours will come flying out of Zhong Guan Cun undercutting your international market share. And the next time you're negotiating with a Chinese company, they'll just happen to have access to all of your corporation's emails.

But you can live with that. Can you really live with full amnesty and the consequences of destroying the Republican Party as little more than a protest vote in a Socialist International America?

You spent the last election whining about how hard it is to do business in America under the Democratic Party. You hate ObamaCare, despite promoting it, and then you do everything in your power to make Democratic Party rule permanent through amnesty.

I'm not a psychiatrist and it would be hard for me to get all of Corporate America onto a couch for a session, but it seems to me that you're suffering from a severe bout of schizophrenia.

You want workers who will take low pay without complaining about working conditions. And you can get that with illegal aliens who don't speak the language and don't know their rights, until they hook up with community organizations backed by the entire Democratic Party and then you're up to your neck in lawsuits and minimum wage bills.

At which point you'll threaten to move to Mexico or China... to escape a problem that you caused.

Maybe I'm misjudging you, but I don't think you really want an open economy where deregulation cuts out the government bureaucracy and makes it possible for both workers and corporations to do business on better terms.

I think that Mexico is exactly what you want. Sometimes in business you have to take yes for an answer. And I think that in this case yes is the answer.

You want a closed system where there is no competition and cronyism is the only way things get done, where the corporate taxes are a bit lower, but the difference is more than made up by bribes, a society sharply divided between the vast armies of the unprotesting poor who are resigned to their fate and a small wealthy elite that enjoys its superiority in ways that it can't on this side of the border.

You don't really want to build things. You want to keep other people from building them while you enjoy a monopoly on the things that someone innovative built twenty years ago before he was forced to leave the country.

Paul Ryan is your boy and few other politicians represent the complete disconnect between the economic and immigration policies of your kind better than him. Ryan wants to cut social benefits and legalize 12 million illegal immigrants. He wants to cut money for the "takers" and add million more takers to the voting rolls to ensure that any legislative changes he makes will vanish in a wink.

So what does Paul Ryan really want? Does he want to cut spending more or does he want amnesty more? He's willing to sacrifice his budgets for amnesty, but not amnesty for his budgets.

Ryan may spout nonsense about how this generation of "family-oriented" illegal aliens will start lots of business and keep social security afloat, and how they, in a complete reversal of history, will be all for cutting social spending and voting Republican. But I doubt that he or McCain or anyone else is stupid enough to believe that nonsense.

Given a choice between America, the Republican Party and Amnesty, they're willing to sacrifice America and the Republican Party, not to mention Conservatism, on the altar of Amnesty.

The real question is why. Not why Ryan is choosing such a course, but why his backers who claim to want legislative reforms and economic freedom are pursuing an aggressive and well-funded course that will ensure that America will never have any more economic freedom than can be bought by a bribe or a family connection? Why are the people who claim to be concerned about our debt and our unsustainable spending determined to take both up to eleven?

Maybe we're all part of the problem. Maybe as a society we're no longer capable of producing leaders capable of thinking in terms of long term consequences. We want what we want and we want it now.

Corporate America has decided that it needs cheap labor now and the tens of millions of unemployed and unskilled Americans don't do. In the long run, amnesty will make America all but impossible to do business in for any company that doesn't have General Electric, Duke Energy or Tesla in its name. But in the long run, the sun may go nova. That's how people like that think.

Maybe it's as simple as pumping and dumping America, cashing in on a few years of cheap labor and then heading somewhere else and profiting from selling the last remnants of the collapsing economy to Qatar or Saudi Arabia. It appears to be happening in Europe. Why not America?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for capitalism in the same way that I'm for democracy. As Churchill said, it's the worst possible system except for all the alternatives.

Capitalism, like Democracy or Wikipedia, isn't innately good, it's just better because it's decentralized and that allows people to pursue their own dreams, agendas and anything else they like. The sum total of this crowdsourced wonderland is sometimes good, sometimes bad, often in-between, but on average better than any tyranny of politics, economics or articles on breeds of armadillo would be.

Democracy gave us Barack Obama. Capitalism gave us GE. Wikipedia lists a blue armadillo that doesn't exist in nature. All these flaws remind us that crowdsourcing is imperfect. It doesn't give us good results. It gives us better results.

But dear Corporate America, despite what Rachel Maddow says, I kind of like you. You make decent toasters. Or at least you design decent toasters that China makes. And if you ever decided to dump the Green energy labels, the abstract art and the million dollar donations to gay rights groups and turn into the monstrous cryptofascist conspiracy that liberals claim you are, we might get somewhere.

But we both know that's not going to happen.

You're not conservative. You're certainly not right-wing. There are exceptions, but they're not the rule. Like most of our elites, you're liberal. At best you're occasionally libertarian, but in a limited way. You're all for opening up the borders, but you're all for requiring businesses to get permits if they're in a competing line of work. And you feel guilty, about ice caps, black kids in the inner city and all the other stuff that comes in your mail.

But don't feel too bad, Corporate America. You're not uniquely awful. You're just part of a society whose best and brightest have lost their way and whose proud and prosperous have spent too much time listening to them.

In a decaying society, you have learned to grab what you can without believing that the society and the nation are worth protecting as more than sources of loot. In your comfort zone, the transnational idea has come to seem plausible and the world and its many nations seem infinitely redundant to you. If America doesn't work out, try China or Mexico or Qatar or Singapore.

That comfort zone in which you can thrive on transnational fantasies while still vacationing on Martha's Vineyard is brought to you by a Pax Americana. The peace of the American mercantile empire that your forebears put into place with sailing ships and armed men enables you to sell and buy across the globe, to jump in a jet plane and pop from airport to airport and from luxury hotel to luxury hotel.

All this is not the fulfillment of some Tom Friedmanesque fantasy about the inevitablity of globalism and the flattening of the world. It's not a new era of history. It's the last days of a peaceful empire that  made your wealth and power possible. And that you are destroying the same way that the Romans destroyed theirs.

Yes, for a time you will have your estates in Gaul and compliant barbarians who will clean your floors and look after your kids at cut rate prices. The wine will be plentiful and the circuses shocking. And one day you will wake up and discover that your grandchildren have become barbarians, that the civilization you knew is gone and the virtues that made your way of life possible are gone with it.

I won't preach to you about sacrifice.I'll leave that to Elizabeth Warren and her ilk who will bleed you for every cent you have unless you pay her off first. I will tell you that actions have consequences and not just of the class action lawsuit kind. Power is not the same thing as control. That's not only a lesson that Obama must learn. It's a lesson that you must learn as well.

To build a thing, you must know what it is you are building, you must test the structure, practice with the tools and make it real. Destroying a thing is easier. All you have to do is tear down what works and replace it with a slipshod structure made out of poor materials and tools you don't know how to use as cheaply as possible.

That's what your amnesty push will do to America. And when it's done, when America is California and California is Mexico and organized crime is indistinguishable from government and the only way to do business is with a handful of bribes, then you really will have built that.

On that day, there will be no Tea Party to save you and no Republican Party left to defend you.

You will flee to Singapore or China or Africa, only to realize that you are no longer a wealthy American, but the citizen of a fallen empire without protection in a world where the old rules made by the Pax Americana no longer apply. When the last bribes have been squeezed out of you and your company has been taken over and looted by the son of some government official, perhaps you will finally come to know the worth of the civilization you so foolishly destroyed.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure my DVD player no longer works.

best

Daniel

Israeli police arrested a fourth person for calling Mohammed a pig. Avia Morris, the first person arrested described being taunted with cries of “Allahu Akbar”  and “Kill the Jews” along with signs of support for ISIS. But it only became a legal matter when the twenty-year-old woman retorted, “Mohammed is a pig.”

Calling for the death of infidels isn’t a crime. Insulting Mohammed is.

Avia got off lucky. When a young woman named Tatiana Soskin drew Mohammed as a pig scrawling in a Koran, the Clinton administration was more outraged by this than by the World Trade Center bombing.

Its spokesman said that it gave “great thought to this… at the very highest levels of our government.”

