Suppose we have two groups. Group A believes that women are human beings, just like men are, and that they should be equal partners in their society. Group B believes that women were created by the devil to tempt men, that they have no human rights, and that they must be used to have as many children as possible. If Group A and B live in different parts of the world, each region will develop in a way that reflects their different ways of life.
Group A will have highly productive workforces and individual freedom, high divorce rates and low birth rates. By contrast Group B will have high birth rates, no divorces, weak productivity and no freedom. Both groups enjoy the consequences of living in tune with their worldviews. For a while. But what happens when Group B begins to move its surplus population into the region of Group A?
The higher birth rate enjoyed by Group B will make it more aggressive, particularly since a society that devalues women will also cull baby girls and practice polygamy leading to a surplus of young male. But those same qualities will also help keep it backward, making it much less effective militarily against a modern productive and efficient society. Group B will therefore have a great deal of trouble successfully invading Group A's territory, unless Group A allows it to happen. That of course is the situation we're faced with today.
There are a number of approaches that would balance the demographic scales between Group A and punish Group B.
For example, Group A might refuse to share the advanced medical technology that its society develops with Group B, unless the latter agrees to enact certain reforms that will grant rights to women and help lower the birth rate. If it agrees Group B will have a more stable and less threatening society. If it refuses, its high birth retain will have to compete with a high death rate. However if Group A provides Group B with the benefits of its medical technology, without demanding social reforms as the price-- then Group B will pose even more of a threat, because its population boom will continue for ideological, rather than biological reasons, no longer to compensate for a high death rate, but on purely competitive grounds.
Group B will begin suffering from a population surplus, which it will try to export into the territory of Group A, by force or immigration, collectively or individually. Group A will now begin experiencing demographic competition on its own soil. If like so many empires throughout history, it sees them as a beneficial form of cheap labor that will help keep its own citizens prosperous by making the cost of goods and services cheaper, it will have eventually doomed itself through demographic suicide.
By reaping the benefits of Group A's social setup, without accommodating itself to those same parameters, Group B is engaging in social parasitism, partaking only of the advantages to themselves, while avoiding their natural consequences. Much the same as a welfare recipient benefits from a social safety not paid for by active workers, exploits a system without paying into it-- Group B exploits Group A's social setup that it cannot recreate on its own.
Alternatively Group A might prevent Group B from settling in its territory. This would force Group B to live with the consequences of its ideology. Group B would be allowed to fail, and have the chance to learn from that failure, and enact reforms for a more stable society. Forcibly attempting to invade Group A's territory, would show Group B its own impotence, and force it to contemplate the causes of that impotence. It will probably not draw the right conclusions, much as the Arabs in the aftermath of several lost wars, decided the solution was not a civilized society, but to replace Arab Socialism with Islamism. But they will have the time locked up in their own territory to contemplate and to change. They will have examples of what to become and what not to become.
So long as there is distance, both groups can live with the consequences of their social setups. However once Group B migrates into the territory of Group A, so long as Group A tolerates it-- it only needs to compete on demographics. And not on anything else. No matter what else Group A achieves, it will eventually be outnumbered by Group B. The resulting society will have the values and laws of Group B, unless Group A tries to maintain a tyranny. Even this will not avail it in the long run, as tyrannies must mimic the values of their subjects to be effective. If they fail, they will be toppled. So if Group A does nothing to change the terms of the competition, it is hopelessly doomed.
Group A's problem is that its sophistication causes it to have a wider definition of cooperative groups than Group B does. Where Group B's nexus of loyalty is blood kin, Group A compensates for the lesser role of the family by providing for multiple levels of social interdependency. Group B's families can exploit these systems for the benefit of their own families, while retaining their blood ties as the primary nexus of loyalty. Its second nexus of loyalty is an ideology that encompasses all members of Group B, but none of Group A. So while Group A's cooperation values lead it to try and cooperate with Group B, Group B has no such value system. When Group A looks at Group B it sees human beings, when Group B looks at Group A, it sees outsiders. So Group A will cooperate with Group B even at a loss for itself, but Group B will not cooperate with Group A unless there is a direct benefit to it, and sometimes not even then.
As a result Group A keeps trying to cooperate with Group B, which instead of cooperating takes but doesn't give, thereby destabilizing the social setup. If Group A continues to tolerate such behavior, members of Group A will try to begin joining Group B, to protect themselves or to gain advantages in the competition for resources. While members of Group A cannot be part of Group B's primary nexus of loyalty, they can become part of its secondary nexus of loyalty. Within Group B, people who are protected by the secondary nexus, but are not blood kin, have a second class status. But within Group A, those who are members of Group A already hold third class status, because they have obligations to Group B, which has none to them. Since ordinary Group A citizens have become third class, those who are even part of Group B's secondary nexus of loyalty are already a step ahead of them in the shifting landscape of the country.
Since Group A's society is cooperation based, it will try to accommodate Group B. However since Group B's society is authoritarian based, it will refuse to accommodate Group A. The less clearly Group A insists on reciprocity in its social contract, the less Group B will cooperate with it, since it does not cooperate without gain for its nexus of primary loyalty. Group B's rejection of interoperability cripples it socially, but not demographically. Group A's openness enhances its skills, creativity and knowledge; but dooms it in the demographic competition. While Group A thinks that the net result of their interaction will be Group AB, Group B thinks that the net result will be Group BB. And while Group B is not entirely right, Group is entirely wrong, because while Group B will be influenced by Group A, it will still absorb it.
Group A allows itself to be defeated by failing to meaningfully leverage its strengths, instead relying on a social and political model that is no longer relevant to the problem it faces. That is because like most societies and cultures, it has a blind spot when it comes to its own weaknesses, either refusing to recognize them, or insisting that they are actually strengths. Group B is doing the same thing, but by exploiting Group A, it has actually managed to take its greatest weakness and turn it into a limited strength. Group A has no one to exploit but itself. Its own system insures that its limited attempt to exploit Group B will cost it, more than it will cost Group B.
Group B's authoritarian nature, its willingness to use force and its birth rates insure its victory, unless Group A changes the terms of the conflict, not through denial, but through a realistic assessment of the situation. Group A can either choose to submit and become part of the secondary nexus of loyalty in Group B, or even accept a lower status than that, or resist the occupation of its territory and its culture by Group B. Which means working to reverse the facts on the ground created by the invasion, loosening the social and economic footholds of Group B, and removing as much of Group B's population from its territory as possible, while preventing further migrations.
Like many cultures, the self-images of Group A and Group B vacillate between omnipotence and impotence. In the omnipotent state of mind, the group believes that it is invulnerable and destined to succeed. In the impotent state, it believes that it is doomed and completely incapable of doing anything to change that. This cultural form of manic depressive thinking can actually lead from one to the other. Both however are misguided and dangerous. A culture which feels that it has hit bottom, may rebound with a sense of false omnipotence by seizing on an old or new idea to reinvigorate its identity. And a culture which is cloaked in its own sense of omnipotence may be unwilling and incapable of recognizing how bad things have gotten, only to sink into impotence when it does. In this scenario Group A is suffering from impotence, while Group B is experiencing omnipotence. And few in either group understand how quickly the tables can be turned. But a cultural rebound can be just as destructive, because desperate people will seize on anything that offers them hope, without thinking it through. And hope without reason can be a very dangerous thing.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Friday Afternoon Roundup - Congress of Children
Obama and the Democrats are still running the country, but they're swiftly passing the point of return with the public. They still wield power, but without public support, their power comes without any legitimacy attached. The media has been ignoring that sticking point for a while, but no matter what the Jornolist folks though, the media doesn't actually control elections.
