The days when national leaders responded to a crisis with courage, fortitude and action are long behind us. Today when a crisis occurs leaders look to do two things

1. Shift the Responsibility - Shift the responsibility and the blame

2. Let's Make a Deal - Play let's make a deal with whoever they think can make the crisis go away

To wit behold French President Sarkozy in Israel's Knesset playing an upscale version of Shift the Responsibility and Let's Make a Deal.

If Israel forcibly ethnically cleanses Jews from X amount of land and divides its capital with the terrorists, surely there will be peace, Sarkozy proclaims. As part of his "I'll give you nukes if you join my imaginary Mediterranean alliance" to the Middle East tour, Sarkozy has managed to repackage the same old politics of 'Let's Make a Deal' combined with 'Shift the Responsibility' so someone else pays the price (in this case Israel and French taxpayers) with some dusted off 19th century ideas about building a vast French led alliance.

Yet Sarkozy is downright visionary compared to his predecessors who didn't bother with anything beyond "Shift the Responsibility." This sadly is the modern criteria for visionary leadership. So have the standards for leadership declined that the leader who goes beyond "Shift the Responsibility" by merging it with "Let's Make a Deal" is considered a man of action.

Gone are the days of the Rooseveltian "Pedricardis alive or Rasuli dead!". In the Bush Administration this sort of sentiment enjoyed a brief resurgence after 9/11 when the US took on the Taliban and Al Queda in the old fine style backed by modern weaponry. A few years later though it had all been squandered in a welter of the "Let's Make a Deal" politics that brought us the Iraqi occupation and all the diplomatic initiatives of the Condoleeza Rice White House. Force was out and Diplomacy Uber Alles was back in.

Of course it's a madman or a warmonger who always chooses war over diplomacy, but it's a coward or a traitor who always chooses diplomacy over war.

There are two reasons why diplomacy has so overshadowed plain old war in the arsenal of modern political decision making. It isn't an excess of idealistic pacifism, very few true pacifists are able to do the ruthless things necessary to get into power in the first place. It isn't guilt over past nationalism or colonialism, such things are reserved for university professors and wealthy upper middle class pundits living on seized Indian lands in the suburbs.

The first reason is 'Shift the Responsibility'. Modern day politics is the politics of the lazy. Contrary to what the ideologues of the left like to believe, it's a much safer political bet not to invade a country than to invade it.

Wartime Presidents since the latter half of the 20th century have routinely lost elections or been forced out of office. From JFK's Bay of Pigs to LBJ and Nixon's Vietnam, to GHW Bush's Gulf War to GW Bush's War on Terror, wartime Presidents have taken a beating from any military involvement.

The safest way to lead in modern politics is to take no positions except a solemn promise to change everything the other guy has gotten wrong-- this in a phrase is the motto of the Obama campaign. Leading from the front is the worst way to go. It's safest to be neutral, to make vague statements, to shift the blame and go on shifting the blame, knowing that politics is simply a matter of waiting for your political opponents to do something and screw up.

This modern blinking contest is at the heart of politics not only in America but across Europe where cowardly and inept politicians ignore the need for decisive action and stare across parliaments and houses of legislature, concerned mostly with how their opponents will exploit the situation. And so both sides stare and make occasional speeches and squander money and nothing is done.

The second reason is even worse. It's "Let's Make a Deal". The only real resolution to the politics of inaction is Chamberlanian compromise. The final refuge of the coward and the knave is the politics of splitting the difference. After all no one can blame a peacemaker, right?


The business interests that once drove war, today mainly drive peace. With the end of colonialism, the major corporations still have the same priorities as before, international trade, cheap production and harvests in the third world and fluid travel and no trade barriers. Only the means by which they get it have changed.

The same industries that once made international trade and production flow through national enrichment and conquest now make it flow by dismantling the national sovereignty of their countries, frowning on any military action and pushing peace not for the sake of peace, but so that the rivers of commerce will flow.

The "Let's Make a Deal" politician is the product of "Let's Make a Deal" business. War costs money. National pride costs money. National defense is fine so long as it involves buying weapons from corporations that won't actually get used in any way that disrupts international trade. For corporations, countries have become platforms for doing business. Platforms which they can move around at their disposal.

The price of "Let's Make a Deal" politics is paid by "Shift the Responsibility." Shift it to the taxpayers, to other countries, to future generations. Meanwhile build up your paper alliances into paper empires, hold your paper meetings and dream of a paper world in which all people will get along with each other. And try, try to look away from the riots, the beheadings and the storm of war growing outside. And whatever you do, turn away from the smell of burning paper.

Jihad. We write it in capital letters. We argue over its definition. We place it on the same grandiose level as its perpetrators do.



But Jihad is a very simple thing. It is the religious sanctification of the most cowardly and brutal crimes imaginable, from robbery to rape to murder to mutilation to massacre. Without Jihad a murderer is a murderer. With Jihad every murderer becomes a hero.



As much as it rests on the occasional fanatic, Jihad rests on the criminal. It might be the fanatics who blow themselves up, but it is the criminals who create the drug, smuggling and car theft networks that finance the Jihad. It is the criminals who kidnap and behead hostages ranging from aid workers to the children of tribal leaders they want to blackmail. It is the criminals who create Jihad states to bleed dry.




It is in Iraq that the Jihad has shown its truest face, as Al Queda recruiting primarily from criminal classes unleashed a wave of brutality and death that alienated even its former Sunni allies. Yet it's also the raw reality of Jihad.



At the heart of it Jihad is Indulgence, much like those distributed for the Crusaders. An Indulgence for Muslims to act out their worst impulses and crimes and be celebrated as heroes for it.



Do you want to rob? Do you want to behead? Do you want to butcher children? Do you want to rape and mutilate? The socially acceptable and approved thing for a Muslim with such impulses is to become a Jihadist.



The social covenant between the so-called Moderate Muslims who don't actually put themselves on the line and the various fanatics, lunatics, murderers, rapists and criminals of the Jihad is that the Jihad will turn itself against their foreign enemies, and in turn they will receive the sanctification and admiration of the Muslim world.



A Muslim murderer who kills for the Jihad becomes a hero, never mind that he's killing innocent vacation goers. A Muslim rapist in Sydney is a hero of the Jihad for "fighting for Muslim beliefs". A Muslim drug dealer in Paris is a hero for laundering Jihadi money.



In Iraq, Al Queda broke this covenant and was reviled for it. Of course Muslim terrorist groups had commonly fought and oppressed Muslim civilians and each other, but never so blatantly or ruthlessly. It does not however change the general Muslim willingness to excuse Jihadi violence. Particularly when those atrocities are aimed at non-Muslims.



The religious santification of crime in the Muslim world under the banner of Jihad directs violence outward and creates a feeling of pride among Muslims who know their societies are inferior to the West and must invent imaginary conspiracy theories to account for it. The butchered reporter in Pakistan, the bombed nightclub in Bali and the raped woman in Oslo give Muslims a sense of pride from their complicity in these crimes.



The support of "Moderate Muslims" for Jihad is no different than that of the ordinary German who cheered Hitler. The timid sadist must always have monsters who do his work for him. The average Muslim may not be able to set off a roadside bomb or drive by a car in the West Bank taking aim at the children in the backseat-- but he can fund those who do and go to a rally and wave their flag if he or she is feeling bold enough.



As Jihad makes every murderer into a hero, so too it makes every Muslim supporter into a murderer by vicarious proxy. Those who shout "Heil" in the stands and hold up signs reading, "We are all Hizbullah" are no less accountable than those who pull the triggers.



A society, a culture, a religion that sanctifies murder has become a Cult of Death. And though that cult may be driven by impotence and bitter resentment over its own inferiority, it has no less marked itself as an evil thing that the civilized world cannot-- and dare not tolerate or abide.

One of the few good things about the Bush Administration's Supreme Court appointments was that they were supposed to herald an end to the activist judiciary. The activist judiciary is a fundamentally unconstitutional and undemocratic institution, as lifetime appointed officials creating their own laws is something out of medieval Europe and has no place in a Democratic America. Nevertheless that's exactly what we have and if for a while Justice Roberts seemed to have a moderating influence on the Supreme Court, Justice Kennedy seems to have gone power mad lately and we now seem set for a bunch of increasingly activist decisions.