It denounced the “outrageous, crude and sick portrayal of the Prophet Mohammed” and claimed, “This woman is either sick or she is evil… she deserves to be put on trial for these outrageous attacks on Islam.”

That rant didn’t come from some storefront Mullah or Bin Laden clutching his assault rifle in a cave on an Al Jazeera video. It came from the twisted mind of a sick and evil appeasement administration.

Sick and evil might have been a better description of Mohammed’s practice of sex slavery than of a young woman who drew a cartoon of a rapist as a pig. When the Caliph of the Islamic State was revealed to have taken American hostage Kayla Mueller as his slave, he was following the law of Mohammed.

As ISIS put it, "Enslaving the families of the kuffar (non-Muslims) and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah (Islamic law) that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Koran and the narrations of the Prophet.”

Was Mohammed a pig? He raped a little girl, forced his son to divorce his slave wife so he could have her, and took a number of captured non-Muslim women as slaves the same way the ISIS Caliph did. Their numbers included a number of captured Jewish women, Safiyah and Rayhana, as well as Arab women such as Juwayriyah. Rape and sexual slavery was a way of life for Mohammed and his men.

By any civilized standard, Mohammed was a pig and worse. And yet instead of calling out those who praise a rapist and a pedophile, we lock up the young women who dare call out his piggishness.

There is no reason to be surprised that these piggish habits should also be a way of life for his followers.

As we consider the fate of Kayla Mueller or of the thousands of girls groomed to be sex slaves to Muslim men in the UK, we must conclude that what happened to them took place because our societies have failed to tell the truth about Mohammed.

The response to Muslim violence has been greater extremes of censorship. There is a direct connection between the amount of protective censorship imposed on any criticism of Islam and Islamic violence. The Clinton administration rant about Tatiana’s cartoon took place after the World Trade Center bombing. And yet it would have been unthinkable then to lock up a Mohammed filmmaker, as Hillary and Obama did after the Benghazi massacre. Each new atrocity creates new momentum for censorship.

The Israeli police behave the way they do because the authorities are desperate to keep some kind of peace and it is always easier to censor, arrest and control non-Muslims than Muslims. That is also why the authorities in European countries are far more willing to lock up those who burn the Koran or criticize Islam than the Salafis who patrol the streets as Sharia police and call for a Caliphate.

This is not tolerance. It’s appeasement. It’s cowardice and treason.

We are in a race between collapsing systems struggling to prop up an impossible situation despite the outbursts of violence and those who tell the truth about them. The worse the situation becomes, the more the systems will try to retain control through censorship. Unable to control the followers of Mohammed, they will instead seek to control those who tell the truth about him.

Telling the truth will become more dangerous, but it will also save lives.

If Kayla Mueller had known the truth about Mohammed, she might never have gone to Syria. If more mothers and fathers in the UK had known the truth about Mohammed, they might have been better able to protect their daughters. If more people in America and Europe knew about Mohammed, they might demand that their governments let fewer migrants in who believe Mohammed is a role model.

What is happening in the Islamic State is only a more open version of what is already taking place in the West. Slavery has returned to America, not under the Confederate flag, but under the Saudi flag. The Muslim sex grooming in the UK does not come with its own flag, but with the Koran. And Muslims in this country continue to try and bring non-Muslim women out of this country to serve ISIS.

The Yazidi little girls enslaved by ISIS, just as little girls in the UK were enslaved by Muslim migrants, were told by their captors that raping them was a prayer to Allah.

“According to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever,” a twelve-year-old girl was told. “He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to Allah.”

As Islam spreads across the West, we are all drawing closer to Allah. Portions of cities go dark and become no-go zones. Terrible things happen there that no one talks about. It’s important to talk about them. But it’s also important to talk about what ties together the little girls in the Islamic State and the United Kingdom, the slave trade of over a thousand years and Mohammed’s wives.

And that is Mohammed. Mohammed was a pig. We can and should say it. As many times as it takes. He is not a role model. He is not a prophet. It’s not the women who call him a pig who are sick and evil.

It’s those who imitate and defend his sick and evil ways.

Telling the truth about Mohammed is more than a statement. It’s not a mere provocation. It saves lives.

(This article originally appeared in another form at Front Page Magazine)

When Obama took office, his first phone call to a foreign leader was to the head of a terrorist group.

"This is my first phone call to a foreign leader," Obama told the PLO's Abbas. "And I'm making it only hours after I took office."

Obama repeatedly bent, twisted and mutilated existing laws to keep the money flowing to the PLO’s
Palestinian Authority.

When Hamas and the PLO temporarily reconciled, Obama sent them money anyway. When Congress froze aid after the PLO defied the peace process by trying to join the UN, he signed a waiver claiming that aiding the terrorist network was “important to the security interests of the United States.” Earlier this year, when the PLO went after Israel at the International Criminal Court, Obama defied a Congressional law and bipartisan demands mandating a cutoff of aid.

If Abbas personally flew a plane into the new World Trade Center, Obama would find some excuse to keep the money coming to his terrorist group anyway. But now his determination to aid terrorists has hit a new low as he sides with terrorists against terror victims.

Eleven years ago, ten families who had suffered at the hands of the Muslim terror network filed a lawsuit against the PLO, Arafat and assorted PLO/PA officials. The American families suing the terrorists included Jamie Sokolow whose eye was damaged by shrapnel in the Jaffa Street bombing that injured 100 people and killed a 81-year-old amateur painter who had been out shopping for painting supplies.

"I'm 12 years old, I'm from New York, and I’m going to die," she recollected in court thirteen years later.

Shayna Gould was a 19-year-old college student waiting at a Jerusalem bus stop in the rain when a PLO terrorist opened fire. She had no life signs when she arrived at the hospital.

Janis Coulter was killed when a PLO terrorist set off a bomb in the Frank Sinatra cafeteria at Hebrew University. Her family has been fighting for justice for a long time.

Dr. Alan Bauer was walking down the street with his 7-year-old son when a PLO terrorist set off a bomb in the French Hill bus station. “I couldn’t find my son. I then saw him face down. I picked him up and heard him moaning, so I knew he was alive,” he said.

A screw had torn through his son’s brain. “He was put in coma to let fluid drain out and was then left blind and paralyzed on his left side.”

Some of the killers were part of the “police force” armed and trained by the Clinton administration. They were dispatched by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, which is listed as a terrorist group even though it’s part of the PLO network whose regime in the West Bank is funded by the United States.

Finally the families won their case in court. A jury found the PLO/PA guilty and ordered the terrorist network to pay $218 million to the families. The Antiterrorism Act tripled that award. The PLO appealed, but the terror group was required to post a bond to show that it was willing to pay the judgment.

And that’s when Obama came to the rescue. The State Department stepped in to warn the judge that depriving the PLO of money would “severely compromise the P.A.’s ability to operate as a governmental authority”. This would not necessarily be a bad thing as the PLO/PA’s operations mainly involve giving money to terrorists, incitement against Israel and the United States, and assorted criminal enterprises.

The PLO doesn’t have an economy. It has the American taxpayer. It wouldn’t exist without the US, Japan, the EU and the UN shoving money into its giant gaping terror hole. The money immediately disappears into a bunch of foreign bank accounts and the PLO/PA declares that it’s facing another financial crisis and needs a few hundred million more to tide it over or it will collapse.

It’s currently in the middle of another one of those “financial crises” which somehow prevents it from posting a bond, but hasn’t stopped it from funding terrorism.

The Palestinian Authority is not a government. There are no more elections. Everything is run by Abbas and the PLO Central Council. Abbas’ Fatah dominates the PLO and funded the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade which just claimed responsibility for new terrorist attacks against Israelis. The Palestinian Authority is the PLO. The PLO is Fatah. When Obama sends more money to the PA, he is funding terrorism.

And the United States should not be funding terrorists. It should not be paying the killers of Americans. It should not be standing up in a court of law for Muslim terrorists and against their American victims.

But that’s exactly what Obama and Kerry did.