The perfect storm of media bias in 2008 helped rig the election, but that only worked when the public was unhappy and didn't strongly favor either side. Rigging the election now and in 2012 will be a lot harder, no matter how much bias flows through the sewage pipes of the handful of struggling media conglomerates still left standing. And the media knows it too. They know which bandwagons to jump on, and which bandwagons to jump off. And the Obama bandwagon is headed into a deserted station.
The outrage over the 9/11 health care workers bill, in which Dems tried to ram through more hidden measures under the guise of paying for health care for Ground Zero workers, is the latest flashpoint in a conflict over an administration and a congress unwilling to work together with the opposition, and determined to get its way by hook or by crook.
The reports of Obama plotting to bypass congress for a limited amnesty, are on par with how ObamaCare was shoved under the door. And the public has gotten tired of these games. Scott Brown's victory was a warning from voters in one of America's more liberal states, that they were fed up with the one-note power crazed politics of the Democratic party. But the Democrats didn't listen, which means they'll be forced to listen. Because America is still a democracy. And that means accountability comes sooner or later, when the people get around to voting.
The Obama Administration and congressional Democrats thought that the Obama cult of personality they were building would make them bulletproof. They were deeply wrong. The cult collapsed with a roar of laughter around the time Prince Barry got his Nobel Peace Prize for absolutely nothing. Now it's just touring the world, and playing golf, while everything goes to hell.
The 9/11 Ground Zero bill was an obscenely cynical charade, that removes any right whatsoever for the Democrats to criticize the Patriot Act, rolling in their own legislation, depriving the opposition of any ability to modify the bill, and pushing it out there, assuming that the Republicans wouldn't have the guts to vote it down, no matter what is actually in the bill. Weiner's temper tantrum is embarrassing.It gives the Netroots exactly what they want. Angry hysterical Democrats acting like children, because they can't get their way.
Of course Weiner wasn't screaming at Obama, when Prince Barry's administration tried to cut off 9/11 funding for New York, because the city's politicians stood up to him on holding the trials for Al Queda in Lower Manhattan. But this isn't about 9/11. It's about politics. Cynical politics by spoiled brats in dark suits.
What began with MoveOn.org, ends with immaturity and juvenile tantrums from overgrown infants who feel they never got their way. Right up to the Infant in Chief himself. And as it began, so it begins to end. Shamefully and pathetically.
The Democrats are raising their spending limits to try and hold on... even as they keep spending the country's money even faster.
And their ad buy focuses on a 10 point list which warns potential voters that Republican victories would lead to a repeal of ObamaCare, DoddFinance and create tax breaks. The rest of it tries to convince voters that Republics will abolish the EPA, the Department of Education and the 17th amendment. Somehow the DCCC will not be claiming that the Republican party will be bringing back slavery-- but only just by a little.
The obvious problem is that the public supports a repeal of ObamaCare and hates Congress. So the Democrats are left with a strategy that warns people that Republicans will destroy all their "good work", which the public opposes anyway, or trafficking in alarmist conspiracy theories. And somehow they decided to do both.
The DCCC asks people to sign on to help fight the "Tea Party, which is probably the worst campaign slogan in some time, because it frames a showdown between populism and the establishment, which all the attempts to tie together Republicans and the Tea Party won't upset.
And the news gets even worse for them.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's multi-million dollar ad buy across 60 congressional districts makes a statement that the party will come to the front lines to hold the House of Representatives. But what are they fighting against?
A look at results from the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll among those who live in the targeted congressional districts suggests the Democratic party may be fighting its own leader.
Views of President Obama were broadly negative among those in the targeted districts. A majority (54 percent) said they disapprove of the way Obama is handling his job in the July poll, including 41 percent who "strongly" disapprove.
And confidence in the president to make the right decisions for the nation's future stood at an abysmal 36 percent.
But that's not the worst part...
A generic congressional ballot was about evenly split among registered voters in these districts (45 percent said they'd vote for the Democrat in their district, 48 percent the Republican), however, nearly six in 10 (57 percent) said that regardless of their own vote, they would prefer to have "the Republicans in charge of Congress to act as a check on Obama's policies."
What that means is the Democrats cannot win as a party, only as individual Democrats who disassociate themselves from Obama and the rest of the party. Because a lot of voters are somewhat okay with their own congressmen, but distrust Obama and hate the Democratic congress as a whole.
The DCCC should be doing damage control, instead of launching more attacks on the Tea Party, but it's pretty hard to do damage control, when you don't acknowledge that you did anything wrong.
A few halting attempts are being made to maybe, possibly repeal some of the worst sections of ObamaCare, but it's too little and too late
For the first time, House Democrats are proposing repealing a piece of the health care overhaul, one that small businesses have been warning is going to be overly burdensome.
The move comes just four months after the Democrats’ health plan passed in March. The provision would have required businesses to file 1099 tax forms for all transactions with vendors that total over $600.
Due for implementation in 2012, it would have raised $19 billion over 10 years to pay for the health care overhaul.
Rep. Scott Murphy (D-NY) offered the bill on Friday morning. Ways and Means Chairman Sander Levin (D-Mich.), spoke in favor of the bill on the House floor Friday.
Honesty alone should compel them to repeal the whole mess and start over with something workable, where everyone knows what they are voting for. Which is exactly what Brown proposed.
Meanwhile Prince Barry trotted off to Detroit to show off GM's new magic wondercar (TM)
And he made sure to send a shout out to Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick.
Detroit Mayor and Hall of Famer Dave Bing is in the house. (Applause.) Two senators who have been fighting for you each and every day, Carl Levine and Debbie Stabenow, are here. (Applause.) Wonderful Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick is here. (Applause.)
Who's that wonderful woman? The mother of convicted Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Which is handy because Carolyn herself was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury in March. And despite trailing in the election, and low on funds, and Obama is there to help.
And, Hoekstra says despite the efforts by the White House to proclaim Obama’s visit a trip about autos, there’s definitely a political tinge.
“The president is touting jobs the government created because Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick is on the appropriations committee. Why else would he come to the same state in two weeks?” Obama was in Holland, Michigan July 15 making remarks at Compact Power, a battery plant.
Kilpatrick is running for re-election to the House seat in Michigan’s 13th district, in what Hoekstra describes as a tough fight and Hoekstra calls the Obama visit to Detroit “pure politics, plain and simple”.
And that's how it goes.
But the good news is that Nancy Pelosi finally has her own handbag. She can use it to pack and get out of here.
Continuing the roundup, at IsraPundit, Gingrich and Palin again appear to be the only two prospective GOP Presidential candidates who are taking on Islam. Compare that to Huckabee. Of course Gingrich had to modify that by emphasizing those Muslims who live in "the modern world" who are just fine.
