A society always needs enemies. Or rather a political cause does. A society that pursues peace with a former enemy, usually does so at the cost of finding new enemies, usually enemies at home.

The left which believes itself above this kind of politics, in fact vigorously practices it. When the progressive camp preached against Red-Baiting, it was not because they sought a different kind of politics than one premised on demonizing your opponents and conducting smear campaigns against them-- but because they felt there were worthier enemies at home to demonize and conduct smear campaigns against.

With the Cold War over and the Democrats in power, the Clinton Administration did its best to convince us that the real threat to America came from the Militia Movement-- and possibly right wing talk radio.

In Israel this was paralleled by the "Peace Process" in which Israel set up a Palestinian terrorist entity within its borders and declared that a New Middle East was here-- and the Labor Party promptly turned on its old enemies, the Likud and the right and declared that they were the real threat to the nation.

After the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, which occurred under extremely dubious circumstances, the ruling Labor Party set to work blaming every conservative in Israel for the murder, Likud Party offices were trashed and people were called in on suspicion of making jokes about Rabin.

This pattern resumed again under Sharon, who once having decided that he wanted to create a Palestinian state and forge a center coalition, conducted a vicious and ruthless campaign against the Settlers-- created a new enemy to fight in place of the one he had given up trying to defeat. The tactics involved the physical expulsion of thousands and the destruction of their homes followed by an organized and active effort to maintain them in a dispossessed state by destroying their economic prospects, expelling them from temporary locations by pressuring more than one Kibbutz to withdraw its offer and even leveraging a tax on donations of used clothing from abroad.

The Israeli left which styles itself as enlightened peace activists had worked hard and continue to work hard to make war on a section of Israeli society with hateful rhetoric, with provocations and with prisons and beatings. While Arab terrorists are freed to kill again, teenage girls have been imprisoned simply for participating in opposition rallies. Society needs an enemy.

In the United States, the most vocal voices of the Anti-War movement call for "Peace" but like their Israeli counterparts, they do not mean a universal peace, but rather peace with the terrorists and war against their domestic political enemies. The Republican right, they argue, are a bigger threat than Al-Queda. The slogan could be summed up as "Hands Off Osama and Impeach Cheney."

If the wars of conservatives against foreign enemies also provide opportunities for politically hammering progressives, progressives prefer to dispose of the wars and let the enemy win and focus their attention purely on their domestic enemies. Given a choice between a Republican victory and a Communist or Al-Queda victory-- Liberal Democrats have repeatedly demonstrated a preference for the latter. A society needs enemies and if conservatives find them abroad in defending their country against outside threats, progressives see any ideology but their own as the gravest threat.

In Israel that has led to a country tearing itself apart, fighting itself while the enemy only gains in strength. In America that has led to a political opposition that does everything possible to help the enemy win, so long as it wins them the election.

General Douglas MacArthur had fought in the first and second world wars and then in Korea. He had served as General of the Army. The transition from WW1 and WW2 to Korea marked a transition to a different kind of war, from the massive collision between the vast armies of industrial nations to a proxy war fought between the armies of an industrialized nation and guerrilla and insurgent forces supplied and trained by its enemies.

Korea was the first test of such an engagement that would shape the nature of the wars America fought throughout the twentieth century. After much bloodshed and loss of life, the allied nations managed to keep South Korea free, in a prolonged and bloody campaign. The Vietnam War would follow the Korean War, a war in many ways not too dissimilar but one fought by a generation that had seen its culture and its elites heavily infiltrated by the ideology of the Communist enemy.

The War in Iraq we are fighting today is a repetition of the same fundamental problem, a struggle to maintain order and a functioning nation against an insurgency backed, armed and funded by the enemy outside its borders. As China backed North Korea during the Korean War, Syria and Iran have backed the Sunni and Shiite terrorists operating in Iraq.

General MacArthur who had faced the problem at its very beginning in Korea and whose bold strategy at the beginning of the war had brought an early victory, understood what needed to be done to win the war. The Chinese bases inside Manchuria had to be destroyed. Without that the UN forces were faced with cutting off a dragon's head that repeatedly regenerated itself. But such a tactic was not politically correct and so it was denied by Truman, eventually leading to MacArthur's dismissal. The Korean War became a holding action that was only sustained at the cost of much blood.

The continuing War in Iraq, is not a war. The war was fought and won in a short period of time. It is a campaign where US troops have been set to try and maintain order in a country tearing itself apart, in part due to existing tensions, but in great part due to outside interference. The ability of Sunni terrorists to use Syria as a gateway for arms and terrorists gave birth to the insurgency in the first place. Iran's training and arming of Shiite militias and general efforts to touch off a civil war have brought the situation to its current disastrous stage. Iranian forces have openly operated in Iraq. Iranian personnel have been captured in raids. The actions of both Syria and Iran have allowed them to take thousands of American lives while barely lifting a finger themselves.

A proxy war can only be won by either destroying a country or by engaging and defeating the forces using the insurgents as proxies. Everything else at best leads to a stalemate or to defeat. This is the third time the United States has had to learn this lesson and it has yet to be learned primarily because politicians choose to ignore the hard realities of war and ignore the soldiers who speak them.

This week my op-ed piece, "Librescu Repudiated The Cult Of The Victim" appears in the Jewish Press.

Additionally I've been nominated for the Jewish and Israeli Blog awards in several categories. Readers who like can vote for me here for Best Current Events Blog and Best Right Wing Blog here Thanks to all who nominated for me and voted for me, particularly Lemon Lime Moon and Linda of Something and Half of Something. Mr. Bagel meanwhile has a cartoon rendering of the JIB's.

For all his belligerence and incompetence, Boris Yeltsin was the rarest of creatures in the phylum of the Russian ruler, a democrat and an idealist. He fell, as democrats and idealists tend to fall in the gullet of the Russian state. But he defied the monster, the beast of the totalitarian Soviet bureaucracy of death and stabbed it in its dying throes and stood upon its bleeding corpse with sword raised high and celebrated thinking the monster dead.

The monster of course does not die. It coiled its ugly self around the Empire of the Czars as over the Empire of the Premiers. It returns now in the form of a grim skeleton, a KGB chief with dead eyes who rules the land again and stretches out his hands across Europe and the oceans beyond. Dragons are hard to slay and if Boris Yeltsin was a poor dragonslayer, he did not lack for courage and in a land filled with dragons and too few men to slay them, he raised his sword and stood his ground for that golden shining moment in the sun.

For all the corruption of the democracy's dream which flared so briefly to life in Moscow, almost as briefly as it had in Baghdad, for a moment it seemed as if the darkness could be lifted from a very dark land. If Yeltsin's passing is to be accompanied by the voice that cries out, "The hour has come but not the man," then at least it is a passing of a man who might have broken the chains of slavery that bound the Russian people so far back through time. Who might have been the man.

Americans saw Yeltsin as a cartoonish figure. In a land rarely ruled by Russians, Boris Yeltsin had been a true Russian leader. Drinking to abandon, fighting blindly but courageously and finally failing disastrously, he epitomized the best and worst of the Russian spirit and the Russian heroes of myth and legend. He goes now to whatever great big Vodka barrel there is in the sky, a man who despite his failures, stood his ground under the shadow of Communism, who protected the people under him with determination and courage and whose all too human failures, render him that much more human.

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Well how shocking is it that LePen lost the election. After all with even his daughter abandoning him and moderate right voters more likely to go for Sarkozy or the Christian Democrats, LePen's only demographic seemed to be former Nazi war criminals. LePen had even abandoned criticism of Muslim immigrants, for the usual kind of tedious Anti-Americanism every other candidate could offer, including Jose Bove, who also took a beating in the election.

The reason LePen had been a threat in the first place, was that France had faced a choice between two candidates who were not terribly dissimilar. By contrast Royal and Sarkozy both represent the right and left spectrum of French politics and can fulfill voter's needs without the need to drag out radicals like Bove or LePen.

For two thousand years, the two world religions that had taken their inspiration from the religion of the Jews did their best to grind the very people into whose well of beliefs they had dipped their buckets-- to dust. For a thousand years the voices of the world that weren't advocating ghettos and Pharaoh's whip and the Inquisition's stake, whispered eagerly that the only possible way for the Jews was assimilation. To mingle with the rest of the world and vanish forever.

Arnold Toynbee proclaimed that the Jewish people were the fossils of history. And then the fossils rose again. The cemeteries disgorged their dead. A nation composed of farmers and Holocaust survivors stood off the armies of the Jordanian Legion and that of five Arab nations, each of which was many times larger than Israel. And at the end a blue and white flag waved over a new land.

Within a decade that land was bursting with productivity and industry. With settled cities and great works. With toil and labor and art and song. A land that had once been a pile of stones and dust. A relic of history had become new again. And at the wall of the temple, priests who were the descendants of Aaron raised their hands once more to bless the people. "May the Lord bless you and keep you." And he had.

None of this stilled the fury. The world does not like miracles. Pharaoh did not respond to G-d's wonders by bowing out. He only increased his fury and viciousness. The Pharaohs of the world always do. For tyrants, whether they are tyrants who hold thrones or tyrants who hold academic chairs and whose scepter is the rule of the unyielding ideology of historical necessity, do not bow to miracles. Miracles only demonstrate to them that there is more in heaven and earth than had been dreamed of in their philosophies.

Pharaohs who see slaves becoming free, a nation reborn and the dead rising from the graves have one simple response, to fill the cemeteries with the dead again.