"Money is the oxygen of the terrorist," Ron Gould, Shayna's father, said. "And what we hope to do, is deplete some of that."

Unfortunately Obama is determined to keep terrorism alive with a little legal CPR performed on the PLO.

“If my shooter hadn’t been killed, he’d be sitting in jail, being paid,” Shayna said. “The person who helped him plan the attack is still being paid.”

“If the PA has enough money to pay convicted terrorists,” her lawyer said, “it has enough to pay the judgment in this case.”

The PLO/PA pays out $144 million a year to terrorists in Israeli prisons and the families of suicide bombers. The money doesn’t just go to PLO terrorists, but also to their Hamas terror colleagues.

President Bush made the case that Saddam’s payments to the families of suicide bombers, an event that took place under portraits of Arafat and Saddam, solicited terrorism. So why is Obama determined to help the PLO continue soliciting more terrorist attacks by funding killers and suicide bomber clans?

Obama’s involvement sends the message that terror victims will be blocked from holding the PLO accountable. This administration has fought Congress to keep money flowing to the PLO. Now it will fight the men and women who survived PLO terror. It will fight them to keep funding Muslim terrorism.

You might call it a new low, but as with a lot of "lows," the Clintons were there first.

Alisa Flatow was a New Jersey college student murdered in a bus bombing in 1995. When the Flatow Amendment that would hold Iran accountable came up, President Clinton’s Secretary of State threatened to shut down the government if the amendment wasn’t dropped.

When Congress stood up to Clinton, he instead threw in a signing statement claiming that allowing terror victims to collect judgments against Iran “would encroach on my authority under the Constitution to ‘receive Ambassadors and other public ministers.’"

The Clinton administration fought the Flatows every step of the way to protect Iranian properties in the United States. It dispatched fourteen lawyers to fight the family’s lawsuit. When a US company was sending money to Iran, Clinton blocked efforts by terror victims to seize the money. He even blocked attempts to seize the New York building owned by the Alavi Foundation, Iran’s arm in the United States.

The Alavi Foundation would later become a donor to the Clinton Foundation. Congress stood up to Clinton over Iran. It’s time for Congress to stand up to Obama and end funding for PLO terrorism once and for all with no loopholes, excuses or waivers.

Zionism was never limited to physically living in Israel. Jews have always lived in Israel. Nor is it limited to Jewish self-government. The ghetto was also a form of Jewish self-government in which Jews oppressed other Jews in order to avoid upsetting the powers outside the ghetto.

An Israeli ghetto whose court Jew leaders are always pleading for mercy from the world while beating their own people to appease the masters outside the borders of the ghetto is worthless.

It is worse than worthless. It is a perversion of what Israel was meant to be.

Zionism was the physical resettlement of the land and the spiritual transformation of the people. Neither is fully realizable without the other. A resettlement in which Jews retain the habits of their old condition only creates another ghetto and no meaningful internal transformation from dependence to independence is possible without a physical relocation to an independent nation.

But the Ghetto Jew has proven much more difficult to uproot from the psyche than all the stones and thorns of the land of Israel. The Ghetto Jew has been freed from the ghetto, but it still exists inside his head.

The abused wife eventually loses her identity and comes to see herself from her husband's perspective. In Stockholm Syndrome, the captive takes on the captor's point of view. 

The Ghetto Jew has internalized anti-Semitism. He has become his own oppressor. What little identity he has is tied up in fighting anti-Semitism in a futile and misdirected effort. The real anti-Semite isn't living in an ADL newsletter. He has taken up residence inside his own head.

When the Ghetto Jew looks at his own people, he sees a twisted tribe of grotesques. This is reflected in his literature, his plays, his jokes and his television shows. Goebbels couldn't possibly assemble a more disgusting collection of Jewish caricatures than Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Woody Allen and your average Jewish television executive or comedian.

This is not the Jewish view. It is the view of the thing living inside his head. The thing can't be fought by mailing a check to the ADL. It can't be driven out in a Holocaust museum. A far worse thing than the anti-Semitism of the non-Jew is the anti-Semitism of the Jew. It is easier for the anti-Semite to come to love than the Jews than it is for the Ghetto Jew to come to a healthy love of being Jewish.

What the Ghetto Jew thinks of as his identity is really a vacuum filled with historical experiences of oppression. The reaction to these experiences are his identity. He doesn't have a Jewish identity. What he carries with him inside his head is Hitler's view of Jews and Stalin's view of Jews and Obama's view of Jews. Some of these views terrify him. Others he struggles to appease.

The Ghetto Jew views Jews through a funhouse mirror that magnifies each flaw and offense. He is constantly seeing Jews as he imagines others see them and the sight makes him anxious. He battles the anti-Semite living in his head by rushing to apologize for things he never did and mounting overarching defenses against attacks that most others would shrug off.

Pride to him is this cycle of justification and apology. He rushes from one to the other. He hysterically defends against all sorts of accusations and then, when confronted with a Jew who has committed some crime, he wails, "What will they think" and hysterically denounces them and apologizes to the entire world.

This, "What will they think" defines him.

He has no thoughts of his own on the matter. He does not even wonder what other Jews think.

He is other-directed. He cares little what Jews think of Jews. What interests him is what everyone else thinks of Jews. He will enthusiastically fight for the causes of others, rather than for his own, to avoid any accusations of selfishness. He will generously build hospitals and engage in feats of philanthropy. In doing so he thinks that he is helping Jews, because to him the Jews can only be helped by changing how others see them. His Jews don't have a separate existence or identity.

For all his sophistication, erudition and education, he is an empty house with no one living inside.

To the Ghetto Jew, Jewish history is an extended trial, not by G-d, by the collective public opinion, which has cast Jews as the worst of the worst, a charge that can only be met by being the best of the best. Since no man and no nation can ever achieve this, it is a doomed project. In the eyes of the Ghetto Jew, the Jews can only be found innocent through their helplessness, and if given power, through a pure dedicated altruism bordering on sainthood. Israel complicates this will to martyrdom.

Israel said that victimhood is not the Jewish ideal. That there can be redemption without the innocence of helplessness. That we cannot truly help anyone until we help ourselves.

Most of all it claimed that Jews were not mere defendants in a trial lasting for thousands of years, that their mission in this world was not to constantly defend themselves against accusations by dedicating themselves to helping others, but that they were a nation and a people with their own history.

Jewish identity did not have to be a mirror of persecution. It was something unique and authentic.

Zionism was an attempt at a clean sweep. It sought to empty out the clutter of thousands of years of exile and replace it with simple sand and earth, with the clean lines of low buildings and water towers. It wanted a fresh start in an old land where the Jews had last been a free people.

It told the Jew that his models were kings and prophets, that he was the inheritor of David and Samson, of the warriors who fought to the last against Babylon and Rome. And an old people found their strength and fought wars against terrible odds. And this time they won.

They were no longer victims. There was no one living in their heads. They were free.

And it almost succeeded.

But the Ghetto Jew has brought things full circle again. He is endlessly obsessed with how the rest of the world sees Israel. He has reduced the reborn Jewish State to another ghetto, forever in peril and unable to escape from it, dependent on the goodwill of its masters outside the ghetto.

The survival of this large ghetto depends not on fighting those trying to kill Jews, but averting any misbehavior by Jews who might make the other residents of the ghetto look bad. To the Ghetto Jew, the greatest threat to Israel is not in Iran or in Gaza, it's that somewhere in Israel one lone Jew will do something or say something that will make make all the Jews look bad and lose the world's sympathy.

"What will they think," the leaders of the ghetto wail. 

And so the Ghetto Police are dispatched, not to fight the terrorists (this is a task they are increasingly forbidden from tackling lest they too lose the sympathy of the world), but to hunt down any Jews who might make Israel look bad.

None of this has anything to do with Israel or Zionism. It is the old twisted ritual of the Ghetto Jew who sees his own people through the eyes of those who hate them.

The Ghetto Jew is the Jew who has not found a Jewish identity. He has let his enemies define him. His efforts go to fight a losing battle because he has allowed the enemy inside his head. He has failed to build a positive Jewish identity. In its place he has a mass of congealed suffering, neurotic anxieties and fears for the future living inside his head.