Case in point the latest SCOTUS ruling striking down a Louisiana law that allows the execution of people convicted of a raping a child. Now that law might arguably go too far, that is something for the voters, the legislature and the courts of Louisiana to decide. Striking it down as cruel and unusual punishment is extremely dubious to say the least. The misuse of cruel and unusual punishment was how the Supreme Court illegally and unconstitutionally barred the death penalty in the first place.

Now only is this latest Supreme Court decision a blatant violation of States Rights, but it once again puts the Supreme Court in the position of playing veto nanny to half the country by stretching the Constitution to mean exactly what it does not. The death penalty as applied today is clearly not what was meant by either cruel and unusual punishment. Neither is a so-called disproportionate use of the death penalty itself cruel and unusual. Disproportionate and cruel and unusual are not the same thing.

Now the Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment for anything but premeditated murder. The Court is willfully abusing the eight amendment and dragging out the old 1958 Trop vs Dulles "Evolving Standards of Decency" crap, itself one of old crazy Justice Earl Warren's decisions that categorized removing someone's citizenship as cruel and unusual punishment and created an endless slippery slope that allowed justices of the Supreme Court to characterize absolutely any damn thing they pleased as Cruel and Unusual Punishment... so long as they could claim it fit under "evolving standards of decency."

If the Supreme Court can't control its worst instincts to legislate law, instead of manufacturing it, maybe it's time to bring back good old FDR style court packing again.

Lately as the Democratic left has become emboldened with the rise of Obama, the Congress has increasingly become a Congress of Traitors, which this unbelievable clip from Democratic Congressman Delahunt makes all the more obvious. This isn't simply about opposing the War, it's about supporting the terrorists.

Congressman Delahunt endorsed Obama early on during the primaries as an anti-war candidate

Delahunt says America needs a dramatic change in foreign policy. "The Bush administration has not only divided us here at home, but has isolated America from much of the world. Barack Obama understands these challenges. He will not only bridge our divisions here at home, but will reach out and rebuild diplomatic ties with countries around the world.”

Obama of course praised Delahunt in turn as a voice for American ideals. Though it seems more like a voice for Al Queda ideals.

“Congressman Delahunt has been a leading voice in Congress opposing the Bush administration’s foreign policy that has diminished our credibility abroad and made us less secure,” said Senator Obama. “He understands the need to leverage not only our military might, but also the power of American ideals, as we work to rebuild our standing in the world. Congressman Delahunt knows that to bring the war to an end and to restore security and prosperity, we must fundamentally change the way we conduct foreign policy.

When challenged about it Delahunt lied and claimed that he had been misunderstood and that he had said that he was glad to watch Addison, a statement that makes no sense and which matches neither his words, nor Addison's reaction to them.

Michelle Malkin has more on Delahunt's presence, which was illegitimate and a product of Nadler the Waddler illegitimately permitting him to be there.

One of the most hostile and ignorant questioners was Rep. William Delahunt (D-MA)–who is not even a member of the subcommittee. When subcommittee member Steve King (R-Iowa) politely objected that Nadler had not followed the rules in obtaining unanimous consent for Delahunt’s questioning (King did not object to his presence, just the failure to follow House rules), Nadler obnoxiously acknowledged the point of order, regretting that he had been called out. Later, after King had left the hearing room, Nadler personally attacked King and snarked that he must not have cared about the rules enough to stay.

To protect Delahunt's comments and conduct, you can phone his office at 202-225-3111 or by email at william.delahunt@mail.house.gov.

This is the faction of the Democratic party backing Obama and it is all the more crucial that the pro-terrorist wing of the Democratic party cannot be allowed to win the election.

Meanwhile the dirt on Obama's corrupt financial ties is just beginning to come out. The No Quarter blog has a Boston Globe expose that shows just how cynically Obama exploited the very people he was supposed to represent, especially minorities, by selling himself to the developers.

Campaign finance records show that six prominent developers - including Jarrett, Davis, and Rezko - collectively contributed more than $175,000 to Obama’s campaigns over the last decade and raised hundreds of thousands more from other donors. Rezko alone raised at least $200,000, by Obama’s own accounting.

One of those contributors, Cecil Butler, controlled Lawndale Restoration, the largest subsidized complex in Chicago, which was seized by the government in 2006 after city inspectors found more than 1,800 code violations.

Similar to Rezko, Cecil Butler is a developer who profited from the privatization of low income, public housing in Chicago during the 1990s. Butler is also not coincidentally a major supporter of Barack Obama whose low income tenements were ultimately seized by the government for multiple building code violations.

Lemon Lime Moon meanwhile tackles Obama's endless bus ride over everyone who stops being useful to him,

And why is Wall Street the only thing he says he considered outside politics? If he is so for the people why wasn't he an affordable lawyer for the poor? That applies to Mrs Obumpty too... for all their love of the "common" people these snobs don't work to help them really. If Obumpty was sincere he would have been working for legal aid or opening a law office that catered financially to those who most need it. No, both he and Mrs. Obumpty are multi-millionaires with privilege piled high and deep on their plates alongside the arugula that most American's cannot afford.
(I am reminded of doctors from poor third world nations who said they studied medicine to serve and help people yet they all come to the US rather than stay in their own nations to "serve" and "help" people. They are serving themselves a hefty pay check , that's what.)

It seems that if even a thousand years after slavery is gone from American shores, men like Obama and wife will continue to use it as a hammer to get their own way rather than working for it . It is the child's way of blackmail for what you want rather than hard work and good values. Most black Americans just work hard and never play a race card at all. Obama uses it as a club and tool.

Christmas Ghost meanwhile has a letter from a retired US Marine who tells it like it is

Yes, I'm questioning your patriotism. Your loyalty ends with self. I'm also questioning why you're stealing air that decent Americans could be breathing. You don't deserve the protection of our men and women in uniform. You need to run away from this war, this country. Leave the war to the people who have the will to see it through and the country to people who are willing to defend it.

No, Mr. President, you don't get off the hook, either. Our country has two enemies: Those who want to destroy us from the outside and those who attempt it from within. Your Soldiers are dealing with the outside force. It's your obligation to support them by confronting the AXIS OF IDIOTS.

America must hear it from you that these self-centered people are harming our country, abetting the enemy and endangering our safety. Well up a little anger, please, and channel it toward the appropriate target. You must prosecute those who leak national security secrets to the media. You must prosecute those in the media who knowingly publish those secrets.

Our Soldiers need you to confront the enemy that they cannot. They need you to do it now.

Maggie at Maggie's Notebook asks whether the UN will do anything to enforce its resolution on rape war crimes

The U.N. Security Council has now "resolved," through a "Resolution" to do something about rape in time of war.

One "action" the U.N. has woven into their "Resolution" is to "sanction" the offender. I'm certain all those victims of "gender" abuse feel better now, and those knowing they'll likely be a future victim, now know that their abuses will not go unnoticed.

If "Resolutions" had any merit within the U.N.-body, we would not be in Iraq, Saddam Hussein could not have stolen the food away from his own people under the august "Oil for Food" program, and Iran would not be on the nuclear track. Resolutions mean nothing to the U.N.

Meanwhile the New Centrist celebrates the Supreme Court decision on gun rights as a victory for individuals over collectives

Given the general failure of gun-control in urban areas I am wonder why so many clear-thinking people would stick to these policies. Much of it is fear, the notion that more guns in the community cannot lead to any positive outcome and will only result in more gun violence. Yet DC has had gun-control for three decades and regularly leads the country in incidences of violent crime. And when the “assault-weapons” ban ended in 2004, there was no spike in violence associated with semi-automatic rifles. I suspect similar results in DC.

Solominia meanwhile takes a look back at Pre-WW2 anti-war radicalism to discover that the anti-war campaigns of today are just rewinds of the anti-war campaigns of the past, with their own Cindy Sheehan.

Ted Belman rounds up the opposition to the release of Samir Kuntar, whom I have written about in the past. Citing Caroline Glick, IsraPundit posts;

“It is a stinging indictment of Israel’s political and media culture that the debate about these life-threatening deals has been dominated by the impassioned and tragic pleas of the hostages’ families. As Sharansky notes, if as the Schalit and Goldwasser fathers argue, issues of paramount national security are to be determined by the parents of soldiers, then no government can ever commit forces to battle. It is an abdication of national responsibility for Olmert to send the Goldwasser, Regev and Schalit families to his colleagues to beg them to vote in favor of these blood deals. And it is an abdication of responsibility by the media when they provide these terrified, victimized families with an open microphone to rail against our politicians for refusing to have mercy on them.

