Last week Democrats were supposedly outraged by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki's refusal to condemn Hizbullah and condemnation of Israel. Howard Dean called him an Anti-Semite. Senator Barbara Boxer and Charles Schumer boycotted his speech. Then of course Dick Durbin just had to join in the fun.

Now I have no doubt that as a Shiite with close ties to the Iraqi Ayatollah, Maliki's views on Jews are pretty much what they are across the Arab world where the median range is between those who want to kill Jews now and those who want to kill Jews later. That doesn't mean the born again Pro-Israel Democrats are anything but laughable.

"We don't need to spend $200, $300, $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself and refuse to condemn Hezbollah," Howard Dean said.

This pretty much categorizes the Clinton administration, certainly the Carter one. They certainly never believed Israel had a right to defend itself and repeatedly refused to condemn Palestinian terrorists. The only reason Democrats are doing this is to create a split between Jews and the Bush Administration before the elections and embarass the Bush Administration with an impossible choice as well as finding a new angle attacking the War in Iraq.

Even as the Democrats play the same tune that the solution to the conflict is for the US to "leverage its prestige and resources to achieve a final settlement and peace in the middle east," translation, "pressure Israel for more concessions to the terrorists" they try to out-hawk the Bush administration on Israel, a laughable enterprise. The Republicans at least occasionally comprehend that Israel needs to defend itself, the only time the Democrats do is when they want to poke a stick in the Republican's eyes and score some political points.

Now of course on Israel 90 percent of the time the Republicans talk like Ronald Reagan and act like Jimmy Carter. The Democrats talk like Reagan on Israel only when it's election time. Reagan meanwhile talked like Reagan but wound up acting like Carter a lot of the time too, trading arms for hostages and bullying Begin to get out of Lebanon comparing Israel's bombing to the Holocaust.

The real moral may be that 90 percent of politicians will set out Israel in the hopes of scoring points with the Arab world and pander to Jewish voters during election time and the occasional AIPAC dinner. Jews of course, like lonely spinters, seem pathetically eager to hear how politicians love us. Conservative and liberal Jews hold up the speeches of Republican and Democratic politicians as proof of how much they love us. They point to voting records full of meaningless votes intended to be cancelled out by Presidential fiat. They ignore the simple fact that American politics like British colonial politics is geared towards an Arab Middle-East in which a Jewish Israel is an occasional strategic and commercial ally but mostly a nuisance that alienates those Arab nations they're trying to woo.

For half a century the diplomatic Romeos of the Western world have waited beneath the balconies of Arabia reciting protestations of their love to their veiled duplicitious Juliets. And though they continue to be spurned, they continue to pursue that impossible romance. Like Truman they may tell the Jews what we want to hear, but it's to Saudi Arabia, Quatar and Egypt, that they're actually true. Will it all end in mutual suicide here as well as the Western World chokes on the Islamic threat it determinedly whitewashes and ignores while the Islamic world melts down into a frenzy of madness hate.

Who is to know. Who is to say.

The report says Mel Gibson told the deputy, "You mother f****r. I'm going to f*** you." The report also says "Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me."

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"

Nine IDF soldiers were killed in the Hizbullah village of Bint Jbeil. One of those killed was 20 year old corporal Ohad Klausner. Klausner's father spoke out saying that his son had not been trained to fight terrorists but to expell Jews. Disengagement had become the priority of the Sharon government and it increasingly focused the efforts of the military and inteligence branches on fighting other Jews, rather than fighting terrorism. The price for that is being paid on the battlefield.

Major Royie Klein who was killed in that same battle was a deputy commander of the elite Golani brigade. In the best tradition of Israeli Defense Force offiers, he fell on a grenade to shield his own men and died. Now his widow and her two children are threatened with expulsion from their own home because of a Peace Now petition (members include the Defense Minister and Pime Minister Olmert's wife) demanding the demolition of twelve houses in Eli, they claim were built on land belonging to Arabs. The last such succesfull petition resulted in the police riot at Amona in which homes were destroyed and hundreds were assaulted and trampled by Yassam police squads.

A third soldier who died in that battle was 24 year old Captain Amichai Merhavya. Amichai had been suspended from his unit and threatened with dismissal from the army for writing a letter to the Chief of Staff objecting to the expulsion of Jews. Though he is dead, his brother continues fighting in Gaza.

A year after Disengagement Israel has paid a high price for it in national divisions, in the worsening of our strategic situation and the growing enemy threat. It has also paid a more unseen price in the politicisation of the IDF, the dismissal of capable generals and officers, who were replaced by men loyal to the policies of the Sharon government. It has paid a price by focusing on training to expell their own brothers from their homes by force and inteligence spying on opposition activists rather than focusing on fighting the enemy.

Disengagement is over. Its bloody cost is all around us. Further Disengagements are a madman's dream. What has begun is the Reengagement, the reality that we cannot run away from the enemy and that turning on each other will only profit the enemy whom we must confront as a nation united. It's time to send Peace Now packing back to their EU and Vatican sponsors and to reengage with Zionism and with our own people.

In 2000 Ehud Olmert's current political ally and then Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew from Lebanon giving Hizbullah a free hand to build up an army at Israel's borders and turn former Israeli controlled territory into a war zone from which to shell Israel all the way to Haifa. Barak promised that the retreat would secure Israel's borders so that Israeli troops would not have to return to Lebanon. He lied.

In 2005 Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert withdrew from Gaza. They turned Gaza over to Hamas which began building up an army there and using it as a base for terrorist attacks against Israel and to shell Israeli towns and cities. Sharon and Olmert claimed that the withdrawal would secure Israel's borders and Israeli soldiers would never return to Gaza. They lied. A year later and they're back. A year later and the only difference between Lebanon and Gaza is that the Hizbullah had 6 years of free reign to prepeare for this war, while Hamas less than 1 year.

With Israel casualties of the killed and wounded in the hundreds, with the entire north of Israel under fire, with tens of thousands of refugees and Haifa's residents sleeping in shelters; the idea that withdrawing from territories and turning them over to the terrorists can bring security or peace. That false delusion has been buried along with the bodies of dozens of soldiers and civilians, of the rubble in Haifa and Sderot. Or it should have been.

Ehud Olmert arrived at Nitzanit where so many of the refugees he created, before Hizbullah got their crack at them, live. Where a woman who lost most of her possessions in Gush Katif went after a shell struck her home and she lost all she had left. He arrived with no regrets or apologies for the disastrous failures of his policies. Instead he continued to champion a further retreat from the West Bank. Even as Israel is being pounded from Gaza and Lebanon, Olmert wants to open the door for Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad to shell Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Facing the very people who were the victims of his government's disastrous policy of retreats that had led to this war, Olmert snidely told them that a pilot had died today and his family unlike the settlers didn't ask for any compensation. This shamefull Soviet display of rhetoric is almost fantastic coming from a man living in safety and lecturing people who actually are on the front line. That pilot was killed in a war with the enemy. The settlers were attacked by their own government and even the compensation promised to those who left on their own, was never paid.

Olmert's determination to continue pursing a policy that has led Israel to disaster would be the equivalent of England proposing to continue turning a blind eye to German conquests even as German bombers were striking London. Even at war with enemies that have taken advantage of Israel's retreats to subject Israel to the kind of assault the country has not experienced for decades. Even after dozens are dead and Arab terrorists have thoroughly demonstrated that a border and a wall are no defense against a sustained bombardment, Olmert is blindly continuing to push a policy that only a lunatic could embrace at this point.