Over time the Ghetto Jew gives birth to an even more twisted creature, the Jewish Anti-Semite.

The Ghetto Jew has turned his insecurities and lack of independent identity into an external perspective. He sees from the imagined perspective of the "Other" while still suffering as a Jew. He is both the anti-Semite who sneers and the Jew who is sneered at. He suffers a thousand deaths with these neurotic preoccupations over the great undying question of, "What will they think?"

The Jewish Anti-Semite, sometimes wrongly called a self-hating Jew, has completely externalized the Jew. He has become the anti-Semite and driven out the Jew. Now he attacks the external Jew with the relentless compulsiveness of a maniac. Actual Anti-Semites shake their heads at his deranged antics.

The Ghetto Jew wrestles with his projection of an anti-Semite and that projection's projection of the Jew. The Jewish Anti-Semite cuts to the chase by becoming the anti-Semite and attacking the Jew.

The Jewish Anti-Semite adopts the worst possible assumptions of the anti-Semite. The Ghetto Jew is caught between the Jew and the anti-Semite. The Jewish Anti-Semitic adopts the latter's perspective wholly. In the redemptive fires of rage, he attempts to destroy his Jewishness by attributing the worst possible behaviors and ideas to Jews. Sometimes he lives a perfectly happy malicious life of BDS and angry letters to the editor. In the more extreme cases, he destroys himself in some spectacular fashion.

This demented state is one path of liberation for the Ghetto Jew. The Ghetto Jew can either liberate himself of the anti-Semite or the Jew.

To liberate himself of the anti-Semite, all the Jew needs to do is become a Jew again. Instead of renting space in his head to Hitler and Obama and a thousand petty critics and tyrants, he needs to find a better class of tenant. He needs to stop seeing himself from the perspective of others, he must stop being other-directed and become self-directed. He must become a Jew.

Judaism and Zionism, in their proper applications, are better tenants than the neurotic anti-Semite whispering in the ear of the Ghetto Jew at night. They concern him with the task of building the spirit and the land, rather than quivering at every taunt and threat.

The Ghetto Jew can either become a Jew or a Jewish anti-Semite. Israel can either be a Jewish State or it can be a ghetto. It cannot and will not be both for long.

The Jew is proud of what he is. He is not defined by those who hate him or by pleasing others. He does not waste his time apologizing and justifying his existence to them and the voices in his head. He does not take on collective responsibility for the crimes or virtues of his people.


The Ghetto Jew instinctively sets up a ghetto. His defining organizations are communal institutions whose top leadership plead on behalf of the community to the rulers of the land. These are not democratic institutions. They dispose of some for the supposed good of the many. This was the way of the Jews of Poland who died at Cossack hands rather than risk the wrath of both Poles and Ukrainians by defending themselves, of the Kahal which rounded up children for the Czars or the Judenraats which collaborated with the Nazis in the hope that some might be spared.

This was not what Israel was meant to be. The guard towers of this land were never meant to face inward. When they do, it is not a free land, but another ghetto.

A free Israel requires free Jews. It is easier to conquer a city, as the Sages said, than to control the self. It is easier to transform land, than to transform the mind. It is easier to free land than to free Jews.

The process of liberation was not complete in 1948 or 1967. It may never be complete. But without it, there is no hope. As the land is renewed, so the people must be renewed. Renewal need not be a struggle. It is not all a matter of lifting rocks. It is more a matter of placing fresh earth over old earth. Of placing a living Jewish identity over the empty ghetto with the Ghetto Jew just outside its gates.

The Ghetto Jew does not have to be an abused woman forever waiting for her husband to come through the door. He does not have to be a saint or a victim. He does not have to live life from the perspective of the 'other'. He does not have to constantly worry, "What will they think?"

He must become again what he once was, before the lost wars, before slavery, before suffering went so deep into his bones that it became his identity until he could not envision being a Jew without being a victim.

The Ghetto Jew lacks his own identity. His identity is a scarecrow, a thing of scattered bits and pieces, fears and neurosis, a twisted version of a human being as seen from a twisted perspective. His redemption will come when he inhabits his own body as much as he inhabits the land, when he ceases to care what they will think and starts to think for himself, when he stops worrying how others see the Jews and fully comes into his own inheritance as a Jew.

We live in a strange world in which the weather is a subject of furious political debate. People have been arguing about the weather ever since the first rainstorm caught the first man without the umbrella that he did not yet know how to make, but they didn't hold political debates over it.

For the last fifty years, the anti-weather side has been insisting that the world is headed toward a Frostean apocalypse of ice or fire. The calm biblical assertion that "Seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease" was replaced by the terrifying certainty that the planet would soon turn into Mars or Venus; either too hot or too cold.

The end of weather was here. Instead of stable rhythms and cycles that might last for months or centuries, there was a runaway weather apocalypse that would culminate in unlivable conditions.

The doomsday predictions roll out daily without any regard to scientific or experiential reality. The more the predictions fail to match up, the more urgently Warmists insist on immediate action. The harder it snows, the more articles appear warning that snow may soon be a thing of the past.

Never mind the weather; the end of weather is almost here.

There is a fearful logic to the Warmist creed. Of all the planets, minor planets, moons and assorted rocks drifting through our solar system, only one is inhabitable by man. It is very easy to assume that, but for the grace of random chance, the Earth might be just as uninhabitable as Mars or Venus and to worry that one day it will be.

Mars and Venus inspired more than a series of bestselling books about gender relations. They also convinced the Warmists that Mars and Venus are what the Earth would become.

"Venus is too hot. Mars is too cold. But the Earth is just right a heaven for humans. After all, we evolved here. But our congenial climate may be unstable. We are perturbing our poor planet in serious and contradictory ways. Is there any danger of driving the environment of the Earth toward the planetary Hell of Venus or the global ice age of Mars? The simple answer is that nobody knows," Sagan wrote in Cosmos.

The insistence that Mars and Venus were variations of Earth, rather than entirely different planets, was a false assumption that predated Sagan. This geocentric fallacy insisted that Mars and Venus were teaching us about our world, rather than about those worlds. Their unlivable atmospheres reinforced the neurotic obsession of doomsayers who treated them as failed Earths. 

The original error of climate researchers was their assumption that planets were more fragile than they truly are and could be undone by a nuclear exchange or even by a few coal plants. Carl Sagan, who had done much to popularize unscientific paranoia about nuclear winter and global warming, warned that the Gulf War's oil fires would lead to a miniature nuclear winter.

They did not.

The mingling of philosophical paranoia over a godless universe and political pacifism disguised as science shaped not only Sagan's musings, but the entire ideology of weather apocalypses which derived from the conviction that ungoverned man was bound to destroy his environment.

"The surface environment of Venus is a warning: something disastrous can happen to a planet rather like our own," Sagan wrote.

Sagan, who had predicted that Venus was a hot and dry desert due to a runaway Greenhouse Effect, did not have a very good track record on that planet... or on this one.

Integral to the doomsday model was the belief that Mars and Venus were planets that had once been very much like our own. Sagan, who had spent so much time decrying the primitivism of the medieval mindset, had adopted its geocentric assumption that Earth was the baseline and that if Mars and Venus differed from earth, then they were failed earths.

It was not the first time that distorted geocentric perceptions of Mars and Venus would influence Earth.

In the 19th century, Percival Lowell, a popularizer of often bad science and an earlier version of Sagan complete with anti-clerical and pacifist views, became obsessed with the idea that Mars was an inhabited world whose native race was facing extinction because the planet was losing its water. After the Martian canals had been completely discredited, Lowell's obsessions were dismissed as the error of a lone individual; but that was no truer of Lowell than it was of Sagan.

Socialist science fiction had become a booming field in the late 19th century. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward had envisioned time travel to a Socialist American utopia in the year 2000. It was a bad book, but a popular bestseller because it used the frame of pseudoscience to depict Socialism as both a practical model and inevitable. Likewise, Lowell's Mars allowed Socialist theorists to depict the Martian Socialist utopia that Earth could become.

