TEHRAN: Iran's Prosecutor General Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabadi has issued a dire warning about the culturally "destructive" consequences of importing Barbies, Harry Potter toys and more from the West.

"The displays of personalities such as Barbie, Batman, Spider-Man and Harry Potter ... as well as ... unsanctioned computer games and movies are all warning bells to the officials in the cultural arena," his letter added.

Najafabadi's warning comes almost six years after Tehran launched an unsuccessful campaign to confiscate Barbies.

There is of course the obvious reason, she's female. Barbie may only be a doll but she is female and the female is an Islamic taboo. In Islam the female form is an abomination, a neurosis and a source of powerful energy wrapped all in one.

Two years ago the police raided toy shops and put black stickers on the packaging of Barbie dolls to hide their bodies. Barbie contravenes Iran's rule that women must cover all bodily contours. Iran's rivals to Barbie and her partner, Ken, are Sara and Dara, who respect Islamic rules but do not enjoy Barbie's popularity.

But there are others too. Barbie is not simply a doll, any more than Harry Potter is just a boy wizard, Batman a man in a funny costume or Spider-Man is just a fellow in a red and black outfit who can climb walls. These toys and books that Iran is so outraged by are not simply objects, they are also subjects, they are characters in a narrative and the narrative is one that Islam's Mullahs, Ayatollahs and assorted riffraff in robes and turbans are not at all happy with.

Let's take another look at Barbie again. For all the beating that Barbie takes from Western critics, she is the creation of an independent woman and in her context is independent herself. She exists in a toy world where women can go out without being beaten and live their own lives without being killed. And she carries the assumptions inherent in that toy world with her wherever she goes.

It's an assumption that Americans may take for granted but that sense of personal destiny and individual freedom comes packaged with American cultural products. And while much of what we export may be junk, even our junk is accompanied by the basic premises of our culture, that individuals including women have rights. And that has a power constantly underestimated by Western cultural critics.

Inherent in the Barbie doll is the assumption that women can control how they look and where they go, an idea hateful to the rulers of Iran. When little Iranian girls play with Barbie, they take part in roleplaying with a female character devoid of their limitations.

And that is why Islam is afraid of Barbie, just as they are afraid of the rest of our culture. Not simply because some of it is sexualized, but because it is free of the Islamic code of behaviors, enforced by social consensus and terror.

Barbie, Batman, Harry Potter, Spider-Man and all the rest of the characters Iran is so worried about are individuals. They represent individual choices, whether it is hedonism or heroism. In Islamic societies where the young are expected to follow the old and women are expected to obey men, their very context defies those expectations.

In societies ruled by social conformity, Batman, Harry Potter, Spider-Man and most comic book characters carry the implicit liberalism of the American respect for what is different, for the right of the individual to be himself, to differ from his society and nevertheless to serve it.

And then there's the Jewish factor. Ruth Handler, the creator of Barbie, was Jewish. So was Bob Kane (Robert Kahn) the creator of Batman. As is Spider-Man creator Stan Lee (Stanley Lieber). To a regime obsessed with hating Jews, there is of course an inevitable need to "purge" Jewish culture, much as Ahmadinejad's role model in 1930's Germany did.

Finally these characters are non-Muslim role models in Islamic societies that reject and demonize non-Muslims. Batman, Spider-Man, etc are heroic, noble and brave. Virtues that the regime of Iran likes to reserve for its own "martyrs" -- but more than they represent an explicitly Western heroic tradition, one that believes in fair play, victory rather than death and the value of the individual.

At the heart of it that is why Islam fears Barbie, Spider-Man, Harry Potter, Batman and all the rest. Because they are individuals. They think for themselves, yet they act for the greater good, defying the totalitarian model of the individual as a natural hedonist who must be controlled by the rulers.

The Islamic tyrannies know that it takes conformity and obedience to send hundreds of thousands to their deaths. An individual is prepared to die, but he needs something worth dying for-- and Islam has nothing to offer in that regard but 72 Barbies in paradise.

(Pardy) Jeremiah Wright, America's most misunderstood black nationalist pastor, was kind enough to sit down for an interview with us.

A.C. Reverend Wright, I'm glad you could join us to explain how you've been misunderstood.

Rev Wright: That's right, I've been gravely misunderstood. I've been accused of being unpatriotic. I'm not unpatriotic, I just hate this country!

A.C. Glad you could clear that up for us.

Rev Wright: I'm so glad to be here! God Damn America!

A.C: What?

Rev Wright: Didn't you hear, God Damn America is the new God Bless America. Everyone's saying it now. From Islamabad to Cairo to Gaza to Jersey City to the sacred mosque of my brother Louis Farrakhan, they're all shouting God Damn America.

A.C: Can you just cut that out?

Rev. Wright: It's in the Bible!

A.C: Alright, where is in the Bible?

Rev. Wright: In one of them big chapters with all the goat sacrificin and the killings all that stuff in Aramaic.

A.C: I can see why the Reverend Pfleger called you America's most renowned theologian.

Rev Wright: God Damn America!

A.C.: Would you just stop that!

Rev. Wright: You got something against the Bible?

A.C.: It's not in the Bible!

Rev. Wright: It's in my Bible.

A.C.: Where?

Rev Wright: It's penciled in.

A.C.: Who penciled it in?

Rev Wright: God.

A.C.: God did not pencil that in.

Rev. Wright: Alright, I penciled it in! God Damn America!

A.C.: Sir, you are not God.

Rev Wright: I am God. Jesus was a poor black man just like me, driving a Porsche and living in a 1 million dollar home his church paid for. God Damn America.

A.C.: Didn't you claim you were misunderstood?

Rev Wright: That's right, I was taken completely out of context!

A.C: In what context did you mean God Damn America?

Rev Wright: In the context that this God damned country has poisoned the black man with AIDS and drugs and taken away his rightful arugula. This vile hellspawned country has oppressed the terrorist and the drug dealer, it has sowed its chickens across the world and now it reaps the whirlwind.

A.C.: That's a bunch of mixed metaphors.

Rev. Wright: No that's not a mixed metaphor, I'll tell you what's a mixed metaphor. What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like an arugula in the sun? What happens to this racist country if it refuses to elect a 1/4 black candidate four years out of the Illinois state legislature who wanted to build a home for senior citizens on a toxic waste dump, to the highest office in the nation? I'll tell you what's gonna happen to that arugula. It's gonna stink bad. Real bad!

A.C.: Getting back to your statements--

Rev. Wright: No I've had enough of you quoting me out of context. They want to take two minutes out of my speech about God damning America and using that to define me. What about all the times I didn't say God Damn America? Why don't I get credit for that?

A.C.: That's a very good point.

Rev. Wright: What about all the time I was saying God Damn Italy and God Damn Israel and God Damn The Entire Western Hemisphere instead? How do you balance that against my decades of service, for which I am only repaid with a million dollar home and millions of dollars in my bank account?

A.C.: That doesn't sound so selfless to me.

Rev. Wright: How dare you talk to me this way? I was a United States Marine. I spent Christmas in Cambodia with John Kerry.

A.C.: Kerry wasn't in the Marines.

Rev. Wright: Course he was. We was on a secret mission to deliver bombs so the white man could bomb some brown men in Cambodia. The chickens was coming home to roost all across Southeast Asia. We smuggled in hash in brown paper bags infected with AIDS to spread disease among the brown man. And the Jews were behind it all!

A.C.: I don't even know where to begin.

Rev. Wright: Same place I did. Just be a Black Muslim, then rip off their best material and use it to create your own church. God Damn America!

A.C.: So how do you feel about Obama disowning you?

Rev. Wright: Obama didn't disown me. He just had to get the Jews off his back. The Jews got this gay bomb that turns men of color into homosexuals. The Israelis developed it in South Africa and they used it on Michael Jackson when he wouldn't go along with them. Obama knows if the Jews use the gay bomb on him, there ain't no way the racist American people are gonna elect a gay 1/4 black man who lies a lot to the highest office of the land.

A.C.: There is no secret Israeli gay bomb.

Rev. Wright: Oh there's a gay bomb. They used it on Michael Jackson. They dropped it on Prince and between all that arugula and spanish ham, I half think they might have used it on Obama already.

A.C.: Like most Americans I just can't help wondering what the hell is wrong with you.

Rev. Wright: I'm a man of God and I serve him in my own way.

A.C.: You just said you were God.

Rev. Wright: That's right, I'm my own man. I serve myself. God Damn America!

In Zimbabwe international observers and diplomats sadly shake their heads as the 84 year old Mugabe unleashes yet another reign of terror in order to stay in power. Mugabe has presided over a long list of massacres and atrocities, over the murders of hundreds of thousands, over wars and ethnic cleansing. His latest bid for power is almost mild by comparison to the numerous atrocities of the Rhodesian Bush War, the Gukurahundi massacres, the Second Congo War and the land seizures and while the diplomats shake their heads-- the fact of the matter is that Mugabe is their monster.