Due to Hizbullah’s and Hamas’s deliberate, evil designs, the Goldwasser, Schalit and Regev families find themselves set apart from the rest of their countrymen. And since their personal suffering is easier to understand than the general suffering of the public if the murderers go free, it is difficult, but not impossible to understand what is at stake.

Again, that the price is not clear is the fault of the media and the pandering politicians. Disgracefully, both have left the Israeli people as a whole unrepresented in this debate.

Read the entire roundup at IsraPundit including Sharansky's comments

From my own post on Samir Kuntar a while back, a testimonial by one of Samir Kuntar's surviving victims.

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

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

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

A nation can't exist for long cannot exist without both a national identity and a national structure. The latter has to come from the political and practical institutions of the state. The former has to come from a shared value and belief system. A state without a shared positive value system is on the way to extinction, as first world nations can amply demonstrate for us. A value system without a state leaves only victims and exiles.

The collapse of the first world nations is occurring precisely because those value systems are being ruthlessly torn down, leaving hollowed out states that have the structure of a nation but no defense again attack or ability to rally morale. Like mannequins they have the appearance of states, but not the content. This is occurring across America, Europe and Israel.

Without that larger value system birth rates fall, patriotism is deserted by idealists and really does become the last refuge of the thug and the scoundrel, extremist camps are everywhere and represent no one, while the consensus falls into the camp of greed and ego.

In Israel, Caroline Glick nails down the catastrophic campaign against Religious Zionism, which parallels the assault on national patriots in America and Europe as well, as the elites look for ways to destroy the more rural, traditional and patriotic elements of the population.

As Glick brilliantly puts it, the contrast between the failed ideology of Labor which prioritizes socialism over religious Zionism which prioritizes the fusion of national and religious fulfillment, is the precise reason for the conflict.

Labor Zionists have been confounded by the endurance of anti-Semitism and its transformation of Israel, though anti-Zionism, into the International Jew. The world’s refusal to accept Israel as an equal has been shattering for them. It has caused Labor Zionists to abandon Zionism in the hopes that by doing so they will finally be accepted as equals by the nations of the world. At its core, Labor Zionism is outward seeking rather than inward looking.

In contrast, Religious Zionism is inward looking. It seeks to turn Jews into actors on the international stage as Jews. It also seeks to make Judaism responsive to the imperatives of an empowered people as it was responsive to the imperatives of Jews as a powerless people during the generations of exile.

Labor can conceive of a state. Haredim can conceive of a religion. But only Religious Zionism has been able to unite them together. Yet the pressure of the Rabin assassination and the Gaza Expulsion has moved to split down Religious Zionism into the politically familiar lines of appeasing moderates or Mamlachtis and spiraling out of touch extremists who are prepared to sing the anthem of the Neturei Karta. And if that state of affairs continues, the secular socialists will have achieved their Pyrrhic victory over the ashes of the state, while the Haredim will hug close religion, claiming that the destruction of Israel proved they were right all along.

We can see this same kind of split happening among conservative Christians in America who are withdrawing from the political process, which only marks time until they're the next FLDS in a compound being raided by the government.

Religion of course should not rule a state, neither in Israel or America or anywhere else, simply because it tends to fail miserably and when it implodes, the results are catastrophic. The strength of political institutions is that they can reform themselves, religious institutions that gain political authority, rarely can. They can only splinter and war among themselves.

But religion has a more important role, to guard the values of the nation. When religion and politics mix, the results leave both poisoned and compromised. But when religion guards values while the political institutions maintain the state, both work separately to maintain the country, the state as the exoskeleton from without and religion as the beating heart from within.

State religions work badly, but a state of religion is an ideal for a nation that wishes to survive. That means there shouldn't be only one stream or one religious consensus. What it does mean is that there should be a consensus on moral matters and national ones. A religious stream that promotes moral disintegration or opposes national defense is a cancer and if it grows, it will poison all that it touches, regardless of all its other "good works" and "good intentions". And when the values of the state implode, it it those genuinely religious people who must step into the breach to seal the holes and fight to restore the morality of the people and the state.

Religious Zionism was the greatest gift to the State of Israel that the state ignored and often treated with contempt, because they cared about the welfare of the state itself. Though Religious Zionism has many flaws, it is unlikely at this point that the survival of the State of Israel and the survival of Religious Zionism can be detached from one another.

With the rise of leftist dogma that propounds the criminality of the State of Israel among the secular left, Religious Zionism exists as the only real bastion that stands between annihilation and the state. Yet the deliberate assaults have borne their fruit as I've noted above. Religious Zionism has not not entirely given up on the State, even if the State under pro-appeasement Prime Ministers has turned ruthlessly on Religious Zionism. But neither the "hug everyone as brothers" position of the Mamlachtis nor the increasing fanaticism around the edges that has led to the embrace of everything from the NK hymn, to FC, to various therapy cults to conspiracy theories to increasing detachment from what is actually happening in favor of short term messianic solutions is a sustainable position for the survival of the state.

Religious Zionism holds the future of Israel in its hands. It is only a question of whether the burden will not prove too heavy for it to hold.

(Due to another unavoidable absence by Sultan Knish, in place of a post we present another issue of Ask Imam Abdul Moderate, the column by Imam Abdul Moderate that serves as a guide for moderate Muslims all around the world. All 4 of them.)

Asalaam Aleikum Brothers and Sisters of the Ummah and Assorted Unclean Infidels

While the Zionist media and their whores at CNN, the motherless sons of impotent donkeys at MSNBC and the castrated infidel demons of the BBC continue to misrepresent Muslims as bigoted fanatical madmen filled with hate for everyone-- we Muslims must strive to set an example of moderation to the sons of pigs and monkeys who torment us with the vileness of their unclothed women and ham sandwiches even as they plot genocide against the Ummah.

I will now reply to your questions.




Dear Imam Abdul Moderate,

As a resident of the godless abomination of the United States of Infidels, I was planning to vote for Barack Hussein Obama, but I am torn between my desire to vote for Obama in order to drive the Americans and their Zionist collaborators out of the White House and my desire to behead him for his reversion from Islam as a heretic.

I am not sure which I should do first. Please helm me Imam?

Indiana
Manfooz Bayiz
Executive Director CAIR


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Manfooz,

The proper order is to vote Obama into the White House so that he may bring defeat to the Crusaders, dismantle America's military might and destroy Israel. Afterward you may behead him for being a heretic. This is the way of the moderate Muslim to engage with the civil institutions of the Dal Al Harb for the ends of the Ummah before bombing them to smithereens.

Imam Abdul Moderate


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Dear Imam Abdul Moderate,

I own a small restaurant in Manchester. Outside of it is a neon sign for the bar across the street whose loops and curves resemble to me the name of Allah. Should I blow it up or worship it?

Los Angeles
Hassan Chop


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Hassan,

I suspect you are an infidel prankster who is impersonating a true Muslim in order to mock Islam. Nevertheless because I am a moderate Muslim, I shall answer your question. Liquor is Haram. Bars are also Haram. Also they are filled with loose women who will spill drinks on you and refuse to sleep with you, even when you tell them that you are an Imam.

You should blow up a bar regardless of whether Allah's name is in lights above it. In your particular case, I would advise blowing up the bar but leaving the lights alone. If they are truly sacred, then the neon letters will hang in space on their own projecting the name of our moon god across all of Los Angeles.

If not let them burn.

Imam Abdul Moderate


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Dear Imam Abdul Moderate,

I am a very devout Muslim, but I have an uncontrollable appetite for beer, women and chess playing. How may I best serve the Ummah while still continuing to sin relentlessly? Also I never say any prayers.

Derry
Raheem Hasseen


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Raheem,

As a Muslim you are obligated to pray five times a day, refrain from alcohol, women and chess playing. If you cannot do any of these, it is alright as long as you remember the cardinal rule of Islam, ABKI. Always Be Killing Infidels. When you are at the grocery store, kill an infidel. When you are vacationing at a resort in Taba, kill an infidel. When you are reciting a prayer for peace at the opening session of the Iowa Legislature, kill an infidel. Remember beer, women and chess are Haram unless you are involved in the noble cause of Jihad. Jihad opens the doors of pleasure, as we used to say in the Muslim Brotherhood bathhouse.