Thus the world whose nations, singly and collectively, had for thousands of years protested at the presence of Jews within their nations, which had cried unendingly, "What Shall We Do With This Accursed People", which had screamed and even now scream that the Jews had seized their industries, their jobs, their governments and were constantly plotting against them-- suddenly discovered that the one thing worse than the exiled Jews was the unexiled Jew. In the blink of an eye a hundred nations discovered that the best solution for the Jews was to live among them.

"Why would you possibly want to leave the socialist homeland?" the Soviet commissars implored, after half a century of massacres approaching genocide and perpetual discrimination and bigotry.

"Why do you need a state?" queried a baffled Europe, which had only shoved millions of Jews into the cemeteries only a few decades ago. "Come back. We're friendly now. We'll even rebuild some of your synagogues."

And then the barrage began. By the artful crafty propaganda of the Pharaohs in Moscow, London and Cairo, the forsaken people which had finally rebuilt its homeland were the colonialists and the hate-filled sons of an Empire that had blotted out and continued to blot out freedom and human dignity across the Middle East were its oppressed victims.

It was truly no wonder. Under the Czars, a hundred million Russians had wailed that the few million Jews dwelling in a handful of ghettoized villages were oppressing them. The German people had wailed that even less Jews were oppressing them. And now it was the turn of a hundred million Arabs to wail. The existence of a tiny state in an otherwise Arab and Muslim Middle-East was a blow to their honor they could not endure. They might live among dirt and as the dirt, they might murder their own daughters for stealing a kiss with the neighbor boy and they might make their pilgrimages to London and Paris as eagerly as to Mecca, buying up everything in the stores to haul home to their villas all the while laboring under this demonstration of the superiority of the infidel's commerce and culture; but to tolerate a Jewish State was too much.

And the world, as it always has, joined happily in their cry. And when these Pharaohs gathered their armies and harnessed their steel chariots and watered them with the oil that flowed from their wells, the world smiled its awful secret smile as it saw them go on their way to drive the Jews into the sea again, as if four thousand years had passed but like a day. Theirs was the smile of those who enjoy seeing the weak crushed by the strong. Who find secret pleasure in this reassertion of the natural order. An order devoid of miracles.

And then another miracle happened. And another.

And the Pharaohs fumed in their villas, there was a great gnashing of teeth in the halls of Moscow and all right-thinking Europeans wept.

But they did not weep for long. When a river turns to blood, Pharaohs know they can wait it out. When fire and ice fall from the sky, they may tremble but they will not bow. For the secret of the Pharaoh is that the Pharaoh knows that G-d may be strong but man is weak. And it is over men that Pharaohs rule.

And so the Pharaohs which had divided the borders of the Middle East and proclaimed that this group of Arabs was to be Syrians and this group of Arabs, Egyptians and that Jordan would be ruled by a Saudi King who was to now be a Jordanian King, said that if G-d can bring forth a nation out of nothing, so can they. And as the Egyptian magicians had cast their staffs into snakes, the political magicians behind the Iron Curtain and across Europe and the Middle East cast forth their staffs and behold there was a Palestinian people.

And so the Pharaohs said to G-d, "You have created a nation and we have created a nation and we shall see which nation prevails."

Where G-d had created a Jewish nation to serve him and to bring light to the world, the Palestinian nation existed for no purpose than to strangle the Jewish nation. It had no identity except the name the Roman conquerors had given to Israel when they sought to eradicate the last traces of the Jewish people from their land. And fittingly, this became the name of a people whose sole striving was to do just that.

When they wrote poems, it was poems of murder. When they sang songs, it was songs of death. When they gave birth to children, it was to raise them up to kill and die. Old and young, men and women, they lived for no other purpose than to kill.

Given a piece of land, they set up rockets on it. Given a house they dug tunnels under it. Given a tool, they turned it into a blade. Given a child they turned him into a weapon. And as the worshipers of Moloch had done in ages gone, they passed even their own sons and daughters through the flame.

And having cast forth their serpents, the Pharaohs of the world leaned forward eagerly to see their work. And they lavished fortunes on them. And they ceaselessly agitated on their behalf in the international organizations of the world. Whatever Israel might do for them was spurned. Eagerly they waited for the end. Eagerly they waited for the cemeteries once again to fill with the dead.

And when the staffs had been cast, the burden had increased on the people of Israel. And they cried out as they sought to appease the Pharaoh, all the Pharaohs. They cried out against the redemption wishing only that they could return to the condition of slavery they had become comfortable in. They believed the Pharaohs who told them that it was only because of the redemption that they were being whipped.

They cried out in the pages of the Washington Post and in Newsweek and in the Sunday Times and in the letters column and on blogs and on television. "It is because of you who wish to go out that we are being whipped." As the Jews in the USSR had once cried out at the hardening of the exile against those refusniks who wished to go, so now the Jews in New York and Paris and Brussels cried out. "Let us live among our vegetables and our pots on meat in the suburbs of the Tri-State Area. Let us have our split level homes, our consumer electronics and our SUV's."

Their cry is always the same. Their cry was always the same. "If it was not for you, we might live in peace. If it was not for the trouble you make, the Russians, the French, the Germans, the Poles, the Arabs, the editors of the New York Times, would like us. It is because of you that conditions grow worse for you."

The cities may change. Ramses may become London and Pitom may became New York. The opinion makers may wear cassocks or coats or Armani suits or nothing at all. The broadcasts may be the gossip in the street or the transmissions of telecommunications satellites. The details change. The picture remains the same. The exile is ending and it is a bitter road to walk. The Amalekites converge on one side, the Moabites, the legions of Egypt, fire falls from the sky and seas turn to blood.

Israel may be a free nation but Pharaohs do not easily give up. The Pharaoh is the representative of man's tyranny over the world. The force that built up the Tower of Babel. The power that demands that all men be slaves, whether it is in the treasure cities of Egypt or in the academic theories of dialectical materialism. There are many chains and they are forged in many ways.

The redemption of G-d is the destruction of the tyranny of man. It is the miracle that shows that no matter how the chains are forged, they can be broken and no matter how strong the sword, it can be shattered. The culmination of the first age of the history of the world which will reach its close with the final redemption of Israel is the utter annihilation of the slavery of the Pharaohs, in whatever form it comes in. It is the fall of all the images of kings and leaders men have set up to worship. It is the destruction of all privilege and power that has set itself up in place of G-d.

It is the final undoing of history as man has seen it and its completion as G-d has chosen it. A dead nation has already risen and its flag waves over Jerusalem. And when the final redemption comes, the graves too shall give up their dead.

How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,
Close by the street of this fair seaport town,
Silent beside the never-silent waves,
At rest in all this moving up and down!

But ah! what once has been shall be no more!
The groaning earth in travail and in pain
Brings forth its races, but does not restore,
And the dead nations never rise again.

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport - Longfellow

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and the LORD carried me out in a spirit, and set me down in the midst of the valley, and it was full of bones

And He said unto me: 'Son of man, can these bones live?' And I answered: 'O Lord GOD, Thou knowest.

Then He said unto me: 'Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off.

Therefore prophesy, and say unto them: Thus saith the Lord GOD: Behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O My people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel.

Yechezkel 37

Human beings quickly learn to take things for granted. 75 years ago the prospect of a Jewish state was as likely as a city on the moon. There were those who busily worked, agitated and struggled for it, but to the majority of Jews it was a distant dream. And yet as in a dream it exists. It is a matter of a plane ride for a Jew anywhere in the world to arrive there and walk its streets.

Most people think of miracles as entities of smoke and flames. As insubstantial things you cannot see or touch. The incredible and the unbelievable. But those are wonders. Miracles are everyday things whose wonder is difficult to hold in your mind. The tree that shades the lane. The sun that shines above. A state built out of the ruins of fallen empires rising like a green shoot in springtime to the light.

Now that the State of Israel exists too many take it for granted. Others have unknowingly slipped into the narrative crafted by our enemies, whose goal is to portray the State as a terrible burden, both for the Jews and for everyone else. A burden that is best dismantled.

Miracles after all are not supposed to exist and people react badly to them. When the Jews multiplied in miraculous numbers in Egypt, Pharaoh shuddered and brought out the chains and whips and murdered their children. When G-d threw open the gates of Egypt, still he pursued them into the very sea.

When millions of slaves walked out into the desert, nations plotted against them and peoples struck at them. As Pharaoh had before him, the Moabite King proclaimed darkly, that they cover the face of the land. For he too was a Pharaoh. Though their names and countries might changed. They were all Pharaohs at heart. For thousands of years, The Country That Should Not Have Been, struggled against pagan invaders. And when Israel finally fell and the Jews became exiles, they became The People That Should Not Have Been.

For two thousand years, the two world religions that had taken their inspiration from the religion of the Jews did their best to grind the very people into whose well of beliefs they had dipped their buckets-- to dust. For a thousand years the voices of the world that weren't advocating ghettos and Pharaoh's whip and the Inquisition's stake, whispered eagerly that the only possible way for the Jews was assimilation. To mingle with the rest of the world and vanish forever.

Arnold Toynbee proclaimed that the Jewish people were the fossils of history. And then the fossils rose again. The cemeteries disgorged their dead. A nation composed of farmers and Holocaust survivors stood off the armies of the Jordanian Legion and that of five Arab nations, each of which was many times larger than Israel. And at the end a blue and white flag waved over a new land.

Within a decade that land was bursting with productivity and industry. With settled cities and great works. With toil and labor and art and song. A land that had once been a pile of stones and dust. A relic of history had become new again. And at the wall of the temple, priests who were the descendants of Aaron raised their hands once more to bless the people. "May the Lord bless you and keep you." And he had.