Mugabe and the long list of crimes perpetrated by him lies not only on the doorstep of his former Soviet allies who backed his campaign of terrorism against the Rhodesian government, but the British and American diplomats who embraced this Marxist thug and insured that he would take power. If the story sounds like a familiar one, that is because it is quite familiar across many of Europe's former colonies in which the Marxist terrorists created and backed by the Soviet Union were embraced by Western diplomats who insured that they would take power in their respective countries. And when their reign turned into a bloody tyranny interspersed with even bloodier massacres, they shook their heads and wondered what else they could have done.

Mugabe is diplomacy's monster, just as Arafat, the eternal terrorist, is diplomacy's monster. The transformation of thugs who led bands of terrorists and killers on sprees of atrocities into Presidents and Prime Ministers is a crime that must be laid at diplomacy's door.

The rise of these diplomacy's monsters to power marked not only the surrender of the moral authority of the West, but the surrender of hundreds of millions of people from the third world under the authority of some of the worst dictatorships that could not have come into being without Western backing.

It was Western pressure, most notably from Britain and the United States, that overturned Rhodesia's last election and brought Mugabe to power, even though everyone concerned was quite familiar with the intimidation and atrocities that had preceded it. It was that same Western pressure that kept the cause of Mugabe's ZANU and ZANLA thugs burning bright, defending the ZANLA terrorist camps in Mozambique against Rhodesian strikes and forced a premature pullout from Mapai insuring that ZANLA would live to fight another day.

It was that same Western pressure which kept the PLO alive and resurrected it from defeat to defeat, pressuring Israel to negotiate with the PLO, transforming autonomy into an independent state and sending billions and providing arms and training to Fatah's horde of Marxist turned Islamist terrorists. Today Western pressure is brought to bear on Israel to turn over half its capital and a sizable portion of its territory to Arafat's successor Abbas even as the diplomats turn a deliberate blind eye to Fatah's crimes and corruption, not only against Israel, but against their own people.

If the Soviet Union sowed its legacy of dragon's teeth across the world by creating, equipping, backing and training Marxist terrorist and guerrilla groups across the third world, it is Western diplomacy that has reaped the full harvest, piling them into the silos of government and turning terrorists into national leaders. And each time those same diplomats claim to be surprised when their harvest yields nothing but rot and malignant infestations.

It was Western diplomats who transformed Marxist thugs like Mugabe and Arafat into world leaders while turning a blind eye to their brutal history and yet attempt to disavow credit for their legacy. Yet it is to them that the credit belongs and any War Crimes Tribunal that sees fit to judge the crimes of diplomacy's monsters, must also put the diplomats themselves in the dock.

While we pay close attention to how our wars are conducted, we pay far too little attention to how our diplomacy is conducted. We hold our generals to account, but all too rarely our diplomats. We demand results on the battlefield but take whatever agreement the diplomats create as a fait accompli. We demand ethical behavior from soldiers but expect none from diplomats. And our inattentiveness has consistently carried a terrible price for it as diplomats have saddled us with policies and agreements that have become millstones around our necks, in their support for tyrants and mass murderers, in the betrayal of our allies and our own national defense.

In matters of foreign policy, we are repeatedly told that more weight should be given to the diplomats over the generals. Diplomacy is portrayed as somehow nobler than war, when in truth it is far fouler. When we consider the full weight of atrocities created by diplomacy, from Hitler's conquest of Czechoslovakia to Stalin's conquest of Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century to the Marxist and Islamist tyrannies of the latter half of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st, diplomacy casts a far darker shadow than tyranny and in that shadow, diplomacy's monsters, the Arafats and Mugabes of the world, thrive.

With the final days of Passover now coming up, Sultan Knish enters a second brief blog hiatus for two days. Regular blogging will again resume Sunday evening. As hiatuses go, I would say that one is pretty short.

Around the world evil meanwhile runs the same old rat race.

Jimmy Carter's Hug Evil tour has fizzled out with criticism from both America and the Arab Palestinian authorities. Carter hoped to show up everyone with an accomplishment, but without access to Federal billions and military pressure, he had to rely to making the rounds of a dictatorship, paying tribute to its murderers, moonbat style, and finally going on his way.

This Jerusalem Post editorial suggests that Carter's campaign against Israel is more about attacking Christian conservatives.

Levine speaks of liberals - the Hebrew Bible's calls for justice are too often twisted into anti-Jewish and anti-Israel rants.

"Jesus becomes the Palestinian martyr crucified once again by the Jews; he is the one killed by the 'patriarchal god of Judaism.'" She adds, "The history is dreadful, and the impression given of Judaism is obscene."

Liberal Protestantism, both in North America and Europe, is experiencing a steep numerical decline. It has lost considerable ground to secular consumerism on the Left and the startling growth of more conservative churches on the Right. This is a galling proposition for a committed liberal Christian such as the former president, who took office in 1977 as America's first openly born-again chief executive.

For Carter, blaming Israel for the Middle East's problems and cuddling up to those who are among the Jewish state's most implacable enemies is an indirect attack on conservative Christians, and most pointedly those who would identify themselves as Christian Zionists, his bitter theological rivals.

While Carter would certainly not be the first leftie to aim a few kicks at the Jews in order to get to the conservative Christians, I don't think it's that simple. Carter has a long history of genuinely hating Israel and Jews.

Rather than being a means to attack conservative Christians, campaign against Israel are part and parcel of the belief system of such liberals as Carter or Obama. Their campaigns against Israel are consistent with their campaigns against America.

It would be inconsistent for Carter not to hate Jews and Israel, just as he hates America and Conservative Christians.


The Sean Bell verdict has come in, and though I'm no apologist for the NYPD, I believe it's the right verdict, when the facts that the media isn't hyping, are taken into account. I think there is far too much casual use of force by the police and while there may have been dubious actions in the Sean Bell case, they never rose to the point of a criminal prosecution.

Bloomberg's leap to judgement against the police was despicable and part and parcel of his odious liberalism and toadying to extremists in exchange for political support.


China and Tibetan protesters appears to be extracting a Pyrrhic victory as the crackdown on foreigners in China, including at least one assault on a volunteer teacher in Hunan, is likely to discourage foreign Olympic visitors.
There are of course the usual government approved demonstrations against foreign businesses and even the occasional protest rally abroad, including in Seattle. With thousands of estimated industrial spies from China in the West, there are no shortage of personnel to send out to shout in front of a building I'm sure.

There are also occasional attempts to exploit social networking to get the Chinese government's message across but they've amounted to very little.


Around the blogsphere, Boker Tov Boulder has a good summary of the funeral for the absurd letter that Sharon touted would protect Israel. Much as I predicted, the letter is being disavowed by the State Department, once more concessions have been pressed into service.

The diplomats have been happy enough to presents letters, agreements and promises that never meant anything. And that's how an autonomous territory ballooned into a terrorist state in the first place.


Maggie's Notebook has a look into the genuinely sick theology behind Wright and Obama.

"Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill gods who do not belong to the black community. Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in black power which is the power of black people to destroy their opinion pressers here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love."

The Ol Broad blog has her take on the D.C. disconnect with the real world.

The New Centrist has a thoughtful look at identity and radical politics in the US

It’s my contention, and I realize it’s a strong claim, that most people involved in radical politics in the United States are not involved for reasons that many would consider political. Instead, involvement in these groups and organizations provides a sense of belonging and identity.

Most of the actions that take place under the rubric of “radical politics” in the U.S. has very little actual political content, at least in relation to domestic or foreign policy. As Kevin Harris has argued, many people who join these marginal political groups are participating in a self-delusional political fantasy:

At the Keli Ata blog, more information on the brutal murder of local boy Jonathan Cote in Iraq.

Samurai Mohel updates the increasingly odd story of Edwin Beckford.

Wake up America covers the hypocritical firestorm over Limbaugh's comments and the Recreate 68 hypocrisy.

Lemon Lime Moon writes on Barack Obama: Messiah of Hope, Martyr of Misunderstanding

He and his elitist wife are a extreme parody of snobbery . They are so snobby that they feel they can make absolutely idiotic statements and lies and get away with it.They look so far down their long noses at others that they feel people will accept anything from them and thank them for it too.

Christi Parsons at The Swamp reports this quote from Barack made at Rodeph Shalom synagogue: “My links to the Jewish community are not political," he said. "They preceded my entry into politics.” Yes, they are not just political they are heartfelt and they are anti-Jewish and anti-American , mean spirited and bigotted. His choice of pals shows his position :Farrakhan, Wright and home grown hippy terrorist William Ayers. I would guess the list continues from there and probably gets more interesting

Yid with Lid asks, Will Bush's Legacy Be the Destruction of Israel?

After 9/11 when so many Americans were tragically lost Bush had a change of heart. He came to understand what terrorism was about. His relationship with Israel's leaders became much closer. Bush began to understand that Israel is on the front lines in the war on terror. But now all that has changed, he has gone back to being a Dhimmi,

After the 2006 mid term elections, Bush became for all intents and purposes a lame-duck President. Instead of continuing the fight for what is right, he 'gave in to a Secretary of State who sees the Palestinian terrorists as heroes and the terrorist leader as Martin Luther King.