Imam Abdul Moderate


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Dear Imam Abdul Moderate,

I live in Jerusalem, where I have a good job, my children get a good Muslim education at the expense of the infidel pig-monkey zionist occupying government, and I even get a parking space in front of my flat.

My question is whether it is better to kill a Jew, lose my job and let my family starve to death, or just to continue to take their money?

Abdul Mustapha
French Hill
Jerusalem


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Abdul,

As you well know there is no contradiction between the courses of action you propose as the fiendish Zionists will not only continue providing you money and paying for your children's Muslim education should you declare Jihad against them-- but they will offer you even more money. Should you be killed in the cause of Jihad, they will even pay for your burial. Should they withhold any of the free education, money or land, you may be certain that all the condemnation of the world will fall on them.

Imam Abdul Moderate





Until next week then, peace be upon you if you are a Muslim and violent and bloody death be upon you if you are a dirty infidel. And remember when discussing Islam with the vile and filthy Crusaders and Zionist dogs, be sure to emphasize that we are a religion of peace, that we also believe in Ibrahim and Yasus. And if that doesn't work and they don't agree to revert to Islam, chop their heads off.

Asalaam Aleikum, Peace Unto You

Justice for the oppressed, is at the heart of liberal, progressive and socialist morality. And while it is a noble enough cause, it has become the solo cause of liberalism, the one fundamental pillar to which all others must bow. In the process the definitions of both "justice" and "the oppressed" have undergone various changes bringing us to this point.

The oppressed were first defined as those deprived of their rights, initially defined as the underclass. This gave the upper middle class intellectuals and lower ranked European nobility a noble seeming goal, to uplift the impoverished, while also giving them muscle in the form of lower class mobs that could do their dirty work. The bloody results of this combination were all too clear during the French Revolution as the liberal upper class wrangled and debated and signed execution orders, while the mobs could be counted on to cry for more heads.

Quieter versions of those same battles were being waged in the United States as well, whether it was John Adams' showdown with Jeffersonian sympathizers of the French Revolution via the Alien and Sedition Acts or Thomas Paine demonizing Washington as a tyrant or Aaron Burr seizing New York by opening up the franchise through a clever loophole and some financial chicanery. American liberals naturally sympathized with the French Revolution, though they parted company with the Reign of Terror and its absolute state control, that they themselves feared and resisted.

The French Revolution however was nothing more than a rehearsal for the Communist revolution that took the Age of Terror to a whole new level, still rooted in that same basic premise of liberating the underclass through a campaign of terror against their upper class oppressors combined with hard line state control over all aspects of life to ensure the classless society. Communism was the logical end result of liberalism's oppression with liberating the underclass. And like the French Revolution it had the sympathy of American liberals who agreed with its aim and its program, if not always its tactics.

By that time American liberalism was coming to accept the premise of the French Revolution that the Jeffersonians had not, that centralized state control was required to insure the freedom of the "oppressed". The Great Depression opened the door to turning theory into reality as FDR came to power with a mandate to do anything to restore the country's fortunes and promptly began centralizing, nationalizing and regulating everything in sight. By his death. America was heavily regulated from the top down, a member of the UN and had been rebuilt, often undemocratically, along the lines of European socialism, rather than the old more libertarian Jeffersonian liberalism.

Prosperity in the wake of WW2 increasingly began to make the focus on liberating the economically underprivileged seem absurd, as regulated capitalism proved that it could provide a high standard of living for all Americans. Along with that came the changing nature of American immigration that with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the devastation of Europe was steadily growing more oriented toward minorities. In the latter half of the 19th century, immigrants had made up the new wave of the "oppressed", but those immigrants had at worst been Catholic or Jewish. Racial minorities represented a new challenge for the Democratic party.

The Democrats who had long held a racist platform because of their position straddling major Eastern trading cities such as New York that depended on Southern slave labor before the Civil War and economic undeclasses that consisted of poor whites and immigrant groups that resented minority competition, found their urban working class support slipping away into suburbia while having to compete with a new generation of pragmatic Republicans free from the elitist stigma of the party with a great deal of appeal in their own midwestern and southern strongholds.

Like a chameleon, the Democratic party shifted by shifting the focal point of the "oppressed" from the traditionally economically deprived working classes, to minority groups. Liberal progressives had long felt stifled by Democratic party racism, even as they watched Republicans and then American Communists outmaneuver them on race domestically, spearheaded the growing transition and fought the internal battles in the party war. The true narrative of the Civil Rights movement was that it was a Civil War fought within the Democratic party.

This transition however was followed by the same fallout the Democratic party machine had constantly suffered throughout the 19th century as it worked to gather in a new immigrant group, only to find that the immigrant group didn't simply want to be patronized, its activists wanted to rule. The Democratic machine had experienced this with German immigrants and the Irish, Jews and Italians. Now it would experience this with Blacks throughout the 70's, culminating in the usual integration of leading activists into the party machine that usually followed such shakedowns.

Fusing the narrative of economic oppression into racist oppression, Democrats became the party of race, creating racial tension and promising to heal it, in the perfect protection racket, just as the leaders of the French Revolution had unleashed the mobs and then offered themselves as the only ones who could control the mob. It was a cynical game that liberals had been playing some time on both sides of the ocean, but their usual pawns had been the poor, now it was to be racial minorities.

Opening the door to redefining oppression also meant a constant search for oppressed groups to welcome in. The party paid lip service to the idea of women as an oppressed group. Gays slowly gained acceptance within the party as another oppressed group. Neither however would receive anything more than token ideological support as like Jews they were unable to provide the key requirement for an oppressed group, social immobility. The Democratic party had been too badly burned by the erosion of their economic underclass oppressed base to take seriously any group that was economically capable. What the traditional party of the plantation wanted most was plantation underclasses, groups that could be kept dependent, provided with incentives that only further isolate them and foster their dependency.

Many liberals however, never having entirely recovered from the perceived ingratitude by black Democrats directed their energies toward creatures that couldn't talk back to them, animals. Animal rights provided many of the traditional objectives of fighting for the underclass, in that animals were notably helpless and oppressed, they were however unable to vote which prevented them from being particularly useful in party politics. Nevertheless representing the animal kingdom proved to be lucrative with the rise of the Earth movement, which combined the old socialist love for One World politics and centralized regulation, their suspicion of the big industries which had ended the era of Southern slave labor and of course provided plenty of opportunities for graft and personal profit via recycling and various Green businesses.

With the War on Terror, Democrats rediscovered Muslims, who were small in number, but could easily be included as an oppressed group and poster children for traditional liberal anti-militarism and the Democratic party's reflexive hostility to any military effort carried on by a Republican administration.

Today the Democratic party ideologically embodies a strange coalition of oppressed groups, or rather their self-proclaimed advocates, doing their best to bridge a yawning gap between working class Americans, urban minorities, polar bears, gays, Muslims and women. And while this is practically unfeasible, liberals have successfully built up an unreal image of themselves as the defenders of such a rainbow coalition, promising Americans a Utopian society devoid of disharmony, bigotry or inequality-- even while pursuing a disharmonious unequal society precisely in order to perpetuate the divisions that attach these groups to them in the first place.

The pursuit of maintaining and creating an underclass has turned the Democratic party into a "Cult of the Oppressed" and has led the party to chase after increasingly exotic oppressed groups. As the party has embraced illegal aliens and Muslims as two of its latest groups, the destructive nature of this pursuit has become all too obvious. Liberal morality is built on fighting for justice for the oppressed and that tunnel vision combined with cynical political calculation has led Liberals to fight for terrorists and criminals, unwilling to see the damage this is doing to their country and the very system of government they are fighting to control.

Any goal taken to its farthest extreme becomes destructive, and liberal goals are no different, as both the French Revolution and Communism proved. Today liberalism insists on destroying the bastions of freedom in the name of the groups they consider oppressed, without considering the welfare of everyone else and pretending to ignore or dismiss the impact of their actions while ideologically distorting the consequences to match the imaginary vision of their utopia.

Can you hear the echo?

Iran has nothing to gain by war... No, it is not Iran that wants a war with the United States. It is the United States that has reasons to want a short, sharp war with Iran.



Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted.

That echo is the sound of appeasement at the heart of Buchanan's rhetoric, 1939-2008.