I'm guessing that would include the Times Square Car bomber who was on Facebook, the Fort Hood Shooter who was an American born graduate and a medical professional? Just modern people who pose no threat at all.
But Islam and technology get along quite well. Just take a look at this wonderful use of technology.
Saudi technology guards against women escaping
When women’s rights activist Wajiha Al-Huwaidar flew out of Saudi Arabia last week for a holiday in Italy with her family, she was hoping for a brief respite from what she describes as the ‘gender apartheid kingdom.’
She wasn’t so lucky.
As she left, her husband received an automated SMS text message from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informing him that his wife, legally considered his ‘dependant’ under Saudi Arabia’s strict gendered guardianship system, had left the country.
Al-Huwaidar’s husband received the same text, she learned last week, when she had left Saudi Arabia on another recent trip to Germany.
“It is sad how Saudis use technology in a way not intended to be used for,” she told The Media Line. “In Saudi Arabia, technology brings more restrictions and misery! They use it to have more control over people’s lives, especially women.”
Just more modern people who live in the modern world, who treat women like slaves. Of course the article claims that this sort of thing has nothing to do with the Koran. Nothing at all.
"Narrated 'Aisha: "The things which annul the prayers were mentioned before me. They said, "Prayer is annulled by a dog, a donkey and a woman (if they pass in front of the praying people)." I said, "You have made us (women) dogs."
No wonder even more than half of Canadians want to ban the Burqa.
Robert Avrech rounds up some of the responses to Cameron's shameless toadying to Turkey
And see more at Steven Plaut's article in the Jewish Press
Famagusta, Cyprus: The ghost town lies near the very center of the city, just outside the Venetian walls. It is home only to snakes, scorpions, and rats of a hundred varieties. Signs on the fences around the ghost town show armed Turkish soldiers threatening those taking photographs with arrest or worse. The crumbling buildings inside the perimeter are frozen in time in 1974, as if in an episode of "The Twilight Zone."
Nothing has changed since central Famagusta was converted into a ghost town - called Varosha - by the invaders. It is said that the car distributorships in the ghost town even today are stocked with vintage 1974 models. For years after the rape of Famagusta, people told of seeing light bulbs still burning in the windows of the abandoned buildings. Hollywood studios could clothe whole movie sets with the 1974 fashions still in the closets of the homes.
orn in ethnic cleansing, it is the enduring testimony to the illegal land grab on Cyprus by Turkey, the mass expulsion of the ethnic Greek Cypriots from the northern 40 percent of the island, the theft of their property, and an unknown number of murders of Greek Cypriots by Turkey.
The illegal "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" is recognized by not a single country besides Turkey itself.
This is only an excerpt, but the entire thing is well worth reading.
The Cyprus Action Network meanwhile has a release showing a certain affinity between the current Turkish regime and the Nazis
A counter demonstration was staged and closely supervised by Gunay Evinch, of the law firm Evinch and Saltzman. Gunay Evinch is widely acknowledged as “the lawyer of the Turkish Embassy.” Gunay Evinch has defended Turkey from American lawsuits by Greek-Cypriot Americans, he is the President of the Turkish Lobby. Gunay Evinch is a promoter of Armenian genocide denial within the United States and the source of Turkish invasion of Cyprus denial propaganda for Turkey in America.
The main speaker for the Turkish Embassy counter demonstrators (who was witnessed as receiving help and consulted with Gunay Evinch) repeatedly made the Hitler salute and shouted “Heil Hitler” towards pro-Israel activists and the Greek-Cypriot community. The Turkish Embassy staff also participated and helped GUNAY EVINCH AND THE TURKISH EMBASSY HITLER YOUTH who also barked out to the Greek-Cypriot community "Turkish soldiers raped your mothers" and further committed hate crimes against women by making obscene gestures with his genitalia and his megaphone. The Cyprus Action Network of America (CANA) will be releasing the pictures and videos of GUNAY EVINCH and his Turkish Hitler Youth making the Hitler salute to Jewish Anti-Semitism watch groups and to the Israeli and German government which monitors such hate speech and hate gestures and enforces heavy criminal penalities for glorifying Hitler:
You can see the videos via the following link
And for more ethnic cleansing and bigotry, let's turn to Abbas (Oh My Valve)
"I will never allow a single Israeli to live among us on Palestinian land.”
And then there's the Sharia finance MasterCard (See SquareMile Wife)
The first halal payment card is now available across Canada. While the initial need to design the iFreedom Plus MasterCard came from the Muslim community (under Islamic law, paying interest is not halal, and so is a perceived sin), this prepaid, no interest card is ideal for everyone. Holders load their own money (up to $6,000) onto the card, then spend it when they need to. "A lot of people view this as more stress-free shopping because they're actually using money they have rather than ringing up their credit card and getting a huge bill," says Omar Kalair, the president and CEO of UM Financial, which launched the card with MasterCard.
This card was released in 2009 at Toronto's "Reviving the Islamic Spirit Conference" (a conference which has featured speakers like Zakir Naik, Yusuf Islam, Tariq Ramadan, etc.). In the press release, MasterCard stated that amongst the cards various benefits, "In addition, for every transaction of over $20 billed to the card, one needy child in a developing country will be fed for a day through RS Foundation."
And where does all that money go? One of RS Foundation's partners is Human Concern International.
HCI has an interesting "history"
"In a 1995 interview, Osama bin Laden identified Blessed Relief’s place in his network, “The bin-Laden Establishment’s aid covers 13 countries . . . this aid comes in particular from the Human Concern International Society.”
Another partner is the IDRF, which is partnered with Islamic Relief Worldwide, which is also clean as a whistle
Islamic Relief Worldwide (IRW) is an international Islamic aid organization that was founded in United Kingdom, in 1984, by Dr Hany El Banna. It was reported in 1999 that IRW's main UK office received $50,000 from a Canadian group that "the U.S. Treasury Department called 'a(n Osama) bin Laden front.' Moscow's Obshchaya Gazeta has reported that IRW has collected and funneled millions of dollars to the Chechen terrorist rebels in Russia, who have ties to al Qaeda.
...
In May 2006, Iyaz Ali, a UK IRW project coordinator, was arrested in Israel for assisting the terrorist group Hamas. Part of IRW coordinator Ali's activities involved transferring funds and assisting Hamas institutions and groups, including Al Wafa and Al Tzalah, both of which are officially illegal in Israel. When Ali was investigated, incriminating files were found on his computer which showed links to IRW's ties with illegal Hamas funds in UK and Saudi Arabia, as well as photographs of swastikas, of "Nazi German officials, of Osama Bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as well as many photographs of Hamas military activities."
...Religion of Peace.
At HIR, Francisco Gil White questions Who The Real Netanyahu is.
Enjoy your weekend
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Cameron's Despicable Toadying to Turkey
It is sadly unsurprising that Prime Minister Cameron's highly publicized trip to Turkey went with no mention of that country's continued denial of the Armenian Genocide, and its suppression of Kurdish and Armenian minorities. Indeed when Turkish leader Erdogan discussed his threats of ethnically cleansing Armenians in the UK, Gordon Brown made no more comment on the matter than if Erdogan had been discussing his favorite television programs.