Meanwhile over at Debbie Schlussel, the story of how Sharia in America destroyed a black couple's restaurant.

Arcapita/First Islamic Investment Bank, is owned by Saudi and other Gulf state sheiks, some of whom are believed to have donated to homicide bomber telethons, and one of whom is from the family that owns Al-Jazeera. And Arcapita/First Islamic still employs another Islamic sharia authority with ties to Al-Qaeda.

Arcapita has acquired businesses and important installations all over America for its wealthy Islamic sheikh owners. As I've noted, Arcapita recently acquired an energy plant in Texas. And, as I've noted over the years, they continue to own Church's Fried Chicken.

The Beasleys owned a Church's Fried Chicken franchise. They planned to offer breakfeast dishes, including pork and bacon. But, once Arcapita acquired Church's, Arcapita's strict sharia compliance requirements were foisted upon the Beasley's and they were restricted from selling the breakfast items. They say this is the reason their business failed and that they were driven to bankruptcy. They lost everything, including their home, as a result

The Torah speaks of four sons: One wise, one wicked, one simple and one who does not know how to ask a question.

What does the wise son say?

"What is this country that God has given us and what are the laws and practices we must maintain to keep it safe?"

And you shall tell him that after the land is liberated through Divine aid and the blood of heroes one may not maintain the enemy there for he will surely rise up against you and give you neither. (Numbers 33:55)


What does the wicked son say?

"What is this labor of oppression to you? Let us retreat from the land, let us abandon it border by border and city by city and relocate somewhere where we may do whatever our heart desires."

To you and not to him. Since he excludes himself from the Jewish people, he betrays the heart of his identity and you shall say to him, "It is for the sake of this, that we should enter the land and keep it and serve Him that God liberated us from our exiles and from under the hand of cruel kings and tyrants. For us and not for you. The exile is in your soul and as you are exiled from your God and from your people, so too will you be exiled from the land wherever you may be."


What does the simple son say?

"What's all this? Why have all this fighting and killing. Why can't we all just live in peace?"

And you shall say to him, "As long as there is evil and evil men in the world, men of good courage must keep a sword raised and a rifle close to defend their families and their people against them. For where there is light there is also darkness and where there are those who hold true their ancient faith in one God, there shall be forever those who seek to destroy it until the end of days comes. Now be of good courage and know that true peace comes not from treaties or empty promises, but from those men who do their duty and stand against the darkness."


What of the Son who does not know how to ask?

And the son who does not know how to ask, you open the conversation for him by saying, as the Torah says: "And you should tell your son on that day, saying 'It is for the sake of this that Hashem did for me when I left Egypt.' And out of all the exiles as out of Egypt, we only truly come together as a people serving our God in the land of our ancestors."

70 year old Jerusalem resident Nathan Weil, a former soldier of the IDF Paratrooper brigade with the help of his 68 year old wife drove off three Arabs who broke into his home.

Nathan was alone in his own home in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Bayit VeGan on Pesach when he heard a knock on his door at 5 PM yesterday and someone called him by name, "Nathan, Nathan." After opening the door he was confronted with an Arab robber who entered his home and ordered him to stand aside.

Without losing any time, the former paratrooper stunned him with a fist to the face. He reached for the phone to call the police but before he could complete the call, two other Arabs entered wearing in ski masks.

The two assailants attempted to strike Nathan with steel bars they had in their hands but he succeeded in avoiding the blows which did smash a utility cabinet along with the telephone.

While one of the Arab burglars attempted to seize him and tie him to a chair, Nathan Weil broke one of his fingers. At this point Nathan Weil's wife returned home and seeing what was going on called for help and the Arab burglars fled. Nathan Weil's wife pursued them and as they drove away succeeded in memorizing the license plate number of their car.

The police used the broken finger and the license plate number to identify and arrest the robbers. a

We talk a lot about Dhimmis and Dhimmification but aside from the generic yielding to Islam, what exactly does a Dhimmi look like?

There's not much point in talking about the average man on the street, bullied into dhimmification by a political and cultural elite. We've talked before about the dhimmi impulse on the left and its cultural impact and we will again. But it's our leaders, the top rank of our nations and civilizations, who have willingly adopted the role of Dhimmi despite being in the power center of mighty nations.

Or to put it another way, What Makes Johnny Dhimmi Run Away?

A closer look at the Dhimmi leadership will yield some surprises. These leaders of the Dhimmi class and of our own nations and cultural centers are occasionally left wing, sometimes liberal leaning but generally moderate. While their views may seem liberal to us, that's only because in truth they lack any real views of their own. As the left's culture war has continued to push the center further and further to the left, views that were once liberal, become mainstream. And Johnny Dhimmi is a creature of the center, a true moderate in the sense that he moves with the herd of public opinion while pretending to be its shepherd. As a faithful worshiper of the status quo, Johnny Dhimmi is quick to adapt to whatever the dominant view appears to be.

Johnny Dhimmi may be President of a nation or a college, he may be Prime Minister or an Archbishop, he may be a corporate CEO or an army General. He does however have certain common denominators. He is not particularly smart or particularly honest, but he has mastered two core elements, people and organizations. Johnny Dhimmi is the Peter Principle come to life, promoted well and above his level of incompetence.

In person Johnny Dhimmi is generally congenial but with a sharp sense of humor that usually expresses itself at someone else's expense. He is not successful at any actual job or task, but what he is successful at is networking and making connections and then using them to climb the next step of the ladder.

Johnny Dhimmi does not have any ideas of his own but he excels at borrowing other people's ideas, breaking them down to the simplest common denominator and using them as a repetitive slogan. You couldn't argue with Johnny Dhimmi because he spends very little time thinking about things and ideas need to be conveyed to him in bite size form. At the same time Johnny Dhimmi is suspicious of excessively simple ideas, such as national self-defense or a clash of civilizations, as a natural born manager, he prefers an answer that will smooth out the bumps and keep business moving. While he is not above exploiting patriotic symbols or rhetoric and even believes them at the time, he never takes them too seriously, they are a costume he puts on and takes off when appropriate.

Johnny Dhimmi lives in a business oriented world. His friends are often businessmen and he may have even had a business background and even if he doesn't, thanks to his friends he likely has some business interests now. As a politician his policy agenda is colored by the impact of legislation on his business friends. This does not necessarily mean that he is pro-business in the conventional way, he may be pro-environment if his friends have plans to profit from environment related businesses. He may be pro-socialized medicine if his friends have interests in companies that expect to profit from the transition. He does not see this as hypocrisy, only good business... because he tends to define the public interest in terms of the business interests of his associates who to him represent the 'public', the 'ordinary' people he has access to on a regular basis. Often, like many politicians, he genuinely sees no contraction in this.

As a General, Johnny Dhimmi has very little interest in war. The military for him is an extension of business and political ambitions. He is often anti-war in private and prefers to avoid any conflicts, as they interfere with his comfortable position. After the military, he likely looks forward to a job as a lobbyist for the defense industry or perhaps a career in politics.

As a clergyman, Johnny Dhimmi has little in the way of religion. He believes in God in a formal sort of way and sees his job mainly involving making people feel better about their lives. He has no desire or interest to seek out God and while he is suspicious and hostile toward his co-religionists who do, he admires Muslims who seem so determined about their faith-- from a safe distance. His view of them is an uneasy mix of orientalism and the noble savage, but in public this emerges as admiration and interfaith fellowship.

The one thing that cannot be denied though is that Johnny Dhimmi possesses certain leadership skills or at least the facade of those skills. He is a decent public speaker but often even better on a one on one basis, capable of fathoming what others want and compromising and cutting a deal. Though he has poor decision making skills, these abilities move him up in business, politics and the military, sometimes all the way to the top.

Johnny Dhimmi has learned throughout his career that the safest approach is the mildest. He is capable of bold rhetoric and action when needed, he is not emotionless or a robot, but he is naturally static and has trouble coping with new ideas. He prefers accommodation to conflict and while he will fight politically for what he believes in, it will only be until he realizes that it is hopeless and then he will look for a way out. It may however take time for this understanding to sink in, often making him the last man on the Titanic to notice the big iceberg.

Johnny Dhimmi is not a bad man, often he is a moderately decent man. He thinks of himself as moral and in some ways he is. He makes an affectionate husband and a loving if somewhat self-centered father. But he also lacks any real ideas or character and when push comes to shove, he falls backward.

His response to the rise of Islamic terror is to look for easy solutions that work for everyone. His initial response is to ignore it. His second response is to accommodate the moderates while banishing the extremists. When this fails, he stalls and looks to someone else for answers. Finally he begins negotiating the terms of surrender for his country in order to get the best terms and limit the damage.

The destructive capacity of Johnny Dhimmi lies in his sheer uselessness and lack of mental agility and ability. Devoid of any spine, he folds easily. Things have come easy to him in life and his entire professional career has been devoted to convincing people to do what he thinks is best. And what he thinks is best, is what will keep business going.