Pat Buchanan has spent a lot of his career dancing around the Nazi question, from throwing in his lot with Holocaust deniers, defending Nazi War Criminals and badgering Reagan to lay a wreath at an SS memorial. Lately though Pat Buchanan has stopped dancing and begun to seriously lay down a revisionist history that seeks to blame Nazi crimes on England and America as an anti-war argument against the United States taking military action against the Hitlers of today and tomorrow.



Buchanan opened the hellgates back in 2005 by arguing that WW2 wasn't worth it since much of Eastern Europe wound up in Soviet hands anyway. Despite the backlash it would begin laying out one of Buchanan's key thesis that WW2 was a mistake, that Churchill and FDR had been wrong, and using the fall of Eastern Europe as a key plank in his argument.



The quote from Buchanan's 2005 article is typical of his disingenuous position

In 1938, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain refused. In 1939, Churchill wanted Britain to fight for Poland. Chamberlain agreed. At the end of the war Churchill wanted and got, Czechoslovakia and Poland were in Stalin's empire. How, then, can men proclaim Churchill "Man of the Century"?



True, U.S. and British troops liberated France, Holland and Belgium from Nazi occupation. But before Britain declared war on Germany, France, Holland and Belgium did not need to be liberated. They were free. They were only invaded and occupied after Britain and France declared war on Germany – on behalf of Poland.

The pattern inherent in Pat Buchanan's Nazi apologetic, is the same one used today by defenders of Islamofascism-- it's to argue that any Nazi action was actually a reaction to the actions of England or Poland or America. This can be called Pat Buchanan's "But the Nazis Weren't Bothering Anyone" argument. It's a kissing cousin of the modern day anti-war "But Muslim Terrorists Weren't Bothering Anyone" argument that Buchanan himself has championed.



The logical fallacy at the heart of it is that it expects us to believe that Hitler had no ambitions on Western Europe and would not have acted against Western Europe. We know of course that he did. In Buchahan's universe, England and France should have let Hitler have Eastern Europe and waited until Nazi troops were actually attacking them. Considering that most of Western Europe was overrun even when Churchill did enter the war, letting Hitler and Stalin carve up Eastern Europe and giving Germany access to Volksdeutsche recruits and slave labor and allowing it to move against the Allies at its leisure-- would have course have been far more destructive, something Buchanan knows quite well.



Even in 2005 Buchanan had set the pattern for sneaking in small Nazi apologetics in between the lines, e.g

At least the Sudeten Germans wanted to be with Germany.

Just as he continues to do so to the present day.

If he (Hitler) wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?

Like most revisionist historians though, he's careful about tipping his hand. This is typical Buchanan and it's a typical apologetic for Western defenders of tyrannies that they sneakily support. Buchanan has avoided an outright defense of Nazi Germany, like Lindbergh and many of the WW2 era anti-war groups, his thesis has been to heap the blame on England, on Churchill and on the Allies.



So to fit the pattern Buchanan avoids actively justifying the Holocaust in his latest column, Was the Holocaust Inevitable? Instead he blames England and America winning the war for the Holocaust.

That Hitler was a rabid anti-Semite is undeniable. "Mein Kampf" is saturated in anti-Semitism. The Nuremberg Laws confirm it. But for the six years before Britain declared war, there was no Holocaust, and for two years after the war began, there was no Holocaust.

Not until midwinter 1942 was the Wannsee Conference held, where the Final Solution was on the table. That conference was not convened until Hitler had been halted in Russia, was at war with America and sensed doom was inevitable. Then the trains began to roll.



The Holocaust was not a cause of the war, but a consequence of the war. No war, no Holocaust.

Never mind of course that the Nazis had been killing Jews long before the Wannsee conference. One million Jews had been murdered before the Conference. The concentration camps were being built in 1940. The first gassings at Auschwitz began in 1941. Buchanan's cynical attempt at historical revisionism attempts to treat the Holocaust as a consequence of the Allies War on Hitler. Yet it's quite clear that the Holocaust had been in the offing well before then.



Buchanan himself can't make any credible connection for his claim that the Holocaust was a consenquence of the war. His primary argument that Hitler's conquests were a response to Western aggression fails to apply to the Holocaust. But Buchanan is recycling Linbergh's old argument that Britain and the Jews would have the most to lose from American intervention in WW2. That the Holocaust itself proved Linbergh wrong, has not deterred Buchahan in the least.



The ultimate thrust of Buchanan's arguments however is to discredit WW2's premise of military intervention against foreign tyrannies. It is the ultimate agenda behind Buchanan's book Churchill, Hitler and The Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. In penning his Nazi apologetics, Pat Buchahan is actually conducting a Jihad on behalf of the Fuhrer, but not merely Hitler, but the Hitlers of the present and the future. By attacking Churchill, Buchanan is trying to restore Appeasement to a position of honor and respect.



In Munich 1938, Buchanan makes that ultimate agenda increasingly clear

When President Bush, before the Knesset, used the word "appeasement" to label those who would negotiate with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he invoked the most powerful analogy in any debate over war and peace.



No man wishes to be regarded as an "appeaser."



Chamberlain believed not -- and, after three trips to Germany that September, he effected the transfer of the Sudeten Germans to Berlin's rule, where they wished to be. He came home in triumph to be hailed as the greatest peacemaker of all time.



Why, then, are "Munich" and "appeasement" terms of obloquy?

Of course as Buchanan will tell us it was actually all the fault of those stubborn Poles. Appeasement it turns out is a good thing. It is those who refuse to appease tyrants who are to blame for what the tyrants do next.

Hitler did not want war with Poland. Indeed, he wanted the kind of alliance with Poland he had with Italy. But, first, Danzig must be resolved... The problem was the Poles, who refused to discuss Danzig... Then, in March, Czechoslovakia suddenly began to fall apart... Hitler intervened to guarantee the independence of Slovakia...



Chamberlain, now humiliated, mocked by Tory back-benchers, panicking over wild false rumors of German attacks on Romania and Poland, made the greatest blunder in British history. Unasked, he issued a war guarantee to Poland...

The final conclusion of course is that Poland brought the War on itself, by refusing perfectly reasonable demands from Germany. Hitler of course had no interest in invading Poland, he only wanted an alliance. In a minor variation of the same column titled "Bush Plays the Hitler Card", Buchanan spews out the same vile justification for laying the Nazi murder of millions at the feet of those countries that refused to surrender to Hitler.

The cost of the war that came of a refusal to negotiate Danzig was millions of Polish dead, the Katyn massacre, Treblinka, Sobibor, Auschwitz, the annihilation of the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, and 50 years of Nazi and Stalinist occupation, barbarism and terror.

Thus all of Hitler's crimes are actually laid at the doorstep of those who refused to submit to him-- in Pat Buchanan's foully twisted moral universe. It is classic appeasement and it explains why Buchanan today heads up the faux conservative branch of the anti-war movement via the American Conservative, a magazine bankrolled by Taki, a convicted cokehead and features such as its editor, Scott McConnell, who had been fired from the New York Post. It's these dregs who continue to promote Buchanan's vision-- the question is, when all the dancing stops, what is that vision really?



While Buchanan is overtly arguing for appeasing tyrants, he's no peacenik. Outside of pacificists, those who argue for appeasing tyrants-- only do so to appease the tyrants that they favor. Buchanan was no fan of appeasing the USSR. Behind his defense of Chamberlain and his indictment of Churchill and Poland lurks a darker truth, which is that Buchanan favors Hitler's victory. Buchanan may not entirely embrace the Third Reich, from his standpoint the Nazis ventured too far into secularism, but as his arguments tellingly show, he believes that Nazi Germany was preferable to not only the USSR-- but to the rise of a Secularist Europe and America. The former is an argument Buchanan makes mostly by implication, the latter is one that slowly peeks out around the fringes of his rhetoric.



Many are asking why Fox News and other major Conservative outlets are giving Buchahan airtime. Part of the answer is his connections. Part of it is his limited supply of charm and TV ready personality. Much of it is because Pat Buchanan has mastered the art of talking around conservatives, leaving too many hosts and pundits missing the point.



Buchanan subtly introduces his real agendas, he doesn't use them as premises. He leaves the reader to draw the right conclusion with a few obvious prompts. Take Buchanan's The Lost Tribes of Israel column, which he begins by seemingly praising Israel for its achievements, then neatly digressing into a demographic discussion, that takes a sideswipe by blaming American Jews for abortion, progresses to arguing that Israel must appease the Arabs, concluding by subtly stating that Israel is doomed and it's time for America to embrace the Arab victors.