Novels such as "Politics and Life in Mars", "Unveiling a Parallel", "To Mars via the Moon", "A Prophetic Romance" and "Red Star" envisioned culturally superior Martians demonstrating their advanced Socialist societies with income equality, planetary labor unions and pacifism to the human race.

In the Russian "Red Star", the Lowellian canals are a Communist triumph over inhospitable nature anticipating the USSR and Communist China's disastrous dam projects. The German writer of "Two Planets" envisioned the advanced Martians invading Earth to impose their superior Socialist society on human beings.

The Martians, like Global Warming, were a tool of radical social change.

In "A Message from Mars", a turn of the century novel, play and film, a Martian from an advanced society visits the most selfish man on earth to convert him to "Otherdom" teaching him to share what he has with the less fortunate. In "Unveiling a Parallel", a reactionary man visits Mars to discover how well a progressive society can work.

In the Martian Socialist utopias, the aliens lecture human beings on our selfishness, urging us to cast aside nations, religions, private property and monogamy and build our own Socialist utopia.

An inhabited Mars became a fictional conceit for envisioning an ideal society. Global Warming serves the same purpose, providing a fictional framework that can be used to reconstruct human society along more progressive lines. The only difference is that Warmists have gotten further along in imposing their delusion and their plans on the world than the Lowellians ever did.

It does not matter to its proponents, inside or outside the scientific community, whether the planet is warming or cooling, any more than the existence of Martian canals was pivotal to the Socialist Martian utopias. The bad science is only a means of advancing bad politics.

The Martian canals, like Global Warming, provided a perspective shift to enable us to see our society as changeable.

Or as Lowell wrote, "The fact gives us but a flat image. It is our reflexions upon it that make it a solid truth." Global Warming is another of those "reflexions" that led Lowell to see a dying ancient Martian civilization in the sky contrasted with a modern dystopian Earth dying of its industry and its wars.

Lowell's Mars was dying of "Global Cooling". Earth is dying of "Global Warming". The crisis of the Martians forces them to band together to manage the water they have left and abandon selfish preoccupations with capitalism and nationalism. The Warmists warn that unless we embrace global government, the excess water stored in icebergs will flood the world.

Their Martian crisis has become our crisis.   

In "To Mars Via the Moon", the human narrator encounters a Martian Socialist utopia which accepts the inevitable destruction of its planet by practicing birth control.

"As the final period draws nearer, families will become smaller and smaller, and in the last Martian century no children will be born; so the diminishing water supply will suffice for the needs of the dwindling population," A Martian character explains, forecasting the environmentalist Zero Population Growth movement on our own planet. "Thus the race will gradually die out naturally, and become extinct."

Humanity, envisioned as the plague by environmentalists, has only one final solution. Extinction.

Though Sagan and the Warmists depict Venus and Mars as failed earths, the threat to Earth that they envision comes from man. Or as Sagan put it, "Intelligent life, able to make major environmental changes." The dream of finding Martians and Venusians had died. It could no longer be argued that these worlds had been rendered uninhabitable by intelligent activity. But man was still on the hook.

Nuclear winter and Global Warming indicted war and industry, the targets of those old utopias, for making earth uninhabitable. The loudest advocates for Global Warming within the scientific community went on using Venus as a model for a failed Earth.

"The Venus syndrome is the greatest threat to the planet, to humanity's continuing existence," James Hansen declared. "If we burn all the coal, there is a good chance we will initiate the runaway greenhouse effect. If we also burn all the tar sands and tar shale, I think it is a dead certainty."

Hansen's Venus syndrome is a modern echo of the old Martian obsession. Earth will lose its oceans unless it undergoes radical social and political changes. It will become Lowell's Mars.

Lowell's Mars and Hansen's Venusian Earth are both crisis societies with no room for individual concerns. Survival demands the abandonment of selfish desires such as heating your home or driving to work. It mandates a progressive society where the collective good reigns supreme and the leaders hold unlimited power until the ordinary people become progressive enough.

Global Warming is the culmination of the Martian utopias. Either we become Socialist Martians or die on Venus.

There is no more basis for Venus syndrome than there was for the Martian canals. Both depend on wishful thinking and misinterpreting data. The real threat to humanity does not come from the climate, but from the ambitions of other men. That was something that the ancients knew long before they knew anything about the worlds around us or the distant stars.

We do not face a crisis of climate, but a crisis of ideology, not a crisis of rising oceans or temperatures, but rising ambitions and egos. The environmental crisis is a work of ideology, not science, its goals are not planetary salvation, but radical social change.

Our troubles do not come from Mars or Venus, from the oceans or the volcanoes, but from the evil dreams buried in the hearts of other men.

Conservative social media is a very depressing place these days. It's not just all the people on the same side hurling hate at each other. It's the fragmenting of a once united movement into candidate partisan groups that circulate talking points and fight culture wars against 'outsiders'.

This isn't the Tea Party. It's little cults of personality around candidates. It's cultural groups forming around people, signaling insiders and outsiders, the righteous and the infidels.

This isn't about Trump. It's about all the candidates who have attracted passionate followings. Conservative social media these days often consists of these partisans having it out.

I don't know who the winner of all this is, but it isn't going to be the things we believe in.

What was great about the Tea Party was that it was skeptical about politicians. It said, support the policies we care about or we'll kick you out. Now it's support a candidate and excuse their policies.

This isn't about who we should support. It's about what we should support.

Every Republican presidential candidate has serious flaws on the major issues. Yes, every single one of them.

And that's normal. It's the way politics works. It's the way politicians work. (Running for political office means you're a politician, even if you haven't held political office before.) It's the way people work.

There are no perfect candidates. It's why the job of people like us is to hold politicians accountable instead of being their shills. That doesn't mean not voting. It doesn't mean not supporting a candidate.

It means supporting candidates realistically by putting ideas first and politicians second.

It means acknowledging that your favorite candidate has flaw X and pushing him to do better. It means supporting him or her because of their policies, not because he or she seems like the 'one'.

Passion is fine in romance, it's bad in politics. Politicians, unlike husbands and wives, always cheat. They're surrounded by advisers who have a lot more influence on them than you do. They have donors and companies and agendas orbiting around them. Their life is different than your life.

And if they win, their life will be so radically different than yours that they just won't understand.

We're not going to have a conservative revolution by electing the perfect candidate. Three elections full of disappointments should have shown that already. If we're going to have one of those, it will be because we have a movement of ideas that can't be hijacked by anyone with an angle.

I'm not asking you not to support candidate X. I loathe the idea of seeing Jeb Bush up on the podium with Hillary Clinton more than eating used rubber tires. But you might just want to consider the possibility that Jeb Bush's path to the nomination might be through your favorite candidate and that yelling all day at other conservatives does nothing except open a path for him to get there.

Romney won because there was no consensus conservative opposition candidate. It wasn't for lack of different potential candidates and their supporters yelling at each other and smearing each other. None of that yelling did anything except clear a path for Romney to the nomination. And then conservatives could self-righteously stay home while Obama grinned at another victory.

We don't need another replay of 2012.

If we put politicians first. We lose. If we put ideas first, then win or lose, we build a movement.

When we put ideas first, politicians compete to adopt them. That's what happened with opposition to ObamaCare. It's what happened with immigration.

Putting ideas first puts us in charge. Putting politicians first puts us right back where we started.

There's a big difference between supporting a politician and believing in a politician. Belief should be saved for ideas, not for people running for office. When you believe in a politician, you lose sight of the ideas we are fighting for. You stop asking questions and stop holding them accountable.

And then you get Hoped and Changed on.

No politician can save us. No politician will save us. Fighting for the right ideas just might.

It's fine to look back on a Ronald Reagan with rose colored glasses. Movements need ideal models and the best ones are out of office. It's dangerous to do that with people who are actually in power because it blinds us to their weaknesses and mistakes. It weakens our fight for what's right.

None of the candidates in this race is absolutely the 100 percent right one. Some of them may be close enough for government work. And your view and the view of the guy next to you may vary. The right way to tell is by looking at their track records and what they actually support in the cold light of day.