Johnny Dhimmi is loyal, but not to a country. His first and foremost interest is not the nation, but that corner of it which consists of his friends' business interests. He is strongly loyal when it comes to his friends and what his friends what is for international trade to keep running smoothly. They will be interested in new business opportunities from conflicts on occasion, but mostly they prefer that their country be viewed positively abroad, that trade run smoothly, that tourism is easy and that a large supply of cheap labor exists through immigration. They like the idea of government taking on many of their responsibilities and they strongly dislike excessively loud patriotism and nationalism, as it tends to scare away the foreign clients and offends their cynically comfortable lifestyles.

This is the face of Johnny Dhimmi, traitor without a clue, the man whose very hollowness undermines his country without ever understanding the how or why of it. Lacking principles and judgment, he sells out his country because he does not understand what he should be standing up for and why.

Lately it doesn't seem to be enough for liberal politicians to merely run on a political platform, it's not enough to do such mundane things as discuss policy proposals and programs, in place of politicians, liberalism now gives us saviors.

From Saint Barack to the Goracle, liberal politicians are no longer satisfied with just dispensing pork and collecting six figure salaries. Now they want to be your savior too.

Al Gore has built his post-crazy reputation on promising to save us from a crisis that doesn't exist and that we couldn't actually do anything about it, if it did. Strange bearded men who stand in Times Square wearing sandwich boards claiming that the world is doomed are laughed at... unless they happen to be a former Vice President that is.

Saint Barack, with the Illinois State Legislature still wet behind his ears, disdains to run on experience, instead of running for President in 2008, he's running as the Savior of Camelot Reborn or maybe it's Best JFK Impersonator with Criminal and Racist Ties.

Remember when politicians just used to be politicians, without expecting you to erect a Church or a Temple in their honor? It takes an outsized ego to run for public office, but even the Democrats should have drawn the line at worshiping a fat crazy bearded ex-president who claims the world is going to end if we don't switch to energy saving light bulbs (Q. How many Gores does it take to screw in an energy efficient lightbulb? A. None, energy efficiency is only for the little people) and a slimy Chicago State Senator with charisma and ties to radical Muslims.

Sadly they didn't and so now we're saddled with a black Carter trying to pass for JFK and a political hack who went crazy after losing the election and decided that he's the environmental messiah, despite his fleet of cars and the fact that all his books on the environment are ghostwritten and riddled with obvious errors.

American democracy was premised on the fallibility of our leaders. That's why we have a system of checks and balances in the first place. We don't elect monarchs, saviors or deities. We elect men.

Obama and Gore's liberal supporters expect us to treat their idols as suprahuman. If you question Al Gore's popularized misinterpretations of scientific theories, you're a heretic. If the ABC debate asks Saint Barry about his Wright issues, the Dem Underground mob lets out a howl and demands the scalps of ABC producers who of course are in the pay of Karl Rove.

Welcome to 2008 - The year the Democrats got religion. Unfortunately it's the idolatry of politicians, rather than the worship of any higher power. Democrats may claim to be for the Separation of Church and State, but what they're foisting on us instead, is Church fused with State, a secular religion dedicating to turning living politicians into minor deities.

Absurdity transcends absurdity with liberals warning us about the dangers of state religion as they're turning their limousines and campaign vans into the turnoff to Babylon.

With Passover we celebrate the redemption of the Jews from Egypt. What is the significance of this redemption? Was it merely slavery that we were redeemed from? In fact 4000 years before Hitler, Pharaoh had built his own system of genocide for the Jews. Like Hitler he began by accusing the Jews of disloyalty to his own countrymen, he followed this up by building the first work camps for the Jews and then implementing the first plan of genocide to wipe out the Jewish people.

Millennia before Hitler, Pharaoh had a systematized plan of genocide in place. The Jews would report to work building his pyramids for him under Jewish foremen and work themselves to death and the Jewish newborn boys would be killed by Jewish midwives. Like the Kapos and the Yevesketsia, Jews would do the dirty work and Pharaoh would reap the benefits.

And what did Pharaoh have the Jews build for him? Pyramids, tombs of the dead for a kingdom of death in which the Pharaohs would be buried, eternal rulers of the dead over a kingdom of the dead. Appropriate enough for Egypt which had dedicated so much of itself to a study of death, to mummification of the dead and to its pyramids of the dead, all attempts to preserve corpses and enthrone death above life.

And what began the redemption of the Jews from Egypt? We see it at the end of the first chapter of Exodus after Pharaoh has enslaved the Jews, he decided to wipe out the next generation by commanding the Jewish midwives to kill the Jewish newborns. The kingdom of death issued its command but the midwives did not obey. Instead of fearing Pharaoh, ruler of the Kingdom of Death, it says, "Vatirena Hameyaldot et HaElohim" "The Midwives Feared God" and so they did not do as Pharaoh asked, "Vetaheyana et Hayeladim" "They Kept the Children Alive."

What is the great significance of this? Children are the essence of the future. They are life itself at the core of its potential. They are the next generation, born either to life or death, the only hope of perpetuating the future. When Pharaoh strove to kill the Jewish children, he was aiming to wipe out the life not only of the next generation of the Jewish people, but all the generations. Like Hitler, he had built up a kingdom of death embodied in pyramids in Egypt, as it was embodied in the crematoria under Germany. And in defiance of him, "Vetahayena et Hayeladim", the midwives instead chose to fear God and they chose to let the children live. The culture of life prevailed in that instant over the kingdom of death.

And how did God respond? The rest of the chapter tells us, "Vayaas Lahem Batim" "He Built Houses for Them". What does that mean exactly? The commentaries tell us that these were the houses of royalty and priesthood for Miriam was to be an ancestress of the House of David and Aaron the patriarch of the priesthood. In what merit were they so honored? Because they had chosen life. They had perpetuated the next generation of Jewish children and so their children would become the leaders of future generations in perpetuity. Theirs would be the Temple and to Egypt would remain the echoing tombs of the dead.

But the kingdom of death does not take this lying down. The kingdom of death never does, so Pharaoh orders his people to go and kill the Jewish children themselves. And like so many peoples throughout the ages, they go out and do this. The kingdom of death always knows to go after the children. When the Palestinian Arab sniper saw ten month old Shalhevet Pass in his scope, he knew he had his target. When the Arab terrorist burst into a school into Jerusalem to gun down students, he too knew exactly what he was doing. When Arabs teach their children to hate and kill, they too show themselves to be the spiritual descendants of Pharaoh, the rightful inheritors of his kingdom of death.

And what do the Jews do to defy this? What does God do? It's simple. At the beginning of the second chapter it says, "And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took as his wife a daughter of Levi And the woman conceived, and bore a son." To achieve victory over the kingdom of death, you perpetuate life. You create life. You defy death.

We can see the drop in the birth rates or the high infant mortality rates of cultures that have decided to give up, to build themselves virtual tombs of consumer electronics and to mummify themselves in the shrouds of their own hedonism and self-centeredness. The culture of death begins in self-centeredness, the obsession with one's own mortality and degenerates a contempt from life and from there into violence and murder. For good to triumph over evil, the culture of life must triumph over the kingdom of death.

Beginning today Sultan Knish goes into a 3 day hiatus for Passover. Blogging will resume again Monday evening. But in honor of President Putin, I leave you with the new Russian National Anthem. Enjoy.



Meanwhile in the roundup, Mr. Carter goes to Hamas continues to play out, but Carter has done this before. While he obsessively hates Israel and Jews, it's a subset of his larger hatred for America. This is the man who sabotaged even fellow Democratic Bill Clinton in order to keep North Korea on the path to developing nuclear weapons.

Even obnoxious Presidents have traditionally stayed quiet after their term was up. Carter has instead become even more maniacal, a disgrace as President, he has become an even bigger disgrace as an ex-President.

But Carter's escapades are a preview of what a President Obama would be like... and that's one reason Democrats are scrambling to try and get him out of the spotlight. After all Obama's politics give us every reason to believe that the man under the mask would make even Carter look moderate. From Ayers to Said to Wright to Pfleger and all of Obama's other friends and mentors, a grim radical picture continues to emerge.

Meanwhile in the next tab on the list of things sure to infuriate Muslims, the new book 'Why We Left Islam' is already provoking outrage.

Not only does it have a picture of Mohammed (Peas Be Upon Him) but it's a picture of him torn in half.

Why We Left Islam, features Ali Sina, of FaithFreedom who has been a leading voice for ex-Muslims and against Islam. The Daily News article quite inaccurately cites our old friend Ibrahim Hooper as a "moderate muslim".

Why We Left Islam is important as a counter to the great megaphone of pro-Islamic propaganda being broadcast everywhere. As in Afghanistan and Somalia and Iraq and Gaza, the growing dissatisfaction with Islam is best exemplified by those who have had to live through it, just as the best people to really speak to the evils of Communism were those who lived under it.

Why We Left Islam is available at WND Books or Amazon.com Why We Left Islam: Former Muslims Speak Out

In the great big blog roundup, Elder of Ziyon reminds us of our Fatah peace partners' plan to poison hundreds at a restaurant using chemical weapons.