Talk about seperation and secure borders becomes laughable when the enemy simply goes over and under your borders. Israel is not ancient China and a wall is a static defense that cannot keep a determined enemy out. If the arguments against withdrawals were theoretical beforehand and required the Israeli public to imagine the enemy shelling Israeli towns and cities, no imagination is needed anymore. It's just a matter of looking outside or turning on the TV news. The war is here and will only intensify as every inch of territory yielded by Israel will be turned by the enemy into a base of operations to inflict terror on Israeli citizens.

International forces are not the answer. Hizbullah operates openly around UN positions. NATO will not remain long and will likely be equally tolerant of Hizbullah. Any NATO forces that don't turn a blind eye to Hizbullah operations will quickly meet the same fate as the US Marines who were deployed there. NATO, particularly those members already committed to Iraq, are not going to fight another war in Lebanon against Hizbullah. All that NATO's deployment accomplishes is to provide political cover for Israel's retreat and to give Europe further authority to dictate settlement terms to Israel; all the while charging the bill to Israel's political capital for getting NATO troops there in the first place.

Negotiations have failed. Withdrawal has failed. Turning over Israel's security to foreign troops is futile and an admission that Israel can no longer protect itself and desires to be a colony again. The last time around Rome was happy to oblige. Do we really want a repetition of that history?

In the end all the clever new solutions meant to usher in a bright and shiny new middle east have failed. Wise men return to the old solutions that kept the peace. Fools and liars learn nothing and continue the folly of their ways.

(Reuters) "Pakistan's Supreme Court has ordered an inquiry into the case of a man who spent three years in jail for a murder that never happened, a court official said Tuesday. The woman Malik Taj Mohammad was convicted of kidnapping and killing was arrested for theft two years ago and is serving a jail sentence in the eastern city of Gujarat.

The woman, Malkani Bibi, was said to have been murdered during a property dispute between relatives, although Taj had maintained that his accusers had performed a mock burial."

Something to keep in mind when more Lebanese or Palestinian 'casualties' come in, some of whom wind up walking off during their own funerals like the last time....

Most people remember the Iraqi Information Minister's outrageous statement that are no American troops at Baghdad International Airport. Some were outraged by it, others bemused by the sheer baldfaced denial of reality. Few realized that in truth they were getting a view into how Arab cultures cope with defeat.

Arab cultures cope with defeat by first denying it happened and then by pasting conspiracy theories over it. Few Arab states ever admit they were defeated. Saddam erected statues to his victory in the 1992 Gulf War and the Iran-Iraq War. Egypt celebrates its victory in the Six Day War. This attitude is not just a matter of historical revisionism but how Arab countries and Arab societies approach wartime as well. With his entire air force destroyed and Israeli forces advancing on Cairo, Nasser and the entire Egyptian political and military establishment continued to insist that they were winning. Nasser even telephoned the King of Jordan telling him that the Israelis were on the run and it was time to join the war and reap the rewards. Predictably Jordan joined in. Disastrously.

Orientalists often celebrate the 'Death Before Dishonor' cultures of the east and romanticise them. The reality though is that an honor and shame based culture is not a moral culture. It is a culture in which each man must see himself as a hero and twist and warp reality to maintain his status. Honor comes before everything else. An Arab family may kill their daughter is she dishonors their family by having a fling or marrying the wrong man. Arab families will send their sons off to blow themselves up, because this too elevates their honor, which is more important than life. Given a choice between living in peace and dying with honor, Arabs will choose the mythological chimera of honor because they would rather die than face the truth and have others see their shame.

This is why vendettas in the Arab world never end until one side is completely decimated. As long as both sides continue to live, the pressure of shame and honor compel them to continue killing each other. There may be truces and pauses in the violence but sooner or later the killing always resumes. It's why peace is ultimately impossible.

In the culture of Islam the meaning of peace is identical to the meaning of Islam itself which is submission. The entire religion of Islam is premised on submission to Allah. To the Muslim mind, non-Muslims can only attain peace with Islam by submitting to them as the messengers of Allah. There can be no peace with a non-Muslim only a truce. The only kind of temporary peace Arabs can even contemplate is one in which the enemy makes sufficient concessions that the Arab side feels it 'won' even when it lost. Such was the peace Egypt made with Israel, but even that didn't save President Sadat from being assassinated.

To understand why the Palestinians won't make peace with Israel, the simple answer is that any peace would require admitting to a defeat. As long as the terrorism continues they can insist to themselves that they never lost because they keep on fighting. The moment they reached a genuine accord with Israel and ended the killing, no matter how much land they gained, the mythology they built up about Israel and themselves will come crashing down on them.

The same misguided sense of honor that requires them to murder their daughters rather than accept that they may have had a fling with a boy, requires them to continue killing Israelis, regardless of the consequences to themselves. The Israeli counterattacks then further feed their own mythology of themselves as victims, as oppressed and as defiant fighters of the monstrous Israeli war machine. The so-called cycle of violence is really a cycle of shame and honor, in which to atone for their shame, they go out and kill until they feel honorable again.

Reaching a lasting peace becomes a hopeless task because peace can only be made with people who are prepared to compromise. And compromise would be a shameful act. Every Arab leader who even tried was subjected to numerous assassination attempts. So Arab leaders under pressure by the West to make peace begin playing both sides. To Israel and the West they promise peace and to their own people they promise war and of course it's only war that they deliver. None of this is considered dishonorable to them because their sense of honor is rooted in no moral code, but in their own desire to appear mighty and powerful in their own eyes. Their honor is entwined with their ideas of masculinity and strength and they cannot compromise on it without destroying their sense of self.

Unilateral Israeli concessions are also useless since they only embolden a delusional enemy to believe he is winning and no concession can ever be sufficient since there will always be some pretext for further violence, not because the concession wasn't sufficent but because the violence wasn't sufficient.

Violence compensates for the failures of Arab states and Arab cultures who see themselves as great and yet see their world status as small. They believe they should be the world's leaders yet they cannot acknowledge their own flaws and reform them. Trapped in this box they reason their way out of it by resorting to conspiracy theories, by believing that they are being suppressed and that only more violence is the answer. Their own losses become proof of the enemy's evil and the battles themselves become victories to be celebrated.

There can be no real communication between Western and Arab cultures because the assumptions in place preclude communications. Western cultures continue to believe that Arabs are just like them except with an accent. Arab cultures continue to believe that Western culture have brought them low and are keeping them down and that they can only rise by destroying them. Arab responses to Western diplomacy all come couched in the deceptive and manipulative phrasing of people who believe themselves to be cunningly gaining advantage of an enemy and Western diplomats continue to be baffled when nothing they do produces any results. But the Arab cultures are only implementing Theodore Roosevelt's famous maxim about diplomacy. They keep saying 'Nice Doggie, Nice Doggie' over and over again to America, Europe and Israel while looking for a big enough stick. With Iran's atom bomb program they may soon have it too.

Peace requires finding a middle ground but Arab cultures can only see themselves as victims or heroes. They have no middle ground. They're either overrunning the enemy or being victimized by him while continue to courageously resist him. Finding an enemy becomes a basic psychological need for them in order to continue believing in their own self-worth.

Only honor can wipe away shame and shame comes from any sense of failure or inadequacy. War redirects the numerous forms of shame that Arab cultures produce in men at a greater enemy than each other or their own governments. The war can never be lost because they can never admit defeat until it is as overwhelming as it was in Japan, another honor-shame culture that utterly refused to acknowledge they were losing until the situation was so dire they were on the verge of annihilation. And yet even then the Japanese High Command was formulating plans to wipe out most of their own women and children in order to free up resources for fighting the war. It was only a desperate and unprecedented move by the Emperor that finally ended the war.