If we don't do that, if we make excuses for them, then they may get somewhere, but we never will.

If we want to change America, we have to change politicians instead of letting them change us. If we're not skeptical of the politicians we support, we will keep on being fooled, waking up to wonder why we were fooled and then going through the same cycle as many times as it takes.

The world was outraged when ISIS burned a man in a cage, but Muslim terrorists have been burning Jews alive with little outrage and less attention.

This war, in which cars and buses are torched with families still inside, is not the work of a tiny minority of extremists. Its perpetrators have the support of the Palestinian Authority. Some have been set free from Israeli prisons through the intervention of the PA, Barack Hussein Obama and John Kerry.

Last week Inbar, a young mother of three, was burned over 15 percent of her body after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at her car in Jerusalem. Despite her injuries, she was one of the lucky ones.

Last year Ayala Shapira, an 11-year-old girl, was on the way home from math class. Her parents were driving her back to the village of El Matan (God’s Gift) when Muslim terrorists threw firebombs at their car. The bomb smashed through the window and landed on her lap setting her hair and clothes on fire.

“I just saw something burning fly at us and suddenly everything exploded,” Ayala would later say.

The 11-year-old girl reached into the fire to open her seatbelt and rolled on the ground to put out the flames, but she still suffered third-degree burns over 40 percent of her face and upper body.

Some children attacked by firebomb wielding Muslim terrorists were not so lucky.

Rachel Weiss and her three sons, Netanel, 3, Rafael, 2, and Efraim, 10 months, burned together on a passenger bus, with the young mother throwing herself over her children to try and protect them.

All four were buried together in one grave.

Two American passengers, Sandy and Dov Bloom, were also riding the bus to Jerusalem. They had left their children with their grandparents. The Molotov cocktails set them on fire. Sandy was pushed into Elisha’s spring, named after the Biblical prophet who had healed the waters, renamed Ain es-Sultan by the Muslim invaders seeking to honor their own murderous tyrant in place of the ancient prophet.

The Muslim terrorists had mixed glue and gasoline so that the burning mixture would stick to the skin of their victims. It took years of surgery for the American couple to begin the road to recovery.

Mahmoud Kharbish and Juma'a Adem, the perpetrators of the brutal attack, were freed by Israel under pressure from Obama and Kerry to bring the PLO back to the negotiating table. Along with the other freed terrorists, they were hailed as heroes by President Abbas and were eligible for monthly salaries.

The Moses family was driving on a pre-holiday shopping trip before Passover when their car was struck by a Muslim firebomb. Ofra Moses, who was five-months pregnant, wasn’t able to get her seatbelt open and burned to death. It took her 5-year-old son Tal another three months to die of his burns.

His 8-year-old sister Adi suffered severe burns as her father rolled her burning body in the sand to put out the flames. “I looked in the direction of our car and watched as my mother burned in front of my eyes,” she recalls.

She still remembers lying bandaged while her little brother screamed in pain in the next room.

Mohammad Daoud, the Muslim terrorist who did this to the family, was given two life sentences and an additional 72 years. But when the PLO demanded his release, Obama and Kerry forced Israel to comply.

Israelis who kill Muslims are considered pariahs. Muslims who burn Jews to death are glorified as heroes. And there are many such aspiring heroes, eager for a Palestinian Authority salary funded by American and European foreign aid and a “Get Out of Jail Free” card dispensed by Obama and Kerry.

Last week alone, there were over a dozen firebomb attacks. This year so far there were 102 firebomb attacks. Even the Intifada itself began when a Molotov cocktail was thrown at Israeli soldiers. Over the next four years, there were 3,600 firebomb attacks. Burning Jews to death is what Palestine is all about.

And then there are the Arson Jihad forest fires which can threaten entire neighborhoods. The latest such fire, which forced the evacuation of hundreds of people in a Jerusalem neighborhood, was traced back to two firebombs. Two earlier forest fires last month had also been traced back to firebombs.

But to the State Department, throwing firebombs at Jews is no big deal.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki argued that throwing a Molotov cocktail is not terrorism and offered condolences to an attacker who was shot while throwing a firebomb and then buried in a Hamas headband. The Weiss and Moses families might disagree, but few of them survived to argue their case.

And in any case, the administration isn’t listening.

An administration that contrived the release of the monsters who torched the Weiss and Moses families is not likely to consider burning Jews alive to be terrorism.

But the Muslim Arson Jihad has also targeted Jews beyond Israel’s borders.

In Montreal, Sleiman El-Merhebi and Simon Zogheib threw a firebomb through the window of a Jewish school library before Passover destroying 15,000 books. Yousef Sandouga threw a Molotov cocktail at the window of the Edmonton Beth Shalom (House of Peace) synagogue, but instead set himself on fire.

Last year, Molotov cocktails were thrown at synagogues in France, Germany and Brussels. Two years earlier, in a foreboding preview of the massacre of Jews in a Kosher deli before the Sabbath (described by Obama as zealots who “randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris”), another Kosher supermarket was bombed by two men in black. Last year, it was finally burned to the ground.

In New York City, a year before September 11, Muslims threw firebombs at a synagogue in the Bronx. “A bias-motivated attempt to firebomb a synagogue?” the New York Times asked. “Or a misguided message critical of Israeli policies against Palestinians?”

It is tempting to reduce Islamic terror to a response to the rebirth of Israel, as the New York Times did, but Muslims did not begin burning Jews to death in the twentieth century. The Jewish cemetery of old Oufrane in Morocco is a field of lonely broken stones. Among all the other shattered graves of their people, lie the ashes of fifty martyrs, Jews who had been burned to death for refusing to convert to Islam in 1790. In the same year that the Jews of Newport had thanked George Washington for his role in bringing about a nation “generously affording to all liberty of conscience”, Muslims were still burning Jews to death for their conscience and their faith.

The Fifty Martyrs of Ourfrane were not aberrations. The Jews of Morocco, and those of many other places, lived under a law which decreed that they could be burned to death at the word of a Muslim.

In 1875, as Alexander Graham Bell was inventing the telephone, Jews were being burned to death under Islamic law in Iran. Over a century later, Ayatollah Khomeini told his followers, "Killing is a form of mercy... sometimes a person cannot be reformed unless he is cut up and burnt... you must kill, burn and lock up those in opposition."

Khomeini meant it literally. The origins of the Islamic Revolution of Iran lay in the Cinema Rex fire in which Islamic terrorists launched a false flag operation, locked the doors of the movie theater because of its blasphemous nature and set it on fire killing four hundred people.

This is an Islamic state of mind that has never gone away.

One of the Muslim terrorists behind the Bali bombings, which killed over 200 people in Indonesia, shouted, “Allahu Akbar” and “Burn the Jews” before his verdict was read.

Savages worship fire for its primal destructive power. Whether burning books, buildings or people, the ability to destroy is their idea of a spiritual experience. Islam swept across civilizations like a fire, burning people and libraries, destroying ideas and cultures, leaving behind slavery and despair in its wake.

The fires are burning again from Iraq to Israel. Firebombs are flying into synagogues across Europe. The great hatred of Islam burns in the hearts of a billion bigots. Death and fire follow in their wake.

But the world is only outraged when Muslims die. It is not outraged when Muslims kill. When Muslims burn Jews or massacre Christians, it shrugs and moves on. And this is also true of many Jews.

There is nothing that corrupts conservatives quite as much as the need to be nice.

Conservatives are natural optimists who see the world as being basically a nice place. They are nice because they think that the world is nice. That worldview is not reciprocated by the other side.

Where conservatives see a country store, liberals see an oppressive outpost of capitalism. Where conservatives see a family, liberals see abusive patriarchy, oppressive gender norms, religious indoctrination and apple pie. Our current broken family society is the outcome of a cultural war waged against families based on that viewpoint.

The left is convinced that the world is an evil place, that people are basically terrible and that they are the only thing standing between us and the return of human slavery.

It's no wonder that liberals are so nasty.