The two did not have working permits and were residing in Israel illegally. While in Nablus, they had been recruited to the al-Aqsa Martyr's Bridges, the military wing of Fatah, under the guidance and funding of Hizbullah.

The white substance is virtually undetectable and affects its victims approximately four hours after being ingested.

This is another tactic and a reminder of the real cost of lowering those West Bank checkpoints to bring more Palestinian Arabs into Israel.

Maggie's Notebook has disturbing information from Kenya, where the spread of Dhimmism has implications for this election as well with Obama emerging as a front runner in the Democratic primaries. Also keep in mind how Thailand's Muslim coup turned over the country to a Muslim leader who promptly began a soft on terror policy complete with an autonomy deal.

Wake Up America has extensive coverage on the Texas FLDS compound mess. While I haven't written about the situation to date, one phrase from the story does leap out at me;

When Voss was asked point blank if in her professional opinion the children should be returned to the compound, she said she did not because "the sect members do not believe they are doing anything wrong."

And that is really the problem we are faced with on a global scale, whether it's Islam or Dhimminism. Evil in movies is depicted as consciously evil but real evil does not believe it is doing anything wrong... and that is why confronting it requires more than summoning archetypes or expecting that it will walk in the door with fangs and a gun. Real evil is what we learn to tolerate, what we become habituated too.

The boundary between us and evil is that there are things we do not tolerate. In response to my The virus of Tolerance post, a liberal blog accused me and Avid Editor off the Think Progress Watch blog of being racist. But the following lines which they quoted is at the heart of the matter.

… we must be careful of what we tolerate, because intolerance is the gatekeeper, the immune system that acts as a barrier. There are things for which that barrier should be lowered and things for which it should remain in place. A society that universally tolerates everything is a society without values or defense mechanisms.

When we learn to tolerate something we also accept it and we must be careful what we accept. Accepting something, whether it is homosexuality, polygamy, pedophilia, islamism, communism, fascism, carries a moral price that we pay as we cease to be able to distinguish right from wrong.

Continuing the roundup, Esser Agaroth has the Pesach Hevel Havalim roundup of blogs.

Over at IsraPundit, former Major General and Nat Security Council head Giora Eiland offers some rational common sense for the ongoing Oslo Land for Terror insanity going on in Israel.

So what should we do? We should reshuffle the cards and try to think about other solutions as well. One of them is a return to the Jordanian option. The Jordanians won’t admit this publicly, yet a Palestinian state in the West Bank is the worst solution for them.

They too know that within a short period of time such state would be ruled by Hamas. The moment Jordan – which features a Palestinian majority as well as powerful Muslim Brotherhood opposition – will share a border with a Hamas state, the Hashemite regime will face immediate danger.

Other options are regional solutions whereby both Egypt and Jordan will contribute territory to the Palestinian state. As opposed to common perceptions as if this has no chance of materializing, we can prove that the great winners in such arrangement could in fact be Egypt and Jordan.

Lemon Lime Moon writes on gratefulness or bitter feelings

Magazines, online news and all kinds of places are running polls to find out how "bitter" Americans are. The furor began when Barack Hussein Obama said that Pennsylvanians, well small town people, were bitter and tended to lean on religion , guns and bigotry to get through.

When I was a little girl milk ran through the streets of middle America because the haul of cow's milk was so great that there was no room to store all that was left after storage of years and years worth and after supplying it free to a hungry world.

Silos were filled with years and years worth of grain to the brim and multiple feet of it flowed around the bottoms... again, after everyone was full and more than plenty was sent around the world to feed the nations gratis.

We have the richest wine soils in the world. Our dairies are second to none, our beef cattle the best, our cheeses are health giving and nutritious, the orchards that stretch from sea to shining sea are brilliant and aromatic giving us peaches and apples, nuts, oranges, lemons, limes, and every fruit good to eat can be grown here.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific.. from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico and California there is plenty and freedom from want for any who are enterprising and seek it.

Our poorest folk have more than many in most nations and we have so much that too much is wasted often.

We supply our own and have not neglected to supply the world either with food and charity of all sorts. America has fed the entire world.

What have we to be bitter about Mr. Obama?

First we begin with a desperate smear of McCain on Israel. Now there may be valid reasons to criticize McCain on Israel, but Howie Berman's lame smear via Think Progress that attempts to claim that McCain's commitment to eliminating earmarks means he wants to eliminate foreign aid to Israel is so dishonest as to merit its own place of honor at the shill table.

Now Earmarks are a major source of congressional pork, they are widely abused and largely responsible for ballooning government spending at a time when the economy is in a downturn. Congress has shown that it cannot exercise budgetary discipline, which makes McCain's call for killing Earmarks pretty sensible.

So in response Congressman Howard Berman, member of a party about to put forward a racist with strong ties to radical anti-semites and terrorists and terrorist supporters, actually accused McCain of wanting to cut aid to Israel. Now aid to Israel does not need to come in the form of earmarks. It has bipartisan congressional support and will not be endangered. By contrast individual members designated hundreds of millions of dollars for pork projects will be.

Since then McCain's campaign issued a statement that he intends to maintain funding assistance for Israel at current levels. The Democrats have responded by shrieking and calling McCain a flip flopper who doesn't really want to eliminate earmarks after all. (Ironic from people who just spent a day accusing McCain of being Anti-Israel for wanting to get rid of them) Of course McCain said nothing about preserving earmarks. He said that he intends to maintain funding assistance levels for Israel. Sadly Democrats just can't read.

The real staggering hypocrisy of Howard Berman's attack on McCain over Earmarks isn't just that it was an attempt by an increasingly Anti-Israel party whose ex-President just went off to make out with Hamas leaders and whose current pro-terrorist candidate can't wait to make deals with Iran, to try and smear the Republican Presidential nominee.

It isn't just that it was an attempt to misrepresent a proposal to reform Earmarks as an attack on Israel.

No it's the fact that just last year Howard Berman himself had proposed a bill to ban earmarks. So Howard Berman is attacking McCain, for a proposal that Berman himself had put forward last year alone. So if McCain is Anti-Israel, isn't Howard Berman Anti-Israel too?

But wait the hypocrisy train doesn't stop here either. Because Howard Berman himself has used earmarks extensively, just take a look at his record for 2008.

Highlights include

Tattoo Removal Program at Providence Holy Cross - $150,000

Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterrey Institute for International Affairs - $2 million

Salvadoran American Leadership & Educational Fund - $250,000

US-Ukraine Foundation - $9.7 million

Scholarships for basic and higher education in Muslim countries - $9 million

Seeds of Peace - $1 million

Valley Economic Development Corporation - $250,000

Hypocrisy watch concluded. Meanwhile the handful of liberal Jewish blogs saddled with the thankless task of promoting and defending a party that despises them, like DovBear and Town Crier, have jumped all over the story, linking to the original Think Progress piece.

Unfortunately for them their fellow progressives in the comments section used the occasion to scream against Israel. Choice comments include...

scytherius Says: If it eliminates aid to Israel then I’m all for it.

linda Says: well, i’ll be damned. that’s something i would support whole-heartedly. i am disgusted that this country is held hostage to aipac

freeatlast Says: FYI: As usual, because of the undue influence of a “special” group of people, the Huffington Post link to this article is not allowing free expression and discourse on their comments section. Nice to see there are still “untarnished” sites which allow a different opinion to be posted than only those that are politically correct.

betz55 Says: Cut US aid to Israel.The US should stop pandering to Israel and it`s destructive policies.Cut off aid and stop the loan guarantees.Demand peace and fair settlement with the Palestinians and extract the US from Israel`s damaging,harmful,negative, apartheid policies

hupy Says: It IS about time we cut our colony Israel loose. Let those people go! If this is truly McCain position I plan to vote for him for president. Every single bullet that nails a Palestinian child has USA printed on it.

Enjoy your allies and the real face of the Democratic party.

An agrarian economy will naturally have a higher birth rate in part because children have a greater economic value and utility in an agrarian economy vs a post-industrial economy, where children can quickly become an economic burden rather than an asset.

Third World cultures are likely to be less self-oriented and individualistic while being more religious and traditional and therefore have a higher birth rate. First World countries center around the individual and his or her sense of satisfaction. Consumerism has made satisfying individual needs into a ritual and the individual into the totem idol in the center of his own worship circle. This leaves little room for children and abortion is as much the bastard child of consumerism, as fast food and 300 television channels.

Child labor laws have drastically decreased the economic value of children, (except as child actors and celebrities), accordingly birth rates have dropped even in industrialized Second World nations with child labor laws. With children less able to contribute to the family and with an increasingly prolonged educational process that now culminates anywhere from ages 18 to 22 to a high of 26, high birth rates become increasingly difficult to support. Consumerism itself drastically raises spending on children and by children, making larger families all the more economically trying.

