We Can't Win

When does defeat actually happen? It's not the signing of a document aboard a battleship or in a train car. It's not even even the actual bloody rout. It's when you come to believe that you can't win.



Before submission comes defeat and before defeat comes hopelessness. The three words that are the X mark for defeat are, "We can't win." They're little words but every leader of virtually every country fighting against terrorism today has said them, from Bush to Olmert to Brown to Arroyo. They've said it in different ways, whether it's "We can't fight 1.5 billion Muslims" to "We are tired of fighting", but they all project the same message. "We can't win."



The most basic psychology of warfare is to make your enemy believe that he can't win. They did it with horns and costumes. We do it with Shock and Awe. And it's done to us with suicide bombings and demographic expansion and economic warfare. The end goal is the same, to get the other side to think, "We can't win."



For nearly two centuries America believed it could win any war around. Americans hurled themselves into battle against empires and kingdoms and expanded Westward, then fought and finished two world wars. Then in Vietnam, America hit the "We can't win" point, through the usual combination of a muddled and out of touch military command and domestic lefitst insurrection and protest.



Liberals and Democrats had of course been preaching "We can't win" back to the days of the Civil War, when the Democratic party ran on a peace platform and staged anti-black and anti-Republican riots and lynchings in the streets of New York. They had been bellowing it outright after WW2 and during Korea. But in Vietnam they found their ideal leverage, two weak morbidly depressed and unpopular Presidents, and a public that just wanted all the craziness to stop. And that was where "We can't win" set in.

Bush Sr. broke the "We can't win" spell with the Gulf War. Afghanistan seemed to have cured it for good, but liberals rediscovered Iraq and began preaching, "We can't win", all over again. Except this time the administration and the military rethought and tackled the problem head on and began winning. There's no telling whether Iraq will become another "We can't win" landmark for the American left, or a "We can win" in favor of American military intervention. A likely deciding factor will be the 2008 election itself, because it's leaders who swallow the mantra of "We can't win", more than anyone else.



For decades Israel took on impossible battles and won. In 1948, Israel fought off multiple Arab armies, some trained by the British Empire, with used Czech weapons and an army that had started life as watchmen for orchards to keep Arab vandals and robbers out. In 1967 Israel destroyed the entire Egyptian air force on the ground and liberated Jerusalem. In 1973, despite a betrayal by allies and enemies alike, Israeli soldiers managed nearly impossible last stands that turned into victories, particularly on the Golan Heights. But the bloom was off the rose though as Israel's Arab enemies figured out what the Soviets already understood about America, that peaceloving Democracies will give up more at the negotiating table than on the battlefield.



Israel grew used to signing pieces of paper and giving up land in exchange for peace. The West which eagerly sought to appease the Sheiks and Tyrants of the Middle East began to squeeze Israel to negotiate more and give up more. Israel began with "We don't have to win, we can just negotiate for peace" and wound up with just plain, "We can't win, so we have to negotiate for peace." That's the problem with putting the cart before the horse, sooner or later the horse falls down and you're just left with a broken cart. Negotiations for peace are all well and good, but when you proclaim an era of peace because your enemies have generously agreed to accept all your concessions, while offering none of their own, what you're actually signing is your own surrender document.

An army isn't only as good as its technology. Technology is a tool but it's the morale of its wielders that really matters. America and Israel didn't win all those wars simply through superior technology. They won wars against impossible odds long before the technological advantage on their side. They won because they fought wars with free men who believed in the cause, because the cause was interlinked with the welfare and future of their families and nations.



Today the American and Israel political establishments frown on all patriotism but the hollow candy striped sort. You can have American and Israeli flags on cakes, t-shirts and in parades, so long as you don't actually loudly celebrate any warmongering victories. Theirs is a patriotism that lives in denial of the simple fact that it was war, often defensive war but war nonetheless, that built their nations. And in forgetting that the military ceases to really matter. Without the bottom line understanding that it is the soldier's gun that protects a nation, the gun becomes vestigial and falls away.



And so their militaries have become politicized and their generals are looking for a lateral career move to a contractor or in politics. Little wonder then that the contractors thrive while the soldiers go hungry. When wars are fought, they are fought to "build nations" or "to win the hearts and minds of the enemy." Pretty soon that kind of war becomes a "We can't win" war. And then defeat follows and submission as well.



Islamic terrorism has thrived on "We can't win". Suicide bombing exists to create a sense of "We can't win." After all how do you defeat people who don't care if they live or die? The politically incorrect answer that you respond with such devastation that the ones who care learn to put a stop to the ones who don't is of course unacceptable today.



Human shields get us to the "We can't win" point that much quicker. After all we can't shoot innocent civilians, can we? The politically incorrect answer that not shooting civilians is precisely what makes them such attractive human shields is of course not acceptable either.



Finally Islamic supremacism thrives on simple demographic expansionism. They don't have to beat us on the battlefield, they can just move here, fund their every offspring with our health care tax dollars and teach it well to go blow itself up and blow us up too. Or if they have more of a long range sense of planning, just teach it to run for public office. The former will hurt us, the latter will kill us. Because nothing says, "We can't win" like having your own enemies running your country. Ask the ancient Israelites or the Romans about that one. Or just the Obama campaign.

Defeatism is the Greatest Enemy of the McCain Campaign

Everyone knows that Obama can't win on his merits. Bluntly put, he has none. He isn't running on the issues, since he's demonstrated that he'll switch positions at the drop of a hat. What he's running on is a cult of personality, his own charisma and celebrity. Imagine JFK with no platform but a youthful smile and some vaguely optimistic rhetoric and that is the Obama platform in a nutshell.

Beyond the cult of personality, his real power comes from being treated as the inevitable winner. As far as the press is concerned, Obama is the incumbent, the election is nothing more than a formality and these next few months are a celebration of his victory.

Too many people, even those who hate Obama, see his victory as inevitable. That's not because of the poll numbers, but the perception created by the media with its constant coverage of the Messiah from Chicago and its determination to create the perception that you can't fight the future and that the election is already over. That same perception was used by the media to steamroll Hillary. It's now being used to steamroll McCain. And while the media can't control what happens at the polls, it can discourage and dispirit the opposition.

While there has always been media bias, what we are seeing in the election of 2008 goes well beyond media bias, to outright election tampering. There isn't even any pretense at fairness, nothing beyond a media selected coronation. You can't even call it dirty tactics, it's an outright assault on democracy by the major corporations that control the news media. It has as much in common with conventional media bias as a coup d'etat has with poll tampering.

If the media wins, it defeats democracy and fulfills its dreams of being able to decide who becomes President or not. If the media wins, the perception of McCain as doomed to lose and Obama as the certain winner will follow voters into the voting booth. For McCain to win, the media must lose.

That is why defeatism is the greatest enemy of the McCain campaign. To win McCain and the campaign must get a confident position across despite the media. That means going around the media where possible, cultivating small regional newspapers and radio stations in key battleground states, it means using bloggers and social media intelligently and constantly finding ways to communicate with the public as much as possible. For example a weekly or even daily video addressing the public streamed across video sharing sites would be a good idea.

It also means always having a clear and concise message and constantly creating "events" with a hook that target specific issues. If Obama is to make the campaign about his personality, McCain has to make it about the issues, which are his strongest area and which point up Obama's own weaknesses. McCain himself has spent too much time running on personality, but he will now be operating in a hostile media environment, a media that excells at distorting and destroying an enemy's image. He is going to have to put the issues first and put them out hard and fast to win.

If the campaign comes down to, who do you trust to run the country for the next four years, McCain will win. If the campaign comes down to, whose name do you recognize best and who seems to be a good guy, Obama will win. That's what he's been positioned to do, that's what his whole phony jolly personality exists for. It's meant to make him non-threatening and to deflect any serious questions about him and his record.