In political wars, conservatives have to force themselves to be nasty and liberals have to force themselves to be nice. Media control flips the script so that the average person is under the impression, without having listened to either one, that Rush Limbaugh screeches hate at the top of his lungs while Jon Stewart is a fun-loving entertainer, when really it's the other way around.

But the media excels at pumping out one core message; liberals are good people and conservatives are bad people. The details are usually forgettable and buried in a thousand contextualized stories, but the message permeates everything. And even when the public doesn't buy it, conservatives do.

No one wants to be thought of as a villain and when the media manufactures a crisis, particularly when a whirlwind of manufactured stories begins to spin around some tragedy, some conservatives are seduced into trying to be nice guys and girls.

They won't surrender their main principles. Of course not. They'll just make some kind of gesture. Call for fairness. Find common ground with the other side.

Religious leaders rationalize that they'll convert more of the heathen by showing respect for the other side. Political leaders give in to the urging of their kids and their cocktail party milieu. And too many in the rank and file robotically repeat media talking points no matter how they distrust the media.

And the left wins again.

If there's one thing that conservatives need to cure themselves of it's a slavish desire to be nice. Those who give in to it are lost.

Liberals don't suffer from a niceness crisis. They don't find common ground with us. They don't worry that somewhere out there someone dislikes them.

Nice people want to be thought of as nice. They don't like to be thought of as nasty. Nasty people will pretend to be nice, but being hated does not bother them. They thrive on it.

This is really why there is no conservative party. Eventually all those passionate conservatives we send up and have such high hopes for give in to the questions being hurled at them by the media, by their compatriots in government town asking them what they're going to do about fake crisis No. 3.

And eventually they try to find common ground. And they lose and we lose.

It's not just about policy. This is a conflict that takes place in mental and moral spaces. Before the policy, comes the worldview. The left will lose political battles rather than give an inch on its worldview. They view liberals who retreat on any issue as traitors and punish them. Conservatives lose political battles because they open up gaps in their worldview, they make mental and moral concessions, and once they've done that, losing the policy battle is a foregone conclusion.

Winning requires an uncompromised worldview. Lose that and every battle becomes a frenzied clash followed by a strategic withdrawal to the next crucial issue. ObamaCare. Iran. Planned Parenthood. Don't worry, one of these days we'll fight one to the end. Just not this one. Or the next one.

When you have a compromised worldview, then you stand for nothing.

The Republican Party has ten thousand men and women who believe in nothing, but are eager to discuss policy. Their policy ends up being liberal because there is no firewall of conviction.

Conviction is the difference between victory and defeat. Strategy wins battles, but without staying power, the battles never add up to win a war. A president is elected. The Republicans take the Senate. There are Supreme Court justices and a few legal victories. But none of it has any staying power because there is no larger worldview behind it that is uncompromisingly committed to a goal.

Eventually everyone gets distracted and goes home. That's how those past "conservative" victories ended.

A man or woman of conviction does not bend. They are unconcerned with being liked by liberals. They are even less concerned with being hated by them. They are not moved by media stories. They are inflexibly hostile to their emotional manipulations. They do not accept the latest crisis or the latest talking point. Instead they remained determined to force their crisis to its full momentum.

Conservatives are naturally nice. When the world seems to turn against them, they often become embittered. The happy medium of the happy warrior is a difficult one because it requires remaining centered in the 'nice world', the world of families and neighborhoods, of a glorious past that can be used to build a glorious future, while doing battle in the twisted media landscape of the left.

The internet has made that battle harder to fight, but it has also made it easier to find likeminded people to fight it with.

The left thrives on breaking down social connections and isolating people. That is what is behind its war on the family. Into those cracks, it embeds its cultural and academic programming. It models adult life for children and turns adults into children with fake models of life. It manipulates empathy for its political causes. It convinces good people to empathize with evil while disdaining other good people.

Our battle is not merely external, but internal. Totalitarian movements are not just defeated in the ruins of fallen statues and burning palaces, but in the resistance to their messaging in our own minds. By purifying our convictions, we immunize ourselves to tyranny. We become like those great men and women we admired throughout history whose resistance called on an impregnable moral power.

We become firmed in conviction by not giving in to intellectual or emotional manipulation. We do this by rejecting any moral authority on the left whatsoever. We disregard whether the left considers us nice. We cease trying to find common ground with a movement that wants to enslave us.

When we close that door, the left loses its greatest manipulative weapon.

The left claims the media power to decide who is cool, who is nice, who is good and who is bad, who is laughable and contemptible, who is a bigot and who is a saint. It backs up this power with a million voices echoing at every range. When we cease to pay any emotional or moral regard to this pitcher plant, we take the first step toward becoming a movement of conviction rather than convenience.

It sounds easy, but it's a lot harder than you think.

Imagine the next sob story on the news. The one that is targeted directly at your demographic. Ask yourself what its agenda is. What does it really hope to achieve. It's not that hard, but not even 1 percent of Republican voters, the same ones who poll as distrusting the media, will do that.

And of those who do, far too many will still be influenced by it.

The left has been able to keep winning because it has the conviction to set the agenda and too many conservatives allow themselves to be influenced by it. And then a think tank will roll out a "conservative" solution to climate change, illegal alien amnesty or drug policy reform.

And then the left wins.

If we want to be where the left is today, we will need some of that same determination. We will need to realize that we will not win by being nice, but by refusing to let the left's definition of niceness get a foothold in our minds or our souls.

Civilizations normally go through three stages; Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent.

It's easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty's worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.

Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.

The barbaric civilization is the simplest of all. It runs on kinship. Pre-rational, it operates on explosions of emotion. It has no concept of enduring facts or objective reasoning. It holds life cheaply and kills casually. It loathes outsiders and has no universal laws. It is ruled by hierarchies which gain their position through brutality and trickery.

The decadent civilization has a million laws which it applies selectively. Its universal laws, inherited from a vigorous civilization, are so mired in legalisms as to be meaningless. The laws do not mean what they say. Instead they must be interpreted by a specialized caste. Everyone is always in violation of some obscure laws. Life depends on a lawless dispensation from the law.

The crucial task of the law is interpretation that keeps everyone from constantly being punished. This task is accomplished by lawyers, lobbyists and the politicians who are constantly adding more laws to fix the interpretations in the old laws creating a complex mass of contradictory information.

This holds true in every other area of life.

Interpretation is what the decadent civilization does best. While vigorous civilizations discover new things, decadent civilizations endlessly categorize and re-categorize them to accommodate intellectual fads.

The decadents are great categorizers. They know where everything should belong. They employ armies of bureaucrats to operate vast filing systems which never quite work as planned. They don't cure diseases. That's what vigorous civilizations do. But they do spend billions on medical record systems that never seem to be compatible with each other.

Decadents have a great deal of information and no idea what to do with it. The great task of decadent civilizations is a futile effort to organize all the information they have so that they can make use of it. The internet is the ultimate such mechanism and it is largely a failure as such. It has many entertaining and useful aspects, but it is actually becoming more disorganized with time, rather than less so. ObamaCare is another information organizational failure. So is the VA.

The decadent civilization is convinced that if it can amass enough information, its interpretations will be superior, but its information gathering techniques and its interpretative techniques are both fatally flawed by an inability to focus, by ideologically obsessions and societal corruption. Scientists may have more rapid access to more information, but the scientific community is more contaminated leading to worse results. Similarly, corruption undermines information gathering efforts from the start as projects are diverted to crony contractors by corrupt politicians.

Vigorous civilizations understand that a process must be kept clean by open debate. Decadent civilizations operate corrupt closed processes while convinced of their own innate superiority.

Decadent civilizations are less interested in discovering new things than in disproving old things. The corruption of the decadent civilizations handicaps its advancement. The middling talents at the helm rewrite history while justifying their misrule by denouncing the achievements of their vigorous ancestors.

Where the vigorous civilization disproves the old through its achievements, the decadent civilization considers the disproving of the old civilization to be an achievement in and of itself. Where the vigorous civilization outside its parent, the decadent civilization is still stuck fighting "Daddy".