But there is no emperor to step in and end the war here. It will only end when we surrender or until they realize they have no choice but to admit defeat and do as the Japanese did, reshaping their culture into one that can learn from the West and compete with us in other areas than warfare. Until that day comes the violence will only grow worse.

"MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov invented a new unit of currency on Friday: "That thing your are not allowed to say."

rocess of adopting a law that will fine government ministers for saying "dollar" when they could have used the word "rouble" instead.

But old habits die hard. Telling reporters about a contract to supply fighter aircraft to Venezuela, Ivanov said the deal had "a value of more than one billion of that thing that you are not allowed to say anymore."

There is something strange going on when Israel bombs an Arab country and half the Arab world seems to be condemning the Arab side. Indeed there's more criticism being directed at Israel from Europe with the usual socialist suspects wailing and tearing their clothes, then there is from the Arab world.

Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have issued statements critical of Hizbullah. Even Saddam got in the act warning Syria that its ties with Iran might lead it to disaster. While the media glorifies Hizbullah, the rest of the Arab world is turning its back. So why are pigs flying over Lebanon?

Some would interpret this as an acknowledgment of Israel's show of strength but Israel hasn't shown all that much strength and while Egypt and Jordan would generally want to avoid a regional war, after all both of them signed peace treaties with Israel on recognizing that fighting wars with Israel was pointless; Saudi Arabia is certainly not in that category, let alone Saddam.

It would be more accurate to say that a lot of Arab regimes are turning on Iran's proxies like Hizbullah, because America and Israel have failed to stop them. Arab regimes have traditionally dealt with internal frustrations and Islamic and Marxist terrorist organizations by redirecting them at the two biggest targets, America and Israel. Arab governments happily fund and support terrorist organizations as long as they do their work elsewhere and channel their homicidal anger at Americans and Jews.

Besides Islamic ideology, homicidal xenophobia, injured pride and the usual anti-semitism; the advantage of directing terrorists at America and Israel is that they're targets powerful enough that the terrorists can't win. So in reality Arab governments really redirect the organizations and people that might otherwise cause them trouble into attacking America and Israel which are expected to squash them or at least bog them down, so they never succeed and begin causing trouble at home; all the while distracting America and Israel from causing them problems. It's a little like sending a rabid dog to bite a a police car. It distracts both the police and the dog and keeps them both away from you.

This strategy began to fail after 9/11 when the terrorists overreached themselves and America brought the war home to the middle-east along with a load of half-baked ideas about democratic reforms and free elections. Years later Iraq is a boiling pot, Egypt has been forced to give ground to the Islamists, Lebanon is in turmoil, Hamas is in power, Iran is on the verge of an atomic bomb. Al Queda is now raging in Arab countries and Shiite vs Sunni conflicts are expanding beyond Iraq and even beyond the middle-east. America did not succeed in repairing the problems of the middle-east but did introduce just enough chaos into the equation to frighten the existing Arab governments who can no longer count on the old status quo. They're not in control anymore and it scares them because most of them are little more than a house of cards built on an internal secret service and oil money.

This month Hezbollah overreached itself much as Al Queda had on September 11th, attacking Israel and producing a large scale response. It's fun and games when Israeli buses are blown up. It's not fun and games anymore when Israel is bombing Beirut, not because anyone in the Arab world cares about Lebanese civilians, but because it introduces more chaos into the equation. Worse yet it appears to be strengthening Iran and moving towards a massively destructive showdown and no one in the Arab world wants that.

A key qualification for leadership in the Arab world has been the destruction of Israel. Both Egypt's Nasser and Iraq's Saddam, who had dreams of leading the Arab world, made their attempts. It's clearly Iran's turn now but no one outside Iran, wants Iran in that position. Up until now the Arab world supported Iran against America as a fellow Muslim state, all the while expecting and hoping that America and Israel would stop Iran. The Arab states would have fought it all the way while providing some aid covertly and then signed million dollar checks to the terrorists who would 'avenge' Iran. These layers of hypocrisy are commonplace in middle-eastern politics which are ultimately motivated not by religion but by tribalistic nationalism and the egos of local tyrants.

But America is increasingly showing that it isn't going to deal with Iran in the usual unilateral way that would have both outraged and gratified the Arab world. Instead America twiddles its thumbs. Israel, the last best hope of the Arab world, rather than attacking Iran is bogged down in a military campaign with an Iranian proxy. Iran is moving closer to the atom bomb which can just as easily threaten the Egyptians or Saudis as the Israelis with. As a result the Arab states have stopped playing coy and are openly signaling that they will support American or Israeli action against Iran. They're not usually this desperate but then they never had to be before.

The message is not only intended for America and Israel but for Iran as well, warning Ahmadinejad that he is going too far and will face not only America and Israel, but their opposition as well. The Sunni-Shiite conflict generated by the overthrow of Saddam and the lack of a stable Iraqi government has opened a can of worms that has made every Arab government with a Shiite minority frightened of the specter of civil war.

In its backing of Hezbollah, the campaign against Israel is secondary in the eyes of the Arab world, to the campaign against Lebanon. Where Westerners see Iran backing a campaign against Israel, the Arab world sees Iran leveraging a Shiite minority and providing them with weapons and training that can just as easily and will be used against Lebanon itself. When Hezbollah was merely a proxy for fighting Israel under Syria's rule, it was business as usual in the Middle East where terrorist groups and militias are regularly used that way. Particularly in Lebanon. But in the reality post-9/11 and post-Syria's withdrawal, Hezbollah becomes an explicitly religious Shiite tool of Iran expanding its influence directly into Egypt and Jordan's neighborhood while conducting a takeover of Iraq.

Iran has gotten too big, too fast and the Arab world increasingly doesn't want any part of it. They do not want an Iranian empire that encompasses Iraq and Lebanon backed with huge reserves of oil and nuclear weapons and holding the status of having defeated Israel and America, because such an entity would soon swallow them all. They most certainly do not want a regional Sunni-Shiite war that will tear apart the entire region. And so the Arab world is winking at Israel's campaign to send a message that Iran is alone, except for the increasingly nervous Syria and the psychotic mess of Palestinian terrorists in Gaza.

The Arab world is scared and it should be. It's time for America and Israel to get that message.

5:31 London - This is the BBC



Nigel: Hello my name is Nigel Aintwhyte and in a moment we'll be going live to our correspondent in Lebanon where the full brutal might of the Israeli warmachine has been unleashed on an innocent and unarmed handful of women and children and the few brave Hizbullah fighters courageously defending them against this unprovoked aggression. Stay with us as unlike the American networks we provide you with accurate and unbiased coverage.

And now our correspondent, Angela Wentworth.

5:33 Lebanon

Angela: This is Angela Wentworth reporting to you from Lebanon where a handful of courageous fighters armed only with their courageous courage, small rocks, RPG's and batteries of advanced Chinese missiles are resisting the Israeli occupation of their country. Here is one of them Hamoud Al-Ghazi. Hamoud how is the fighting going so far?

Hamoud: Fighting going great. We down six Israeli planes today. Five yesterday. Many more tomorrow.

Angela: This is amazing news! A truly amazing victory for one of the most intrepid resistance forces on earth. Where are these airplanes so we can get a shot of them for our viewers?

Hamoud: Somewhere, somewhere around here. I not keep track of planes. I have important work to do shooting them down. Ask Mahmoud where the planes are.

Mahmoud shakes head.

Hamoud: Never mind. Zionists probably stole the planes back when we weren't looking. We shoot down more planes today and you see them. Victory for Hizbullah. Nasarallah!!! Allah Akbar. Jihad!! Jihad!!!

Israeli plane passes overhead and Hamood and Mahmoud and the others immediately dive down. Bombs fall and they cower on the ground until the plane passes. They rise from among the rubble.