We've already seen that when the campaign gets hot, Obama melts. He doesn't do well under pressure, he doesn't know what he's talking about and he doesn't have the answers. He's a celebrity candidate whose answer to a problem is to put on a show. When his foreign policy credentials are challenged, he travels around the world and gives out free beer and sausages in order to get a crowd to listen to him in Germany. It's shallow, it's hollow and in the age of Big Brother and Paris Hilton, it works.

All Obama has to do to win, is to keep appearing on the covers of celebrity magazines, smile a lot and act like he's already won, while his friends in and out of the media do the dirty work for him. And he knows it too. If he actually begins lagging in the polls, they'll bring out the real ugliness and the sort of venom and hate they lavished on Hillary Clinton. For now though all they have to do is project his confidence to the American public, his Presidential seal, the references to Barack and Michelle as a First Couple and all the other totems and emblems of the man who is already acting as if he's President.

To beat that McCain will have to connect to the American people, to fight defeatism among Conservatives and shatter the idea that Obama cannot be beaten. Obama can be beaten. Obama has not won anything. And McCain can beat him and will, if he fights hard enough for it.

The Democrats want this to be a repeat of Clinton - Dole in 96. We have to make it a repeat of Bush - Kerry in 2004 instead. The Democrats want the McCain campaign to be an image of an old man toddling around and mumbling something, a respectable man but sure to lose. To fight that McCain has to be dynamic and aggressive, he has to be always in motion, always campaigning and always on message. The man who came from behind to win the Republican primary can do it. It's a matter of actually finding a focus.

The best hope for a Democratic victory in 2008 is for McCain and Conservatives to act and be made to act as if they're only playing out their part in Obama's March to the White House. That's the Dole curse. To beat it McCain must break through the invisible wall in the media and be prepared for the fireworks when he does, something that has already begun with the New York Times Op-Ed rejection. He must frame a clear choice between himself and Obama, based on his record and Obama's and his policies and Obama's. He must not only be prepared for the tidal wave of hate that will unleash, but ride it and even enjoy it, the way Theodore Roosevelt did.

If he can do that, McCain can do more than just win, he can enter the White House in triumph. If he can't, the country may well be doomed.

Is Israel to Blame for America's Middle Eastern Problems?

Since the US is, for many reasons, committed to an alliance with Israel, our options in the Middle East are limited. Note I make no comment on the Israel Alliance: it is as much a fact as the daily sunrise, and it is not going to change without tearing the nation apart.

But it limits our options as to allies. Given the reality of the US-Israel alliance, our choices of other allies in the Middle East were in effect confined to: The Shah of Iran (but not the mullahs); Saddam Hussein and the Baathist party; and the Kemalist Secularists in Turkey (but not necessarily the people of Turkey).

Via an article linked to at LGF

It is of course easier to take refuge in blaming Israel than in dealing with reality. But I have to ask Mr. Pournelle, how exactly has Israel limited America's options for alliances in the middle east?

Today the United States has extensive ties to Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Emirates, not to mention Pakistan. Egypt and Jordan receive billions annually from the United States and have participated in joint military exercises. The United States has spent a thousand times that in both treasure blood and fortune to protect Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.



About the only countries the US can't seem to ally with are Iran, Syria and Libya. Though the US did cut a deal with Libya to end its nuclear program. But these three countries listed are either run by brutal dictators or by ideological fanatics who hate everything the United States is. It's none too clear that we could have had any kind of alliance with Iran, had Israel never existed. After all the Carter Administration gave it its best shot at appeasement and still failed.



Of course America's ties to Saudi Arabia, which incidentally predate Israel, are none too reliable, as the Saudis have a funny habit of funding terrorists and talking out of both sides of their mouths. This has not prevented successive administrations from bowing to Saudi Arabia as if Riyadh were Mecca. Israel's fault, not exactly.



And Pournelle who speaks of the "blood and treasure" the United States has pledged to defend Israel, says nothing about the "blood and treasure" the United States actually has spent to protect the Emirs and Princes of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.



Then there's Egypt and Jordan, which have to juggle their Islamists by directing regular blasts of hate at America. Would this problem go away if Israel did? Doubtfully. The Muslim Brotherhood is not about to sing Allah Bless America, no matter if Israel existed or didn't. Their hatred for the West predates the modern state of Israel as well.



We can take a look at the British, who despite backing the Egyptians and commanding their armies in the 1948 war with Israel and being on the verge of invading Israel from Jordan after 1948, got left with Nasser's boot in their face. It's hard to be more anti-Israel and pro-Arab than the British were in 1948, yet stabbed in the back by Egypt, the British turned to Israel in 1956 to help them get back the Suez Canal.



It's all too tempting for Arabists and various liberals and paleocons to dream of how dandy life would be in the Middle East if Israel wasn't in the way. But the reality is that America's ties to Israel are not the product of some sinister Jewish lobby, but practical necesity. When the chips are down, Israel is the only ally the United States can really count on. (Unike Turkey who in the late 90's and 2003 turned down the United States.) And any honest person who is knowledgable about foreign affairs would admit as much.



For generations the United States has insisted on playing Romeo to the Arab Juliet, wooing constantly beneath the balcony and sacrificing Israel to pay for it. Today the US is pressuring Israel to divide its own capitol. It's hard to contemplate any "blood and treasure" greater than such a sacrifice. But wooing Al-Juliet with David's hardwon gains will yield D.C.'s Romeo nothing.



The United States has no shortage of alliances in the Middle East. None of them are worth anything. As Britain has demonstrated, you can all but go to war against Israel, and still get treated by your Arab allies, the way Lawrence of Arabia was treated. While Pournelle lists the many "allies" the United States has sacrificed, in Iran, Lebanon and now Turkey, he forgets the ceremonial sacrifice of Israel, annually held at peace conferences at better resorts throughout the world.



It isn't Israel's fault that the United States lacks credible allies in the Middle East, but it all too tempting to blame Israel for it. But the blame lies with the tyrants, dictators and thugs, the murderous fanatics, who have no interest in a genuine alliance and instead play both sides of the table, facililating terrorism and American business at the same time.



It isn't Israel that causes the United States to be hated, but a Middle Eastern reality in which Islamists preach against American cultural influences and the secular dictatorships barely keeping a lid on issue blasts at America to direct the people's anger away from their own corruption and malfeasance.



Today Israel is being called on to divide Jerusalem to appease the tyrants, dictators and thugs of the Arab world. In doing so an ally the United States can count on is being sacrificed in order to woo allies the United States cannot count on.

Why Gandhi was Wrong; Non-Violence Doesn't Work

Gandhi's tactic of non-violence is often foolishly credited with the peaceful liberation of India. This claim would be more impressive if the British Empire hadn't expired but was still around with a large retinue of colonies, instead of having disposed of its colonies, many around the same time as India. And considering the bloodshed of Partition, despite Gandhi's best attempts at appeasing Muslims it was hardly peaceful. Yet despite the hypocrisies that have dotted Gandhi's life, his ideas continue to have a powerful hold on the Western imagination.



Few would seriously argue that had Gandhi been facing Imperial Japan (whose brutal conquest of Asia he briefly supported) or Nazi Germany or even the British Empire of the 19th century, that non-violence would have been nothing more than an invitation to a bullet. Yet that is exactly what first world nations are expected to do when confronted with terrorism. Not long after 9/11 slogans were already appearing on posters challenging, "What would Gandhi do?"



We can hazard a guess at what the man who urged Britain to surrender to Hitler and told the Jews to walk into the gas chambers, would do. We can do better than guess at the outcome. The same outcome that surrender to tyranny always brings, whether in the name of non-violence, cowardice or political appeasement, a great heap of skulls shining in the sun.