Those who do not like the Saudi monarchy should consider what is likely to rise in its place, should the House of Saud fall. The same is true of the Jordanian and Moroccan monarchies, and the sheikdoms, emirates and sultanates of the Persian Gulf.



In any struggle of generations, the critical question is often: Whose side is time on? As President Bush celebrates Israel's 60th birthday, and is celebrated in turn as Israel's best friend ever, it is a fair question to ask.

Of course Buchanan has already answered the question with reams of statistics that seem impressive, until you realize they're nothing more than projections and that they reflect a demographic reality that Israel has already survived. But it's typical of Buchanan's minuets that he dances around his real point, which is that it's time to toss Israel overboard and appease the Saudis. A conclusion that he buries in so many rhetorical questions and convoluted statements that it takes a discerning reader to get his point.



As the Prophet of Appeasement to Conservatives, Buchanan knows he has a difficult task, to pull the wool over the eyes of mainstream conservatives while remaining tight with the anti-war flank he's come to head. So Buchanan plays the academic, focuses on WW2, inserts occasional formal condemnations of Nazism, dances from spot to spot but the conclusion is always the same and it falls on the side of appeasing tyranny.



When Iran murders US soldiers, Buchanan argues that Iran is justified because they're only defending themselves.

How? Gen. David Petraeus explained. The Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah are arming, training and directing the Shia militia fighting U.S. and Iraqi forces in Basra and firing rockets into the Green Zone. Said Petraeus, the Quds Force is responsible for killing hundreds of American soldiers.

Why, then, would Iran bloody it up? Why, when things are going Iran's way in Iraq, would it risk war with the United States over Iraq?

The April 16 Los Angeles Times offers an answer. Iran's proxy war against us in Iraq may be Tehran's response to a U.S. proxy war being waged against Iran. Ahmadinejad may be exacting blood for blood.

If you've read this entire post, Buchanan's rhetoric here should seem early familiar. It's the very same rhetoric Buchanan used to defend Hitler's invasions up above.

If he (Hitler) wanted war with the West, why did he offer peace after Poland and offer to end the war, again, after Dunkirk?



Why, then, would Iran bloody it up? Why, when things are going Iran's way in Iraq, would it risk war with the United States over Iraq?

Buchanan is repeating himself and his thesis remains one and the same, to defend tyrannies and to blame their crimes on the democracies who resist them. Whether it's Nazi Germany or Islamist Iran. Can you hear the echo?

Iran has nothing to gain by war... No, it is not Iran that wants a war with the United States. It is the United States that has reasons to want a short, sharp war with Iran.



Why did Hitler not demand these lands back? Because he sought an alliance, or at least friendship, with Great Britain and knew any move on France would mean war with Britain -- a war he never wanted.

That echo is the sound of appeasement at the heart of Buchanan's rhetoric, whether it is focused on 1939 or 2008.

Obama supporters have been playing up the so-called scandal of Claytie Williams, a fundraiser for McCain making a joke about rape 18 years ago. McCain has already canceled the fundraiser but the furor refuses to die down.

This is all the more obscenely hypocritical, not just because of Al Franken's own rape jokes, which have come up during his Senate candidacy, but because Obama has had no problems taking lots of money from Hollywood figures who have regularly mocked the subject of rape and rape victims.

Let's take Seth MacFarlane for starters. As the creator and executive producer of Family Guy, MacFarlane has presided over a TV series that has regularly been criticized for its rape jokes, general contempt for women, racism and anti-semitism and mocked rape victims, such as in the following scene.

--Material should be considered inappropriate for just about everyone--





MacFarlane, like a lot of Hollywood people is a sizable Democratic party donor, having donated a 1000 dollars to Obama's campaign, 3300 to Lautenberg and tens of thousands of dollars to the Democratic party over the last few years.

Daniel Palladino, a co-executive producer on Family Guy donated 2300 dollars to Obama.

It's safe to assume that Obama, who hypocritically attacked McCain over this, won't be returning MacFarlane's donation. And there are of course no shortage of similar examples throughout Hollywood.

Unlike Claytie Williams, MacFarlane's comedy didn't happen 18 years ago, but is an ongoing thing, and one that has a significant impact on American culture and the perception of women.

But of course the entire Claytie Williams scandal was an attempt by the Obama campaign to show itself as pro-woman, itself a pathetic hoax, from a candidate whose supporters routinely trafficked in sexist attacks.

Bloomberg Hearts Obama

Bloomberg defends Obama before Jewish audience

According to the Palm Beach Post, Bloomberg told an audience at an event organized by the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County not to believe the "online whisper campaign" against Obama.

The mayor says the deceptive campaign against Obama, who is a Christian, threatens to undo the strides that Jews and Muslims have made together.

Is it just me or does that last sentence make no sense at all? If Obama is a Christian then why worry about the "strides that Muslims and Jews have made together", whatever those strides may be, they seem to mainly involve Muslims striding to kill us.

And here's a telling comment from a former Bloomberg employee.

Mike Bloomberg speaking for the Jews is hilarious. I worked for his company before he became Mayor and his remarks about religious Jews were disgusting. I later read he had never been to Israel until after he was running for Mayor. Given that background one has to consider either the stupidity of the press who don't examine he facts about him or his attitude that he can get away with anything including the greatest hypocrisy.

Not that this is much of a surprise, considering what a cold, arrogant and egocentric figure the real Bloomberg is. The man whose company fostered a culture of sexual harassment and even rape, and whose company under Matthew Winkler is a fantastically unpleasant place to work. Yet Bloomberg insists on trying to poke his nose into national politics while delivering sanctimonious lectures to one and all.

Much as the media is playing up Bloomberg's comments, he has as much appeal to Jews as he does to non-Jews, namely all the appeal of a fossilized dead fish in an iceberg. Bloomberg has won elections through careful strategy and by projecting competence. But no one loves him. They treat him as a public servant. Unlike Lieberman and Koch, who are likely to be campaigning for McCain, he has no appeal in Florida.

In the blogsphere roundup;

Over at the New Centrist meanwhile Eric has an interesting post, the first part, of which is Leaving the Radical Left: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Jewish Response (Part 1) that is well worth a read.

After WWII, Jews were increasingly integrated into mainstream American society. While already established in academia, law, printing, and publishing, Jews attained political offices and other increasingly public positions. Jews were seen less and less as an “other” and in effect gained “white” status just as the Italians and Irish before them. Concurrent with this development was a shift in mainstream secular Jewish homes away from radicalism and towards liberalism. The apex of this phenomenon was the large Jewish involvement in the Civil Rights struggles occurring in the Southern United States.

However, in the past 40 years there has been a distinct shift in Jewish opinion—if one may even say such a thing exists—away from radical and progressive left movements. What happened? Are there any causal factors that spring to mind?

Over at IsraPundit, Ted Belman comments on the prospective Palestinian state and the Jordanian option

I have consistently been against the two state solution. I favoured annexation but wasn’t happy with taking in an extra 1.5 million Arabs which ultimately would have to be given citizenship. So to get around this I favoured a programme of paying Arabs to leave . There was one other possibility of giving the Arabs autonomy in area A. But this was entirely satisfactory so it would be better if Area A was annexed to Jordan. Some argue that Israel should keep sovereignty over the land and let the Arabs living there have Jordanian citizenship. I recognized that this required Jordan’s consent. I also recognized that Jordan was against the creation of a Palestinian state because it would threaten it.

I would point out that such a development would leave Israel with defensible borders and all of Jerusalem. It would also leave Hamas and Gaza out in the cold. Hamas would then be a goner.

Well Jordan has come forward. This is the paradigm shift I have been waiting for.

Maggie at Maggie's Notebook has more on the hideous face of Mugabe's tyranny in Zimbabwe and the Obamaesque implications for America.

Meanwhile, Mugabe is in Rome at the invitation of the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization, despite having been formally forbidden to travel in Europe as a result of his criminal conduct as Zimbabwe's socialist dictator. At a previous U.N. food conference, Mugabe boasted that his policy of stealing farms was going to increase the former Breadbasket of Africa's food supply. Now people are starving there, the country's money is worthless, and Mugabe has been using foreign food aid as a political weapon.

Over at the Ol Broad blog, Marxists/ Communists for Obama

I’m Trying To Get A Mental Image….…..of Marxists/Socialists/Communists for McCain. Somehow, it just can’t be done.