It is in keeping with that conspiracy of silence, that Cameron made no mention of the thousands of political prisoners in Turkish jails, there often for merely expressing an opinion at odds with the state, for singing a folk song, or delivering an official speech in Kurdish. Naturally Cameron did not think to raise the issue of Leyla Zana, the first Kurdish woman elected to the Turkish parliament and a winner of the Sakharov Prize, who is still in jail today. Cameron could have at least raised the subject of Aysel Tuğluk, a member of the Turkish Human Rights Association, who was illegally stripped of her parliamentary immunity and sent to jail for handing out leaflets in the Kurdish language, and is now due to be sent to jail yet again.
But rather than standing up for human rights, Cameron instead pandered to the radical Islamists who were his hosts, by feeding their appetite for hate directed at Israel. And it did not begin or end with Israel.
Instead Cameron sold out the rest of Europe, declaring that he was "angry" at how long the negotiations to bring Turkey into the EU were taking, and declaring himself the "strongest possible advocate for EU membership". He slammed France and implicitly Germany, for refusing to rush forward to support bringing Turkey into the EU. Cameron sided with Turkey, over France and Germany, betraying allies for enemies. And worse was yet to come.
Not only did Cameron ignore Turkey's ongoing occupation of Cyprus, but he signed a strategic agreement with Turkey that calls for ending the "isolation" of the Turkish Cypriots by upholding their "right to representation" in the European Parliament, and promoting political and cultural contacts with the Turkish Cypriots. What that means is that Cameron committed himself to supporting Dervis Eroglu from the radical National Unity Party, which calls for Turkish annexation of occupied Cyprus. The strategic agreement signed by Cameron, moves the UK closer to recognizing the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, which currently only Turkey itself recognizes.
Again Cameron makes no criticism whatsoever of Turkey's illegal occupation of Cyprus. He does not mention the fact that he signed an agreement promoting the flow of goods from occupied Cyprus to the UK, while Turkey refuses to accept goods from Greek Cyprus. Of course not. No more than his predecessor was willing to.
Did Cameron do any of this out of principle? Nonsense. Cameron knows as well as anyone about Turkey's state of domestic terror, its persecution of the political opposition, and how unworkable Turkish membership in the EU would be. Instead like Brown before him, Cameron pandered to the Turkish thug-in-chief for a few pounds, hoping to boost British exports to Turkey. In the hope of a few million pounds, Cameron betrayed fellow European nations, signed off on Turkey's occupation of Cyprus, ignored the thousands of political prisoners in Turkish jails, and whitewashed Turkey's real record on Islamic terrorism. And while he and his businessmen friends beamed and shook hands with Turkey's chief terrorist-- others were left to stand up against the violence and brutality of the Turkish regime on their own.
In his rambling speech, Cameron praised Turkey for fighting against terrorism. The reality however is that the only "terrorism" that Turkey fights against, is Kurdish guerrillas, from its large Kurdish minority who want to have their own state, or at least some basic human rights. And when Cameron shook hands with Erdogan, he was shaking hands with a man whose patron, Yassin Qadi, funneled millions of dollars to Al Queda, and whose own advisor, Cuneyt Zapsu, donated 300,000 dollars to Al Queda. Al Queda operates its magazine freely in Istanbul, which is convenient because Erdogan claims there's no such thing as Islamic terrorism.
If Turkey, as Cameron says, is guarding the flank of Europe... then who in G-d's name is guarding Europe from Turkey? Certainly not Cameron.
Cameron's despicable toadying to Turkey's Thug-in-Chief was one long collection of lies. In his speech, he claimed that "Europe will draw fresh vigour and purpose from a Turkey that embraces human rights and democracy". Turkey's democracy is such that its opposition is routinely jailed. Its human rights has sent 12 year olds to prison for singing folk songs. It has no concept of democracy or human rights. Its 10,000 political prisoners could testify to that. Almost a 1000 of them opposition politicians.
The sham continued as Cameron congratulated Turkey on "its efforts to achieve the ambition of zero problems with all its neighbours, including Iraq". This after Turkish troops repeatedly invaded Iraq just just last month, murdering a 15 year old girl, among others. The Iraqi government protested, to no effect. Cameron, who is supposed to be committed to guaranteeing Iraq's security, instead shamelessly praises the invaders. The only casualties he mentions are those of the Turkish invading forces, not their victims. Never their victims.
And so it goes. Cameron babbles on about Turkey's religious tolerance, while the level of hateful incitement spirals out of control. He talks about the true tolerant Islam, to a man who was at one point imprisoned for his own Islamic radicalism. He takes up arms against all those damned obstructionists who are preventing a lovely regime like Erdogan's Turkey from joining the EU. He vows to fight them everywhere, like a latter day Churchill, proclaiming not, "There will always be an England", but rather, "There will always be a Turkey in the EU".
If there was any Turk in that room who had the slightest respect for England before Cameron began to speak, it was sure to have vanished in a whiff of contempt. Cameron's speech reminds one of English socialists visiting the Soviet Union and heaping praise on Stalin and the wonderful revolution, before going off to collect their blood money. And now Cameron has done them one better, demanding that a radical Islamist regime share open borders with the EU.
In a speech given while Erdogan prepares to round up political opponents before the election on fraudulent charges of "inciting" Kurdish riots-- Cameron made only one criticism of human rights. Not of Turkey of course. Or of Erdogan, who has jailed about as many of his opponents as Saddam Hussein. No, Cameron courageously blasted Israel, for standing up to Erdogan's IHH thugs, after they beat and stabbed Israeli soldiers inspecting their flotilla carrying aid to Hamas run Gaza.
Cameron blasted the response of Israeli soldiers who fired back after they Turkish Islamist thugs tried to murder them, as "completely unacceptable" and called Gaza, a "prison camp". He demanded a "swift, transparent and rigorous" inquiry. No such demand was of course issued to his hosts for their 10,000 political prisoners, their illegal invasion of Iraq and murder of civilians-- or that Armenian genocide matter. Of course no inquiries are demanded there.
Let us be clear what Cameron has done. He has sold out Europe and the free world by signing on the dotted of an agreement which explicitly trades English support for EU membership for increased exports. This is about money, pure and simple. There are no principles of any kind here. And what does Europe get out of all this? Here is a brief preview of coming attractions;
European tolerance Islamized Turkey. The pandering of unprincipled leaders like Cameron will take it to the brink and beyond.

But rather than standing up for human rights, Cameron instead pandered to the radical Islamists who were his hosts, by feeding their appetite for hate directed at Israel. And it did not begin or end with Israel.
Instead Cameron sold out the rest of Europe, declaring that he was "angry" at how long the negotiations to bring Turkey into the EU were taking, and declaring himself the "strongest possible advocate for EU membership". He slammed France and implicitly Germany, for refusing to rush forward to support bringing Turkey into the EU. Cameron sided with Turkey, over France and Germany, betraying allies for enemies. And worse was yet to come.