The Jerusalem Post story showed photographer Oded Balilty celebrating his Pulitzer Prize win by gleefully opening up a bottle of champagne. The Jerusalem Post, which in the post-Lord Black era, has come to serve as an uncritical mouthpiece for the Kadima party and which repeatedly published lies and distortions about the police riot at Amona, focuses on Balilty's achievement.

There is no doubt that Balilty took some extraordinary and important photographs at Amona. Many of the photos I have showcased in the Amona section of this blog come from him. But there is no understanding either from him that the photo is not an occasion for celebration, but for mourning. That is entirely absent in the cheerful tone of the Jpost article.

Nili herself, the 15 year old girl in the photo states, "In the press they wrote proudly of this award to the photographer that allegedly has brought honor to Israel. But this is not honor, the picture is an embarrassment to the nation of Israel. Instead of defending the people and land of Israel, security forces destroy Jewish homes. A picture like this one is a mark of disgrace for the state of Israel and is nothing to be proud of.

"When the Jewish state, which in the name of morals tries to preserve "the cleanliness of weapons" so as not to damage innocents when the discussion deals with our enemies, gives out iron bludgeons to thousands of policemen and orders them to beat and to inflict severe injuries on adolescents - adolescents! We are not enemies, we are altogether only adolescents. And the result - hundreds of injured and tens crippled, some for life. This is not honor, this is a disgrace!

"When the State of Israel acts against the Land of Israel, and its soldiers and policemen are sent on missions of violence and destruction and expulsion of Jewish life from Gush Katif and northern Shomron and Amona - this is not a badge of honor, but rather a badge of shame.

"When the state Israel does not give Jews the right to build homes in Eretz Yisrael' and destroys houses - sometimes under the pretext that they are illegally built, when they are lawfully built - as now in Hevron - that devise new laws to destroy the right of Jews to live in Erets Yisrael' - this is not honor, this is a disgrace.

Cruelty and violence in Amona did not break us, on the contrary, they tempered us. Policemen in black do not frighten us. They can break to us heads, but they will not break our spirit.

What force exists in these policemen? What power after them?

The force of order, the power of the bludgeons, behind which stands the force of hatred and the power of destruction. Anyone who looks today at the ruins of the houses in Amona - understands that in this operation there was no sense whatever, except destruction and the creation of hatred for itself.

"I saw this long line of policemen and I thought to myself, 'Behind them is one man - Olmert, but behind me is G-d."

Only one Ynet article describes what happened to Nili afterward, but unlike the Arutz Sheva article, does not actually show it.

"Nili's mother, Devorah, described what happened after the snapshot was taken. "What happened afterwards was completely different, and there are pictures documenting that too. The police pulled Nili by the hair and beat her with clubs. It was simply horrifying."

At the actual conference in Amona, Orit Struk stated, "You know Nili to only from the photograph but we know her from many photographs, which were not honored with a Pulltizer Price. But these photographs reflect the assault on the girl immediately after that sequence, when the officers in black decided to punish any opposition to them, even of the symbolic kind. And we also know that she was far from alone. The officers wounded hundreds of adolescents, ten received mutilations, some remain invalids for life. Over 120 complaints have been filed against the policemen, but only four have resulted in criminal case. These numbers speak they themselves for itself and do not require further commentary."

These are the photos Orit Struk mentioned, which are not being shown by any media organization, even though they are decidedly relevant to the case.









Nili made reference to the pictures taken immediately after the Pulitzer-winner, "in which the policemen are 'punishing' me for daring to stand against them. But I have news for them: They did not succeed. What I did in Amona, I am willing, if necessary, to do again."

The name Nili is an acronym of four words. Netzach Yisrael Lo Yishaker. The hope of Israel is not lost. As long as there are people willing to stand up for what's right, hope is not lost. While Nili may have become immortalized in a single photo, she represents thousands of men and women, who have maintained the struggle for the Torah and the Land of Israel.

As Israel continues importing large numbers of mostly Muslim Sudanese refugees, at Kibbutz Yad Chana and other Kibbutzim this squeezing out Gush Katif refugees living in tent cities and resulting in the firing of Christian and Buddhist Thai workers, who in contrast to the Muslim Sudanese are generally Pro-Israel.

The large scale immigration of Sudanese Muslims into Israel has largely gone under the radar and then became a series of heartwarming stories about Sudanese refugees finding shelter in Israel. While there is no doubt that what some of them experienced in the Sudanese civil war is tragic, the majority of those refugees are not the persecuted African Animist and Christian African Sudanese who have been nearly wiped out, by Sudan's Arab Muslim rulers, but Sudanese African Muslims. These Sudanese Muslims in turn spend a lot of time in local Arab villages with their fellow Muslims.

By opening the doors for them, old line lefty Kibbutzim which have found themselves losing the younger generation obtain a cheap source of labor backed by government aid (even as no government aid is forthcoming for the refugees of Gush Katif who were made into refugees by this very government) while worsening Israel's demographic problem. The entire justification for Sharon's Disengagement was indeed demographics, a means of maximizing the Jewish population in Israel by separating from the Muslim population. The Sudanese immigration funneled through Egypt entirely defeats and renders hypocritical this entire program.

Olmert's government continues to undermine Israel in a terrible multitude of ways and this is merely another one of them.

Cho Seung-Hui's father, Cho Seong-Tae spent ten years working in Saudi Arabia as a construction worker. A decade spent in Saudi Arabia would have given his father an extensive Islamic background. Hui's own sister works for the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office in the State Department.

A fact that may or may not be relevant. Hui Chinese are a Muslim ethnicity and are present also in Malaysia and Korea.

The Cult of the Victim and the Tribute of a Hero

At the Munich Olympics, when the Palestinian terrorists broke into the rooms of the Israeli athletes, Yosef Gutfreund threw his weight against the door giving others a chance to escape through the windows. That legacy was alive when Virginia Tech Professor Liviu Librescu blocked the door with his own body so that his students could escape through the windows. The 76 year old man held the gunman back long enough to allow all but two of his students to reach safety. And then he died on the same classroom floor his feet had paced energetically for so many years.

One escaping student, in a letter sent to Professor Librescu's wife, writes of looking back at the professor through the other side of the window from the ledge. "I saw your husband still standing there. He was holding the door closed and looking over his shoulder to make sure everybody else was safe. It was the bravest thing I have ever seen and I will always remember his courage."

In this YouTube generation, Librescu's story of heroism has been overshadowed by the story of Jamal Albarghouti, related to arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti, who filmed some footage of the attack and sold it to CNN. Stories written about Albarghouti repeatedly describe him as a "Palestinian from the West Bank", characterizing his actions as "intrepid", "daring" and "bold". As if such words can be used about a man whose uselessly filmed an ongoing attack and then profited from it.

It's hard to find a greater contrast between a man who risked his life to save others and another man who stood around taking video footage of it and then sold it to CNN for an undisclosed and undoubtedly sizable sum of money. It is more than a contrast between cultures or generations. It is the contrast between running into a burning building and slowing down to watch the aftermath of a car crash.

Shortly after 9/11 articles began to appear in the media complaining about the "Cult of the Hero" they felt had evolved after the attacks, which worshiped soldiers, rescue workers and police officers. Virtue, they felt, had been reduced to a matter of brawn. But of course they had it wrong. It doesn't take brawn to be a hero. Europe is filled with muscular men who do not lift a finger against the Muslim violence brewing in their cities. Against torched cars, rape gangs and Mosques preaching Jihad.

Librescu was no titan or atlas. He was an elderly man who gave his life to save others, not because of his physical strength, but his moral strength. Because he saw the willingness of a man to sacrifice himself for others, as the most natural and responsible act a man can do. His actions serve as a rebuke to a political and media culture that preaches passivity at home and abroad. Which celebrates "citizen journalists" like Albarghouti who stand around videotaping a tragedy, but smears the American soldier in Iraq facing bullets and bombs and the Israeli soldier trying to keep the next suicide bomber from boarding the Number 19 bus.

The rejection of heroism is the rejection of the idea that people can be anything other than victims. The media prefers the complacent viewer who watches but does not act, videotapes but does not intervene. It is unsurprising that television stations which view getting footage of an attack as more important than actually stopping the attack, prioritize Jamal Albarghouti over Liviu Librescu.

Liberalism too prefers the victim to the hero. Rather than strengthening people, it prefers to weaken them. As the media prefers tears to strong arms and figures slumped in misery to men and women raising their heads high, its ideological wellspring of liberalism has replaced "The Cult of the Hero" with the "Cult of the Victim."

It is ironic but not surprising then that under some of the British boycotts proposed against Israeli universities and even Israeli academics and faculty, Liviu Librescu would have been barred in favor of a Jamal Albarghouti. The Palestinian sympathizer is after all the chief worshiper at the bloody altar of "The Cult of the Victim" endlessly magnified. In the amoral transmogrification required to justify Palestinian terrorism, morality and responsibility are eliminated by arguing that feelings of helplessness and hopelessness topple all human obligations and human norms. Once rendered helpless, the "victim" is set free to behave in a completely amoral manner. The "Cult of the Victim" then becomes the cult of the terrorist and the criminal, treating them as nothing more than helpless pinballs in a political and economic system that has left them incapable of doing anything other than committing the atrocities they perpetrate.

The continuing heroism of American and Israeli soldiers and civilians in the face of a constant onslaught of terrorism only further enrages the followers of “The Cult of the Victim" who view apathy or cowardly brutality as the only proper responses to a crisis. Failing to be proper victims, Israelis and Americans after 9/11 are accused of having become just like the Nazis. These are the only two possible categories that exist in the mindset of liberalism. You are either a victim or a Nazi. Liviu Librescu had been a victim of the Nazis, but his actions repudiated these categories. He chose to be a hero.