Gandhi's non-violence or Tolstoy's more honestly named, Non-Resistance to Evil through Violence who heavily influenced Gandhi or Tolstoy's own influence through the writings of Rousseau represent a pacifist strain that runs through Western civilization. It is a particularly futile and dangerous strain that values internal nobility over the lives and welfare of others.

Non-violence is either redundant or dangerously misguided. When confronting an opponent, that opponent's goals are either violent or peaceful. If his goals are peaceful then non-violence is redundant. If his goals are violent, then non-violence achieves nothing. The political victories of non-violence have come mainly from a nation that wanted a peaceful outcome seeing violent suppression of protesters through violent law enforcement tactics. While this produced political victories, it also demonstrated the inherent pointless of it, as it only worked with a nation that was already prepared to reach a peaceful agreement.



Had Martin Luther King tried his tactics in the early 19th century South, he would have gotten nowhere. Had Gandhi pitted himself against Imperial Japan, he would have been beheaded. Clearly non-violence is a tactic that can only work against essentially peaceful opponents who are easily embarrassed by a few jailed protesters. It fails utterly against opponents who genuinely want to conquer or kill you and are willing to do whatever it takes to see that it happens.



Had the application of non-violence been limited to a form of civil protest in democracies, there would be no objection. It is when Gandhi is cited as a model for confronting dictatorships and tyrannies that we reach the fundamental gap between reality and the ideology of non-violence.



Can non-violence stop an enemy bent on your destruction? The answer is no. Non-violence can only enable such an enemy. But the nasty trap in the philosophy of non-violence is that it presumes that a source of the violence is in the victims themselves.

This is why when Gandhi advised the Jews to go willingly into the gas chambers, he described any protest by the Jews to the West as itself violent. Only by being willing unprotesting sacrifices could the Jews fit Gandhi's model of non-violence. This is shocking only to those who fail to realize that "Blame the Victim" is inherent in the philosophy of non-violence. Unsurprising from a man who degraded and abused his wife and drove his sons away, and yet continues to be regarded as a sort of saint.



The self-destructive nature of non-violence is that it only works when the source of the violence really is within the individual practicing it. Non-violence only works therefore when non-violently confronting those whose goals are ultimately non-violent. It is self-destructively useless when confronting those whose goals are violent. But because it teaches that we are the source of the violence, it repeatedly blames the target of the violence for doing anything whatsoever to resist the violence.



In Gandhi's non-violence, a rape victim who screamed for help would be guilty of practicing violence rather than non-violence. In Tolstoy's rendering of non-violence, there is no difference in moral culpability between attacked and attacker. This simplistic picture leaves no room for self-defense and no place for a society that seeks to protect its own people. When viewed this way it exposes the ideology of non-violence for what it really is, a self-indulgent selfish form of martyrdom that emphasizes inner nobility over social utility.



At the heart of non-violence is hypocrisy. Quaker non-violence prevented them from funding a militia to protect colonial settlers against attacks. It prevented them from serving on either side in WW2. It did not however prevent them from composing lists of victims for the Nazis. It has not prevented them from agitating on behalf of terrorists today.



Tolstoy's non-violence did not prevent him from distributing and promoting the writings of violent anarchists, it did however prevent him from condemning the Pogroms. Gandhi's non-violence did not prevent him from self-interestedly welcoming a Japanese occupation of Asia or urging a British surrender to Hitler.

The common denominator of non-violence is a contempt for the victim of violence and a slavish need to appease or appeal to the violent. Given a choice non-violence will elevate the perpetrator of naked violence, over the peace-loving people and nations doing their best to stop him. The former has the glory of an unambiguous sinner ripe for conversion, while the latter appears to the philosopher of non-violence as an obscene heresy that uses violence to achieve peaceful ends.



For the democracy confronting a destructive ideology, non-violence is nothing more than a suicide pact. The refusal to resist evil grants hegemony to evil. But the refusal of the philosophers of non-violence to admit the necessity of violence instead drives them to demonize those who would resist evil with violence, as the source of the violence.

Losing Our Warfighting Focus

A car bomb goes off in Iraq. Another bomb explodes in Afghanistan. In Beirut the terrorists cheer as one of their own is ransomed to them in exchange for dead bodies.

In any fight, whether it's one man or a nation's army, there must be a clear and direct focus on the task at hand. To fight, to dodge, to ultimately win.

To complete any task requires focusing on the goal. The clearer and simpler your goal is, the easier your path to accomplishing it becomes. The more complex and diffuse your goals are, the more difficult it becomes not to accomplish them, but to go through your day. Clarity is focus. Diffusing that clarity means diffusing your ability to accomplish even the simplest things.

Wars fought by democracies are often a tricky business precisely because they suffer from diffuse goals. If your goal is to win a war while avoiding damage to civilians who are virtually indistinguishable from the enemy while keeping peace, protecting infrastructure and making sure that absolutely everyone likes you-- then you've set a virtually impossible goal for yourself. Yet this is how democracies fight wars today.

Fighting a war in a democracy means being entangled by long chains of rules while the enemy operates under no such restrictions. The enemy's focus remains simple. Ours does not.

Israel's current situation is the product of a political establishment that can't decide if it wants to fight a war, negotiate a peace settlement or fight a war in order to make a peace settlement possible or negotiate a peace settlement with an enemy who wants to fight a war-- in order to prove to the world that the enemy doesn't want peace. With that kind of schizophrenic approach it's no wonder that Israel's military has stumbled in the face of a complete lack of focus by the civilian leadership.

The military does not do ambiguity well. A gun is made for a simple purpose. It can be fired or not. Like it the military is built for a simple purpose. While a soldier is a good deal more than a gun, a schizophrenia at the political level and diffuse mission goals lead to diffuse accomplishments.

The US military achieved a strikingly brilliant victory in Iraq only to spend the next few years as policemen, negotiators, nation builders and many other things, besides soldiers. The US military forces have achieved amazing things, but at a mounting toll.

The core of focus is to know your objectives. To know your objectives is to be on the open path achieving your goals. Yet today first world political establishments lack clear and simple objectives. Forget "bring back Bin Laden's head" and think more along the lines of, "work with local tribal leaders, coordinate a multi-nation task force, address the problem of poppy farmers, help provide economic incentives for terrorists to return to civilian life, avoid actually killing anyone who isn't verifiably shooting at you and make sure not to disrespect their traditions when you do kill them." And that's only the first paragraph of the list.

It isn't simply a question of bureaucratic mission creep, but the unwillingness of democracies to confront simple threats with simple responses. Compromise means always seeking the middle ground, the safer route, the one that includes the most options, offends the least people and allows us to have so many goals that we can never get any of them done. And the result is compromised focus and compromised warfighting capability.

The civilian political leadership can't fight wars and they seem to go out of their way to make sure that the military won't be able to either. Nation building and negotiations have the political leadership running for office in the enemy country to insure that we are "liked" and the only way to do that is to keep a choke chain on the men in the field who are expected to play social worker, fire only when they've been hit by a round and withdraw the moment the enemy warlord or thug in a turban announces that he's willing to accept a ceasefire.

A political war means a politicised military fighting for political rather than military goals. It means armies that fight to contain or limit a threat, rather than eliminating it. It means prolonged bouts of inaction giving the enemy the advantage and the initiative to plan and carry out attacks in between phony ceasefires. Such conditions demoralize soldiers and make armies seem incapable and ineffective, thus justifying the political leadership's lack of faith in military solution. When the problem is not in the military, but in the halls of government.

The War on Terror in America has lost its focus and Israel's defensive war against terrorism has floundered. The fault lies not in two great armies, but in two weak and confused political establishments which seek political solutions to military problems. The war on terror will not end with a treaty signing on a battleship, but with the use of military force to demonstrate conclusively that terrorism is not a winning tactic.