Angela: Why didn't you shoot down that plane?

Hamood: No, no. We don't shoot down that plane.

Angela: Why not?

Hamood: No, no. Only one plane. We wait till many planes come and shoot them all down so we not waste ammunition on one plane.

Angela: Oh that makes sense.

Hamood: Nasrallah!!! Saladin!! Jihad!!! Allah Achbar!!! Great victory!! You see!! Great victory for Assad and surviving Lebanese people.

Angela: What about the rebuilding after the war.

Hamood: Not rebuilding stupid infidel woman, rearming.

Angela: I meant rebuilding Beirut and the rest of Lebanon after the bombing.

Hamood: Who give a damn about Lebanon?

Angela: Err...

Hamood: I mean, yes, yes. We true friends of the Lebanese people. That is we Lebanese people. True Lebanese people. We rebuild Lebanon you see. Better than before.

Angela: Do you think you'll need help from the international community to do it?

Hamood: International community infidels, haram. Pigs and monkeys. We rebuild Lebanon out of downed Israeli planes.

Angela: My goodness. Do you really think that will work?

Hamood: Yes, me and Mahmood here we do it ourselves. Down millions of Israeli planes and build new city out of them. Good planes. Good steel. Victory!! Nasrallah we die for you!!! Jihad!!!

A new flight of Israeli IAF planes pass by and Hamood shrieks and dives back into the rubble headfirst and hides there until they pass. He emerges looking a little uncomfortable.

Hamood: I was going to shoot those down too but they too small. I wait for bigger planes.

Angela: Those were bombers.

Hamood: I wait for big bombers. Shut up!! Shut up or I behead you on television just like my wife!

Angela: Anyway I'm sure our viewers in London and perhaps in the American states whose Christian neo-conservative Zionist regime is approving this genocide of the friendly Lebanese people would like to know your thoughts on it.

Hamood: We shoot down all Zionist planes! Shoot down all American planes! Victory through Jihad! Nasarallah leads us to victory! Sons of Saladin, lions of Arabia! We make new Holocaust for Jews like one that never happened.

Angela: I know the British people are greatly gratified by your hopes for peace and your courageous plans to resist the Israeli occupation and rebuild your lives despite the trauma of this past week.

Hamood: We kill British too. London belong to Allah. We turn Canterbury into mosque. Turn Parliament into mosque too! Hang Queen, turn Buckingham Palace into mosque! Make many, many mosques.

Angela: Of course we at the BBC have always been the strongest supporters of a multi-cultural society and have long supported hanging the Queen and turning Buckingham Palace into a mosque.

Hamood: Hang you too, unless you become my wife. Or temporary wife. I know good Imam in Iran who marry us for three minutes. All I need.

Angela: Errr

More Israeli planes pass overhead and Hamood dives back into the rubble as the bombs begin to fall.

Hamood: Allah save me. I am your servant. I never drink beer again. Not one drop. Only save me! Save me!

The planes depart and Hamood climbs out of his hole again.

Hamood: Run you Zionist cowards! We hunt you down! We march to Jerusalem! We burn your women! Jihad!! Jihad!! Nasrallah we die for you!! Just not this minute!!!

Angela: So is there...

Hamood: Did you see how I shot down that plane?

Angela: What?

Hamood: I shot down plane while you weren't looking. Stupid infidel cow! Your camera point wrong way. You missed great Hezbollah victory.

Angela: Terribly sorry. Perhaps you could do it again?

Hamood: No! You probably Zionist spy anyway.

Angela: I assure you the completely unbiased and objective BBC is one hundred percent on your side.

Hamood: One hundred percent not good enough! Where the rest! We are the warriors of Islam! Allah Achbar! Jihad!!! Victory!!! Nasrallah will destroy Zionist infidel pigs just like our brothers in Afghanistan and Iraq and Gaza!!! Victory!!! VICTORY!!

When Osama Bin Laden's Al-Queda launched an attack on the US, he could not have remotely foreseen the consequences of it.

If Osama had been thinking of fighting a drawn out guerrilla war with American forces in the hostile terrain of Afghanistan and repeating the 19th century Afghani expulsion and victory over the British colony in the colossal military disaster what is called the First Afghan War, he was in for a bitter disappointment. It was certainly on the mind of leftists like Robert Fisk who mockingly recited lines from Robert Kipling's famous poem and gloated over the thought of US soldiers being butchered and mutilated in Khyber Pass.

The First Afghan War had not been a war but a case of ignorant Orientalist British politicians who refused to listen to their military commanders and surrendered to the Afghans, allowed themselves to be disarmed and then butchered. Osama might have done better to pay attention to the aftermath of that massacre when the British returned in force to Afghanistan and burned most of Kabul to the ground.

Napoleon said that your battle plan is the first casualty of war. Action follows reaction and any attack touches off a counter-reaction and thus a chain of events that cannot be predicted. Al Queda fought its war in order to create Islamic states in countries with Muslim populations. America countered by fighting a war in order to create Democratic states in those same countries. Both appear to have failed. What the US and Al Queda have accomplished is to create a spiraling wave of reactions whose true consequences we're only beginning to see now.

The war did not stay in Afghanistan for very long as Osama might have hoped because Afghan tribesmen as ever proved to be diffident and unpredictable allies. Instead the war quickly migrated to the heartland of Islam in a way no one would have predicted on September 11th. When the US went to war in Iraq, it had no idea what it was really getting into. America came to bring Democracy to Iraq but what the optimistic neo-conservatives failed to realize is that democracy is not the natural state of affairs that occurs in a country when a tyranny is removed. Such might have been the thinking of amateur 18th century philosophers like Thomas Jefferson or Paine, but can only appear charmingly idealistic but clueless today.

A tyranny is not a usurpation of democracy, in most countries it's simply the next stage after tribalism when the loose confederations of families, clans and tribes is unified under a single leader. Most third world countries have either tribalism or tyranny. When the US naively came to bring Democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq, all it was really accomplishing was to remove the leadership and restored tribalism by hammering out tribal alliances meant to set these countries on the road to democracy. The path from Tribalism to Democracy is an awkward one at best and Bush's civics lesson idealism about human character and the virtues of democracy did no one any favors.

But what America did accomplish unintentionally is to revert Muslim countries back to their tribal roots. When America overthrew Saddam it opened up a kettle of internal factions, the most powerful of which was the Sunni-Shiite split that Saddam had bottled up. The consequences of that did not of course stay within Iraq's borders. Both Iraq's neighbors, Iran and Saudi Arabia represented the two most widely opposing sides in the Sunni-Shiite split. Luckily they were right next door to back their side in the conflict. Soon Al-Queda terrorists were operating for the Sunni side in Iraq and so were numberless Shiite Iranian backed terrorist organizations.

While terrorism in Iraq had started out as a campaign against American troops, they quickly became part of a proxy war between the Sunni and Shiite sides that broke out in the absence of Saddam. When Al-Queda's leader on the ground decided that the best way to get the Americans out war to start a civil war with the Shiites, he was behaving in a predictably tribalistic fashion prioritizing the local conflict over the greater international one. The firestorm of blood created a massive death toll on both sides that soon became an increasingly senseless vendetta.