Romania has conferred the "National Order of the Star of Romania" posthumously on Liviu Librescu. His body will be transported to Israel for burial. A hero returning home.

The New York Magazine article that was supposed to lionize whiny MSNBC ranter Keith Olbermann as a "Limbaugh for Leftists" and the hero who brought down the Republican congress, instead displays Olbermann dredging up new depths of wussiness. There's almost too much material.

I give you Keith Olbermann, liberal action hero.



"I got beat up by girls all the time,” says Olbermann. “They literally posted a sign-up sheet and would take turns. I think that’s why I’ve always been such a fan of Mencken’s line, ‘Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.’ I’ve been afflicted.”


Graduating at 16, Olbermann shipped off to Cornell as the school’s youngest freshman. It wasn’t much fun. His parents went to extreme lengths to make his dorm room the only one in Ithaca with cable TV. Between tearful calls home, Olbermann sat alone and watched the tube. “Thank God for Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” says Olbermann. “Or I might not have made it.”


“Of all the people I’ve known inside and outside of the business, he was the unhappiest,” recalls a SportsCenter staffer. “Sometimes, at the end of the night, I’d leave early just so I wouldn’t have to give him a ride home. And it wasn’t out of my way.”


That Labor Day weekend found him in the Hamptons along with then–Today-show producer Jeff Zucker and Phil Griffin. The weekend was going well until news came in that Princess Diana’s limo had crashed inside a Paris tunnel... Zucker and Griffin began dialing their cell phones furiously while Olbermann panicked, alternately chanting, “We’ve got blood on our hands” and “I’m not going to be able to do the show.”


“All the yelling on the show reminded me of a part of my childhood that I didn’t want to relive,” recalls Olbermann. “I just couldn’t deal with it.”


In May 1998, Olbermann gave the commencement address at Cornell. “There are days now when my line of work makes me ashamed, makes me depressed, makes me cry,” Olbermann told the assembled graduates.


That summer, Olbermann was a man without a broadcast. He moved back to New York, and was working on a novel when he had a dream in which JFK appeared before him on a bus, his head wound dressed with plaster of Paris. In the dream, JFK had just one question for Olbermann: “Why did you leave SportsCenter?” (The novel was never published.)


Eventually, Aaron Sorkin would base his sitcom SportsNight on the duo. (Olbermann once claimed that both characters were based on him.)


Once a recurring “Page Six” figure for his dating escapades, Olbermann recently moved in with his girlfriend, Katy Tur. Yes, she’s a 23-year-old 2005 graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, but the relationship marks his first attempt at cohabitation.


...I don't know about you but I can just see a profile in courage coming here.

Ritter had achieved fame as a crusading UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq, making a name for himself by condemning Iraq's obstruction of inspections and delivering testimony during a stormy session of Congress calling for action against Saddam and confronting Senator Joe Biden, demanding that the inspections be backed by the threat of force.

In Scott Ritter's congressional testimony in 1998, he charged the Clinton Administration with appeasing Saddam and not allowing the inspectors to do their jobs. In an angry exchange with Senator Biden, Biden accused Ritter of wanting the ability to go to war whenever his ability to conduct inspections were denied.

By 2002 Scott Ritter had sunk well into being an Iraqi stooge, penning op-eds like this, which claimed that Biden was actually the one who wanted to remove Saddam while Scott Ritter wanted to protect Saddam's regime.

"Given Sen. Biden's open embrace of regime removal in Baghdad, there is a real risk that any such hearings may devolve into a political cover for the passing of a congressional resolution authorizing the Bush administration to wage war on Iraq. Such hearings would represent a travesty for the American people."

How did Scott Ritter devolve from committed critic of the Clinton administration who argued that Iraq had extensive WMD's that needed to disarmed, by force if necessary, to a stooge for Saddam's regime who took on a post writing for Al-Jazeera, accusing America of creating death squads to murder his Baathist buddies and praising them as a "genuine grassroots liberation movement?"

A big part of the answer came when Scott Ritter was arrested twice for attempting to set up meetings with two underage girls, one whom he believed was under 14, the other 16. First Ritter lied about being arrested and then claimed the whole thing was all a conspiracy against him. The Albany arrests for Ritter made it rather obvious what his price was.

In the days of the Cold War, Soviet intelligence services were adept at exploiting drug use and sexual weaknesses in ranking foreign personnel to subvert and enlist them.

Here is Scott Ritter again commenting on a children's prison he discovered and whose existence he covered up.

"The prison in question was inspected by my team in Jan. 1998. It appeared to be a prison for children - toddlers up to pre-adolescents - whose only crime was to be the offspring of those who have spoken out politically against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was a horrific scene. Actually I'm not going to describe what I saw there because what I saw was so horrible that it can be used by those who would want to promote war with Iraq, and right now I'm waging peace."

With Saddam overthrown, Ritter's access to Saddam's child prisons "too horrible to describe" for a proud wager of peace, had no doubt run out and he had to resort to 14 year old girls on the internet.

This was Scott Ritter in November 2nd, 1998 on Good Morning America.

Lisa McRee: What are they hiding?

SCOTT RITTER: They are hiding their retained capabilities in biological, chemical, nuclear weapons and ballistic missile delivery systems.

Lisa McRee: Can you be more specific about what you believe they have?

Scott Ritter: I think one of the things that has been in the news recently is the VX nerve agent, one of the most deadly substances known to mankind. Iraq clearly produced this agent in large quantities and put it on ballistic missile warheads. They have lied about that, they have said that they have not done this, despite the fact that we have the proof in our hands.

Lisa McRee: What's our appropriate response, then?

Scott Ritter: It's time to call the game for what it is. This is Saddam Hussein's attempt to keep weapons of mass destruction and get sanctions lifted. Saddam is linked with these weapons, there is no way of dealing with the weapons without dealing with Saddam.

Lisa McRee: But do what? Should we have a military strike against Iraq? Should it be unilateral or should we do it only with allies? What do you suggest?

Scott Ritter: These are issues that have to be addressed by the national security policy team in Washington, DC, that's what they get paid the big bucks for.

Lisa McRee: What do you think will work, though? You've been there.

Scott Ritter: I know what won't work, continuing to provide concessions to Iraq only feeds their strength. Iraq is in charge of this game right now. They are the ones calling the shots. It's time for the United Nations, the [national] security council of the United States to seize the initiative to start taking more proactive measures to counter Saddam Hussein. And whatever measures they take, they are going to have to be decisive and not the half steps that have been taken so far.

Lisa McRee: Are you talking about economic sanctions or are you talking about an attack [i.e., war]?

Scott Ritter: Economic sanctions won't work, we know that. Iraq has turned economic sanctions around and used it against the United Nations and United States. I think you are coming to the obvious point, but that is a decision that the national security team has to make, not Scott Ritter.

It was not Senator Biden calling for war, it was Scott Ritter.

By 2002 though Scott Ritter was taking a guided tour of Iraq paid for by Saddam's regime and delivering a speech to the Iraqi Parliament where he declared that Iraq had no WMD's and was not a threat to anyone.

What happened specifically to Ritter after 1998? Between 1998 and 1990? Scott Ritter had continued his work this time in Russia, on disarmament. While still married to his first wife, Ritter began an affair with 19 year old Marina Khatiashvili, his Russian supplied translator and escort.

Under the USSR anyone working with foreigners, especially foreigners tied to foreign diplomatic or military service, without exception reported to the KGB. Ritter himself penned numerous reports at the time stating that the Soviets were using the "young girls" to sexually compromise the inspectors. Later Ritter would deny writing these reports. Finally Scott Ritter would divorce his wife and marry the young girl who had been provided for him and the rest of his career would get uglier and uglier.

The critic of Saddam's regime had by 2005 turned into not merely a critic of the Iraq War or the US presence, but an outright cheerleader for the Sunni Ex-Baathist terrorists, who were themselves closely tied to Russia.

Consider the following Al Jazeera piece Scott Ritter penned this.

"The Sunni-based resistance, having been targeted by the Badr assassins, struck back with a vengeance.

In a campaign of targeted assassinations using car bombs and ambushes, the resistance has engaged in its own campaign of terror against the Shia, viewed by the Sunni fighters as being little more than collaborators of the American occupation.

...History will eventually depict as legitimate the efforts of the Iraqi resistance to destabilise and defeat the American occupation forces and their imposed Iraqi collaborationist government.

In the 30 years of Saddam's rule, the Baathist government and its security organs were very successful in infiltrating the ranks of Kurdish and Shia opposition movements.

The Shia and Kurds, on the other hand, have no history of being able to do the same to the Sunni. If anything has emerged as the undisputable truth in post-invasion Iraq, it is that the Iraqi resistance knows Iraq infinitely better than the American occupiers."

Note here that Scott Ritter is not merely supporting the terrorists. He is praising and celebrating the Sunni Baathist terrorists, the remnants of Saddam's mass murdering regime while dismissing the Shiite terrorists as "American Puppets." This is a purely Sunni Baathist line. It is not simply Anti-American, it is Pro-Baathist. There is no better evidence of who Ritter is working for.

Then there's the direct cash payments.

"In 1999, Scott Ritter was approached by a Detroit area businessman with links to Saddam Hussein, to make a film about the "devasting effects" that U.N. Sanctions have had on Iraq. Ritter completed the film in July of 2000. Ritter was paid $400,000 to complete a one person, two camera, ninety-minute "documentary."

On September 13th 2002, Scott Ritter was interviewed by CNN's Paula Zahn. In the interview, Zahn asked Ritter if he thought $400,000 was an "unusual amount" of money to film a documentary. Ritter's response was "no" he didn't think the amount was high. Ritter then went on to say that "other funding sources" had also been located to help pay the expenses of the trip."