But the half-war, half-political process being waged now bleeds the terrorists, before letting them regroup, knowing that in the end the average politician has less endurance than the soldiers who are doing his fighting for him.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Obama, Mobama, Bobama

Well this has been a very artificially messianic week as Barack Obama, running for messianic savior of the world, made his ignoble tour, going from his hostile reception at the Western Wall where he was jeered with cries of "Jerusalem is not for Sale", despite his secret 3 AM visit intended to avoid protesters, to a speech given at Hitler's old Victory Memorial to a crowd drawn by free beer, sausages and a concert.



Forget about Bread and Circuses, Obama offers the German people Sausages and Beer, skipping on a visit to the wounded American troops he claims to care so much about that it motivates him to run away from Iraq. Can the Democratic party afford a beer and sausage for every American? With Obama's massive war chest I'm sure he could, but Obama isn't coming to power to give anything away, except America itself.



Via IsraelMatzav, Caroline Glick at the Jerusalem Post and David Horrovitz's interview with Obama paint one picture while Andrew Klavan paints another with Bush as   Batman.           



  (Image credit Lemon Lime Moon)                                                                                 



For now though Obama has clearly tied up the vital convicted murderer endorsement

PARCHMAN — Before he died Wednesday evening, death row inmate Dale Leo Bishop apologized to his victim's family, thanked America and urged people to vote for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.



"For those who oppose the death penalty and want to see it end, our best bet is to vote for Barack Obama because his supporters have been working behind the scenes to end this practice," Bishop said.

If only they let convicted murderers vote, I'm sure it would be Obama in a landslide. Not to mention Gitmo.



Meanwhile the Houston Press has a disturbing expose on how the major magazines that are so busy promoting Obama like Newsweek, Rolling Stone or Time are destroying lives and committing crimes to keep their sales going

It's been a tough hop for this caravan of sales crews, though. Winding their way down from California, they lost a few agents. Two were arrested in Albuquerque after they allegedly forced their way into the home of an elderly couple and beat them to death, raping the wife first. A few weeks later, another agent allegedly raped a woman in Claremont, California, so he got picked up, too. Then, in West Texas, a van flipped, killing one agent and injuring three others. That's seven agents out of commission. That's about a $2,800 loss per day.



When asked what they're doing in town, the agents explain their job and how much they love it. It's a blast, they say. You lie all day to sell subscriptions, and you unwind afterward with some smoke. You tell the customers that you live a few streets over, that you go to the local school and play on the soccer team, that you just sold subscriptions to their neighbor, and the idiots buy it because by now you've got it down to a science. And on to the next town. And the next.



In the eight months the Press investigated door-to-door magazine sales across the country, the industry has seen at least three murders, one rape, two attempted rapes, one stabbing, one attempted murder, one vehicle fatality and one attempted abduction of a 13-year-old girl.



Interviews with former agents reveal a constant party atmosphere where agents have easy access — often thanks to their managers — to drugs. The agents come primarily from two populations: reprobates who need to leave wherever they are fast, and vulnerable kids from unstable families who believe that hopping into a van full of strangers is better than what awaits them at home.



...



The Magazine Publishers of America will give a variation of the following, which is a statement it gave to the Press: "Magazine Publishers of America condemns any door-to-door business that preys on vulnerable individuals or poses a threat to the public. [MPA] has long urged its members to identify any subscriptions coming from these sources and recommends that its members cease doing business with any company that does not fully comply with the law. Our guidelines and relations with subscription agents are clear, and we encourage all our members to follow them."



Which, based on the Press's investigation, previous media stories and industry watchdogs, is complete nonsense. The object is to push subscriptions, and it scarcely matters how.



A customer is a "Jones." A sales pitch is a "spiel," and there are all kinds of spiels — a school-spiel, cancer-spiel, you name it. These lies are known as a dirty canvass, and they're quite successful.



...



That's enough incentive to keep using sales agents. Of course, publishers don't want to be linked to any of the kids knocking on the doors, so the system has been arranged to keep everyone at arm's length.



It works like this: Agents knocking on doors turn their sales receipts in to their managers, who send them off to clearinghouses. A clearinghouse submits the subscription orders to the publishers, who then mail out the magazines. The clearinghouses choose which traveling sales crew companies to work with; the heads of those companies usually have their managers do the hiring. This arrangement allows the publishers, clearinghouses and road crew company heads to pretend they have nothing to do with the kids pushing the publishers' product.



The real blessing for everyone, though, comes in a labor loophole: Even though a crew's agents ride in the same vehicle, are dropped off in the same neighborhoods, are returned at night to the same hotels and have commissions held by managers who dole out the cash when an agent wants to buy lunch or alcohol or a new pair of shoes, labor laws have allowed company owners to hire their agents as "independent contractors." Since the crews rarely have solicitation permits, if they are arrested for selling without a license or for any other matter, they are instructed to tell authorities they are not in fact employed by the company they're traveling with.



...



The companies that run the crews primarily hire through newspaper advertisements promising big money and free travel. The ads are generally placed when the crew hits a town; the prospective hires meet a crew manager at a hotel and are usually hired on the spot. Although they're promised about $500 a week, their money goes on "the book," a mysterious ledger kept by crew managers. Often, agents will start out in the red, already owing managers hotel rent money. Managers also dock pay for canceled orders or other so-called infractions.



Agents sell from a "hot-list," laminated brochures of magazine titles, usually provided by clearinghouses, that agents show their Joneses. The agents work on a point system; the hot-lists show the points each agent would get for a particular subscription. For example, a 2006 hot-list from the National Publishers Exchange, one of the country's largest clearinghouses, shows 40 points for Reader's Digest and 80 points for GQ. According to the titles on the hot-list, the agents were selling for — and NPE was clearing orders for — Condé Nast, Disney Publishing, Meredith and others.

The article is worth reading in its entirety for the ugly face of the self-righteous magazines, who have no problem exploiting and destroying troubled kids to make a profit, in between promoting Obama, whose campaign is built on exploiting vulnerable youth, whether politically, economically or sexually.



Via IsraPundit, a hard look at Obama and the bigots at MoveOn.org

Barack Obama’s solicitation and acceptance of an anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic hate organization’s support is entirely consistent with his entourage of racists and/or anti-Semites like Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton, Michael “There were a whole lot of white people crying” Pfleger, and Louis Farrakhan. (Obama refused to “reject” Farrakhan’s support until Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton backed him into a corner on national television.) It is also consistent with his own campaign’s sanction of anti-Semitic and other forms of hate speech at the campaign’s official Web site.

Esser Agarot writes on his own experience at the vicinity of the protests



At this point police have already admitted that the story about a settler holding a knife to a policeman's throat is a lie, much like the acid in eyes story circulated during disengagement was another leftist blood libel.



The New Centrist has a look at the art of Arthur Szyk, whose work during WW2, particularly for the Bergson group, I greatly admire.



Lemon Lime Moon takes on Obama and religion

That we fight to defend what is right, that we fight our enemy as hard as it takes to defeat his hatred of good and righteousness and that in victory we are kind and merciful is lost on men like you.



~Men Like Obama Are Scary Because the ARE Scared~



You fear the fight. You hate it because of cowardice and because within YOU there is no good conscience. But these men go to war with clear conscience knowing that though hard, it has to be done to protect the weak and the good.



When a man's conscience is plagued with moral doubt, however, he is paralyzed with fear and he will espouse "peace at all costs" ,even to placating the enemy





Meanwhile back at the ranch in Berlin, Obama speaks to crowds of his equally clueless admirers by the famous monument that Hitler so loved.. speaking of a one world government and more importantly himself.. while passing up an opportunity to visit wounded American soldiers at the American base in Germany.