Over at the Keli Ata blog, she asks if Democrats are blackmailing Lieberman.

Lemon Lime Moon has harsh words for Israel's EU upgrade

The Jerusalem Post calls it "Israel's EU Upgrade", but by any real consideration it is prostitution and climbing into bed with the enemy. It will bring Israel into the EU's evil embrace for favors such as environment help, space programs, banking, education, trade and perhaps that ultimate goal of goals for silly nations integration into the European single market itself. Oh joy! (Ode to Joy or Ode an die Freude is the official EU anthem.

And finally a little blast from the past of my own, Peace Negotiations and the Bug Problem.

For now there was only one bug and one me. But that could change quickly enough. I suspected that the waterbug would be able to find a mate and begin reproducing in much greater numbers than me very quickly.

"So do I drive it out?" I asked the former Prime Minister.

"No, no," Sharon said ruefully. "You can't drive him out but you can partition your apartment so you have demographic superiority in your part of the apartment."

"Wait a minute," I protested, "so I have to give up my bathroom to the waterbugs? And what if they decide to expand beyond the bathroom?"

"You build a wall," Sharon told me.

"Bugs can get through walls," I said.

"We'll deal with that when it comes up," he said.

When the Allies finally beat down Germany's defenses after a long bloody war and marched through a realm of death, the confrontation was rather anticlimactic as it turned out that only "A Tiny Minority of Extremists" had been responsible for the whole thing. And somehow that "A Tiny Minority of Extremists" had unleashed a global war on the world, in which none of the German participants besides a small handful of high ranking Nazi party members were accountable.

The same farce repeated itself in Japan as once again "A Tiny Minority of Extremists" was responsible for the whole thing. On both sides of the world, war criminal after war criminal was freed and not held accountable. The populations which had supported and conducted the conquest and mass extermination of entire populations in the name of their master race ideologies were treated as equally the victims.

That same farce today plays itself out with Islam which too has supposedly been hijacked by that same "Tiny Minority of Extremists" which certainly seems to get around a lot, having migrated now to somewhere in the Middle East. We are told repeatedly not to blame Muslims, just as we were told during WW2 not to blame the German people. Never mind the polls showing that most Muslims support or justify some form of terrorism, clearly they've been misled and the only way to set them right is to spend a few more billions on foreign aid to them.

The whole premise of the "Tiny Minority of Extremists" is a sham and has always been a sham. A tiny minority of extremists can conceivably carry out a few terrorist attacks. But it isn't a few terrorist attacks that we are dealing with and Al Queda is not the sum total of terrorism. For over a thousand years, Islam has carried out multiple genocides, it has oppressed and enslaved non-Muslims-- and it continues to do so to this very day.

Muslims have mastered not just the general concept of Goebbels' Big Lie technique but its specific application, the claim of constant victimization. When Germany was building up its army, it's only because it felt threatened by England and France. When the Nazis took power, it was only because Germans felt oppressed by the injustices of their defeat in WW1. When Synagogues were being burned, it was only because Germans were economically disadvantaged. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, it was only because now the Sudeten Germans were being oppressed. When Germany invaded Poland, why it was only because Poland had attacked Germany first.

The core of the Big Lie is to always claim to be the victim first and to blame your worst atrocities on someone else.

9/11? Oh that was only because America has troops in Saudi Arabia. 7/11? Because Britain has troops in Iran. Car burnings in Paris? That's because of French racism. Rapes in Sweden? That's because the infidel women disrespect Muslim culture by walking around without their Burqas on. Four decades of terrorism? Western foreign policy. Armenian genocide? They were plotting against us. A thousand years of invading, killing and forcibly converting non-Muslims? But they started it!

The common denominator of course is that someone else is always to blame for Muslim atrocities. Even Muslim condemnations of terror typically come with that same disclaimer. "Yes we reject Bin Laden, but American foreign policy blah blah..."

The Palestinian Fraud has been Muslim propaganda's greatest triumph, to turn their own attempted genocide into a perpetual sense of victimization. We rejected the UN compromise and tried to wipe out a few million Jews and all we got was this refugee camp and this keychain.

But it's par for the course in what passes for dialogue with the Muslim world. The fusion of the perpetual sense of victimization with the "Tiny Minority of Extremists" meme means that the same self-nullifying excuse always comes up.

1. Terrorism is the product of a tiny minority of extremists

2. Terrorism only exists because Muslims are constantly being victimized

The blackmail inherent in this train of thought is that the only way to prevent the Vast Majority of Moderate Muslims from grabbing their scimitars and suicide bombing belts and going on a killing spree, is with large doses of appeasement. And that indeed is the policy proposal that repeatedly comes up. Buy off the "Moderate Muslims" to isolate that mythical "Tiny Minority of Extremists".

Rather than dealing with terrorism, the Muslim world time and time again funds it, playing Divide and Conquer by trying to make distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" terrorism, depending on who their audience is. Speaking to American audiences, they will treat terrorism against America as illegitimate and terrorism against Israel as legitimate. Speaking to British audiences, they will treat terrorism against America and Israel as legitimate and terrorism against Britain as illegitimate. Speaking to French audiences, they will treat terrorism against America, England and Israel as legitimate, but not French targets. And so on and so forth.
Rather than turning its back on terrorism, the Muslim world profits from terrorism, employing the blackmail inherent in the whole "A Tiny Minority of Extremists" sham to bleed Western nations for concessions, at home and abroad. But "A Tiny Minority of Extremists" does not start global wars or carry out mass murder. A tiny minority can't do that, it takes a large majority to support and fund them. Which is exactly what international Muslim terrorism has.

From Muslim country to Muslim country, blaspheming Islam carries the death penalty and terrorist groups have secure bases. "A Tiny Minority of Extremists" isn't simply a lie, it's a poisonous shepherd's pie with intimidation wrapped in victimization. "Pay us off or we'll really get mad" is the message of the moderate hucksters even as their foundations send millions back to buy bomb belts in London, Kabul, Baghdad and Ramallah.

Behind the "Tiny Minority of Extremists" lie is the same evasion of accountability that was behind Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and Soviet Russia. There is no tiny minority of extremists since extremism in Islam is defined on a sliding scale. The more assertive terrorists are simply doing what most Muslims support and fund.

Do you know how powerful AIPAC is?

It's so powerful that the Bush Administration is currently telling Jews in Israel that they can't live in parts of Jerusalem and Samaria, because they really belong to the Marxist Fatah terrorist group that the US has lavished billions on and whose leader, President Bush has praised effusively, despite Fatah's role in the murder of both Israelis and Americans.

No other country in the world gets this treatment from America.

Condoleezza Rice hasn't traveled to Turkey 22 times to tell it to get out of Cyprus. In 2003 Turkey received a 1 billion dollar economic assistance package. In response Turkey blocked the US entry into Iraq crippling the war effort and is doing its part to destabilize Iraq with occasional invasions and bombings. That's because Turkey was holding out for 32 billion. Washington had been prepared to go only as high as 26 billion.

In 1992-93, the US turned over over 1500 tanks and over 50 fighter planes to Turkey, yet without being attached to any US veto over how Turkey fought terrorism... as is always the case when it comes to Israel.

Clearly we can see how powerful AIPAC is.

When Bush arrived for the AIPAC dinner, his speech told AIPAC delegates Israel would have to make sacrifices and concessions. When was the last time a President came to a major lobbying group and told them they have to make sacrifices? Yes folks, that's how powerful AIPAC is.

Today under the All-mighty AIPAC, which as all good disciples of Walt and Mearsheimer know controls American foreign policy, the US is pressuring Israel to divide its own capitol. Clearly AIPAC's power has no limit.

Yes the US gives Israel billions in foreign aid. The US also gives Egypt, Jordan and a raft of Muslim countries billions in foreign aid. Israel got 2.1 billion in military aid in 2003. Egypt got 1.3 billion in military aid. Israel is pro-American. The majority of Egypt's population thinks America is the Great Satan. Israel has provided the US with classified Soviet equipment, intelligence, reliable points of operation and an unshakable alliance. Egypt has provided the US with another third world Muslim dictatorship to sink money into, albeit one that doesn't even have any oil. Egypt began receiving foreign aid in exchange for ending its ties to the USSR. Today Egypt gets foreign aid in exchange for not allying with America's enemies, despite the fact that it gives nothing back.