In 1996 though Scott Ritter had suddenly learned to love Iran, whose terrorists he had been earlier condemning as American Stooges. The shift of course was timed with a change of perspective in Moscow that increasingly turned from its Baathist allies who had become increasingly unlike to regain control of Iraq, to the Iranian backed Shiites who looked like a better and better bet.

"AMY GOODMAN: Scott Ritter, you just returned from Iran?

SCOTT RITTER: I came -- I was in Iran in early September, yes.

What an eye-opening experience to be on your own in a nation that has been called an Islamic fascist state. I have been to dictatorships in the Middle East. I have been to nations that have a high security profile. Iran is not one of these nations. I’m a former intelligence officer who has stated some pretty strong positions on Iran, and yet I had full freedom of movement in Iran with no interference whatsoever...It’s a very modern, westernized, pro-Western, and surprisingly pro-American country that does not constitute a threat to the United States whatsoever."

Note that Scott Ritter is going again well beyond opposition to war. He's celebrating and praising Iran as a wonderful Pro-Western country, a modern country that is not at all an Islamic fascist state... despite hanging teenage girls, whipping people at mixed parties, backing and funding numerous Islamic terrorist groups including Hizbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

What is blatantly clear is that Scott Ritter is not serving as liberal a war critic, he is openly praising and promoting murderous and bloody regimes. And the liberals interviewing him and printing his pieces nod along and say nothing. Amy Goodman does not question his assessment that Iran is a wonderful place. All she's interested is in interviewing someone who will damn another American imperialist plot. Never mind that she's giving the floor to a man who is serving as an apologist for a regime that regularly tortures and murders women.

Now Scott Ritter is back in the limelight with a book blaming the whole thing on Israel claiming the "Israel Lobby" is engaging in espionage and was behind the Iraq War and a new war against Iran.

"The Bush administration, with the able help of the Israeli government and the pro-Israel Lobby, has succeeded in exploiting the ignorance of the American people about nuclear technology and nuclear weapons so as to engender enough fear that the American public has more or less been pre-programmed to accept the notion of the need to militarily confront a nuclear armed Iran."

Later in the book, Ritter adds: "Let there be no doubt: If there is an American war with Iran, it is a war that was made in Israel and nowhere else."

Of course it's all the fault of the Jews. The Jews running America who have brainwashed everyone into thinking nuclear technology in the hands of a madman might be a bad idea. Let's flash back to Scott Ritter's own past literary efforts.

Ex-U.N. arms inspector: Bomb Iraq - SF Examiner

New York - Former United Nations arms inspector Scott Ritter has signed a contract to write a book in which he spells out his suggestions for dealing with Iraq: Bomb the country and overthrow its leader, Saddam Hussein.

"Nothing less will work, and nothing less is justified," Ritter is quoted as saying in Simon & Schuster's announcement Tuesday of his book, "The Iraq Solution," due out in April.

Ritter's book will discuss Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Kurds and Iranians, and "why he must be stopped" before he uses mass-killing weapons again, the publisher said.

Ritter, an ex-Marine, created a stir Aug. 26 when he quit the United Nations Special Commission that monitors Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. He said then that the panel's efforts were being undermined by vacillating American and U.N. policy-makers.

Scott Ritter who had made half a career of promoting a War with Iraq, claims it's the Jews and the Israeli lobby who were behind the War in Iraq and now the non-existent War in Iran.

"The former weapons inspector alleges that some of the pro-Israel lobby’s activities “can only be described as outright espionage and interference in domestic policies.” Ritter also accused the American Israel Public Affairs Committee of having an inherent dual loyalty. He called for the organization to be registered as a foreign agent."

Of course Scott Ritter himself who has made the other half of his career interfering with American domestic policy while married to a Soviet agent, who was considered compromised and a security risk even by the Clinton administration, who does open propaganda work for foreign regimes and has received payment from them... need not register as a foreign agent.

The ultimate irony in Scott Ritter's latest vicious cycle of hypocrisy is that under the Clinton Administration, Ritter himself had been charged with inappropriate contacts with Israeli intelligence services in obtaining reports and information about Iraq. At the time the CIA had refused to work with him and his superiors had raised the possibility that he was an Israeli agent. In reality of course Ritter was actually determining what Israel knew on behalf of his real superiors in Baghdad and Moscow.

Scott Ritter has managed to be both a passionate advocate of War in Iraq and a passionate advocate of Saddam's regime. An advocate of Baathist campaigns against Iran and an advocate of Iran. A pursuer of inappropriate contacts with Israeli intelligence services and a vocal advocate accusing everyone else of being an Israeli agent.

How exactly Scott Ritter was compromised will only be found if he's actually ever arrested and charged, but between his tendencies for young girls and his isolation and seduction in Russia, he was compromised and an offer was made. Ritter's egotism remained the one common denominator, the need to be important, a crusader and a public figure. Never mind that everything that came out of his mouth was a blatant contradiction with the statements that he had made, statements that were not merely "opinion" but informed statements made as a UN Weapons Inspector.

What is more obscene than Ritter's pedophilia and his willingness to serve as the whore of Saddam or Iran, so long as he gets paid and gets his headlines, is that the media is increasingly willing to treat him as a legitimate critic of the Administration, utterly ignoring everything else.

The Forward, which has become a downright hate site, when it comes to politically correct bashing of Israel, does not cite any opposing view to Ritter or deal with any of the contradictions and lies that have issued from Ritter and have been cataloged extensively by his right and left wing critics. As so many others have done in the past

As so often continues to happen, Ritter is given a forum to spew his lies and invective. His claims go unchallenged, even when they degenerate into outright anti-semitic invective. The very same outlets and journalists that want to pretend to be serious critics of the Bush Administration and yet give Scott Ritter a forum are acting no differently, than when they put on Soviet stooges to lecture on the evils of Ronald Reagan.

The same publications and stations so eager to hear the usual bashing of Bush and claims that Iran is a great place that doesn't threaten anyone, abandon what's left of their own credibility and morals and in doing so becomes stooges themselves.

- "The criticism came a day after House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos told reporters in San Francisco he has been trying for 10 years to obtain a visa to visit with leaders in Tehran. "Speaking for myself, I'm ready to go," said Lantos (D-Calif.). "And knowing the speaker, I think she might be."

Pelosi, standing next to Lantos at a press conference, said that while she finds Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks "to be so repulsive that they're outside the circle of civilized human behavior," the willingness of Lantos, a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust, to meet with Ahmadinejad "speaks volumes about the importance of dialogue." New York Post


I wish papers would constantly stop referring to Congressman Lantos as a Holocaust survivor. It smacks of clumsy reporting at best and of exploitation at worst. In reading a dozen articles about Lantos, this is constantly brought up where it has no relevance.

Congressman Lantos being willing to meet with a genocidal madman tells us nothing about the importance of dialogue, it tells us about Lantos' own personal priorities. The logic of those priorities is inexplicable, but that's an explanation he owes to the voters who elected him. He represents his particular district in California, not the Jewish people or Holocaust survivors. For him to allow a status as a Holocaust survivor to be made use of in this way is grossly inappropriate.

Congressman Lantos' own experiences in the Holocaust clearly did not dispose him toward raising Jewish children in a Jewish family. They did not dispose him to resist empowering Ahmadinejad in the manner he is attempting to do. Instead he is doing his best to give that madman a perfect propaganda photo opportunity. Even as he's also giving the murderous Putin regime a massive present by lobbying for the removal of the Jackson-Vanik amendment.


- Caroline Glick has an excellent article demonstrating the flaws of the process of promoting Democracy in the Arab world, that allowed those Islamist groups with better organization and force to seize the advantage.

"Rather than promote liberty, which at its core revolves around a certain foundational understanding of human dignity, the administration promoted elections - fast elections - in Iraq and throughout the region.

In so doing, the administration placed the cart before the horse, with predictable results. The legacy of tyranny is hatred and dependence. And the values of hatred and dependence were those that were expressed at the ballot boxes in Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority. In all jihadists, often allied with Iran, were empowered while those that were considered moderates modified their positions in opposition to the US.

These forces, who receive no money from Iran and Saudi Arabia to buy votes, and have no private militias to intimidate voters, couldn't compete against the likes of the Dawa party in Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian Authority.

By pushing fast elections, the US entrapped itself. It inadvertently empowered its enemies and so was unable to embrace the duly elected governments. In opposing the forces it expended so much energy getting elected, the US was perceived as weak, foolish and hypocritical."


- I've been award a Thinking Blogger award by Maggie's Notebook.



I'd like to mention Maggie herself whose blog combines interesting analysis with current events reporting.

Linda whose blog Something and Half of Something which is always worth reading for provocative and daring commentary.

The Ignoble Experiment is one of the few personal blogs I read regularly.

Right Truth collects information and informed commentary into a great bundle of posts.

And of course NeoCon Express which is a daily read for insightful posts on what's going on in the world today.


- Excellent http://www.israpundit.com/2006/#">article and commentary at IsraPundit on the cost of being prepared to make any concession.

- Finally a must read post from Linda on the consenquences of freeing terrorists.

Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day is approaching now. A day is of course too narrow a period to do anything important justice. Yet we set a single day aside for independence, for mothers, for fathers, for wars and presidents. In recent memory the only major event that could be said to have happened in a day was 9/11.

While the Holocaust was going on, news and discussion of it was mostly suppressed or outright ignored. Major Democratic party leaders, most prominently Joseph Kennedy, father of JFK and RFK, who delivered a speech warning Jews against any public statement or response. Joseph Kennedy had himself said, when the first reports came in of Nazi persecutions of Jews, "they brought it on themselves."