This is a man who uses and disparages religions that made America great just to get notice for himself. A man who plasters his own name on holy sites without regard for the desecration and crassness of it all.



Typical of a man whose religion is based on his own ego.

Obama's Israel Tour in Video and Pictures

First up are two videos of Obama's disastrous Western Wall visit as Obama's attempt to use the holiest site in Judaism as an election photo op fell through as members of the crowd shouted at him, "Jerusalem is not for Sale." As Obama's security led him away, they attempted to drown out the protesters by chanting, "Obama, Obama."

Naturally this has gone virtually unreported in the American media, but has been briefly mentioned in a few British outlets.

Seemingly unaware or gloating, Obama grins on a visit to Sderot while holding up a T-shirt that shows the heart of Sderot pierced by a Kassam rocket, referring to the large scale rocket bombardment of the town. A reaction not shared by anyone else in the photo.

Obama did the usual Yad Vashem tour and then described the place commemorating the murder of six million Jews as "A place of hope." Maybe for him Jewish genocide is a hopeful phenomenon. It was probably either that or describing Yad Bashem as "A place of change."

Pictures of Obama, Hamas terrorist Rantissi and Jesus share the scene. It's like a liberal dream come true.

Obama gets a proper greeting in Israel. Of course the media mostly ignore them.

It's hard to sum up Obama's visit to Israel in a single image, but this does it perfectly, as Obama shakes the hand of the leader of a terrorist organization under the photo of Arafat.

Obama's campaign is certainly not stupid and would not have allowed him to be photographed under Arafat's portrait, except as a subtle way to reassure Muslims about his real agenda.

Israelis for Obama Can't Speak Hebrew

In the ongoing pathetic charade that is the pretense that there's Israeli support for Obama, we have the "Israel for Obama" group, whose "official head" Jan Samson Altman-Schevitz was quoted as saying that Obama would offer "tough love" for Israel instead of a free hand. This quote was widely reproduced by the press and then radically censored, as I've documented. (Altman-Schevitz is incidentally German born and raised, before moving to Israel.)

Though often quoted as the head of "Israel for Obama", on the Obama site Israel for Obama is a rather dubious Messianic Black Hebrew group whose leader Yeshaya Amariel is busy passing himself off as an American Jew who supports Obama, while waiting for the apocalypse and one of whose members may have been involved in violent attacks on Jews in Arad.

"Israelis for Obama", which is the group getting the press, is really headed by Tony Jassen. Tony Jassen may have created "Israelis for Obama" but neither he nor the rest of the group, barring one actual Israeli, can write in Hebrew.





This is the pathetic recitation of how Jassen managed to get Altman-Schevitz quoted in media around the world.

Today we meet at the Kind David Hotel, and surprisingly were able to make it inside. Barack was meeting with Israeli opposition leader and head of the Likud Benyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu. We hung around the lobby making our prescence known to the media waiting by passing out flyers explaining who we are (thanks to Shahar for helping with the Hebrew translation and design!) and being interviewed by some as well (RTVi- Russian TV, Army Radio, Reuters, AP).

Nothing says Genuine Israeli like not being able to write in Hebrew and needing help to translate simple flyers and slogans. At least Tony Jassen and the gang at "Israelis for Obama" are slightly ahead of Yeshaya Amariel at "Israel for Obama" who is not actually Jewish and doesn't seem to like Jews all that much. But you have to wonder why this campaign of support couldn't hunt down Israelis. At this point it should be renamed "Black Hebrew and Subliterate Anglos Hanging Around Israel for Obama".

Meanwhile aside from this "Israelis for Obama" has little content except to repost Yeshaya's material, including his announcement that his father's Black Messianic Church has endorsed Obama. Of course he calls the place "Tabernacle Congregation of Prayer Yeshiva in Israel" which just goes to show that Jassen has no monopoly on Ivrit illiteracy.

But it's only fair that with a shortage of actual Israelis to campaign for Obama, there should also be a shortage of actual Jewish synagogues in Israel to endorse Obama. At this point Obama would be better off clapping a Kippah on Reverend Wright's head and renaming Trinity, "The Cobernacle Tangregation of Yeshiavism in Chicago".

But Israel for Obama or Israelis for Obama or Frauds for Obama gets even better than this... its membership list is headed by Aly Baba Faye, a dubious character, who has been written up before and appears to be a non-Jewish Somali living in Italy who is not a US citizen and is heavily involved in promoting Obama.

Then there's Bradford "Hussein" Lyau, seemingly an Asian fellow from New Mexico. He's followed by Citoyen De Monde, who lives in Japan. At this point you might reasonably wonder why Obama can't hardly find any Americans who support him, let alone Israelis.

Going down the membership list of Israelis for Obama, I couldn't seem to actually find any Israelis living in Israel who support Obama besides Shahar Golan, their token Israeli who translates things into Hebrew and makes posters for them. I did find Jamella from Brooklyn, who isn't Israeli or Jewish. There's Jon Car Harris, a black man/lady from Wyoming. Then there's the Reverend Bry, a Presbyterian minsiter from Virginia. No he isn't Jewish or Israeli either.

I hesitate to say how much of the Israelis for Obama fraud is aimed at Jews and how much of it is simply the commonplace social networking inflation that characterized the Ron Paul campaign and now characterizes the Obama campaign. Phony friends lists and large numbers of people joining groups that have no connection to to make it seem as if these groups are influential or relevant. Right now Israelis for Obama is giving Jews for Ron Paul a run for its money in the lack of credibility department. And that is a genuine achievement when you consider that the head of Jews for Ron Paul was a gay Wiccan minister who stole money from people and pretended briefly to be Native American.

For those truly bored, other highlights of Israelis who support Obama from the group include, Abdoulaye Dieng ,Standing Rock Sioux Nation and Ehuzu Hussein who truly exemplifies Barack Hussein's message of being "All Things to All People".

Ehuzu Hussein is a member of African Americans for Barack Obama

1,000 Black Men for Obama , 30 something women for Obama , A Rosary A Day for Barack Obama , Gay, Lesbian, BiSexual Committee for Barack Obama ,Chicago Jews for Obama , Church Of God In Christ For Obama , Cuban Americans for Obama , Delaware United Auto Workers for Obama , Disabled Oregonians for Barack Obama , Dogs for Obama! , Native Americans for Obama, Gay Republicans for OBAMA , Irish Catholics for Obama , New York Asian Americans for Obama, Iowa Latinos for Change and of course Jews for Obama.

Honestly the only ones I can believe Hussein really is one of these, DC Lawyers for Obama or Egyptians Supporting Obama .

Hussein, Ehuzu rather than Barack, exemplifies the culture of fraud on Obama's blogs, on Digg and YouTube and elsewhere that creates the image of widespread support, often by foreigners like Aly and Hussein, for Obama.

Obama's campaign is a scam and its subsets like "Israelis for Obama" or "Ukranians for Obama" or "Arabs from Abroad Promoting Obama" are scams too, cashing in on identity politics and fake user names with groups that may really have a small handful of members to promote their candidate.

Next time you encounter someone online who claims to be a Disabled Gay Asian-American Autoworker for Obama, keep in mind you're probably just talking to Ehuzu Hussein. And when you run into Israelis for Obama, you're dealing with people who can't even write in Hebrew without help.

How do you spell scam? Yes we can.

Media Censors "Tough Love for Israel" comment by head of Israel for Obama

This is the quote that appeared in numerous articles sourced from the original AP story about Obama's trip to Israel by the head of an organization calling itself "Israel for Obama".

``In general, I think tough love is better than a free hand,'' said Samson Altman-Schevitz, head of the Israel for Obama campaign. He moved to Israel two years ago from Chicago, where Obama's wife, Michelle, was his adviser at the University of Chicago.