Not only did Cameron ignore Turkey's ongoing occupation of Cyprus, but he signed a strategic agreement with Turkey that calls for ending the "isolation" of the Turkish Cypriots by upholding their "right to representation" in the European Parliament, and promoting political and cultural contacts with the Turkish Cypriots. What that means is that Cameron committed himself to supporting Dervis Eroglu from the radical National Unity Party, which calls for Turkish annexation of occupied Cyprus. The strategic agreement signed by Cameron, moves the UK closer to recognizing the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, which currently only Turkey itself recognizes.
Again Cameron makes no criticism whatsoever of Turkey's illegal occupation of Cyprus. He does not mention the fact that he signed an agreement promoting the flow of goods from occupied Cyprus to the UK, while Turkey refuses to accept goods from Greek Cyprus. Of course not. No more than his predecessor was willing to.
Did Cameron do any of this out of principle? Nonsense. Cameron knows as well as anyone about Turkey's state of domestic terror, its persecution of the political opposition, and how unworkable Turkish membership in the EU would be. Instead like Brown before him, Cameron pandered to the Turkish thug-in-chief for a few pounds, hoping to boost British exports to Turkey. In the hope of a few million pounds, Cameron betrayed fellow European nations, signed off on Turkey's occupation of Cyprus, ignored the thousands of political prisoners in Turkish jails, and whitewashed Turkey's real record on Islamic terrorism. And while he and his businessmen friends beamed and shook hands with Turkey's chief terrorist-- others were left to stand up against the violence and brutality of the Turkish regime on their own.
In his rambling speech, Cameron praised Turkey for fighting against terrorism. The reality however is that the only "terrorism" that Turkey fights against, is Kurdish guerrillas, from its large Kurdish minority who want to have their own state, or at least some basic human rights. And when Cameron shook hands with Erdogan, he was shaking hands with a man whose patron, Yassin Qadi, funneled millions of dollars to Al Queda, and whose own advisor, Cuneyt Zapsu, donated 300,000 dollars to Al Queda. Al Queda operates its magazine freely in Istanbul, which is convenient because Erdogan claims there's no such thing as Islamic terrorism.
If Turkey, as Cameron says, is guarding the flank of Europe... then who in G-d's name is guarding Europe from Turkey? Certainly not Cameron.
Cameron's despicable toadying to Turkey's Thug-in-Chief was one long collection of lies. In his speech, he claimed that "Europe will draw fresh vigour and purpose from a Turkey that embraces human rights and democracy". Turkey's democracy is such that its opposition is routinely jailed. Its human rights has sent 12 year olds to prison for singing folk songs. It has no concept of democracy or human rights. Its 10,000 political prisoners could testify to that. Almost a 1000 of them opposition politicians.
The sham continued as Cameron congratulated Turkey on "its efforts to achieve the ambition of zero problems with all its neighbours, including Iraq". This after Turkish troops repeatedly invaded Iraq just just last month, murdering a 15 year old girl, among others. The Iraqi government protested, to no effect. Cameron, who is supposed to be committed to guaranteeing Iraq's security, instead shamelessly praises the invaders. The only casualties he mentions are those of the Turkish invading forces, not their victims. Never their victims.
And so it goes. Cameron babbles on about Turkey's religious tolerance, while the level of hateful incitement spirals out of control. He talks about the true tolerant Islam, to a man who was at one point imprisoned for his own Islamic radicalism. He takes up arms against all those damned obstructionists who are preventing a lovely regime like Erdogan's Turkey from joining the EU. He vows to fight them everywhere, like a latter day Churchill, proclaiming not, "There will always be an England", but rather, "There will always be a Turkey in the EU".
If there was any Turk in that room who had the slightest respect for England before Cameron began to speak, it was sure to have vanished in a whiff of contempt. Cameron's speech reminds one of English socialists visiting the Soviet Union and heaping praise on Stalin and the wonderful revolution, before going off to collect their blood money. And now Cameron has done them one better, demanding that a radical Islamist regime share open borders with the EU.
In a speech given while Erdogan prepares to round up political opponents before the election on fraudulent charges of "inciting" Kurdish riots-- Cameron made only one criticism of human rights. Not of Turkey of course. Or of Erdogan, who has jailed about as many of his opponents as Saddam Hussein. No, Cameron courageously blasted Israel, for standing up to Erdogan's IHH thugs, after they beat and stabbed Israeli soldiers inspecting their flotilla carrying aid to Hamas run Gaza.
Cameron blasted the response of Israeli soldiers who fired back after they Turkish Islamist thugs tried to murder them, as "completely unacceptable" and called Gaza, a "prison camp". He demanded a "swift, transparent and rigorous" inquiry. No such demand was of course issued to his hosts for their 10,000 political prisoners, their illegal invasion of Iraq and murder of civilians-- or that Armenian genocide matter. Of course no inquiries are demanded there.
Let us be clear what Cameron has done. He has sold out Europe and the free world by signing on the dotted of an agreement which explicitly trades English support for EU membership for increased exports. This is about money, pure and simple. There are no principles of any kind here. And what does Europe get out of all this? Here is a brief preview of coming attractions;
It is mainly young people who take to the streets, with Turkish flags in their hands, whistles in their mouths and hatred in their eyes.
"We have waited long enough," reads one poster. "Allah wants this war," is the message on another.
European tolerance Islamized Turkey. The pandering of unprincipled leaders like Cameron will take it to the brink and beyond.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Is Fighting for Smaller Government Racist?
When the NAACP allowed itself to be used by the Democratic party to try and smear a grass roots movement for smaller government as racist, the resulting controversy shone a light on more than just racism by individuals associated with the NAACP, but with the organization's inability to delink class warfare from racism. If there is one thing that both the white media elites at Jornolist and the NAACP leadership agreed on, it's that fighting for smaller government is racist.
The peculiar notion that reforming government by reducing its size is racist originates from the marriage of racial equality with class warfare to create the 40 Acres and a Mule politics covering everything from wealth redistribution to affirmative action to social welfare programs-- all under the aegis of the federal government. And yet this same brand of 40 Acres and a Mule politics underlies the particular tragedy of the black community, whose leaders traded in aspiration and equality for government handouts, forcing them to make the argument over and over again that there can be no social justice without total government control.
When the Democratic party was forced to make the transition from a party of Northern businessmen and Southern plantation owners, after two Republican Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, put a severe dent in their Southern plantations and the Northern business offices that had formerly given the party a death grip on the country's economy-- it did so by redefining the "Company Store" to mean the Federal government. The Republican notion of individual rights and free labor met the new Democratic notion of ward boss handouts at the Federal level in a battle for the soul of the Black community, and the Democrats won. Not immediately, not conclusively and not absolutely-- but they won, and the NAACP's leadership demonstrates why.
The black leadership has gained distinct advantages for itself as a separate class, while disadvantaging the black community as a whole. Civil rights leaders who made their money on lawsuit shakedowns and diversity training seminars, corporate executives and business owners who got where they were through affirmative action programs that encouraged companies to hire one black executive for appearance not merit, and rewarded minority business owners for the color of their skin, rather than for results-- helped create a black leadership that owed its position and power to government intervention, rather than ability. And in the process that same leadership marginalized more qualified people within the black community, while teaching the lesson that aspiration and ability did not matter, only connections and politics did.