Even after the war discussion and commemoration was distinctly stifled. The USSR suppressed any discussion of the particular murder of Jews, treating everything as the murder of Soviet citizens. The United States under Eisenhower and Israel under Ben Gurion were pursuing improved relations with Germany. Nazi War Criminals were freed and a lot of matters were swept under the rug.

During the war Great Britain and the United States had mostly ignored what was going on and even aided it with the British preventing Jews from escaping to Israel, deporting German Jews back to Germany, as the US had done with the St. Louis. But Jews in the United States had little better of a record.

The generally liberal American Jewish leadership had fallen hook, link and sinker for the Cult of FDR and the New Deal. And FDR liked Jews about as much as Joseph Kennedy or Harry Truman did. The Jewish leadership sabotaged whatever measures it attempted to take and aside from some limited aid, did very little that was useful. Those who did labor to rescue Jews and bring the Holocaust to public attention were outsiders like Mike Tress or Ben Hecht, who were more often than not condemned for their work and are little remembered today. While Mike Tress worked to rescue Jews from Europe, Ben Hecht with the Bergson group organized protests, press releases and plays meant to force public attention to the genocide of Europe's Jews and embarrass the White House into taking action. The advertisement above is a sample of the organization's work.

Much of that history is forgotten now. The Holocaust as is remembered today has been simplified, as most history is, into a series of commemorations of the dead. To liberal Jews, who did little to nothing to save those who died, the Holocaust has becoming a teaching lesson, a way to lecture about the dangers of intolerance and nationalism. Having universalized the Holocaust, they also rendered it devoid of meaning. Nothing more than photos and a drawn out version of, "Why can't we all just get along."

To ultra-religious Jews the message of the Holocaust was to rebuild elsewhere and to keep everything going as it was before, in other parts of the world. That has arguably succeeded. Jewish life has been rebuilt in America and Israel. Unlike most secular Jews, religious Jews were well aware that the Holocaust was not a unique event, but part of a chain of persecutions that had been underway for thousands of years since Pharaoh.

What they refused to become aware of, is that the unique element of the Holocaust was the fusing of new technologies with ancient dreams of Jewish massacres. Transportation, organization and industrialization had made the Holocaust possible on a scale greater than anything that had come before, including the Roman massacres, the Crusades or the Chmelnitski pogroms. Simply waiting out and enduring the latest atrocity was no longer a realistic option. Within a decade of the Holocaust, two more attempted, one by Stalin in the USSR and one by the Arabs in Israel. Had they succeeded, few surviving Jews would have remained in the Eastern Hemisphere.

To the Zionists, there was the warning that Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Uri Zvi Greenberg had given years before the Holocaust, "We must liquidate the galut or the galut will liquidate us." The rebuilding of a state of Israel and the seeming end of the exile for the majority of the Jewish people seemed to provide some of the promised benefits. A strong army capable of protecting its people. A state capable of diplomatic negotiations on behalf of Jews being persecuted anywhere in the world.

But the Galut could not be so easily liquidated. Setting up a state meant setting up a barrier, but the real barrier was within. People who have grown used to being slaves, to being a persecuted minority for thousands of years, cannot suddenly become free men. G-d understood this when he took the redeemed Jewish slaves away from Philistine territories. It was not that they were incapable of fighting, but that in the face of war they reverted to their old instincts, slaves facing masters and willing to make any concession needed.

To look at Olmert and his gang, it is not difficult to hear Datan and Aviram shouting that we need to turn back and return to Egypt. One can read papers and hear prominent liberal Jewish figures stating loudly that the creation of Israel was a mistake. One can see ads for the return of Jews to Russia, under the auspices of that movement which stands to benefit from it.

Commemoration of the dead is only half the response to the Holocaust. The other half is planning for the future. We have succeeded in the former and failed utterly in the latter. It is never too late though. Not if we recognize it.

The headline of one of Ben Hecht's advertisements comes to mind. "For Sale To Humanity 70,000 Jews Guaranteed Human Beings at $50 A Piece" (New York Times, February 16, 1943, p. 1)

Ariel Sharon was one. So was Richard Nixon. France's De Gaulle and South Africa's Botha. They have some things in common.

They usually posses a gruff no nonsense outward manner that appeals to the public, while disguises a massive ego within. Inside they're selfish, paranoid and often corrupt.

If they served in the military they have a history of insubordination behind them. Being self-centered, they refuse to follow anyone else's orders. They can strike patriotic poses and stand passionately for causes and take big risks in the process, but those are just vehicles to fulfill their own ambitions and serve their own egos.

To their supporters they appear to be paternalistic figures reminding them of their fathers and embodying virtues such as loyalty, traditional values and decisive leadership. In truth they have no loyalty to anyone but themselves and will discard people the moment they cease being useful to them. They use many people but they trust no one. They may play at endorsing traditional values but they likely view such values with contempt, because they view the public with contempt.

The same elements that appeal to conservatives, cause them to be targeted by huge volumes of hatred from liberal and left-wing elements. Politicians like Nixon, DeGaulle, Sharon faced a volume of hate, character assassination and unfavorable comparisons to Hitler on a regular basis. If the politics of conservatives are shaped by a search for a father figure to create a safe home, the politics of liberals are shaped by an ongoing vituperative rebellion against father figures.

In times of crisis the public seeking a father figure elevates them to political office and gives them virtually unlimited powers. Conservative and traditional elements back them seeing them as the saviors embodying their values. This is a big mistake and often the last mistake they and the country will ever make.

Misled by their no nonsense attitudes and their tough rhetoric, people elect them believing them to be wolves. Instead once elected after a period of tough talk and tough measures they turn out to be sheep in wolves clothing.

What the public sees as courageous leaders are in fact selfish cold-blooded men who are experts at protecting themselves. Even as they amp up their rhetoric, they decide the struggle can't be won and the crisis can only be resolved with a retreat. What follows are surges of violent attacks combined with a surrender to the enemy in principle. Vietnam, Algeria, Gaza all followed the same pattern.

The rhetoric and bursts of violence result in rising international condemnation even as the retreats give the enemy exactly what they want, thus handing them a double victory. Some of their supporters remain blinded by the rhetoric and the occasional attacks such as the targeted strikes against Hamas terrorists or the Christmas bombing of Hanoi failing to realize that they are just covers for a large scale surrender.

Shocked at this sudden turnabout the people who supported these leaders may protest and even take violent action (Israel and France) only to be ruthlessly cracked down on. The aftermath leaves the conservative and traditional camp shattered and riven between 'moderates' who are willing to sell out and 'extremists' who are delegitimized, suppressed or splintered into many useless organizations. By the time they finally leave office, their politics of surrender have become the de facto national politics and they are usually replaced by a liberal figure who takes these policies to a whole new level.

By the time their reign is over, the country will have suffered damage it may take decades if ever to recover from, the enemy will have won, the liberals empowered and the conservative forces that might have stemmed the breaches have been greatly weakened. They retire as controversial historical figures who are usually remembered as hated tyrants and rarely given credit for the liberal policies they actually implemented.

"Telephone callers from Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and Australia have importuned Governor Brown to spare Chessman's life. Brown has received save-Chessman pleas from Belgium's Queen Mother and from the Social Democratic members of Italy's Chamber of Deputies.

Secretary of State Christian Herter told his press conference last week that the Chessman case had stirred up "quite a surprising amount of interest" in South America. In Brazil, circulators of a save-Chessman petition claim more than 2,500,000 signatures. In The Netherlands, record dealers are profiting from brisk demand for a new platter, in Dutch, called The Death Song of Chessman.

The London News Chronicle recently editorialized that "the great American nation is humiliated because of the agony of Chessman," and the London Daily Herald added that the day Chessman is executed "will be a day when it will be rather unpleasant to be an American." Buenos Aires' Critics called the Chessman case "the most terrible case that has faced the world in recent history." - Time Magazine, Mar 21, 1960

Who was Chessman that America should want to condemn him and the entire world should so hysterically agitate on his behalf and what is his connection to the War on Terror?

Caryl Chessman was a robber, rapist and murderer who dragged women out of cars and sexually assaulted them. He was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to death. He was held on death row while every goodhearted liberal demanded his release.

Caryl Chessman was to liberals what the terrorists of Guantanamo Bay are today. Imagine Tookie Williams and multiply him a thousand times over and that was Caryl Chessman. Liberals contended he was the victim of a cruel and unfair justice system. They wrote books about him, they made two movies about him, they published the books he wrote and the essays condemning his imprisonment. Ronnie Hawkins wrote "The Ballad Of Caryl Chessman" and Phil Ochs wrote "The Iron Lady" in sympathy for him.

E. A. Poe, Henri Rousseau
Sholom Aleichem and Caryl Chessman
Alan Freed and Buster Keaton too
And each one there
Has one thing shared
They have sweated beneath the same sun
Looked up in wonder at the same moon
And wept when it was all done
For bein' done too soon
For bein' done too soon
For bein' done

Neil Diamond - Done Too Soon

There were no ballads or songs written about Caryl Chessman's victims. One of those victims remained in a schizophrenic state for as long as Chessman remained on death row. But there was no pity for her or for any of them.

No singer worried how much they ached or sweated or how they lived their lives. The liberals ranging from Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Aldous Huxley, Norman Mailer (who himself nearly murdered his wife), Robert Frost (who had also obtained clemency for Nazi propagandist poet, Ezra Pound) to those letter writers sending in a 1000 letters a day cared very much about them.

What all those great men and the everyday liberal had in common was that they gave nearly as much of a damn for Caryl Chessman's victims, as today's liberals bleeding their little hearts all over Abu Ghaib and Gitmo, have for the victims of September 11th and the victims of Islamic terrorism all over the world.

