Showing posts from April, 2009

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Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Shape of Things to Come

How neatly the pieces seem to fall into place. Specter announces his party switch, strengthening the Democrats in the Senate, just as liberal Republican Supreme Court Justice prepares to retire from the court. Coincidence? Sure. This gives Obama a free hand with his first Court appointment, now who could possibly fill Souter's slot? Well there is Noah Feldman, Souter's own former law clerk, who's been tipped for the court despite his young age for some time now. Feldman has numerous assets to recommend him. He writes for the New York Times Magazine. He rabidly hates Jews and he's a proponent of Sharia Islamic law. What else can you ask from a Supreme Court Justice? Even if isn't Feldman now, I'm sure Obama will dig through his radical grab bag to find someone just as ugly to hijack the court to the far left. And we may not be too far away from the first Muslim Supreme Court justice and the real onset of Sharia law in America. And just to give us a preview, Tariq

Winning the War on Terror

Islamic Terrorism has become to the early 21st century, what Communism was to the late 20th century, the ultimate existential threat that the civilized world was forced to grapple with. In this article I will take a look at a few of the existing approaches, and their pros and cons, for winning the War on Terror. 1. Steal Their Thunder - It isn't the approach that comes to most average people's minds when it comes to dealing with terrorism, but it is the one favored in practice by most Western governments. "Steal their thunder" is a conventional enough defense strategy, in particular as practiced against Communist and Socialist groups, defusing their popularity by adopting a portion of their agenda as part of policy reforms. The thinking behind this approach is that adopting some of a populist but extremist party's agenda, will defuse its base of support and quiet the undercurrent of frustration that fuels their followers. Since the conventional policy thinking is

What Was Done Once, Can Be Done Again

What does an independence day mean anyway? As a culture grows softer, it simply comes to mean another holiday, festive foods, fireworks and a day off from work. In the purely hedonistic misinterpretation, independence means a chance to celebrate your own creature comforts without thinking about the sacrifices they cost and the sacrifices needed to perpetuate that personal independence, made possible by a greater national independence. Individual independence requires national independence. To be free, you must also live in a free nation. And for a nation to be free, it must be made up of free people. Yet what happens when independence becomes just a word. When a nation isn't really made up of free people anymore, or when it's no longer quite free? I return tonight from saying Hallel, from prayers that celebrate the independence of the State of Israel as a divine gift. In a little more than two months from now I will stand beneath the coruscating explosions of colorful fir

Why Reviving Zionism is Crucial to the Survival of Israel

A nation's integrity doesn't rest in its military, or its economy or even its self-interest. These are all dependent on its core ideology or belief system. Without that, even the strongest and most secure of nations is nothing more than a paper tiger waiting for a breeze to blow it over. A nation's core ideology must answer three questions. 1. This is who we are 2. This is why we are here 3. This is what we plan to do in the future Like virtually every Western country, Israel's own core ideology, Zionism, has all but withered away. Virtually every major party in Israel is either post-Zionist, pre-Zionist or anti-Zionist. The major governing parties, Likud, Labor and Kadima, have become post-Zionist parties, occasionally dressing up in the flag and cloaking their agenda in the colors of Zionism. This leaves the pre-Zionist Haredi religious parties such as Shas and UTJ (which paradoxically would not exist were it not for Zionism), concerned only with sustainin

The Morality of War and the Anti-War Movement

The essence of the left's political grip on three generations has been to distill completely irrational ideas into short catchy slogans. The slogans take about two seconds to recite and about five minutes to properly disprove. This intersection of advertising logic and propaganda has enabled the left to pollute our political culture with dangerously insipid slogans, many that impact our moral justification for defending ourselves such as, "We need to be better than them", "War is never the answer" or that all time classic, "The ends can never justify the means." Popularized by Aldous Huxley, whose mix of psychedelic drugs and anti-war activism showed that he was a man truly ahead of his time, the slogan argues that all war is wrong. Huxley took this literally boldly addressing large anti-war rallies in England, not long before Hitler rendered the point moot by demonstrating that no matter how much one side may not want a war-- sooner or later when co