Affirmative action politics closed far more doors than it opened, but those who got through the open door knew exactly what they owed it to. Creating racial quotas as a way to select leaders was an effective tool for perpetuating the same system over and over again, marginalizing black candidates and business owners as a whole, while rewarding a select few who would then be in a position to praise and maintain things the status quo.
The racism charge leveled against the Tea Party is the doing of a leadership that sees itself as completely dependent on the Federal government, so much so that it finds any talk of reducing it to be dangerous and threatening. And as the Democratic party has identified itself closely with the domestic expansion of government and wealth redistribution politics, it has been able to manipulate the black community, to appropriate its decision making powers and use it as a political tool, while virtually eliminating its actual political clout. The sad state of affairs in which the official black leadership damns anyone who doesn't toe the Democratic party line as Uncle Toms and "not real black people" reveals just who really calls the shots in this arrangement. And it is not the black leadership, which gets trotted out when the Democratic party needs them, and gets told to go home when it doesn't. Which is no different than the treatment accorded to women's or Jewish groups.
The attacks hurled at the government reforms advocated by Tea Party groups rely on invoking sixties racist boogeymen about States' Rights, but the Tea Parties are not fighting to resegregate schools or lunch counters, as many times as liberal political bloggers may try and market that particular smear. Instead the Tea Party is an attempt to salvage the financial viability of the Middle Class that has traditionally been America's only reliable bastion of political and social equality. And their targets are not Eisenhower's forced desegregation and challenges to States' Rights, a Republican President, but the out of control government expansion that began with FDR's New Deal, which enforced racial segregation and plunged the country deeper into the depression.
Wealth Redistribution will never solve the black community's problems, only worsen them. Which may be why most of the greatest African-American inventions took place before it, not after. All that spending has not helped the black community, in part because while the spending may use social welfare as a justification, it is mostly directed at building up the size of government itself. The gargantuan bureaucratic structures that form as a result only perpetuate poverty for everyone, while feeding money to a small group of insiders who are politically connected enough to benefit from it. The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disasters in which black homeowners were saddled with debt, that was then resold worldwide by bankers and brokers, is a typical example of what happens and where the money really goes.
Investing more money and power in the Federal government is short-sighted and unwise. Before the Federal government was forcing open schoolhouses, it was forcibly segregating Northern neighborhoods. Before it was filing lawsuits on behalf of black homeowners, it was demanding that Northern states return escaped slaves. Like all centralized power, Federal power is not moral, it serves the interests of those who wield it, who in turn use everyone else. To see such a system as dangerous and unstable is not racist, it is common sense.
The same system that has marginalized black politics to a few handpicked candidates running in gerrymandered districts, has done the same thing to the voice of the black community as a whole. Just as it has done to other groups across the United States. This plantation politics that promises protection in return for fealty is not only degrading and undemocratic, it is dangerous to everyone involved. And as the current escalation of Federal power threatens to destroy the Middle Class for good, it is important for everyone who believes in individual achievement and aspiration to join together and protect their present and their future from out of control spending and big government.
The peculiar notion that reforming government by reducing its size is racist originates from the marriage of racial equality with class warfare to create the 40 Acres and a Mule politics covering everything from wealth redistribution to affirmative action to social welfare programs-- all under the aegis of the federal government. And yet this same brand of 40 Acres and a Mule politics underlies the particular tragedy of the black community, whose leaders traded in aspiration and equality for government handouts, forcing them to make the argument over and over again that there can be no social justice without total government control.
When the Democratic party was forced to make the transition from a party of Northern businessmen and Southern plantation owners, after two Republican Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, put a severe dent in their Southern plantations and the Northern business offices that had formerly given the party a death grip on the country's economy-- it did so by redefining the "Company Store" to mean the Federal government. The Republican notion of individual rights and free labor met the new Democratic notion of ward boss handouts at the Federal level in a battle for the soul of the Black community, and the Democrats won. Not immediately, not conclusively and not absolutely-- but they won, and the NAACP's leadership demonstrates why.
The black leadership has gained distinct advantages for itself as a separate class, while disadvantaging the black community as a whole. Civil rights leaders who made their money on lawsuit shakedowns and diversity training seminars, corporate executives and business owners who got where they were through affirmative action programs that encouraged companies to hire one black executive for appearance not merit, and rewarded minority business owners for the color of their skin, rather than for results-- helped create a black leadership that owed its position and power to government intervention, rather than ability. And in the process that same leadership marginalized more qualified people within the black community, while teaching the lesson that aspiration and ability did not matter, only connections and politics did.
Affirmative action politics closed far more doors than it opened, but those who got through the open door knew exactly what they owed it to. Creating racial quotas as a way to select leaders was an effective tool for perpetuating the same system over and over again, marginalizing black candidates and business owners as a whole, while rewarding a select few who would then be in a position to praise and maintain things the status quo.
The racism charge leveled against the Tea Party is the doing of a leadership that sees itself as completely dependent on the Federal government, so much so that it finds any talk of reducing it to be dangerous and threatening. And as the Democratic party has identified itself closely with the domestic expansion of government and wealth redistribution politics, it has been able to manipulate the black community, to appropriate its decision making powers and use it as a political tool, while virtually eliminating its actual political clout. The sad state of affairs in which the official black leadership damns anyone who doesn't toe the Democratic party line as Uncle Toms and "not real black people" reveals just who really calls the shots in this arrangement. And it is not the black leadership, which gets trotted out when the Democratic party needs them, and gets told to go home when it doesn't. Which is no different than the treatment accorded to women's or Jewish groups.
The attacks hurled at the government reforms advocated by Tea Party groups rely on invoking sixties racist boogeymen about States' Rights, but the Tea Parties are not fighting to resegregate schools or lunch counters, as many times as liberal political bloggers may try and market that particular smear. Instead the Tea Party is an attempt to salvage the financial viability of the Middle Class that has traditionally been America's only reliable bastion of political and social equality. And their targets are not Eisenhower's forced desegregation and challenges to States' Rights, a Republican President, but the out of control government expansion that began with FDR's New Deal, which enforced racial segregation and plunged the country deeper into the depression.

Investing more money and power in the Federal government is short-sighted and unwise. Before the Federal government was forcing open schoolhouses, it was forcibly segregating Northern neighborhoods. Before it was filing lawsuits on behalf of black homeowners, it was demanding that Northern states return escaped slaves. Like all centralized power, Federal power is not moral, it serves the interests of those who wield it, who in turn use everyone else. To see such a system as dangerous and unstable is not racist, it is common sense.
The same system that has marginalized black politics to a few handpicked candidates running in gerrymandered districts, has done the same thing to the voice of the black community as a whole. Just as it has done to other groups across the United States. This plantation politics that promises protection in return for fealty is not only degrading and undemocratic, it is dangerous to everyone involved. And as the current escalation of Federal power threatens to destroy the Middle Class for good, it is important for everyone who believes in individual achievement and aspiration to join together and protect their present and their future from out of control spending and big government.