They liked and like to believe that they're enormously sensitive people full of love for mankind, yet that love seemed to best express itself toward murderers and rapists. After Caryl Chessman would come Eldridge Cleaver who would boast of his rapes and of practicing on "little black girls in the ghetto" before using the white women who were the racial enemy. There would be Che Guevara whose murderous visage still adorns millions of red t-shirts.

There would be Adolf Eichmann, who despite carrying out the genocide of millions, was the subject of pleas from all over the world for forgiveness. There was Yasir Arafat whose terrorist thugs carved a brutal trail of terror and death across Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. There would be Tookie Williams and there would be Hicks and the terrorists at Gitmo. The cycle of sympathizing with the criminal and transforming him into a victim, of sanctifying his bloodiest deeds in the name of his victimization by the system and the United States, dated long before Islamic terrorism even reared its ugly head. It was an ugly foulness that was always in our culture and always nesting in the rotting heart of that brand of liberalism which is attracted to the dirty bloody hand and repulsed by the waving flag.

In the death row waiting for their turn
No time to change, not a chance to learn
Waiting for someone to call
Say it's over after all
They won't have to face the justice of the chair

The Iron Lady - Phil Ochs

Aren't you sad now? Can you feel empathy for what he's going through? Poor dear Caryl Chessman. Note the overflowing well of pity for a man who had none for anyone else but himself. Caryl Chessman spent years waxing outraged about his treatment and his abuse by the criminal justice system, even as he concocted more and more outrageous lies in his own defense. And his defenders lapped up every one of them.

Chessman's methods and techniques would inspire hero worship in the Hillside Stranglers who would go on to kidnap, torture and murder a number of women. Even after they were arrested, they nearly got off for it, but for the insistence of the trial judge on refusing the prosecution's motion to withdraw the case and prosecuted it instead.

Chessman is mainly forgotten today, perhaps out of embarrassment. He was sent to the gas chamber from where he never returned. Liberals have found new murderers to idolize. Monsters who make Caryl Chessman or the Hillside Stranglers look like amateurs.

Why remember Caryl Chessman at all? Because he is an example. He is the sham that exposes the fraudulent feminism of liberals who tirelessly defended rapists like him or Eldridge Cleaver. Hunter S. Thompson, that great inspiration to gonzo journalism, who all but celebrated the gang rapists of the Hell's Angels.

It exposes the love that liberals hold for criminals, but never for their victims. Their willingness to identify with and weep over the sufferings of a condemned criminal, without caring a whit for those people whose lives were ruined in his aftermath.

It exposes the fact that modern day liberal sympathies for terrorists is not the product of a more enlightened global worldview. Why after all did Caryl Chessman hate the people he assaulted? He didn't. He wasn't the product of America's policies in the middle east or the ghetto or anywhere else. He was a sociopathic monster in a line of sociopathic monsters whose magnetism and charisma would captivate liberals leading them to make their pilgrimages to Fidel Castro or Yasir Arafat or Ahmadinejad.

When the world wails over Gimto or Hicks and liberals condemn Bush and churn out petitions, there is nothing new under the sun. It has all happened before. It will all happen again.

"One atrocious but clever criminal called into question our judicial system and brought discredit to our laws...Then ... he intimidated the Governor of California and drove the timorous U.S. State Department to declare him an international issue. And finally, he beheld the legislature in a session specially called to change the law so that he could be saved from execution . . . What will happen now? They would not change the law for Chessman, but it would be unwise to give odds that he won't beat it again." Los Angeles Times

Does this sound familiar? Think of Arafat brandishing a gun at the U.N. Think of Ahmadinejad smirking at Britain as he seizes hostages, negotiates an exchange and then sets them free. This is what happens when civilizations give in to thugs. This is what happens when a nation bows its head to a monster.

This is how evil wins, whether it is the evil at the heart of the USSR or Iran or in Ramallah or thugs and murderers smirking their way through sessions with their lawyers. Evil does not merely win when good men do nothing. It wins when the supposed good men do their utmost to fight fiercely on its behalf.

They used to tell me
I was a shoo-in
For the Presidential spot
Where there were crowds to wow
Or chads to tear
I was always there
Campaigning at every stop

They used to tell me
I was a shoo-in
With Presidential glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for a Cafe Au Lait?

Once I built the Internet
Made it run
Made it race over a DSL line
Once I built the Internet
Now it's done
Brother can you spare a dime

Once I made a movie about the sun
Said global warming is a crime
Once I made a movie
Now it's a rerun
Brother can you spare a dime

Once in Big and Tall Men's Suits
I used to pompously strut
With Tipper hanging on my arm
Carbon footprints had to be cut
They were causing planetary harm
And I was the one with the plan
Say don't you remember?
They called me Al
It was Al all the time
Why don't you remember?
I'm your pal
Say buddy, can you spare a dime?

Oh don't you remember
They called me Al
It was Crazy Al the time
Why don't you remember?
I'm your Presidential pal
Buddy can you spare a dime?

The double irony of this photo is not merely Nancy Pelosi, who had billed herself as the most powerful woman in America, subjugating herself for entry into the Umayyad Mosque. What Nancy Pelosi is doing is looking at the supposed head of John the Baptist, a looted Christian artifact, displayed in a Muslim mosque. That isn't a notion that would ever enter Pelosi's head, but it's certainly one that's apparent to any Muslim who views the spectacle of one of the political leaders of a Christian country smiling and nodding along at the theft of one of her religion's holiest relics.

The Umayyad or Omayyad mosque is built over the ruins of a Christian Church dedicated to John the Baptist that was torn down by Muslims and replaced with a mosque. When Muslims talk about Jews, Christians and Muslims living in peace once, that is the kind of "peace" they mean. A peace where domestic Christians, Hindus and Jews are persecuted, their holy places torn down and replaced by Mosques, just as Joseph's tomb was and just as the Temple Mount is.

And a peace where delegates from the Western world smile and tour the grounds with no clue that they're nodding along to the destruction of their own heritage and humiliation of their own religion. In one visit Pelosi had managed to acquiesce not only to the degradation of her own gender and country, but also her religion. A true triple score.

After her visit, Islamic Jihad leader Khaled Al-Batch proclaimed that, "If the Democrats want to make negotiations with Syria, Hamas, and Hizbullah, this means the Democratic Party understands well what happens in this area and I think Pelosi will succeed. ... I hope she wins the next elections...I think the Democratic Party can do things the best."

Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip, said the willingness by some lawmakers to talk with Syria "is proof of the importance of the resistance against the US.

"The Americans know and understand they are losing in Iraq and the Middle East and that their only chance to survive is to reduce hostilities with Arab countries and with Islam. Islam is the new giant of the world," he said.

Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity said, "All the American people must make peace with Syria and Iran and with Hamas."

And there it is in a nutshell. The Democratic path to peace. Surrender to the terrorists. Smile, smile and then smile some more. If they trash your churches, smile politely. Wear whatever they tell you to wear and march along.

FOX News reported on a Wayne State Rally by an Anti-Israel group that featured Swastikas combined with Israel and shouts of "Go Home Jews." Two days before that same group had conducted a similar protest at a Jewish Civil Rights event against Anti-Semitism.

The Group Anti-Racist Action has in the past praised Hizbullah at its rallies and is pushing for "Divestment", an extension of the Muslim boycott of Israel into the United States. Wayne State University is adjacent to Dearborn and its large radicalized Muslim community. ARA groups around the country have advocated the destruction of Israel and the United States and the murders of police officers and soldiers.

Now as we're seeing the situation unfold in which British troops allowed themselves to be captured without a fight, read confessions on television and the British government has all but ruled out military action and is preparing to apologize, it's worth taking a look back at how US soldiers handled an Iranian abduction attempt.

"U.S. soldiers from the 5th Squadron 73rd Cavalry 82nd Airborne were accompanying Iraqi forces on a routine joint patrol along the border with Iran, about 75 miles east of Baghdad, when they spotted two Iranian soldiers retreating from Iraqi territory back into Iran. A moment later, U.S. and Iraqi forces came upon a third Iranian soldier on the Iraqi side of the border, who stood his ground.

As U.S. and Iraqi soldiers approached the Iranian officer and began speaking with him, a platoon of Iranian soldiers appeared and moved to surround the coalition patrol, taking up positions on high ground. At that point, according to the Army's statement, the Iranian captain told the U.S. and Iraqi soldiers that if they tried to leave they would be fired on. Fearing abduction by the Iranians, U.S. troops moved to go anyway, and fighting broke out. Army officials say the Iranian troops fired first with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades, and that U.S. troops fell further back into Iraqi territory. American forces killed at least one Iranian soldier who had been aiming a rocket-propelled grenade at their convoy of Humvees."

Long before the Iranian abduction of British troops, the British presence in Basra had degenerated into allowing the Shiite Iranian backed death squads to do anything and everything they liked. While British commanders boasted as to how well they knew how to handle the natives, as opposed to the Americans, they left the area open to Sadr's forces.

When Sadr militamen killed British troops, the British stopped patrolling the streets.

When Basra residents demanded the expulsion of 'al-Sadr's people', British Major Ian Clooney said, "I can understand what the Iraqis are saying, but confronting violence with violence is not going to work."

Only when two SAS commandos were seized by Iraqi "police officers" answering to Sadr, did the British military use force to rescue them. The British demonstrated repeatedly that they would allow Iran to bully them. Iran has taken them at their word. Blair's pullout plan did not make violence against British forces less likely, but more likely. In a point that Westerners repeatedly refuse to comprehend, retreat in the Middle East makes you an easier target and who doesn't like taking on easier targets?