And Now for Meghan McCain's Plan to Save the Republican Party

(Sultan Knish was not available to write a blog post today. In his place we present this insightful piece from guest columnist Meghan McCain) How I Can Save the Republican Party Meghan McCain So today I was like in the bathroom, brushing my teeth and thinking about what's going to be in my memoir (which by the way I just sold to Hyperion for 600 thousand. Nice, right?) and I had a great idea how to save the Republican Party. What was that? No I'm busy right now. You know my generation doesn't like the Republican Party and the name is totally a huge problem. Who wants to vote for people named "Republicans" anyway? What is a Republican? What does that word even mean? I opened up a dictionary and it said something about a Republic, which is some kind of magazine or something. And if I don't know what it means, no one knows what it means. So why do we even have the name? It's like all those weird signs on the back of a dollar bill which I swear begin t

Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Religion of Moderate Torture

ABC News aired a tape showing the brother of the crown prince of the UAE and the Emir of Dubai brutally torturing a farmer in a way that was supposed to be unique to Saddam and his progeny. A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country's royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails. A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim's arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man's wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV. "The incidents depicted in the video tapes were not part of a pattern of behavior," the Interior Ministry's statement declared. The Minister of the Interior is also one of Sheikh Issa's brother. The government statement said its review found "all rules, policies and procedures were followed correctly by the Police Department." Naturally. The UAE is a dictatorsh

"Extremists" and "Moderates" and the Future of the Republican Party

For 7 years after 9/11, American concerns about "extremism" were usually preceded by the word, "Muslim". Today the Dems are back in power and "extremism" is once again preceded by "Right-Wing". But buying into the notion that our focus should be on "Right-Wing Extremism" means buying into a 9/10 mentality. And for anyone regardless of their political affiliation, who had their eyes opened on 9/11, this cynical attempt to divert attention from the real threat of Islamic Terrorism, in order to scapegoat the political opposition should be easy enough to reject. From early on part of Obama's strategy has been to pit the so-called moderate Republicans against the party's conservative core. This has been less of an electoral strategy, than one focused on getting his political opponents to fight among themselves. Liberal Republicans form a small part of the party's electoral base, but a large number of its public face. Conversel

The Lessons of the Holocaust for the Obama Generation

Yom HaShoah has come and gone again. A day for looking back at what has happened and a day for looking away from what will happen. In Skokie, millions of dollars have been spent to build a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, even as Iran is spending its millions on building another kind of memorial to the Holocaust, in the form of nuclear technology that will be used to finish that piece of history that Ahmadinejad claims never took place. It is of course an easy thing to build a memorial. You hire the architect, raise the money, buy the land and then cut the ribbon. It is a much harder thing to do something about the need for those memorials in the first place. That is what learning the lessons of the Holocaust is about. Yet instead of learning the lessons, the American Jewish community has thrown itself into memorializing a horror that they could have helped prevent, if they had shown the guts to stand up to the icon of liberalism, FDR. But it is of course easier to buy a

Embedded with the Iraqi Liberation Forces of Operation American Freedom

Our First Days 18:22 Monday, April 27, 2021 Ever since Prime Minister Jafar's speech a month ago, in which he stated that we had a moral duty to bring democracy to the American people, these troops have been en route to the United States. No one in the Desert Lions Mechanized Brigade had any idea what kind of opposition they would face when they arrived as part of the struggle to liberate America from President Hussein's rule. Landing in the vicinity of Jeremiah Wright International Airport, the expected opposition has thus far failed to materialize. Few in the once vaunted American military seem to have any desire to die for President Hussein. The streets are mostly empty, except for the murals of "President For Life" Hussein on almost every building. The countless murals of President Hussein, the magazines with his picture, his face on hundreds of books, remind me of the stories my father told of growing up under Saddam Hussein's rule, before the Ameri