Monday, July 26, 2010
What the Left Really Thinks of Hitler
Oliver Stone's comments about a "Jewish dominated media" exaggerating the Holocaust have shocked some people, but they shouldn't. Like the rest of Stone's tirade about Western bankers and Hitler being a product of his time, it's copy and pasted from Soviet history textbooks. Like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Oliver Stone's "Secret History of America" is the USSR's version of American history, backed by some domestic sources.
One of the left's dirty secrets is that the Soviet Union was the preeminent country engaged in Holocaust denial. At a time when Germany had outlawed Holocaust denial, the Soviet Union mostly suppressed any mention of the Holocaust, focusing only on Russian casualties as a whole. Unsurprisingly that is exactly the line that Oliver Stone takes, when he emphasizes that; "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 million killed". In 1982, Mahmoud Abbas of the PLO, and current leader of the Palestinian Authority, included Holocaust denial material in his doctoral thesis at a Moscow University. Unsurprisingly his doctoral thesis reads a lot like Stone's comments. That is because both are grounded in the Soviet Communist view of history.
Stone's comments about Hitler and Stalin come from the same source material. His apologetic for Stalin's atrocities, "he fought the German war machine more than any person" and the claim that Hitler needs to be seen in context as a tool of Western bankers all come gift-wrapped in the red and yellow. And of course they're also lies. Because this isn't just about Oliver Stone trafficking in the anti-semitism that is now fashionable on the left, it's about some of the big lies of the left about WW2.
The Big Lie that the left has desperately tried to cover up is the Soviet Union's complicity in Hitler's rise to power and the atrocities of Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union began by suppressing German Communists to pave the way for Hitler (just as it would later do to Egyptian Communists on behalf of the Hitler-besotted Gamal Abdel Nasser). Why would it do that? For the same reason that the USSR allied with Hitler in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which allowed Hitler and Stalin to carve up Eastern Europe.
Stalin wanted to replay WW1, with another war between Germany, England and France-- that would give him a free hand in Eastern Europe, and then allow him to occupy a weakened Western Europe. His plan backfired badly, because Hitler proved too unpredictable for him, and England and France buckled too quickly-- but when the dust had settled, the USSR got most of what it wanted, including a sizable chunk of Germany. In 1925, Stalin made his strategy clear; "if war breaks out we shall not be able to sit with folded arms. We shall have to take action, but we shall be the last to do so. And we shall do so in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, the weight that can turn the scales." The goal was for the rest of Europe to wear itself down through war, while the Communists would come and clean up afterward.
To that end the USSR did everything possible to strengthen Hitler's hand in order to make him a more formidable enemy for England and France. While millions of its citizens were starving, Russia provided massive amounts of supplies and aid to the Nazis. In fact trains carrying Russian supplies were still headed to Germany, even while the Nazis were launching their attack. This is particularly ironic in that the US would then go on to provide massive supplies to the Soviet Union of everything from powdered milk to army boots, which enabled the USSR to stay in the fight. After the USSR had supplied Hitler for two years, enabling his conquests in Eastern Europe and the beginning of the Holocaust.
At the end of September 1939, after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had both invaded Poland, and England, France and other allies had declared war on Nazi Germany-- the USSR and Nazi Germany issued a joint declaration endorsing their own invasion, and blaming England and France for the "state of war." Both even signed secret agreements to coordinate the suppression of Polish nationalism and allow the Nazis to remove any Reich Nationals, even inside Soviet held territory.
Hitler made it clear in his correspondence that Soviet collaboration enabled Germany's assault on Eastern Europe. For example on August 25, 1939, Hitler wrote to Mussolini saying;
The Soviet alliance with Hitler enabled the Nazis to achieve the gains they did by creating a balance of power, giving Eastern European countries no choice but to either cut a deal with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or try to remain neutral and hope the Allies would rescue them. Every Nazi atrocity until the summer of 1941, including the Holocaust is deservedly placed at the door of the USSR as Hitler's partner in the conquest of Eastern Europe.
Stalin, should have been properly ranked with Mussolini and Tojo, as one of Hitler's allies, who jointly planned invasions and whose alliance strengthened the Nazis. Indeed the USSR did far more to strengthen Hitler, than Mussolini or Franco ever did. Yet post-1941 revisionism did its best to reinvent the USSR as one of the Allies fighting against Hitler. This is a blatant lie. The Soviet Union did not stand up to Hitler as one of the nations fighting Nazi aggression-- it collaborated with Hitler up until the moment that he stabbed it in the back.
The Soviet Union did not fight Hitler voluntarily-- it fought involuntarily for its own survival. Like Finland, it would up fighting against its former allies. Unlike Finland it had no excuse for making that alliance to begin with-- except greed and ambition. The USSR suffered huge casualties, because it was unwilling to believe that Stalin would turn on it so fast. And because Stalin's own atrocities had purged too many generals, and because his entire approach to the war was done without any concern whatsoever for the deaths of his own people. All this allowed the Nazis to gain a great foothold in Russia, which combined with Hitler's refusal to retreat, ended up inflicting huge casualties on German forces as well. But let there be no doubt, that the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany was a war between former allies.
Reading all this it should be obvious why Soviet history turned Russia into the victim and practiced Holocaust denial. It was in the USSR's interest to pretend that Nazi atrocities began in the summer of 1941, because it had been complicit in Nazi atrocities up until that point. This focus also turned the USSR into the chief victim of the Nazis, as a way of deflecting the accusation that the USSR had actually been collaborating with Hitler. All the prattle about the horrors of war and the huge numbers of Russians killed, resurrected by Oliver Stone, was and is meant to mask what had been an alliance between Soviet Communism and German Nazism.
Furthermore the USSR had a compelling reason to quash any general talk about atrocities, considering its own extensive history of massacres up until and during WW2. And since Soviet Commissars had been conducting executions of Jews, back when Hitler was still trying his hand at being a painter-- any talk about the mass murder of Jews would have been unhelpful. Particularly as Stalin had liked the Holocaust, enough to try and copy it in the 1950's with the "Doctor's Plot", which would have wiped out most of the surviving Jews in the USSR.
Post-war Soviet history would insist that America and England had actually been the ones to ally with Hitler. This theme would be fused with anti-Semitism when in the 1950's, Stalin's minions launched the opening of his planned Holocaust by accusing Zionist Jews of being agents of America and England to bring down the Soviet Union. Oliver Stone's narrative is virtually the same, except that he reverses the equation by accusing America and England of being agents of the Jews. And claiming that America and England had empowered Hitler.
The emphasis on seeing Hitler "in context" and arguing that he was really no different than any Western leader, is typical of the Soviet line that there was no real difference between FDR, Churchill or Hitler. In the Soviet narrative accepted by the left, they were all capitalists who made war for greed. This rhetoric was embraced by the anti-war left in the 30's and 40's to argue that war against Hitler would be just another capitalist war to enrich the arms merchants.
What does all this have to do with the left? Because the American and European left was complicit in it by allowing itself to be manipulated by the Soviet Union. Left wing groups, many of them Communist fronts, conducted propaganda against the war-- up until the Soviet Union itself was invaded, at which point they switched to a rabidly pro-war theme, and even helped the authorities suppress remaining Trotskyist anti-war groups and labor unions.