This quote originally appeared in the AP story at outlets such as USA Today and the Miami Herald, as can be seen via a Google search. However it now only appears at the Guardian and various blogs. Instead the outlets have run a greatly foreshortened version of the piece that censors all such negative references to Obama pressuring Israel.



Other outlets have more neatly sliced out only the "Tough Love" section from the story as can be seen at the Gulf Live.

Here is the original AP story that Gulf Live originally ran as can be established by Google.



Here is the Gulf Live version now with crucial paragraphs missing.



The LA Times wrote its own story, which as you can see above, included Samson Altman Schevitz. Now he's gone. He appears in the search link to the story on the LA Times' own site but not in the story itself.



The same story is repeated at outlet after outlet. Even the Yahoo News version of the AP story has been similarly censored.



Nor is this a matter of one story being replaced by another, because it's the same story and Samson's quote only appears at the Guardian and the original AP story at Google News.

Outlets to the right and the left of the Democratic party, such as Fox News, NPR and the New York Sun appear to still carry the story with Samson's quote inside.

If what I'm seeing is correct, then this is a disturbing example of the willingness of the media to censor itself in order to get out only the spin that the Obama campaign wants to appear on a given story.

The AP story's quote by Schevitz-Altman, formerly tied to Michelle Obama, who inconveniently began promoting Obama's "Tough Love for Israel" was emblematic of the sort of "Tough Love" the media would like to see applied to Israel. However it would seem that cooler heads, whether in the Obama campaign or in the outlets themselves, chose to slash everything but a purely pro-Israel take from the AP story. This is of course not for Israel's benefit, but in order to present Obama as Pro-Israel to a gullible American Jewish audience.

But in moments like this what we really see is the sausage being made, the large scale propaganda campaign undertaken by the media to insure that Obama becomes the next President.

A Special Message from the New York Times

Hello, my name is David Shipley. As Op-Ed page editor of the New York Times I would like to take this opportunity to talk to you, the American reading public.

As journalists we take very seriously our obligation to present a diverse group of voices on our op-ed page from Hamas terrorists to Anti-war activists to 9/11 Truthers to Holocaust deniers to Osama Bin Laden. While we may occasionally face criticism for the editorials we choose to present in our forum, we continue to believe that the best hope for understanding one another lies in communication. In the spirit of that openness, we would like to explain why we refused to run an editorial written by Senator John McCain.

While we did endorse Senator McCain during the Republican primary because of his faith in global warming and illegal immigration, his continuing support for the War in Iraq makes it unconscionable for us to provide a forum for his hateful views. As the voice of the American people, if they would just shut up and listen to us, it is our solemn and sacred oblgiation to tell them who to vote for. And what to vote for. We take our responsibility to select the future President of the United States very seriously and it is our duty to prevent abuses of power by the American electorate that threaten to destabilize the Hamptons housing market and the value of our GreenTech stock.

There were a number of problems with Senator McCain's editorial, which we dutifully pointed out to him. Should he correct these errors in judgment, the New York Times will be pleased to run his editorial, pat him on the head nicely and smirk knowingly when he is defeated in the fall.

First of all McCain's editorial insists that American forces are winning in Iraq and that the Surge is working. As all constant readers of the New York Times know, Iraq is a second Vietnam and a hopeless disaster that unravels the morale of our military and depresses the hell out of the press corps. As responsible journalists we cannot permit views within our pages which contradict the known facts reported by us.

Secondly McCain's staff has refused to allow us to color in devil horns on his photo. This is a grave mistake and one that makes it impossible for us to properly display our hatred and contempt for him. While we offered to compromise with a burning swastika and a Hitler mustache or a montage of dead Iraqi or some sort of babies, the McCain campaign has refused to work with us to find a reasonable compromise on this issue.

Finally Senator McCain continues to insist that he intends to win the Presidency. We find this to be grossly and wholly unacceptable. The New York Times along with the rest of the legitimate press has already determined that Barack No Middle Name Obama is to be our appointed President and we will tolerate no dissent whatsoever from our position. Not from the American people. Not from Senator McCain and not from anyone.

As dedicated journalists, we at the New York Times have grown adept at reporting our views to you. We believe that you need our views because we are smarter than you, because we are better than you and because some of us like David Carr, are fat crackheads who beat our girlfriends, we can also print anything we make up. Because what is truth anyway? Truth is what we decide it is.

Therefore we cannot print Senator McCain's editorial because it fails to meet our standards. Our standards of truth. Our standards of integrity. Our standard of creating the news and deciding what you are allowed to think.

Yours in Obama

David Shipley

James L. Jones, Big Oil's Conflict of Interest on Israel

In what is practically a dictionary definition of Conflict of Interest, Retired General, Chevron Board Member and President of the Institute for 21st Century Energy, James L. Jones was chosen to give a report on Israeli tensions with Fatah terrorists in the West Bank. Now word is that the report will be negative, though why anyone would expect a man who is set to join the board of directors of one of the world's largest oil companies to do anything but issue a report blasting Israel baffles me.

The James L. Jones story gets much dirtier when you consider that he was appointed to his post by Condoleeza Rice, who even wanted him to become her Deputy Secretary of State. Condoleeza Rice is herself a former Chevron board member and even had a Chevron oil tanker named after her. This is yet another illustration of the revolving door between the energy industry and the diplomatic corps.

Chevron is of course closely tied to Saudi Arabia. In his Saudi speech, Chevron's Vice Chairman called for "energy interdependence" with Middle Eastern oil producing countries, rather than energy independence. Anyone who seriously thinks therefore that James L. Jones has any credibility in his role at the Institute for 21st Century Energy in its stated mission of moving America off the gasoline teat, is living in a fantasy world. The same goes for anyone who thinks James L. Jones has any credibility in his role in investigating Israel. Having a major oil company board member whose corporation is beholden to the Saudis investigate Israel is like having the mob investigate the NYPD.

The ugly reality is that the people in charge have no interest in change. The oil companies or the State Department both represent the Dhimmi Arabist wing of the United States piling political influence and billions of dollars behind backing Islamic appeasement, and doing what the Saudis want. James L. Jones who has received a medal from Saudi Arabia for the billions of dollars spent and lives protecting the Saudis from Saddam is a perfect choice because his military record belies his current employment and gives him credibility that people like Chevron's Vice Chairman don't have.

It remains in the interests of the Saudis to focus negative attention on Israel, not only because of their natural hatred for the region's only non-Muslim state, but because it diverts attention from Saudi Arabia's own crimes and their role in stirring up trouble and terrorism in the region and around the world.

Saudi Arabia must prompt its tools to continue emphasizing the few billion Israel receives in annual aid, otherwise they might ask about the hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives the US has lost because of Saudi Arabia. They must emphasize AIPAC, because otherwise they might begin looking at Saudi oil and its influence on American politics.

This report from James L. Jones will be nothing more than another sad chapter in the oil industry's deliberate obstruction of the War on Terror and their promotion of Islamic appeasement.

Another Settler Takes Down another Bulldozer Attack

In Jerusalem another Arab terrorist went on a bulldozer rampage wounding 25 people and crushing cars and overturning a bus. The terrorist is part of the Abu Tir clan and related to a top Hamas figure.

The man who took him down before he managed to kill anyone was once again a settler. Yaki Asael, 58, farmer, resident of Susia, father of 8, Tank Reserve, former company commander, Veteran of several wars, owns a vineyard, teaches Torah at Yeshiva Kiryat Arba.

The media and the authorities will once again try to ignore who really took down the terrorist and attempt to give credit to the border policeman, just as they did each time. But as in the previous bulldozer attack where an off-duty soldier who had been arrested for protesting Disengagement took down the terrorist, it was a "politically incorrect" and a wholly Zionist figure who in his life embodies the Jewish and Israel ideal, right down to the vineyard.