When Third World cultures enter First World nations, they enter an industrial economy whose birth rate they quickly exceed. These multiple births however are out of place in an industrial economy which is no longer meant to accommodate them. Supporting such a birth rate therefore becomes a problem that is foisted onto social services. Once a family becomes dependent on social welfare programs, it can often decide to milk the system for all it can get, creating endemic fraud. Even if does not go this route however, the children are often put to finding extralegal means of contributing to the family income, which generates crime and creates a criminal culture within the family and the community that can then last for generations.

There are a number of ways for First World nations to cope with this situation.

First of all set immigration quotas by birth rate. While some immigrants are needed, immigrants who outreproduce you, are not, since they create radical change that a nation's own culture cannot sustain. The melting pot only melts so far until it explodes.

If immigration quotas are set by family size and by the average birth rate of the country of origin, a country can better accommodate the collision of birth rates, taking in those immigrants whose birth rate is more compatible with their adopted country.

This would for example mean more Polish (10/1000), Chinese (13/1000) and Irish (14/1000) immigrants and less Pakistani (27/1000), Mexican (20/1000) and Somalian (45/1000) ones. Note how this compares to the American (14/1000), Canadian (11/1000), British (10/1000), French (13/1000) birth rates -- and decide for yourself which groups are more compatible birth rate wise.

The advantage of this is obvious. Large birth rates are more taxing and require heavy investment in schools and social services infrastructure. Which diminishes the value of the immigrants to their host society and creates a heavy burden.

Secondly, increase native birth rates to better match those of the incoming populations. The common approach has been to do this through tax incentives and similar programs, but that has been demonstrated to be unsatisfactory. First World countries have adopted economies that make childbearing a burden, even with incentives and generous maternity leave and similar programs, all that is accomplished is to make the burden a little more manageable.

It is important to recognize that the entire economic structure in the West, from consumerism to high tax rates to heavy debt to extended educational processes that primarily serve as an advanced educational form of babysitting, effectively make large families difficult to sustain. Restoring the birth rates we used to have will require deemphasizing consumerism and the debt economy, reducing the tax burden significantly on native born families and enabling the return of the extended family, trimming the extended educational process and accepting a larger role for children and teenagers in contributing to family finances. While none of this is likely to happen, it is worth noting in order to contemplate what it would take to compete in terms of birth rates with incoming immigrant populations.

Thirdly the economic structure of the population in the target country and the country of origin must be heavily weighed in considering prospective immigration. People from a country of origin who are not capable of properly functioning in a Western economy without becoming a burden on social services should not be admitted. Western countries have no shortage of shopkeepers that we constantly need to be importing more and more of them.

Taking in immigrants who cannot function economically and demographically in a way that contributes positively to the country without excessive negatives, is unhelpful both to the host country and to the immigrants themselves.

The real problems of immigration stem from its unplanned and chaotic nature as random rules and a complete lack of oversight make no coherent attempt to plan the flow of immigration with a view to integration.

For every European who ever sat in snide judgment about Israel, who thought things would have been hunky dory if "that shitty country", in the words of a French ambassador, had never existed, I have bad news. You are Israel.

In the early 20th century Britain took over and began attracting large numbers of Arab laborers. A few decades later those Arabs combined with some of the existing natives had a manufactured identity as Palestinians, a flag, an anthem written for them by a Greek Communist composer, guns, bombs and Western bleeding hearts on their side. They've spent the intervening period, rioting, looting, raping and killing any way they can.

Sound familiar? It should.

Israel's Muslim problem pales by comparison to France's 5 million Muslim problem. And Britain didn't simply attract Arabs to Israel, it attracted them to the home country as well. Europe is overrun with guest laborers, con artists, smugglers, students, second wives and the whole bubbling goulash of Muslim immigrants who are reproducing in great numbers. They have held their first Intifadas, blown up buses, burned cars, built Mosques where the same flavor of hatred is preached as in Gaza or the West Bank and declared their intentions to reclaim Spain and whatever other parts of Europe the Ummah feels it has a claim on.

If Israel was supposed to be the new Europe, Europe instead is turning out to be the New Israel, saddled with defunct socialist bureaucracies and a growing Muslim terrorist threat that socialist governments do their best to whistle and pretend isn't there or try to frantically appease.

Oslo may have been the setting for Israel's Going Out of Business sale, but Norway and Sweden may well be the ones to go out of business first as even the coldest lands have filled up with the cries of Allah Akhbar, the lusty calls of newborn Muslim infants and the sobs and screams of raped Swedish women. This will make little difference in Israel or any other Western country which is on the conveyor belt to the same place, the Sharia Abattoir.

Israel's situation didn't come about because the Jews have some special quality for antagonizing perfectly peaceful people, as too many Europeans would like to believe. All it really takes to turn any European country into Israel is a few hundred thousand savages squatting on carpets, demanding their rights and grabbing the knife or the detonator if they don't get them. And the only thing that can prevent it is a good strong immigration policy and a great deal of boats to ship anyone back home who isn't happy with it.

Contrary to the endless bewailings of phony refugees in decades old refugee camps, Israel didn't expel Arabs from its territory. Instead Israel sent soldiers to reassure them that they wouldn't be harmed and to invite them back in. Madness? Yes, but a quite familiar madness to anyone who watches Prime Ministers declare that Islam is a religion of peace and welcome in more refugees and immigrants, even as the Muslims make it clear that if they had their way, the Prime Minister's head would be decorating a sharp stick outside a Mosque somewhere.

Welcoming the apocalypse may be madness but it's the madness of shortsighted politicians and like their European counterparts, the Israeli politicians were motivated only partly by soft-minded humanitarianism, in the mix too was the delectable thought of a reliable Labor voting base that could never possibly cast a vote for a conservative candidate and cheap labor too. That the voting base would wind up opening fire on their grandchildren was not a thought they took seriously, because it was an inconvenient thought.

The way things are has moved from inconvenient thought to inconvenient reality, but that has not diminished the desire of politicians, both European and Israeli, to wish it away in favor of a New Middle East, a New Britain, a New Ireland, a European Union -- some magical utopian socialist reality where college degrees are all the wealth anyone needs, where governments care for everyone and any immigrant can be assimilated no matter how many wives they have and what prophet they believe in.

The more bombs go off, the more politicians cling determinedly to their fantasy and look for some pesky reactionaries to blame for the whole thing. Israel blames the settlers. Europe blames Israel. European left wing parties blame the Right. The Right blames America. America blames Republicans. Republicans blame a tiny minority of extremists, effectively negating their own argument.

And as the fingers point, the chorus bellows, pointless propositions are put forward and struck down in favor of lunatic appeasements, the West is turning into Israel. And as far as both the Muslims and the Left are concerned, like Israel, the world would have been a better place had Western civilization never existed and they are doing their best to put theory into practice.

Like every good con artist, Obama knows that the trick to winning your mark's confidence is to convince them that you identify with them. Except in this case "The Mark" are the American people or enough of them to get him through the goalposts of the Democratic National Convention and the general election beyond, as BHO tries his own 'Test to Destruction' of Abraham Lincoln's truism, "You can't fool all of the people all of the time."

For now Barry Hussein has managed to successfully fool some of the people some of the time, namely Democratic Party voters. And he did it in true con artist fashion by trying to pass himself off as everything to everyone. To young liberals, he was supposed to be a radically progressive visionary. To old line Democrats, he was supposed to be the second coming of JFK. To rich party elites, he was one of them, a wealthy Harvard and Columbia grad from an academic family. To the working class of Pennsylvania, he tried to reinvent himself as an ordinary bowling cheeseburger eating son of a working class family.

And that's where he screwed up, because you can only double date so many demographics before one of them finds out what you've been saying about the other one behind its back. And that's what happened when Obama cracked wise to his rich liberal hosts about those backwoods people with their bitterness, religion, guns and hatred of immigrants. Obama was doing what Obama does best, reinventing himself in the style of a celebrity for every new demographic but while he was busy bonding with his new friends over their mutual distaste for working class people, he wasn't counting on having those same snide remarks go public and live.

Like every con man, Obama's outward image is appealing precisely because it's fake, a carefully woven coat of many colors, with no substance underneath. And like every con man, that identity begins to unravel when exposed to enough scrutiny. The consistency that a lie requires is nothing compared to the consistency that the many lies which define Obama require to maintain under the pressure of a campaign. Finally like every con man, Obama responds to the revelation of the inconsistencies, personal, moral and political, with glib rhetoric that tries to change the topic and recontextualize the situation. But you can only strain the coat of many colors so many times before it begins to tear and the constant shifts Obama must undergo creates a kind of narrative jet lag until the public grows tired of paying attention to whom Barack is trying to be at any given moment.

In his endless quest to reinvent himself, BHO has become the worst kind of chimera, a man without a face, painfully eager to turn private narrative into public image and fictionalizing his life in the process. Obama is his own biographer and even when he writes history, under his smooth pen it flows out as fiction. Navigating his many identities, American, Foreigner, Christian, Muslim, Black, White, Poor, Rich, Liberal, Progressive, Undefinable, Experienced, A Fresh Voice, Black Nationalist, Racial Unifier, Healer, Bigot creates the kind of schizophrenia that must in the end bring down even the greatest of con men, as we no longer know who Obama is anymore and until even Obama himself loses track of who he really is.