Al Queda expanded its operations into Egypt and Jordan and Israel. Gunfights broke out in the streets of Riyadh. Lebanon and Egypt began undergoing turbulent political changes. A maniacal leader came to power in Iran who believed the Shiite messianic age was about to be born and he was the man to make it happen. The US which had long since lost control of the situation in Iraq could do little more than try to provide security while riding out the storm. Meanwhile Shiite Hizbollah began exchanging harsh words with Sunni Al Queda. The Sunni-Shiite conflict was now spreading into hostilities between the proxy terrorist organizations for Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Most of the press was baffled when Saudi Arabia condemned Hizbollah and when other Arab nations followed suit. The reality is that the instability created in the Middle East is approaching a critical point and the tribalism that has been unleashed is creating a regional Sunni-Shiite conflict ostensibly over Iraq. Arab regimes are nothing more than bees in a bottle, open the bottle and the bees fly out. Arab Tyrants maintain a tight rule through brutality and terror and by redirecting the people's anger at an external enemy such as the United States or Israel. With them gone, what emerges are a thousand factions all of whom have grudges and resentments against each other going back for centuries that no Western force can hope to make sense of.

The usual practical Western response to an attack is to bomb whatever country was responsible. The result of course cracks open the bottle and releases the bees. In Afghanistan the US made deals with local tyrants that kept the lid on. In Iraq the US pursued Democracy which is just Arabic for tribalism unleashed. The rumbles of the proxy war in Iraq that resulted are now touching off wars that no longer have anything to do with America and in which America is nothing more than an irritant to the various sides who want nothing more than to kill each other.

Unlike Western powers, Sunni Muslim states understand that if Iran gets nuclear weapons it will use them. They hope the weapons will be used against America or Israel, but they know all too well they may actually be used against them. America and Israel can retaliate against a nuclear attack, the rest of the Arab world can't. Sunni Muslim states meanwhile have their own Shiite minorities they're afraid will come loose in all the chaos. The result is they want a war but don't want to be the ones to fight it. America and Israel look like much better candidates, preferably Israel. So much of the Arab world is shrugging its shoulders when it comes to Israel bombing Lebanon, because they want to see an Israel-Iran war that will take care of their problems.

Meanwhile in the Arab street, the last few years of fighting has induced Terrorism Fatigue. There's nothing like years and years of pointless suicide bombings to convey the pointlessness of terrorism. And there's nothing like seeing Sunni and Shiite suicide bombers blow up in each other's mosques in the name of Islam to communicate to the average Arab the sheer stupidity of the religious underpinnings of terrorism in a way that killing Americans and Jews never could.

Arabs who had once sat in their living rooms cheering the 'martyrs' of Palestine were now beginning to live in the same reality as the Israelis. When Al-Queda suicide bombers struck in a Jordan hotel, Al-Queda's popularity took a sharp tumble. As terrorism comes home and the chickens return to roost on the mosques, terrorism suddenly stops looking like an enjoyable hobby and more like terrorism. For too long Arabs have been protected from the consequences of the terrorism they supported. Al Queda's growing popularity, the War in Iraq and now the War in Lebanon combined with footage from Arabic news channels is bringing the reality home and it's not an attractive one.

Unintentionally America's War in Iraq had taught many in the Arab world that maybe terrorism wasn't such a good thing, not through democratization, but by setting off a chain of events that clarified the consequences. The generation of Patton and McArthur wouldn't have needed such a roundabout costly way of conveying the message, but the generation of Bush and Olmert have awkwardly but surely begun communicating to the Arab world that they may be weak leaders but they're weak leaders in charge of mighty powers and whatever move they make, will in the long run make Arab states regret they ever got into this.

A final defeat of Iran will demonstrate to Arab tyrannies that directing your people's homicidal frustrations at foreigners is not a safe outlet nor is paying terrorist organizations to attack those foreigners a good investment. If you can't fight amongst yourselves in good old tribal fashion, then just go back to fighting with your neighbors.

Israel is being disproportionate, the world is crying.

Tragic I know. You have to wonder what in the world proportionality has to do with anything. Faces should be proportionate. If you're loading cargo, it should be proportionate. But proportionality in war just means an endless stalemate.

If WW2 had been fought with proportionality we'd have just only returned fire when the Germans and Japanese did and refused to bomb their cities, until they bombed ours. We could still be fighting WW2 with a thousand times the number dead. And wouldn't that just have been so wonderfully proportional.

The people advocating 'proportion' are really advocating tit for tat kids on a playground morality which is an idea as backwards as them. if someone attacks you, what's the moral basis for demanding a proportionate response.

If someone attacks you, you do what it takes to make sure he doesn't attack you again. Demanding proportionally presumes that the attacker and the victim are equally guilty and should just exchange equal blows. It's a completely senseless position. The point of fighting a war isn't to even the score, as the media seems to think every time it talks about Israel looking for revenge or striking back, it's simply to end the war.

Many Anti-War liberals seem to believe that people fight wars because they like them and want to drag them out forever, instead it's actually their delaying tactics that drag out wars forever and inflict far more casualties. Winning a war and ending it requires the disproportionate use of force. The entire concept of a war is to win it by employing disproportionate force against the enemy, that is more force than the enemy has been employing against you.

Anyway if Israel was being proportionate, it would kidnap and behead some Arabs. Is that what the advocates of proportionality really want?

2006 - Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah promises a new surprise weapon that will provide victory. It proves to be a UAV which lightly damages an Israeli ship.

1944 - Hitler boasts in radio speeches of the new weapons with which Germany will win the war. The new weapons prove to be V1's and V2's which inflict damage on England but make no significant difference in the war.

They are not misguided. They are not confused. They are not oppressed. They're evil. This is what this war is about. It is purely and simply a war against true evil. This is Samir Kuntar. One of the terrorists whose release Hizbullah is demanding in exchange for their Israeli hostages. This is the face of evil.



"Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah demanded at a news conference held yesterday at the Hezbollah's headquarters in Beirut that Israel release three Lebanese prisoners it is holding - Samir Kuntar, Yehiya Saqaf and Nasim Nasser and promised that he would demand the release of additional Arab prisoners in the course of negotiations."

"Samir Kuntar is “a beacon of light” for having slaughtered an Israeli father and his two young daughters in a terrorist attack in 1979, according to the PA-controlled daily newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida. On Thursday the PA daily featured an article labeling Kuntar an “authentic role model” for all Palestinian Arabs."

...and here is what Samir Kuntar or Quntar, hero of Hezbollah and the Palestinian people did in the words of one of his victims.

"They held Danny and Einat while they searched for me and Yael, knowing there were more people in the apartment. I will never forget the joy and the hatred in their voices as they swaggered about hunting for us, firing their guns and throwing grenades. [Emphasis mine-SW] I knew that if Yael cried out, the terrorists would toss a grenade into the crawl space and we would be killed. So I kept my hand over her mouth, hoping she could breathe. As I lay there, I remembered my mother telling me how she had hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust. "This is just like what happened to my mother," I thought.

As police began to arrive, the terrorists took Danny and Einat down to the beach. There, according to eyewitnesses, one of them shot Danny in front of Einat so that his death would be the last sight she would ever see. Then he smashed my little girl's skull in against a rock with his rifle butt. That terrorist was Samir Kuntar.

By the time we were rescued from the crawl space, hours later, Yael, too, was dead. In trying to save all our lives, I had smothered her."

More at the Shrinkwrapped blog

You that Mitchel's prayer have heard,
'Send war in our time, O Lord!'
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind

Under Ben Bulben - Yeats

On September 11th 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark New Jersey to San Francisco took off with 37 passengers on board. Four of those passengers were not Americans and were not passengers. They were murderers awaiting their moment.

When their moment came they took out their knives and claiming to have a bomb on board, They stabbed Mark Rothenberg and then murdered flight attendant, Debra Welsh.

Then came the passenger's moment. Calling their loved ones they learned what had happened. They learned of the two planes that had crashed into the World Trade Center. They knew what was about to happen and they took action.