Asael represents the embodiment of everything that the far left is trying to tear down in Israel, while the Arab attacker represents everything they are trying to promote. Today's attack is another painfully literal demonstration that it is only the "politically incorrect", the so-called radical extremists, the settlers and religious Zionists, who stand between the state and its destruction.

Meanwhile the same press which routinely uses "settler" in a derogatory form makes no mention of where Asael lives or that his home has been in the gunsights of every left wing group, including that of the Prime Minister's spouse, looking to drive Jews out of as much of Israel as possible.

This attack is once again nothing short of a wakeup call warning us to stop making deals with the Arabs, stop utilizing cheap Arab labor and to return to the ideals on which Israel was built. Or perhaps it was the terrorist's way of welcoming Obama to Jerusalem.

A Dress Code for Muslims in the West

After the Obama campaign issued a dress code for female reporters ordering them not to wear jewelery, nail polish, open toed shoes and a warning to have a scarf on hand to cover their heads with in a makeshift Hijab, Nancy Pelosi style on his MessiahTour 2008 of the Middle East, you can't help but wonder why Americans are once again called on to "respect" Muslim sensibilities with a dress code in their country, while no such equivalent "respect" is reciprocated in our country.



If Americans are to be expected to dress like Muslims in Muslim countries, then the reverse should be true, Muslims should be expected to dress like Americans in the United States. But of course the reverse isn't true which really means that we accept Muslim standards as superior both at home and abroad.



It's no surprise that Barack Hussein Obama would have female reporters trot out the makeshift Hijab. I'm sure we'll get to the point when Obama Girl is wearing one too. But if Muslims expect us to live by their rules and bay for blood when a schoolteacher names a teddy bear Mohammed or when a reporter wears nail polish, maybe they need to learn to live by our rules over here.



But par for the course, instead we find that Muslim laws are being imposed on us in our own country. The Hijab evolved as a way for Muslim women to avoid being raped in Beirut by Arafat's PLO thugs. (I'm sorry that's Nobel Prize winner and Palestinian President Yasir Arafat.) Today they serve that same function for non-Muslim women in Norway and Sweden and parts of France. What the Hijab really communicates is, "I'm subservient, please don't rape me." It's a true testament to the hope and change Obama and the Democratic party are bringing, for them to compell female reporters to don that badge of servitude that is really no different than a yellow star.



If the United States demanded that Muslim women who come to the United States wear pantsuits, which we consider respectable dress, there would be an uproar. But when a Presidential candidate whose middle name shall not be mentioned demands the same of American women, we're expected to take it in stride.



Today the black ghosts of masked women haunt European and American cities. And what bruises, what bloody marks and what brutality those veils and sheets hide is anyone's guess. While Muslim groups practice their idea of anti-civil rights as civil rights by fighting for the "right" of Muslim women to be oppressed, Western feminist groups hold Hijab and Burka fashion shows whose message seems to be, "Try on some oppression now so you can get used to it."



If the standard is "When in Rome", then it's time for Muslims in America to dress as Americans. If the standard is, "Follow your own cultural traditions", then Americans in Muslim countries should dress how they please. But instead the real standard is "Muslim dress is correct in all circumstances." And that cannot be allowed to stand.

We don't expect Muslim women to wear pantsuits. That is our idea of tolerance. Muslims however expect us to dress by their standards. That is their idea of tolerance. In such an exchange, tolerance meets intolerance and the intolerant win. Just like negotiating land for peace with enemies who take land but don't keep the peace, providing tolerance to those who refuse to practice tolerance in turn is a sure formula for defeat.

Socialism and Anti-Semitism

Can you name the country where the government controlled media repeatedly spreads antisemitic invective and cites The Protocols of the Elder of Zion? A country where a third of the Jewish population has emigrated and the exodus continues? A country whose governments carries out raids against Synagogues for "subversive activity" and whose advisers accuse Jews of plotting to take over the country?

Finally a country whose government or rather dictatorship is widely supported by liberals in the United States and Europe.

No it's not located in the Middle East, but in South America. The country of course is Venezuela and like the antisemitic agenda of their fellow Marxist Sandinistas, Hugo Chavez's "Jewish Problem" demonstrates that leftist antisemitism has very little to do with the existence of Israel or any so-called oppression of the Palestinian Arabs.

The Marxist and leftist hatred for Jews long predates the modern State of Israel. In fact it goes back to Marx himself, who despite having Jewish ancestry, hated Jews all the more.

When Marx wrote, "Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist... The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him, money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews", he was setting forth the antisemitic viewpoint of Marxism that continues to this day.

This is the sort of rabid antisemitic ravings most people would expect to see in a copy of Mein Kampf, but Marxism and National Socialism are two faces of the same coin and Marx and Hitler were both conceiving of a new vision for Germany. One that demonized the Jews as evil bankers and hoarders, obstacles to a true socialist or national socialist state.

When Chavez speaks about Jews, he reflects the same Marxist stereotype and obsession with the Jews as the financial rulers of the world or in particular Venezuela; "The world has enough for everybody, but it happened that some minorities—the descendants of those who crucified Christ... took possession of the riches of the world."

Declaiming against Jewish wealth is of course an old stereotype, but takes on a particular meaning for socialists whose goal is the expropriation of wealth and property into the hands of a socialist state.

To socialists, Jewish success and ability is our original sin. Where liberals claim to be motivated by a desire to bring equality by removing social discrimination, the reality is that this is never meant to actually work. Discrimination is meant to be an endless treadmill, escape from which can only be achieved through socialism and government control. Jews however have been the most notable exception, succeeding widely in the arts, commerce, industry, medicine, law, politics and a hundred other professions, despite social discrimination.

Jews are an embarrassment for the prophets of socialism, because Jews disprove its fondest premise, that only government control can insure equality and justice. Is it any wonder then that socialists tend to hate the Jews?

Modern socialist antisemitism justifies itself through Israel, but it has little to do with Israel. Socialists celebrated Israel in 1948 when they thought it would be a socialist beachhead in the Middle East. Instead Israel embraced free market reforms and become one of the world's biggest sources of medical, technological and agricultural development. Israel's GDP ranks with that of Western Europe. Israel's median household income is just behind Australia and ahead of Ireland and Hong Kong.

Is it any wonder that the socialists which once looked hopefully to Israel now despise it, rant against it, boycott it and repeat the vilest slanders they can find? They are merely following in the footsteps of Karl Marx, who saw Jewish economic vitality as a threat to his socialist vision. Anti-Semitism is not the socialism of fools, as Bebel said, instead socialism is irrevocably chained to antisemitism, whether in Germany or England or beyond.

Socialists traffic in antisemitism, not because of Israel, but because they resent Jews and because it is a cheap source of bigoted populism, in Venezuela for Chavez or in the UK for George Galloway or in America for Cynthia McKinney, current Presidential nominee of the Green Party.

Many will retort by pointing out that a great number of socialists were and are Jewish. What of it?

Torquemada, chief instigator of the Spanish Inquisition, was descended from Jews. Even Ferdinand and Isabella had Jewish blood. Many of those who burned Jews at the stake in the Spanish Inquisition, like Marx or Adam Shapiro of ISM, were of Jewish descent. Before they too were burned, more often than not.

The same pattern played itself out in the USSR as the Yevesktsia, the Jewish Section, carried out purges of Jews, eradicating religious and Zionist figures, for their masters in the Kremlin, until it was their turn to go before the firing squad. It has played itself out numerous times over and over again, from Convents to Kapos and will continue playing itself out in the future.