Obama's biography like his convention speech was about navigating identities, a fundamental preoccupation for a man whose life is based around presenting himself as many things to many people. Obama's campaign reminds one of the character played by Will Smith at the beginning of his movie career in Six Degrees of Separation, itself based on the true story of David Hampton, a con man who moved through the upper classes of New York society under a false identity and conning the wealthy out of their money.

Who is Barack Obama? The real answer is that like all con men. he's a lie. Not simply because he's lied on any single point but because his entire identity is a constantly shifting lie as he juggles a hundred balls in the air, trying to play to every demographic in its own turn.

With America as his "Mark", Barry Hussein has tried to sell himself as the country's savior but his halo can only stand so many dings before it begins to look tarnished. And the shiny coating is quickly coming off as millions of Americans begin asking the same questions and coming up with some bad answers.

His narrative gymnastics, his political yoga, his self-help contortionist act has brought him to this point and left him empty, both inside and outside. Like a brand of soft drink, Obama has become a brand and a logo, but the person who stands behind it remains an ugly enigma, a calculating liar who may no longer even remember who he himself is anymore.

Tolerance is the credo of the age, the great rallying call of modern liberalism. Tolerate and be tolerated, they say. Tolerate to all alike.

But what are the limits of tolerance? To tolerate is to accept things that are strange or unpleasant to you. You tolerate things that are different from you in nature and expectation. Without a reasonable amount of tolerance, no society would be able to function for long. But at the same time the flip side of tolerance is that to tolerate a behavior is to perpetuate it.

If your neighbor plays loud music at 1 o'clock in the morning and you tolerate it for a while, you've given permission to him to continue doing so and getting him to stop will now prove much more difficult than if you had put your foot down from the beginning.

And that is the crux of the matter, because there are behaviors that we accept, behaviors that we tolerate and behaviors that are unacceptable. The liberal credo of tolerance though has eliminated two of the categories and warped language and attitudes to equate tolerance with acceptance and to all but eliminate the idea of unacceptable behaviors entirely, as long as they are grounded in a different culture.

Tolerance for liberals means acceptance. While the larger society may not accept, when it begins to tolerate, acceptance is the next and final step of the process. When liberals say tolerate, what they really mean is not 'tolerate' in its original sense of not interfering, but to mean acceptance and accommodation.

That is why we must be careful of what we tolerate, because intolerance is the gatekeeper, the immune system that acts as a barrier. There are things for which that barrier should be lowered and things for which it should remain in place. A society that universally tolerates everything is a society without values or defense mechanisms.

When the defense mechanisms no longer exist, when the gate is permanently raised and the immune system disabled, the society is open and vulnerable to conquest, exploitation and colonization. A society eager to tolerate its intolerant enemies is like an AIDS patient with no working immune system welcoming in cold sufferers or an unarmed man offering a hug to an opponent who is trying to stab him to death. Yet that is almost exactly the situation we are in.

Liberalism does not promote a universally tolerant society. Instead it promotes something far worse. Intolerance toward the immune system itself, toward the gatekeepers and the traditional and conservative elements of the society combined with a limitless tolerance toward the foreign invasion. This is not merely apathetic tolerance, it is tolerance turned virulent. It is tolerance turned into a virus that kills the host society.

Liberal society today is the AIDS patient actively seeking infection and throwing out his medication. It's the unarmed man going to the most dangerous part of town and threatening the police with a lawsuit if they try to protect him.

Like most things tolerance is a dangerous thing. To tolerate is to give your consent, your permission to an act or a way of life. Be careful of what you tolerate and remember to be wary of whether the things and people you tolerate-- are equally willing to tolerate you.

The Dinkins administration, Jesse Jackson, Liberal Jews and the Crown Heights Pogrom. Stop me when this begins to sound familiar...and then begin swapping the liberal Jewish leaders of 1989 and 1991 for 2008. Ein Hadash Tahat Hashemesh.

NYT 1989: Some of New York's Jewish Voters Reconsider Their Support of Dinkins

While many said they wanted to vote for a black man and a Democrat, they said they had become unsure of whether Mr. Dinkins is up to the task of running the city.

''The ambivalence is really strong.'' Mr. Dinkins continues to have his supporters among Jews, many of whom cite his calm and dignified ways; his stands on social, environmental and development issues, and his experience in city government.

But some Jewish voters said their early support for Mr. Dinkins and a tradition of voting for Democrats had been undermined by nagging fears about Mr. Dinkins's political associates and concern over the handling of his finances.

''Dinkins is a kind, caring gentleman,'' said Diane Roskies, a lawyer from the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

1989 - NYT: Dinkins and Koch Vie for Jews' Votes

David N. Dinkins, the Manhattan Borough President running in the Democratic primary for mayor, had just completed a swing through a Lower East Side knish shop, seeking votes among the Orthodox Jewish families gathered for an early Sunday lunch. But the handshaking made no impression on a young man in a yarmulke at the back of the room.

''Koch,'' the 24-year-old accountant from Queens said last week, when asked his preference in Tuesday's primary. As for Mr. Dinkins, now in a neck-and-neck race against the incumbent Mayor, the young man - who declined to give his name - simply shook his head, saying he was ''very uncomfortable'' with the ties between Mr. Dinkins, who is black, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose views on Israel are regarded with suspicion by many Jews.

Mr. Dinkins has taken to challenging his questioners, asking why he should answer for a friend's opinions. ''I'm not here asking you to vote for Jesse Jackson,'' he told an audience on Talkline, a radio program on station WWRV aimed at a Jewish audience. ''Why should it be so important whether or not Jesse Jackson comes in here to campaign for me? What in blazes does that have to do with whether I should be mayor of the City of New York?''

Yet in Queens, Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld, of the Young Israel synagogue of Kew Garden Hills, is predicting a solid victory for Mr. Koch in his neighborhood, saying that Mr. Jackson's appearance on the scene ''had sent certain warning signals to the Jewish community.''

Mr. Dinkins has taken to challenging his questioners, asking why he should answer for a friend's opinions. ''I'm not here asking you to vote for Jesse Jackson,'' he told an audience on Talkline, a radio program on station WWRV aimed at a Jewish audience. ''Why should it be so important whether or not Jesse Jackson comes in here to campaign for me? What in blazes does that have to do with whether I should be mayor of the City of New York?''

Yet in Queens, Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld, of the Young Israel synagogue of Kew Garden Hills, is predicting a solid victory for Mr. Koch in his neighborhood, saying that Mr. Jackson's appearance on the scene ''had sent certain warning signals to the Jewish community.''

Still, Mr. Dinkins is also able to draw on the long history of Jewish support for civil rights and on the sympathies of those voters who are eager to embrace a more liberal candidate than Mr. Koch. Rabbi Balfour Brickner, senior rabbi at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side and a Dinkins supporter, said those voters are solidly behind Mr. Dinkins.

Dinkins supporters expect Mr. Dinkins to win a much greater percentage, based on his long-standing relations with Jewish groups and his reputation as a conciliator. ''He has really reached out to Jews in a special way,'' said Sam Intrator, a legislative aide to Councilwoman Susan D. Alter of Brooklyn.

On My Mind - A.M. Rosenthal 1989

New York Jews who vote against David Dinkins just because they do not like Jesse Jackson are doing a disservice not only to the candidate but to the city, Jews, blacks, Israel - yes, and maybe to Jesse Jackson, too.

'Yes,'' he said. ''On the record. Crazy - and unfair. David has denounced Farrakhan and is a friend of Israel - unfair.''

I am hardly unaware of Jewish sensitivities about Israel. But to vote against Mr. Dinkins because of Mr. Jackson's attitude strikes me as wrong. Before he became a candidate, Mr. Dinkins distanced himself from those things most Jews find objectionable about Mr. Jackson.

Mr. Jackson's politics make me uneasy. But I have heard him speak about this country with belief, positiveness and hope and seen children and parents draw strength from his words.

Vivid New Court Statements Detail Crown Heights Clash

In graphic accounts given in court papers, Hasidic residents and civic leaders from Crown Heights, Brooklyn, described what some called a terrifying "pogrom" in which several said they were attacked by bands of young black men in four days of racial violence in 1991.

The accounts, given in 13 affidavits filed last night in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, are intended to support a suit that Hasidic residents brought last year charging that Mayor David N. Dinkins and the Police Commissioner at the time deliberately withheld police protection while the Hasidim were attacked.

Several Hasidim said in the affidavits that police officers stood by and watched assaults without intervening, and some said officers said they were ordered not to use force against those engaging in the violence.

"The police did not intervene as the crowd surrounded my son and me and savagely beat us with their fists, bricks and bottles," Issac Bitton said in his affidavit. "I blacked out after I was pummeled in the head with a brick or rock."

Nechama Lipkind said, "The rioters were attempting to invade my home" as she was "bleeding profusely" from a head wound caused by a brick or stone that was thrown through a window.