Using improvised weapons and boiling water, they charged the armed terrorists who retreated into the cockpit and took down the plane. Everyone on board was killed and the airplane was never used on its intended target, the White House.

The passengers were nominated for Congressional Gold Medals but never received them. The memorial that is to be dedicated to them where the plane fell and they died along with the enemies of this country has indeed been designed as a memorial but not for them.

Its design as seen from the air is an Islamic crescent and star. As in all mosques, the center of that crescent points directly to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, the home of three of the four terrorists who hijacked that flight and murdered its passengers. It is essentially a plan to build the world's largest mosque on the site of a memorial to one of Islam's worst atrocities of the 20th century.

Yet the design continues on unchanged. The Flight 93 Memorial Project has now opened up comments asking for the public's views on the project. The proposed project is the equivalent of building a cross as a Holocaust memorial, a German flag for the Allied dead or erecting a statue of the murderer at the graves of his victims.

The Flight 93 passengers represented self-sacrifice, a self-sacrifice that deserves to be properly remembered and commemorated. It represented in its purest form a gift, a gift of their lives so that others might live. A gift of life in defiance of the death cult that is Islam, that sends men to kill and slaughter and revels in the blood of the innocent.

Given the chance to choose between commemorating a gift of life and a cult of death, the current memorial design is not merely an obscenity and an abomination, it represents choosing the cult of death in name of political correctness, over that gift of life. Those whose liberal religion leads them to pity the murderer and disdain his victims, have long been worshipers of a cult of death. Liberal ideas of national defense and law enforcement have represented nothing so much as suicide pacts that untie the hands of criminals and tie the hands of the military and law enforcement to fight them.

This latest stamp of Moloch planted in the Pennsylvania earth represents the intersection where Islam's homicidal values meet those of liberal political correctness joining together in a covenant of death that overturns morality and celebrates evil. If the footprint of the largest mosque in America can be built on such hallowed ground, then truly the largest house of worship of evil will have been built over the spot where one of the greatest American sacrifices of the 20th century took place, pointing along to the great home of that cult of death in Mecca itself, in Saudi Arabia from which it first came.

(Learn more about this issue here and leave your comments for the memorial planning project on their proposed design here)

The Forward, which has never found an Anti-Israeli position it didn't embrace and whose politics are indistinguishable from those of Peace Now, has an editorial titled 'Thunder in Gaza' that sums up the feeble arguments of the media and the remaining adherents of Oslo, who continue to cry Peace, Peace, even as a Hamas government with the backing of a soon to be nuclear armed Iran, conducts an open war against Israel.

"It's hard not to notice the huge imbalance between Israel's large-scale actions in Gaza in the past two weeks — bombing bridges, government offices and a university...rounding up elected officials — and the ostensible goal of the operation, rescuing a single hostage."

Gush, that just sounds so awfull doesn't it. Bombing government offices and a university. Rounding up elected officials. Of course the buildings bombed were empty. The government offices belonged to terrorist organizations and the elected officials were heads of terrorist organizations. The US bombed quite a number of government offices and rounded up elected officials too in Baghdad. But rhetoric can paint things different colors, can't it.

The real argument here though is proportionality, one of the more absurd positions of the left. I suppose if Israel was to make a proportional response, it would launch a quick assault, grab a Palestinian and cut his throat, grab another Palestinian and threaten to kill him if Shalit isn't returned. That would be both perfectly proportional and symmetrical, yet that's not what the Forward would want certainly.

More to the point it would also be futile. The real imbalance between the two sides is a moral one. Israel's imbalanced response is an indictator of morality, of caring enough about a soldier to direct a large force to rescue him. The Palestinian imbalance comes about because Palestinians don't care about the lives of their own people. Palestinians would never commit thousands of men to a rescue attempt, only to a murder attempt.

The failure of left wingers like the Forward editors to recognize this imbalance and to condemn its physical manifestation, the rescue effort by Israel, is another demonstration of the moral blindness of the left. It is equivalent to praising the morality of people who will kidnap and murder while condemning the morality of those who would leverage great effort to save lives.



"The actions have won Israel growing condemnation and cast the Palestinians, the initial aggressors in the affair, into the role of victims. The result is a slow but steady erosion in international sympathy for Israel, a critical asset in a protracted diplomatic standoff."

Once again the left rolls out the old chesnut, warning that sympathy for Israel is eroding. Of course for something to erode it would have to exist in the first place. The reality is that there are people who have sympathy for Israel and there are those who don't and never will and the ranks of the latter include the media and most diplomats. The Palestinians will always fall into the role of victims, no matter what Israel does, because the entrenched opposition to Israel is not a factor of Israel's policies but a fundamental belief in the righteousness of terrorists and the evils of their victims that cannot be shaken.



"Still, few can view without wincing the sight of tanks and jets thundering into one of the world's poorest districts, knocking out the main power plant and key bridges, cutting off movement and turning thousands of civilians into virtual hostages."

By 'Virtual Hostages' of course the Forward means something other than real hostages like Gilad Shalit who has a gun pointed at him and is in the hands of terrorists who want to kill him. By 'Virtual Hostages' the Forward means being slightly inconvenienced when after electing a terrorist government bent on war with Israel and kidnapping and murdering Israelis, the Israeli Army comes looking for its missing soldier, carefully avoids bombing anything with people inside and sends truckloads of food to you and provides you with electricity to boot. Free of charge. 'Virtual Hostage' sounds like a pretty damned good deal.

And by 'few' the Forward editors of course mean themselves and other good liberals whose reaction to invasions is determined purely by the economic status of the people there. Presumabely if Israel invaded Switzerland or Brunei, the good editors wouldn't wince at seeing the capitalists get theirs? Or maybe if the Israelis had 'thundered' in hillbilly trucks or cardboard tanks, it would be more acceptable.

Never mind that the Palestinans are the Number 1 UN recepients of aid, that billions is dumped on them annually and that whatever poverty there is, is purely a function of a choice they made; to reject peace and co-existance in favor of terrorism and an Islamic cult of death. If a serial killer loses his job and has to go live in a run-down tenement, isn't that his choice. In the same way the Palestinians choose to destroy everything that is given to them, including the Israeli greenhouses the World Bank spent millions to buy for them. They've chosen to focus all their energies on their one goal of killing Jews. If they redirected all that energy into making a life for themselves, they wouldn't need all that UN aid in the first place.



"If that is what Israel does as a first step in this hostage standoff, what is its plan for the next one? Does anyone in Jerusalem think that such activities will reduce the inclination of the Palestinian population to countenance attacks on Israel?."

Actually yes it will. There are two ways to end hostilities, diplomacy and force. While the Forward continues to insist on a diplomatic solution, Israel has tried diplomacy and sizeable concessions for over a decade. This is the result, terrorism repeated over and over again. A spiraling body count and the mainstreaming of terrorists and terrorism.

The Palestinians elected a Hamas government and poll showing that they support the kidnappings and murders of Israelis. Will rolling over for them yet again somehow reduce their inclination to support future attacks?

The left's premise on peace with the Palestinians has always been fundamentally wrong. The conflict with the Arab world doesn't exist because Israel victimized the Arabs but because religiously and culturally the Arabs cannot countenance the existance of Israel and must do everything possible to wipe it out, at great cost to themselves.

The Palestinians aren't supporting attacks because they feel mistreated by Israel policies. They feel mistreated by Israel's very existance. Tolerating terrorism does not encourage reconcilliation, it just makes Israel a softer target. The failure to understand this lies at the heart of the left's failure.



"In the meantime, the very idea of a leadership taking office and using the tools Israel has established for the purpose of destroying Israel is ludicrous."