If you examine our achievements today, they increasingly have much to do with the supposed social and intellectual progress we have made since the fifties. This progress is relative. It depends on how we view the fifties rather than what we actually have. Worse still, much of this progress is in outlook, rather than in reality. We are better because we are morally superior.

Despite the disdain for the past, decadent civilizations struggle to do more than deconstruct and then helplessly imitate the past. Chaotic deconstruction of past creative arts is followed by retro copying of them, first ironically and then earnestly. Nostalgia becomes the central industry of a civilization increasingly incapable of making its own culture.

The central cultural critique becomes updating older works to more politically correct forms. A classic character is made black or gay. Problems with diversity or sexism are tackled. The critic becomes a commissar whose job is to sanctify the transformation of an old politically incorrect work as politically correct. That is the role of the social justice warrior.

All this energy makes it appear as if there is cultural ferment when nothing is actually being produced. Instead older works are being "cleaned up" in keeping with new social values by a civilization that frantically chews up the past in a desire to forget the problems of the present.

People living in decadent civilization have a greater need for entertainment due to leisure time, extended adolescence and the breakup of the family. But their lack of meaningful work, family engagement and adult responsibilities leaves them increasingly less able to produce it. Instead they become children putting together pieces of stories that "Daddy" once told them while taking the credit.

Decadents confuse criticism and curation with creativity. They develop great sensitivity to everything from literary styles to foods. In a decadent society, everyone is a cultivated critic, but these critics value style over substance. Their criticism is a cultural signal rather than a mastery of technique. The decadent civilization is obsessed with taste as brand. It is sensitive to subtleties, but fails to see the large flaws in a work. Its creativity is microscopically innovative and macroscopically a failure. Its subtle refinements cannot compensate for the lack of vision.

In a decadent civilization, everyone can be a critic or a collector of something, even as no one actually produces anything new until there are more critics and collectors than creators.

The decadent civilization spends much of its time and effort in a battle against apathy. It is forever "raising awareness" about something or other. Its sophisticated messaging however creates apathy as quickly as it erases it. Its messaging becomes more short term and more hysterical. Everything is a crisis and every message is pitched at the highest possible level.

The outrage of today is quickly forgotten by the outrage of tomorrow. The organizers dream of sustaining awareness for real change only to dive into the next round of short-term messaging.

In a decadent civilization, everyone is always fighting a political battle, while the real changes are orchestrated by power groups behind the scenes and presented as fait accomplis to a bewildered public.And most of what is debated is a distraction from what truly matters.

Barbaric and decadent civilizations are both so dishonest that they are incapable of seeing their own lies.

The barbaric civilization simply does not understand the concept of a fixed truth. The minds of its people are capable of understanding it as an abstract notion, but not of holding it in their minds on a specific subjective matter of interest to them. A barbarian can understand that stealing is wrong, but not that robbing you is wrong.

A decadent however can understand that stealing from you is wrong, but not that stealing itself is wrong. The decadent civilization does not have fixed truths. Its people are trained to apply mores to subjective situations, much as barbarians do naturally. While barbarians can evolve from the fixed truth to the fixed value, the decadents have devolved by rejecting the fixed truth.

Fixed truths have been deconstructed and routed through a complex array of relativistic values. A decadent understands that murdering this baby right here is wrong, but can be taught that it is acceptable to trade parts of dead fetuses. For decadents in an information society, definitions are very important. Decadents and barbarians have an empathy that is triggered by cultural signals.

For barbarians, these signals are honor-shame kin-based. For decadents, the cultural signals are more complex group-based signals that are routed through complex intellectual justifications. These justifications naturally create their own unrecognized hypocrisies. Enemy civilians killed in a Republican's war are a horrific atrocity. Those killed in a Democrat's war don't exist.

Groups are politicized and every moral code is routed through an identity politics based on insecurity. There are no morals, only sides. Responses are emotional to shortcut rational reasoning. Decadents function like barbarians, not because they are barbarians, but because their minds have been wired in complex ways by brilliantly dishonest men in academia to reduce them to barbarians.

A major difference between vigorous and decadent civilizations is objectivity and long term thinking. Decadents are incapable of either while vigorous civilizations thrive on both. If decadent civilizations could engage in long term thinking, they wouldn't be doomed. If they could engage in objective reasoning, they wouldn't be slaves to the media machines under a lawless tyranny. 

The barbaric and vigorous civilizations speak little of sex and yet have high birth rates. Decadent civilizations are obsessed with sex and have few children. Perversions multiply in decadent civilizations, especially among the elites, who have the fewest morals, the most wealth and the greatest need for new taboos to violate. This is not a cause. It is only the symptom.

Gay marriage, like so much else, is the symptom of a decadent elite that confuses its own power and privilege with civil rights, that wants to legalize its illicit behaviors even though it only embarked on them because of their illicitness. In its perversity, it must find new taboos to violate each time an old one becomes socially accepted, before then embarking on a civil rights struggle to make its latest taboo socially acceptable so that one day it's gay marriage and the next it's men in dresses.

Barbarians have large families and a tolerance for limited personal space. They speak loudly, are more casual about the deaths of their children, and view success in terms of power. Decadents speak softly, have a high need for personal space, have small families while playing helicopter parents and view success in terms of their own unattainable happiness. Vigorous civilizations have medium sized families, speak loudly, view success in terms of personal accomplishment, are not too concerned about personal space and value their children while allowing them to take risks.

Decadents want emotional rewards without commitments. As a result they are constantly unhappy. They pursue happiness as if it were a quality that could be permanently obtained through the right techniques, rather than a shifting response to the rigors of daily life. The more decadents do this, the more unstable they become, obsessively self-medicating and attempting to otherwise set the conditions of their happiness by controlling its application, and blaming others for their failure.

The more deranged decadents search for those who deny them their right to happiness by failing to accept them, reward them or otherwise please them until they find meaning only in attacking others. Behind their venom is narcissistic self-pity, they are searching for revenge against a cruel world when they are the authors of their own unhappiness. 

The decadent civilization senses inwardly that it has no future. It becomes obsessed with apocalypses. Its people are always fixated on the next great threat to their health individually and the next great disaster that will bring their civilization to its knees. While vigorous civilizations boldly stride forward into the unknown, decadents are nervous and unsure. They veer between comfort zones and ritualized displays of destructive behavior that accomplish nothing except the illusion of freedom.

Vigorous civilizations pursue meaningful risks. Decadent civilizations pursue meaningless ones. For a vigorous civilization, adventure ends with an accomplishment. For a decadent civilization, risk is the accomplishment.

The decadent civilization obsessively manages risk. Its layers of government are mainly dedicated to that task. Accomplishment in a decadent civilization becomes a difficult task because of the many lawyers of corporate and government risk management standing in the way of getting anything done.

Fear is the true currency of the decadent civilization. A corrupted fear that is used to expand a vast bureaucracy that claims to manage risk, but in reality manages who is allowed to circumvent it. Groups are stampeded into accepting new tiers of fear government and fear authority based on the risk that something might happen. And yet the source of the fear is never dealt with.

A vigorous civilization rushes out to deal with threats. A decadent civilization imprisons itself out of fear.

Decadence in a civilization can be reversed. While the barbarian civilization must evolve upward, the decadent civilization must undo the damage that is devolving it. This is easier than it seems. Unlike the barbarian civilization, the decadent civilization has most of the same infrastructure, physical and mental, of the vigorous civilization. Only its ideas have become corrupted.

And even this deeper corruption is largely limited to the elites and the professional classes, while the rest of the civilization has experienced only a surface corruption that is easily wiped away.

The difficulty is however structural. A decadent civilization becomes more top-down with each year. And the source of the corruption is at the top. Removing the source of the corruption requires either removing all or almost all of the elites, and sizable sections of the professional classes as well. Or a campaign of ideas that transforms them as fundamentally as they were transformed.

Either is a daunting proposition. Both require a fundamental transformation, but the former transformation is structural, a revolution that changes how a civilization is run, displacing elites across all the tiers of society, while the latter is a revolution of ideas.