Now, she said, she is frightened merely by "pounding on the front door.

"Police were in the vicinity and, in fact, watched the entire incident take place from across the street," she said.

The suit, filed last November, contends that top city officials failed to respond to the violence because they decided that black protesters "should be permitted to vent their rage" over the incident that touched off the disturbances, the death of a black child, Gavin Cato, 7, who was accidentally killed by a car driven by a Hasidic Jew.

During the disturbances, a Hasidic man, Yankel Rosenbaum, was stabbed to death after being surrounded by a group of youths.

NYT 1992 Dinkins Confronts Jewish Critics in Crown Heights

For the first time since the Crown Heights racial violence 16 months ago, Mayor David N. Dinkins met yesterday with Jewish representatives who have criticized him the most harshly for his leadership during the disturbance and its aftermath.

After name-calling against Mr. Dinkins reached a peak two weeks ago -- when he was called a "Jew hater" at a meeting in Queens and was compared with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader whom many people view as anti-Semitic -- many politically moderate Jews called for an end to the shrill oratory. Howard J. Rubenstein, a public-relations executive who is close both to Mr. Dinkins and to many Jewish organizations, helped organize private talks that led to yesterday's meeting.

NYT 1992 Crown Heights Exposes Fissures Among Jewish Groups

The bitter standoff between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights has not only stirred long-simmering racial tensions in New York City and distilled deep anger among both groups. It has also exposed longstanding divisions within the city's diverse Jewish population

there remains a political and philosophical tug-of-war between the largely liberal Manhattan-based Jewish organizations that have long supported Mr. Dinkins, and more politically and religiously conservative Jews in the other boroughs,

But for weeks, a group of harsher voices had dominated the debate, their ambitions and agendas diverse and sometimes contradictory. They ranged from Assemblyman Dov Hikind, an Orthodox Jew and conservative Brooklyn Democrat who cut his teeth in the Jewish Defense League movement, who has often supported Republican candidates and says he aspires to higher office, to Avi Weiss, a rabbi from Riverdale in the Bronx who has carried his quest to defend Jewish identity from Auschwitz to the Vatican

In October, after the acquittal of the black teen-ager charged in the fatal stabbing of a Hasidic scholar in Crown Heights last year, Rabbi Weiss led a group of marchers to Gracie Mansion with a coffin, amid chants of "Jewish blood is not cheap" and "Dinkins must go." Mr. Hikind, a longtime critic of the Mayor who supported his rival, Rudolph W. Giuliani in 1989, led a similar protest outside the Mayor's recent fund raiser.

Once, such demonstrations would have largely been ignored by other Jewish organizations and the press. But now the anger expressed by such voices has seemed to resonate more broadly, at a time when the specter of last year's violence by groups running through the streets of Crown Heights chanting "Kill the Jew"

Leaders of several Jewish organizations supported Mr. Dinkins's election in the hope that he could ease racial tensions, and were reluctant to be seen as piling on him. That quandary only grew more painful this fall when some Hasidic protesters carried signs branding the Mayor as a wanted murderer, a charge repugnant to (liberal) Jewish groups aware of Mr. Dinkins's long record of support for their causes.

Mr. Siegman of the American Jewish Congress said, "I really don't want to comment about Ed Koch, except to say he continues to be a thoroughly destructive force. He showed his capacity for that while he was Mayor and now he's giving it the fullest possible expression."

Mr. Dinkins has dismissed the harshest of his critics as politically motivated "racists and rabble-rousers," descriptions that his aides said were intended to encompass Mr. Hikind and Rabbi Weiss.

Rabbi Weiss, a soft-spoken, hollow-cheeked ascetic who describes himself ruefully as something of a pariah to what he called "Park Avenue Jews," has protested the Mayor's actions

NYT -1993 Dinkins Retains Financing From Groups of 4 Years Ago

Although Mayor David N. Dinkins has spent much of his re-election campaign trying to hold together the fragile coalition of voters that elected him in 1989, he seems to have had little trouble retaining the financial support of the alliance of Manhattan liberals, real-estate developers, Wall Street executives and black business leaders who bankrolled him four years ago.

Despite polls hinting that the Mayor has lost some support among liberals, including Jewish liberals, campaign finance records show among his major fund-raisers many prominent Jewish residents of Manhattan, including Edgar Bronfman Jr., Bruce Ratner, Jack Rudin, Felix G. Rohatyn, Carl Spielvogel, Jonathan Tisch, Howard Rubenstein and Arthur Levitt.

NYT 1993 On My Mind; What the Hasidim Know

To walk away from Crown Heights now, with its real meaning and the real offense of New York City's government still unstated and unexamined, would make it more likely that some other riot, some other pogrom, against some other group would be committed somewhere in America. There can be hope after Crown Heights -- but, as always, only when reality is faced.

I do not understand why some Jews do not understand what is in the hearts of the Hasidim, or are silent... Are the Hasidim a little too Jewish for them? Maybe they think only a certain kind of Jew gets beaten up. Sweethearts, by you, you are Park Avenue, by your wife you are Park Avenue, but by an anti-Semite you are a Hasid.

All right, we all know that Jews can be among the most suicidal of God's ostriches. But does everybody else have to be that thick too?

Why does Gov. Mario Cuomo say we should be grateful to the Mayor for all the riots that did not happen? Surely he jests; St. John's turns out great lawyers, but lesser comedians.

(Yankees in Space)

Well now we know where Saddam's program went but the truth is we knew it all along. There was extensive information after the fall of Saddam that the WMD's went to Saddam's fellow Baathist regime in Syria. It's no surprise now that there is growing confirmation of it, so many belated years later, and ties into the Israeli strike as well.

An upcoming joint US-Israel report on the September 6 IAF strike on a Syrian facility will claim that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein transferred weapons of mass destruction to the country, Channel 2 stated Monday.

The media was of course too busy crowing about the lack of WMD's to listen or to ask the question of where Saddam's air force went as well. And all this is way behind the curve when it comes to stopping Iran's nuclear program.

The Times of London (at Hot Air) reports that long range missiles have been spotted in Iran.

Anyone wondering why President Bush has been so insistent on missile defense, and why NATO embraced it in its new defense doctrine, will have those questions answered in today’s Times of London. Long-range missile sites have been spotted through satellite imagery in Iran, and the construction shows potential capabilities for a 4,000-mile range. That easily puts eastern Europe within Tehran’s sights, and explains why Poland and the Czech Republic seem so enthusiastic about becoming an integral part of the defense umbrella:

And via LGF, Charles Krauthammer writing that Bush has failed to stop Iran's nuclear program.

On Tuesday, Iran announced it was installing 6,000 more centrifuges — they produce enriched uranium, the key ingredient of a nuclear weapon — in addition to the 3,000 already operating. The world yawned.

It is time to admit the truth: The Bush administration’s attempt to halt Iran’s nuclear program has failed. Utterly. The latest round of U.N. Security Council sanctions, which took a year to achieve, is comically weak. It represents the end of the sanctions road.

This neatly ties together the growing mess, positioning Russia, North Korea, Iran and China on one side and America, Europe and Israel on the other. Russia and China are trickling down weapons to Iran and North Korea which in turn trickle them down to terrorist front groups, which sooner or later will use them against targets in America, Europe and Israel -- with Iran and North Korea deploying their own nuclear missiles to prevent any counterattack and to prevent any disruption of their market.

In the blogsphere roundup, returning blogger Maggie at Maggie's Notebook is connecting the dots between Wright, Obama, Hamas and Cair.

Over at Weasel Zippers, a disturbing story about an 8 year old Yemeni girl seeking a divorce.

At Lemon Lime Moon, a tale of a disgusting opera by an Austrian composer depicting the ruins of Ground Zero and smearing America.

At IsraPundit, an interesting story about a man who fought in WW2 and later for Israel's independence as well.

Shugar is one of the ‘forgotten soldiers’, an American Machal volunteer, who fought in the pre-state Haganah and the IDF during Israel’s War for Independence. He is a North Carolinian by birth and rearing, a graduate of The Citadel, a US Navy officer on ASW duty against Nazi subs in the North Atlantic during WWII, who post-war witnessed the Bikini atoll a-bomb tests. Then he left for Jerusalem as a ’student’ in 1947, joined the Haganah, was engaged in the intense fighting during the Siege of Jerusalem, witnessed the shelling of the Atalena off Tel Aviv by Ben Gurion’s Rabin and was gunnery officer on the first Israeli warship-the Eilat, the converted Northwind USCG cutter shelling Egyptian coastal positions. He is the stuff of legend and will speak here on Sunday about his experiences.

Keli Ata blog has Walter Bingham's letter to WQXR

Fiery Spirited Zionist writes on Carter's Terrorist Treason

Ol Broad's Ramblings blog digs up an odd story on reincarnation therapy at taxpayer expense

Meanwhile Jamiel's Law appears to be a good bet for creating a crack in the sanctuary city wall

An Egyptian author explains what the Hijab really means, at Israel Matzav.