It's not 'ludricious', it's inevitable. While the left supported Oslo and negotiations, that is precisely what Arafat was doing. That's precisely what Hamas is doing. While the liberals shrieked that the only solution is a diplomatic solution and that we have to talk to the terrorists and help them set up a government, that is exactly what they did. And have been doing.

Only truly blind, deaf and dumb liberal activists can try to pretend it's ludricious when it's the policy of the last decade that they've supported and continue to support even in this very same editorial to the bitter end. Watch.



"Israel, for its part, must not let its short-term operational goals blind it to its long-term interests. Israelis must separate from Palestinians if the Jewish state is to survive. The events of the past week are a reminder that fencing off Israel from Palestine will not succeed unless there is a viable, reasonably governed Palestine on the other side of the fence. Israel will not do itself any favors if its current operations leave its neighbor even less governable, and less inclined to coexistence, than it was before."

How would that even be possible, you have to wonder? Less inclined to co-existance? What next, will the Palestinians elect Satan or a party of cannibals? How much less inclined can they be after electing a party whose platform is the destruction of Israel?

The defenders of Oslo have truly come down to the old joke about the Jew facing the firing squad and warning his friend to accept the blindfold and not make trouble. How much more can we anger them precisely and how will making them less governable be a bad thing, when their government of choice's agenda is to kill us.

The Forward's clueless hectoring is what's 'ludricious.' What further pretense is that co-existance is possible with the so-called Palestinian state. What delusion of fantasy is it based on now after a decade of terrorism.

Their policies have become so absurd that in one breath the editors call for fencing off Israel to survive and in the other to work for a friendly Palestine. If we had the latter we wouldn't need the former. The Forward then warns that fencing isn't enough without the friendly Palestine. Out of this schizophrenia the piece pretends to have a coherent policy.

The reality is the Forward supports fencing off Israel only because it means withdrawal from the West Bank. The reality is that its editors have learned nothing from a decade of terrorism and continue dripping their poison into their reader's ears counselling still more appeasement, distortion truth and sincerely trotting out the most absurd and insane premises, long shopworn by now, hoping no one will notice.

But it's past time people did.

There'll always be an England,
And England shall be free
If England means as much to you
As England means to me

There'll Always Be An England, Parker and Charles




Public opinion in Britain is negative towards Americans and mostly favourable towards Muslims, but the feeling is not requited by British Muslims, who are among the most embittered in the western world, according to a global poll published yesterday. The Pew Research study poll found that 63% of all Britons had a favourable opinion of Muslims. Attitudes in Britain were more positive than in the US, Germany and Spain (where the popularity of Muslims has plummeted to 29%), and about the same as in France.

By contrast, the poll found that British Muslims represented a “notable exception” in Europe, with far more negative views of westerners than Islamic minorities elsewhere on the continent. A significant majority viewed western populations as selfish, arrogant, greedy and immoral. Across the board, Muslim attitudes in Britain more resembled public opinion in Islamic countries in the Middle East and Asia than elsewhere in Europe.

In an England with a declining birth rate, Muslims form the largest rising population. British Mosques already host more worshippers than the Church of England. There are nearly a million Muslims in London alone. In Dewbury they make up a third of the population. In Birmingham 15 percent. 12 percent in Westminster. 11 percent in Oldham and Leicester. 10 percent in Enfield. 9 percent in Manchester. 8.5 percent in Kensington and Chelsea. 8.1 percent in Islington. The list goes on and on and those figures are the death knell of England.

These figures dating back to 2001 represent only the tip of a very large iceberg. A census will not cover large portions of an immigrant population. Meanwhile the birth rate in England has fallen to an all-time low of 11 per 1000. The average rate of children per woman is 1.64. Below replacement rate. Meanwhile Mohammed has been the most popular name for a boy in England for the last four years and Muslims command the highest birth rates and immigration rates.

Mathematics alone has marked England along with the rest of Europe for oblivion. But it is ultimately the English who are doing the marching. But the real question is why?

Part of the answer can be seen in British reactions to terrorist attacks in Israel. In a word, gloating. To a smaller degree that was also the real response in England and Europe to 9/11. Behind the public commemorations and the official statements, much of the backstreet chatter could also be summed up in a word, Those bastards got what they deserved.

Britain, like most of Europe, isn't sinking because it has embraced a multi-ethnic society. It's sinking because it's stuck with a growing Muslim population out of a need for cheap labor and it diverts the anger it feels over the growing crime rate, the disenfranchisement of its own citizens as Pro-Muslim political correctness takes hold by venting their anger and blame on safe targets such as America and the Jews.

Israel represents a bonding nexus between Brits and Muslims who can share their common hatred of the country of the Jews and the Jews themselves. While the British delude themselves into believing that the Muslims are their allies in this, the reality is that Muslims regard them as no better than the Jews. This alliance of bigotries is premised on nothing because there is no common goal really. Both the British and the British Muslims would like Israel erased from the face of the earth and both have taken cracks at trying to do it, but British Muslims unlike Pakistani Muslims or Palestinian Muslims live in the UK. Their primary targets will never be Israel but England itself, the country they live in. They may donate to Hamas but they listen to the Imams who tell them that England must be conquered for Allah.

While England practices the same delusional policies of its colonial era, appeasing Muslims by bashing Israel, they fail to realize they are no longer dealing with an overseas colonial population, but a domestic population that wishes to remake the country they live in, in their own image. From a nation of Churches to a nation of Mosques, from hairdos to Hijabs and from eloping to honor-killing. The usual European answer to this has been yet more appeasement in the hope that if Muslims feel more at home, they will drop such bad habits and become fully nationalized.

Yet it is no coincidence that the highest rates of Muslim resentment also take place in the country with the highest rate of denial about Muslim intentions. Muslim resentment is freest when directed at vulnerable targets. England's willfull ignorance is a green light for Imams to preach Jihad in Manchester and London. It is a sign of weakness. That is why Islamic extremism is on the rise in France and England, and not nearly so much on the rise in Germany and Spain. Contrary to the liberal formulation that Islamic extremism is due to intolerance of Islam, it is actually excessive tolerance of Islam that births extremism. Just as permissiveness opens the door to bad behavior, while disapproval closes it; so too approval of Islam increases Islamic misbehavior. And all across England and France, that misbehavior is hitting frightening new rates.

Will there be an England? It now seems increasingly unlikely if only because England no longer means very much to the English themselves anymore.

Much as had been the case in Communist times, Russian radio stations are now barred from rebroadcasting news reports from Voice of America and Radio Liberty. Russian TV stations have been brought under Putin's control. Newspapers and radio stations are quickly following suit.

Originally Voice of America and Radio Liberty served as independent voices reporting the news in opposition to the government propaganda of the Communist regime. They've come to serve that function again under Putin's revival of Russian tyranny and have accordingly been banned.

"Of the 30 affiliate stations Radio Liberty had in Russia in 2005, it now has only four, according to Trimble. Of the 42 stations that rebroadcast material from Voice of America in 2005, only five are still working with the organization"

And now there will be none... meanwhile Putin has been officially authorized to employ Russian military forces abroad...

The character of a nation is born out of strife and struggle. It can be seen more clearly in its darker hours than its times of prosperity. As adversity brings out the true nature of a man through seeing how he copes with his trials, so too adversity brings out the nature of a nation as the men who compose it rise preserve their homeland.

Wars and revolutions define the character of a nation and for the United States of America the War of Independence was both a war and a revolution. The character of the United States of America is marked heavily by it as the scars of the conflict, cannon, shot and bayonet, covered its countryside and the bodies of those men who had fought in it.