The common denominator is that such people living under a value system that despises Jewishness, choose to side with the enemy and adopting his value system are at their eagerest to persecute and kill other Jews. It matters little whether they convert to Catholicism or Communism, the mental phenomenon is the same. And it is not limited to Jews alone, as can be seen with the rise of Dhimmism in Europe and America.

Such people are of course no more "Jews" in any meaningful sense than the American Taliban Johnny Walker was an American. They are simply people who happened to be born a certain way and under the burden of their own self-hatred went to war against their own people.

Leftist antisemitism is not a Jewish burden, it is the socialist burden. It is driven by the socialist distaste for the individual, for individual accomplishment and striving, out of tune with the collective. For that is what Jews ultimately are. The madness of socialism is the madness of crowds, of a great voice howling at a mob and pointing a well manicured finger at a Jew and proclaiming, "There is your enemy."

That voice has been howling for a long time now. When the Green Party chooses someone like Cynthia McKinney as their standard bearer, they are making a statement. A statement about successful minority groups in America, the Jews and Asian-Indians whom McKinney rabidly hates. When Latin American Marxists scapegoat Jews and Chinese, they took are making a statement. And it is a statement that the left vocally cheers on.

The ugly reality behind socialism is that it is an ideology by slavemasters in search of slaves. Those who naturally need socialism are easy recruits. Those who do not will be demonized and made to feel guilty because they work hard for a living and succeed at it. They will be accused of being greedy, privileged, entitled and oppressors. Some in turn will join the socialists' ranks or pay them off out of guilt. And so antisemitism pays for the socialists and will pay again.

In Venezuela, in the UK. In Paris and Seattle. In Bolivia and Nicaragua. In Georgia and Harlem. Socialism continues to be linked to Antisemitism. Not because of Israel. But because of their hatred of Jews and hatred of the individual and lust for power over mankind.

Can an Atheistic Society Survive a Religious War?

That is a serious question being raised today by the Clash of Civilizations between a secularized West and a fanatically religious Middle East. While the Western nations are far from atheistic, they have secularized and liberalized their beliefs. Moreover they have replaced those beliefs with a worship of tolerance and diversity for its own sake.



Religion is far from any certain immunity in war. Indeed in technological armed conflict, the sort of destructive fanaticism displayed by Muslims tends to be self-destructive. But while America, Europe and Israel can easily defeat the enemy on the battlefield, in the clash of civilizations themselves they continue to recede backward while the Islamic enemy advances.



They key missing element is righteousness. Not merely morality for morality can exist apart from religion. But a sense of righteousness is what enables a nation to maintain itself in the face of enemies who fervently believe in their own rightness.



The problem is not that the West consists of atheistic societies. If that were the case, we would be far better off than we are today, for naked atheism is itself a fundamentalist ideology. Instead what we have are watered down, liberalized and secularized fragments of religion, tamed and harnessed to be good neighbors. Such faint beliefs make for faint hearts and faint spirits when it comes to telling Ahmed that he had better stop killing his daughters and that if his mosque doesn't stop playing footsie with terrorism, there will be beheadings and they won't be the heads of infidels.



The problem with that missing sense of righteousness is that as religion has become watered down, people have lost that essential clear belief in right and wrong in a black and white sense. We have grown too used in the West to thinking in gray areas, in finding the non-aggressive middle ground of compromise. Little wonder then that when elections come around and we choose the candidate that best seizes the middle ground, that we accordingly lack the leaders to fight a real war. Compromises make for poor warriors. The sort of man who sees both sides of every issue is not the sort of man to say No and make it stick.



Much of the achievements of modern civilization are indeed due to the art of compromise, but in compromising our belief systems we have also compromised our sense of right and our ability to decisively reject and resist that which is wrong.



Belief serves as an immune system warding us from that fatal doubt which causes us to hesitate when the knife is plunged toward our throats. For decades now we have stood hesitating, as nations and societies, while the curved blade sweeps ever close. It is close enough now that we can read the arabesque writing on its flat. We can make out words such as "Sharia", "Jihad" and "Dhimmi" and yet still we stand there seeing both sides of every issue, when in truth all we are seeing are the sharp and flat sides of the knife.



Like every virtue tolerance must be governed by a higher belief. In abandoning ourselves to the logic of compromise, we have also betrayed our own sense of self-worth, turned our backs on the mentality that proclaims, "I would rather be right than be President." We have become societies that sincerely believe in very little and this leaves us vulnerable in the face of enemies that believe a great deal. Though our competence may exceed theirs, their confidence exceeds ours. To regain the edge, we must also regain the absolute vision of belief and righteousness, the sword and armor with which any religious war is tested and with which such war must be ultimately decided.

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Sarkozy, France and Obama

It's been an ugly week in more ways than one and while a week ends, the problems spawned in that week continue on. Israel has set a precedent that not only encourages kidnapping soldiers and civilians, but makes it clear that the kidnappers don't even need to keep them alive. America has appeased North Korea and Iran. And the Louvre is getting a veil, I have to wonder how long it will be before the paintings of women in the Louvre have veils painted on them too.

At Catherine Falsani's blog, we have a clear demonstration that Obama's ties to Trinity go deeper than he's tried to pretend after he threw Trinity and Wright under the bus.

At 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 27, 2004, when I was the religion reporter (I am now its religion columnist) at the Chicago Sun-Times, I met then-State Sen. Barack Obama at Café Baci, a small coffee joint at 330 S. Michigan Avenue in Chicago, to interview him exclusively about his spirituality...

GG:
Do you still attend Trinity?

OBAMA:
Yep. Every week. 11 o'clock service. Ever been there? Good service.

Yeah. God damn America. Hail Hamas. Best service ever I imagine for Bill Ayers' buddy.

Meanwhile Michelle Obama thinks all a 600 dollar stimulus check can do is buy a pair of earrings. Talk about a woman who truly understands the poor. Let them eat cake. Let them buy 600 dollar earrings. Marie Antoinette has nothing on Michelle Obama.

Over in the blogsphere Dinah Lord takes on the Louvre's new Islamic art wing

As you know, depictions of the human form is haraam in Islam and I mean really, how many old stinky rugs and patterned tiles can you look at before you go off in search of something more visually exciting?

It's no surprise that the museum was started by that old reprobate, Jacques Chirac in 2003 and was funded in large part by Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, whose €17m contribution to the project is one of the biggest private cultural donations made in France. The last "grand project" between France and Islam, François Mitterrand's, L'Institut du Monde Arabe (the Arab World Institute) was formed to:

Boker Tov Boulder has her own punches to throw in the direction of the Galling Gallic, beginning with Sarkozy

The Keli Ata blog has her own take on the Omar Khadr jailhouse performance

I don't have children but friends with kids tell me they can always tell when their kids are lying and fake crying. That is the same way I feel about Omar Khadr. I like to think of myself as a sensitive person who has a decent gauge on when people are truly in distress but I'm just not picking that up from what little I've seen of the Khadr interrogation video. Sure, the kid's probably miserable and itching to go home to Canada, to go home period as any criminal or suspected criminal that is incarcerated would.

But torture? Nope. I just don't read that. We've all seen hostage video either on TV or You Tube. Usually westerners or non-Westerners in acute distress. Some very quite, subdued, in shock, others in great distress (such as the Christian Science Monitor journalist who was ultimately released). I watch the clips of this Khadr kid and it comes across as totally contrived.

Bad acting if you ask me.

Lemon Lime Moon meanwhile wishes Obama all the best for his upcoming engagement with Iran and thinks he will make a very lovely bride and has a post about why you dare not , must not joke about Obama

Debbie Schlussel has this piece about the phony Saudi tolerance conference and the Dhimmi attendees there

The New Centrist has Part of his Leaving the Radical Left: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism, and Jewish Response on his blog.