Do you want to know how really powerful AIPAC is?

The US has pumped billions into the Palestinian Authority, a hive of terrorism, corruption and greed. In 2007 alone the US kicked in over half a billion to the Fatah run PA. 150 million of it came in cash. The PA received “the highest per capita aid transfer in the history of foreign aid anywhere,” according to former World Bank country director for Gaza and the West Bank, Nigel Roberts. Do you know where a good deal of that money keeps going? Look at the dead Israelis. That's your answer.

That's how powerful AIPAC is. That's how in control AIPAC is.

When he was running for office Bill Clinton promised Jewish voters that he would move the embassy to Jerusalem, the capitol of Israel, as is the case with the US embassy in every country. He lied. Then Bush promised the same thing. He lied too. On and on, Clinton and Bush have prevented the embassy from being moved. Both Clinton and Bush created "peace plans" that would split up Jerusalem. That's how powerful AIPAC is.

The same folks who rant on about AIPAC talk about US foreign aid to Israel. They don't talk about the price of that military aid. The US holds veto power over Israeli military action, even in self-defense.

In 1967 the US didn't have that power and when Egypt, Jordan and Syria gathered to make war on Israel, they were hit first. The Johnson administration fumed over the Samu Incident and took Jordan's side. But Israel was free to strike first and disable the armies of 9 Arab nations that had been gathered to destroy it.

In 1973 US foreign aid was high and the US had veto power. This time Israel was not allowed to strike first. This time the enemy struck first on Yom Kippur and Israel was nearly cut in half and overrun. Israeli soldiers fought desperate pitched battles, outmanned and outgunned, including some of the bloodiest on the Golan Heights where handfuls of brave soldiers and officers put up a last ditch resistance against Assad's Republican Guard, kissing cousins of Saddam's Baathist regime in desperate battles that made names like Zvika Greengold and Shmuel Askarov into legends. By the time the Nixon administration realized it had gone too far and began sending aid, there would have been no Israel if not for those brave men who stood and fought the enemy against all odds. And when Israel began to turn the tide, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew off to negotiate a cease fire while rejecting Israel's request to first settle the status of POW's, something that would have saved Israeli soldiers in captivity from brutal torture and mutilation.

And yes AIPAC was around then too. Since then the US has repeatedly pushed plans that would have Israel turn over the Golan Heights high ground that those men fought and died for to Syria.

Yes, AIPAC is all powerful indeed.

The US pours billions into foreign aid for Israel's enemies. The US pays the salaries of Fatah's milita thugs who shell Israeli towns and carry out drive by shooting attacks on Israeli families driving home at night. Behold the might of AIPAC.

US Congressmen blame Israel for the Gulf War, fought to liberate Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The war that left Israel helpless in the face of Saddam's attacks, warned by the Bush Administration that any Israeli planes that tried to take out Saddam's missiles, would themselves be fired on by Coalition warplanes. Because nothing could be allowed to interfere with the Arab support for the war. Behold the might of AIPAC.

Today the power of AIPAC is legendary, referred to as the Israeli lobby, the Zionist lobby when its opponents are trying to be disingenuous, the Jewish lobby when they aren't. It's been described as more powerful than the NRA, yet the NRA has been triumphant while Israel is being progressively carved up.

There are a hundred lobbies, particularly industry lobbies, from the telecommunications industry, agribusiness, oil, pharmaceutical, that routinely get everything they want along with huge grants. Americans pay more for their medications, are subject to more corporate abuses and have less recourse than ever before. From Eminent Domain used to seize homes for private business interests to the Orphan Works Act which will make casual corporate appropriation of art and photos a fact of life to Mandatory Arbitration which denies the most basic individual right to legal recourse, corporate lobbies have never had it so good. And their success shows how laughable the idea of the all-powerful AIPAC really is. compared to the real power they wield and the results they have to show for it AIPAC isn't a tiger, it's a kitten.

Beyond the usual appropriations of foreign aid, much of which are used to fund defense contractors in the same Congressional districts that approve them, what exactly does AIPAC have to show for it all? The answer is damned little. Today the US is pushing the knife down across Israel. The Bush Administration has ignored its own commitments to Israel which justified Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. Today Gaza is shelling Israel from the old Jewish towns and the burned out rubble of destroyed synagogues and Condoleezza Rice is making yet another trip to pressure Israel into turning the West Bank and half of Jerusalem over to another bunch of terrorists and murderers.

Yes AIPAC is all powerful indeed.

AIPAC's power comes not from its effectiveness, but the myth of its effectiveness, a myth rooted more in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, than in any tangible results. The myth of the All-Powerful Jew who is at once weak, is a repetition of the same bigoted cartoon of the hooknosed Jew and his all powerful influence that animated the propaganda of both German Nazism and Soviet Communism.

When WW1 was fought the anti-war movement claimed that the Jews were behind it. The anti-war movement on the far right and left has dusted off those claims again, as they commonly do, except this time they have a name that's shorter and punchier than the Elders of Zion. AIPAC. It even comes with its own acronym.

The same bunch of liars, loons, nuts, idiots and crazed bigots who crawl with Jewish obsessions the way a stray dog crawls with lice, develop the same material that is then upsold and mainstreamed for the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the New Yorker and Salon, by way of the Huffington Post and DailyKos. Their myth of the All-Powerful AIPAC is the myth of the All-Powerful Jew, a myth that liars and bigots, radical socialists and far right nationalists have always needed to explain their own miserable inadequacies and failures and to give the mob something to bay about.

The military industrial complex is a vague diffuse thing. But the Jew is a very real image. Shout that the Military Industrial Complex controls America and you need a book to understand it. Shout that the Jews control America and you can leaf through the book and get right to the hating.

Yet if Israel controls America, the reasonable person must ask why Israel's territory keeps shrinking, why the US holds Israel to standards that no other country is held to, why every other country is free to fight terrorism, while Israel's terrorists are funded, armed and trained by the US.

If the Israel lobby was only a fraction as powerful as its enemies say it is, families in Israeli towns wouldn't be shelled by terrorists whose salaries are paid by Washington D.C. If AIPAC was the all-devouring force its enemies describe it as, Israel would be able to build houses in its own capitol without having to ask Condoleezza Rice for permission. At the very least the US embassy might actually be in Israel's capitol, instead of Rice flying to Israel with another plan to carve up that same capitol for those same people shelling Israeli towns on the US dollar.

There is no All-Powerful AIPAC. AIPAC is nothing but a shortcut, a way for politicians to cheaply impress Jewish voters and solicit Jewish donations and votes. For its membership AIPAC is a lazy way to show concern. For its officers AIPAC is a means of meeting and greeting politicians while holding rubber chicken dinners. AIPAC is not helpless, but neither is it any more than a crossroads where politicians promise what they don't intend to deliver and give eloquent speeches they take back after a week in office... serving the same function as so many other lobbies do.

For antisemites, the acknowledged and the unacknowledged, AIPAC is something far more potent-- the very essence of the Jewish myth, the tentacled Jewish octopus reaching its way into every office and organ of government. For them AIPAC is the Jewish Bigfoot come to life and rampaging across Washington D.C., strangling Congressmen, compelling obedience and forcing George Bush to phone Sharon every time he needs instructions. Old bigotries don't go away and the power of antisemitic myths is not banished by electric lights and cable modems. It's simply distilled, cooked, boiled in the lunatic mind and poured out to fit the mold of a new generation.

Behold the All-Powerful AIPAC.

But let us step away from that myth for a moment and return to Zvika Greengold, born in a Kibbutz named after the Ghetto Fighters who fought their own last stand against the Nazis, fighting alone in a single damaged tank against brigades of Syrian armor.

That night, the information officer finally gets through to command HQ and asks for instructions for the following day. Silence.
"What?" he hears… "You're still alive?"
Taken aback, but recalling the last wishes of his late brigade commander, he replies slowly, "Yes, we're still alive" and replaces the receiver.

That is the real Israel and that is the real Jew who shell-shocked, battered and beaten has fought his way through thousands of years of recorded history to be here today when the Pharaohs and Emperors, Tyrants, Caliphs, Kings and conquerors who have trampled us have come and gone. The world calls on the phone, unable to believe that this "fossil of history" is still alive, despite everything.

"Yes, we're still alive," the Jew says and replaces the receiver, turning to face whatever may come in the long night.