It was a nation born against impossible odds. Farmers gathered in bands to fight the trained soldiers of the greatest world power of its age and stood their ground. The British redcoats had been famous for holding the line no matter what but at Bunker Hill it was the British lines that broke and the American ones that stood. The British had been famous for their naval fleet yet it was the American naval hero John Paul Jones who in a battered merchant ship responded to the British Captain's offer of surrender with, "Sir, I have not yet even begun to fight," and proceeded to win the day.

The British had been renowned for their colonies yet America, their largest possession, was the first colony they could not hold and in losing America, they also lost their empire. The end of the British Empire began not in Asia or Africa as modern liberal revisionist accounts would have it but at Yorktown where General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington as the British military band played a children's song; World Turned Upside down. And indeed the world had been turned upside down. The richest share of the American continent would go not to the empire with the greatest guns but to the bands of ragged men; the farmers, tinkers and merchants the Empire despised who would build there a nation the like of which the world had never seen.

The Jewish people too are marked by their trials and adversities. Our history is one of struggle against impossible odds. We exist by faith, not by rationality or right. We exist though we should not exist at all. Who had ever heard of a nation taken out of slavery from the world's greatest power? Who had ever heard of a nation conquered and broken by the world's greatest empires of the day yet rising again and again? The feet of the great kingdoms of history have marched across our soil and yet here we are ruling over our land with the flag that bears the banner of our king overhead. David melech yisrael chai ve'kayam. One only needs to look up at the blue and white Israeli flag to see that. Greece and Rome, never mind Babylon and Persia and Assyria, are museum relics and yet here we are building factories, printing up newspapers, honking in traffic and praying to the G-d in heaven who gave us all this under the banner of a king whose rule predated them all and post-dates them as well.

We found our kingdoms on faith not on right. By right we should not exist. The historian Gibbon called us a fossil of history. Islam and half of Europe clamors that we should be gone and have no right to be here. For a thousand years and more the Catholic church insisted that we were remnants of a people whose only use was to serve as tax farmers and remind good Catholics of the punishment for rejecting Jesus. Only the hand of a watchful God who neither sleeps nor slumbers kept us from the mortal hands of these enemies and more.

Faith too is what founded America. Faith in a god unrecognizable to the Anglican church, itself an illegitimate offspring of the Catholic church, acknowledged only much later by its natural parent. Faith is what compelled men who were by trade farmers or silversmiths or whiskey importers to take up arms and storm the positions of an enemy in red whose armies crisscrossed the world like whips of fire.

It is no surprise that the Jews were always here then even before there was an America. When good King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who founded their kingdom of a unified Spain on Jewish wealth and expertise began burning those same Jews at the stake, Columbus with charts provided by Jewish mappers and Jewish crew on board sailed west to find a new land. When the equally zealously Catholic Portuguese overran the Dutch in Brazil, the Jews of that land sailed North landing in New York. They fought determinedly for their rights and Asher Levy became the first Jew to serve in the militia of New York. It was the 1660's. In Europe the Jew was an unwanted slave. In the Arab lands a beaten servant. In New York Asher Levy stood at the fort with a musket in his hand. When Jewish immigrant children would come to the United States over three centuries later they would be educated in a school named after Asher Levy who had paved the way for them here.

The revolution came and Jews fought in it. There were only a few thousand of them on American soil but still they fought in it and died in it. When the revolution ran out of money another Jew named Chaim Solomon who had come with the Polish General Casmir Pulaski from the Polish Winters to brave the equally harsh American ones, funded it. The British took him and he rotted in a cell in the same New York Asher Levy had guarded musket in hand until the war was over. Then George Washington raised his sword for Evacuation Day as British troops and their Tory compatriots departed New York like rats from a sinking ship. Solomon's loan to America was never repaid to him or to his children but a measure of repayment was found in the Jews who made this their home and safe harbor when they had none other.

We as Jews represent the world's oldest nation and the world's oldest kingdom. America represents the greatest young nation on earth. Both our existences are the products of faith. The existence of both is revolutionary. Out of nothingness came forth nations and out of a song and a dream a land was settled. As Chanukah represents not the physical victory over the Syrian-Greeks but the spiritual victory over them in the lighting of the Menorah and the spread of the light of G-d across his land; so too the fourth of July represents not the national victory of American forces against British troops in the revolutionary war but the date on which the first representative body of the nation still aborning adopted the Declaration of Independence; the moral framework of a nation whose light of freedom would shine across the seas and oceans and beyond.

When the US Supreme Court recently ruled on the legality of military tribunals for captured terrorists, it was another syllable in a long conversation on how to describe terrorists. As soldiers, pirates, spies or criminals. The left has continually tried to shoehorn them into the category of criminals.

Al Queda terrorists should be tried by the justice system like all criminals, the left has argued, rather than fighting a War on Terror we should be using legal means to extradite and prosecute them, they've argued.

The position of the left derives from the fact that criminals enjoy a good deal of legal protections. But there's a reason for that. Criminals are members of our society whose rights are protected as are the rights of all the members of our society. Terrorists however come from outside our society, infiltrating in the service of foreign governments and agencies with the intent of attacking us and causing us grave harm. As such they fall far more closely into the category of spies like the German saboteurs who snuck ashore during WW2 off a U-Boat and were promptly tried to a military tribunal and shot.

The left wing response to Palestinians terrorists has been ever more confused. At times they argue that Palestinian terrorists are guerrillas. Fine, then hostile guerrillas are legitimate targets. But wait, says the left, they should be arrested and tried in the legal system. Once they're arrested and jailed the left claims that they're freedom fighters and should be released.

Once again what the left is really doing is assigning terrorists the protections of every category and the responsibility of none of the categories. By turns the left views Palestinian terrorists as criminals, as soldiers, as activists, as freedom fighters, as politicians, as guerrillas; but never holds them to the flip side of any category. They cannot be shot like guerrillas or jailed like criminals, they are the elected leaders representing the will of the Palestinian people until Israel strikes back and then suddenly the argument goes, the Palestinian people can't suffer for the actions of a few terrorists.

With the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit, the left has been tying itself in knots trying to oppose Israel's rescue operation. By turns we are told that Hamas is working to resolve the crisis, even though the whole reason for the crisis is that Hamas kidnapped and won't release an Israeli soldier. The world insists that Israel pursue a diplomatic solution, but why? If the Palestinian government decides to attack Israel, Israel has the right to strike back. The diplomatic solution is simple, release the soldier. But by diplomatic solution instead, the world means reaching some sort of deal that frees convicted Palestinian terrorists thus justifying the Palestinian attack in the first place and insuring there will be many more.

The media wails that Israel is imposing collective punishment on the Palestinian people, yet those Palestinian people elected Hamas. Collectively they are responsible for its actions. So far Hamas isn't cleaning up the corrupt government so much as exchanging fire with Fatah and cowering when Israeli tanks drive by all the whole holding a gun to a young man's head and demanding that Israel give them what they want.

The left wants a morality that always puts the terrorists on the right side and holds them accountable for nothing, but that is not a morality Israel or America can afford to subscribe to. If the left wants to call Gilad Shalit a POW to legitimize Hamas' actions, then Hamas is therefore an enemy army and the West Bank and Gaza the territory of an enemy state, which Israel has every right to invade to recover its man. If Hamas is anything less than an army and a state, then they are nothing more than criminals whose territory Israel can enter at will whenever it chooses anyway.

The left has waded up to its shoulders in rhetoric but failed to clarify categories. If it wants to defend Hamas, it must state openly and clearly the status of Hamas and its freedoms and responsibilities. If it does not, then it has nothing to say worth listening to except propaganda and rhetoric.