Two years ago I first began this blog. I'd like to say that I had a grand plan, but the reality was I simply thought it would be a good place to write. It's been a long and turbulent journey. The blog has gone through multiple templates, been designed and redesigned within an inch of its life. I've been linked to, delinked, made enemies and friends in the blogsphere.

Posts from this blog have become op-ed pieces in newspapers, gone around the world and back. I've also offended public relations personnel, political parties, the UN and various liberal Rabbis. I've been a factor in a libel suit, have been threatened with several more and accused of being a Vietnamese virus sending Communist.

As this blog has become more political, the personal photos I take have been spun off into the New York Minute blog. Videos from this blog have been spun off into J-Channel.

Two years have passed and life goes on. To all my readers thank you for sticking around. To all my fellow bloggers, may success and happiness be yours. Now begins the month of April, spring and the renewal of things as we move from the cold of winter into the warmth of a new season. Now also begins Pesach (Passover) the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, moving from the old into the new, from darkness to light and slavery to freedom. May the world that seems to steadily sink into darkness rise into light again.

I'm including below links to ten of my posts over the lifetime of this blog that I in my egotistical arrogance consider important. Pursue them or not at your will over the Passover break which will begin tonight, April 2nd and end on the evening of April 4th.





The Betrayers of the Flame

"The story of Israel, the story of the Jewish people, is the story of the struggle between those who fought and died to keep that flame burning and the betrayers of the flame. It is the same battle we have been fighting for thousands of years.

The dream is dying. The dream a hundred thousand matches kindled into a great flame is in danger of going out. The men and women who struggled and sacrificed to build Israel left behind comfortable lives for the hardships of Israel. The men and women who have taken over now shovel their accomplishments into the rubbish heap while proclaiming with their actions and attitudes that the only worthwhile goal is a comfortable life.

They lead the way in selling out their country, in selling out their friends and colleagues, selling out their parties and government positions; and encourage the rest of the country to follow their example leading the people into the lowest imaginable depths. They go to each man and say to him that the match that burns must be put out, the flame dampened and replaced with the dark abyss of complete unbelief in anything at all."


Whatever You Do, Don't Fight Back

"The common denominator between crime and terrorism is that both are cultural threats to our society. They originate from cultures existing abroad and in the fringes of our own society. A criminal culture and a terrorist culture. They cannot be defeated purely through military means, they must be defeated at the cultural level, and that will only happen when a society of committed individuals resist them, rather than comply with them.

All attempts to transfer individual responsibilities to the government however, are doomed to failure. A government educational system can never replace parents. Government policing can never take the place of individual deterrence and self-defense. Governments can defeat armed forces, but they cannot defeat a culture. Only one culture can defeat another culture and only one civilization can defeat another civilization."


The Muslim Mind is the Mind of a Rapist

"Muslims see women the same way they see America and Europe, dirty, disgusting, satanic but desirable. They do not integrate into American or European society because they do not love their new countries, they despise them but desire them for their material and physical abundance. Their relation to these countries is not love but lust fused with hatred into a desire to rape.

They cannot become Americans or Europeans for the very same reason they cannot love a woman. Love or citizenship in a democratic nation with values demands virtues of them they do not have. So they turn rapist instead."


The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization

"For anyone who finds it hard to imagine Berlin, Paris, London and Brussels' fate, need only look at Constantinople, now Istanbul, once the center of a Christian Empire. Anyone who wishes to envision how the Vatican will look in a century, need only glance at the Hagia Sophia, now a mosque. Take a look around Istanbul or Alexandria, your favorite European capitals will look just like them too.

Yet this will be less a Muslim conquest than Europe's suicide by defeatism, apathy and selfishness, a process that began after WW2. After all it wasn't the Muslims who forced Europe to abandon its colonies and then export millions of Algerians, Pakistanis and Turks as the cheap labor propping up the charade of socialism. It wasn't the Muslims who convinced Europeans that their own personal happiness took priority over everything else, that badgered them into having fewer children and waiting till they were in their late 30's to do it. It certainly wasn't the Muslims who made the average European provincially xenophobic and yet hopelessly defeatist at home and abroad.

The Muslims are indeed reaping the fruits of a conquest but it isn't their conquest but the conquest of Europeans over themselves."


Recognize the Islamic Enemy or Lose the War

"The illusion that Islam can be housebroken so that Muslims stop blowing up inside the house is just that, an illusion cultivated by the same refusal to confront the problem that motivated Bush' statement. For the moment Europe and America are frantically spreading newspapers everywhere while pretending they're spreading out them out for everyone, as if it's a problem for everyone, rather than for the nasty stray they've insisted on adopting and remaining loyal to, no matter how often it bites their children.

We can't win against that enemy when we're not even allowed to speak its name. We can't win against that enemy when we're instead trying half-assed schemes to appeal to its better nature and reform it, before we've even won the war. There are indeed over a billion Muslims and their numbers are growing but the global population is several times that. But as long as the rest of the world lacks unity in confronting Islam, Muslims can take it over country by country."



Alfred Must Die so Mahmood Can Live: Why Socialized Medicine Makes Euthanasia Inevitable


"An acquittance some years back found that her uncle had been disconnected from life support without her authorization leading to his death. When she demanded answers, she was told, "He lived his life."

He lived his life, is the epitaph of a lot of elderly men and women dying under socialized medicine or perhaps being outright murdered. Eugenics today is a dirty word, but the distinction between eugenics as practiced by the Germans or practiced under socialism today, is the definition of "Life Unworthy of Life." The Germans applied it to the mentally ill, the disabled and a variety of categories including the Jews. Today it's often applied to the disabled, babies and the elderly, whose "Quality of Life", a euphemism that could proudly be translated into the German, is measured, found wanting and disposed of."



The Democracy Fallacy

"The myth of democracy as a near-religious icon has been what has blinded Americans time and time again when democracy was offered to other nations and peoples and those peoples shrugged and said "Who needs it" and went on killing anyway.

Democracy only works in a culture where different sides can agree to vote it out, instead of fight it out. Democracy only works in a culture that values human life enough to pull back from the brink and settle things by slandering each other in the press. Democracy only works in a culture where each other side believes the other side is wrong, but not so wrong they have to be wiped out and kept from any role in the country's future."


The Speech to the Nation on the War Bush Should Have Made - But Didn't

"Many people, particularly my political opponents in congress, expect me to call for a withdrawal of troops from Iraq and I will not disappoint them. The majority of our troops will indeed be leaving Iraq but they will not be going far. Withdrawal is another word for surrender and when you surrender you must pay the price of defeat. This country will not be defeated. We are not withdrawing, we are advancing to take on the real enemy. To take on the people behind the terrorists, behind the bombings and behind the kidnappings and murders."




Potential People: A Life in Our Hands

"We all became who we are because no one stepped in at a crucial moment and prevented us from coming to be. We are all potential people. We exist because no one stopped us from existing. Looked at from a purely 'Here and Now' standpoint a fetus is nothing more than a collection of cells. Abortion is a rejection of the future, a rejection of the person who will come to be.

A person's journey through life can be expressed as a three dimensional path. The continuity of that journey is the totality of that life. The path extends behind us and ahead of us. There are no easy answers, only the choices we make and there are times in our life when we hold another person's life in our hands."


Free Power - Republicans and Democrats and the Economic Survival of America

"Socialism creates serf states, sometimes with populations taxed worse than serfs were, where people are earning a little but making very little. Two income families become the norm. Women marry later and have less children. The birthrate drops, which worsens the problem of finding a tax base for the growing bureaucracy, which pushes taxes higher.

Immigrant populations are brought in to replace the worker shortages which further strain and expand the government bureaucracies. The government programs have by now come to resemble a Ponzi scheme and the whole thing teeters on an imminent collapse. Take a look at just about any country in Europe if you want to see a living example of once great nations facing extinction by becoming devoured by their own bureaucracies."


Persistence of Evil Vision: Why Liberals Justify Murder

"Behind a lot of the sympathy we see directed at criminals and terrorists is the underlying false premise that equates their motives and morality with ours. We assume that they are people just like ourselves, that their humanity and innate morality is equivalent to our own. It is only 'circumstances' which have forced them to steal, to kill, to molest children, to blow themselves up in crowded streets. It is not they who are to blame but the 'circumstances.'

When morality is independent of circumstances then it does not matter the conditions, we must nevertheless do what is right. When morality is purely circumstantial, situational, purely dependent on social circumstances then the privileged upper middle class white boy or girl can look into the heart of darkness and justify its tug on him or her by joining it in spirit, by waving a red or green banner, by defending and exculpating terrorists and killers. By joining the 'revolution.'"


Ending Citizenship in the Country of Victimhood

"9/11 is a break from the shifting maze of victimhood's identities, black, latino, white, asian, gay, cancer survivor, abuse survivor, drug survivor; for a chance to unite as Americans and understand that we had a chance to stop being survivors and to become fighters. To stop being the hyphenated victims of pet causes and to rise to the occasions as citizens of a great nation, a waking giant towering over the world.

A war is not merely a struggle, we have assigned Wars on Poverty, Wars on Disease, Wars on Hunger. We've become isolated enough from the reality of war that we've come to use it as a metaphor for any social problem. But war at its most basic is a struggle for the very existence of a people and a nation. That is what we face now and today and that is the test of our nation, whether we can rise above our citizenships in the multitude of countries of victimization and become Americans standing together or perish as victims apart."


Revolutions of Faith

"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.

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 product 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."



Happy holidays to all that celebrate them and to those who do not, may you have personal holidays of your own to rejoice in.