Many principled leftists broke with with the USSR and Communist front groups over the Hitler-Stalin pact. Most however did not. It would not be until Khrushchev's revelations much later as part of the official Soviet Communist line, that there would be a larger exodus. And even so, the Soviet narrative remains embedded in the left-- as Oliver Stone's propaganda demonstrates. And that narrative has been behind the left's historical revisionism.
That historical revisionism has been expressed in the attempt to "Hitlerize" every Western leader and every political movement hostile to Communism and the left's agenda. When liberals in 2006 were comparing Bush to Hitler, they were unknowingly echoing a Soviet narrative which equated all capitalist countries and their leaders. When in 2010, they accuse Israel of being just like the Nazis, they make use of Soviet rhetoric developed during the Doctor's Plot, which was meant to culminate in a second Holocaust.
If one looks at Soviet propaganda, it is virtually identical to liberal attacks on Israel in the present day. For example;
For example the following from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia rather obviously mirrors Stone's own rhetoric about the Jewish dominated media;
Everything you really need to know about Stone's views on Israel and the Jews is contained in the above sentences. It also sums up everything in his documentaries. As well as the dominant view now among the left. Which is completely indistinguishable from the Communist view.
The left's "secret histories" are really Soviet histories. After making a show of breaking free from Soviet domination, they parrot Communist memes out of Moscow without even realizing it. The left has not had a new idea since 1916, and it shows. Its universal "Hitlerization" is nothing more than historical revisionism, whether it's presented as Oliver Stone's "Hitler with Context" or Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmanns".
The great mistake of the 20th century was the failure to hold the Soviet Union accountable for its crimes, and those due to its collaboration with Nazi Germany. And to hold its leftist collaborators morally accountable for the aid and comfort that they provided to the USSR and indirectly to Nazi Germany. That failure has allowed the left to claim a moral high ground that is both dishonest and an obscene insult to the dead.
When Showtime airs Oliver Stone's latest batch of rantings, it is not only airing material from a bigot, but recycled propaganda from a regime that committed some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. If you wish to protest Showtime's actions, feel free to drop them a line at robin.mcmillan@showtime.net or jackie.ioachim@showtime.net.
One of the left's dirty secrets is that the Soviet Union was the preeminent country engaged in Holocaust denial. At a time when Germany had outlawed Holocaust denial, the Soviet Union mostly suppressed any mention of the Holocaust, focusing only on Russian casualties as a whole. Unsurprisingly that is exactly the line that Oliver Stone takes, when he emphasizes that; "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 million killed". In 1982, Mahmoud Abbas of the PLO, and current leader of the Palestinian Authority, included Holocaust denial material in his doctoral thesis at a Moscow University. Unsurprisingly his doctoral thesis reads a lot like Stone's comments. That is because both are grounded in the Soviet Communist view of history.
Stone's comments about Hitler and Stalin come from the same source material. His apologetic for Stalin's atrocities, "he fought the German war machine more than any person" and the claim that Hitler needs to be seen in context as a tool of Western bankers all come gift-wrapped in the red and yellow. And of course they're also lies. Because this isn't just about Oliver Stone trafficking in the anti-semitism that is now fashionable on the left, it's about some of the big lies of the left about WW2.
The Big Lie that the left has desperately tried to cover up is the Soviet Union's complicity in Hitler's rise to power and the atrocities of Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union began by suppressing German Communists to pave the way for Hitler (just as it would later do to Egyptian Communists on behalf of the Hitler-besotted Gamal Abdel Nasser). Why would it do that? For the same reason that the USSR allied with Hitler in the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, which allowed Hitler and Stalin to carve up Eastern Europe.
Stalin wanted to replay WW1, with another war between Germany, England and France-- that would give him a free hand in Eastern Europe, and then allow him to occupy a weakened Western Europe. His plan backfired badly, because Hitler proved too unpredictable for him, and England and France buckled too quickly-- but when the dust had settled, the USSR got most of what it wanted, including a sizable chunk of Germany. In 1925, Stalin made his strategy clear; "if war breaks out we shall not be able to sit with folded arms. We shall have to take action, but we shall be the last to do so. And we shall do so in order to throw the decisive weight on the scales, the weight that can turn the scales." The goal was for the rest of Europe to wear itself down through war, while the Communists would come and clean up afterward.
To that end the USSR did everything possible to strengthen Hitler's hand in order to make him a more formidable enemy for England and France. While millions of its citizens were starving, Russia provided massive amounts of supplies and aid to the Nazis. In fact trains carrying Russian supplies were still headed to Germany, even while the Nazis were launching their attack. This is particularly ironic in that the US would then go on to provide massive supplies to the Soviet Union of everything from powdered milk to army boots, which enabled the USSR to stay in the fight. After the USSR had supplied Hitler for two years, enabling his conquests in Eastern Europe and the beginning of the Holocaust.
At the end of September 1939, after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had both invaded Poland, and England, France and other allies had declared war on Nazi Germany-- the USSR and Nazi Germany issued a joint declaration endorsing their own invasion, and blaming England and France for the "state of war." Both even signed secret agreements to coordinate the suppression of Polish nationalism and allow the Nazis to remove any Reich Nationals, even inside Soviet held territory.
Hitler made it clear in his correspondence that Soviet collaboration enabled Germany's assault on Eastern Europe. For example on August 25, 1939, Hitler wrote to Mussolini saying;
The pact is unconditional and includes also the obligation for consultation about all questions affecting Russia and Germany. I may tell you, Duce, that through these arrangements the favorable attitude of Russia in case of any conflict is assured, and that the possibility of the entry of Rumania into such a conflict no longer exists!
Even Turkey under these circumstances can only envisage a revision of her previous position. But I repeat once more, that Rumania is no longer in a situation to take part in a conflict against the Axis! I believe I may say to you, Duce, that through the negotiations with Soviet Russia a completely new situation in world politics has been produced which must be regarded as the greatest possible gain for the Axis.
The Soviet alliance with Hitler enabled the Nazis to achieve the gains they did by creating a balance of power, giving Eastern European countries no choice but to either cut a deal with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or try to remain neutral and hope the Allies would rescue them. Every Nazi atrocity until the summer of 1941, including the Holocaust is deservedly placed at the door of the USSR as Hitler's partner in the conquest of Eastern Europe.
Stalin, should have been properly ranked with Mussolini and Tojo, as one of Hitler's allies, who jointly planned invasions and whose alliance strengthened the Nazis. Indeed the USSR did far more to strengthen Hitler, than Mussolini or Franco ever did. Yet post-1941 revisionism did its best to reinvent the USSR as one of the Allies fighting against Hitler. This is a blatant lie. The Soviet Union did not stand up to Hitler as one of the nations fighting Nazi aggression-- it collaborated with Hitler up until the moment that he stabbed it in the back.
The Soviet Union did not fight Hitler voluntarily-- it fought involuntarily for its own survival. Like Finland, it would up fighting against its former allies. Unlike Finland it had no excuse for making that alliance to begin with-- except greed and ambition. The USSR suffered huge casualties, because it was unwilling to believe that Stalin would turn on it so fast. And because Stalin's own atrocities had purged too many generals, and because his entire approach to the war was done without any concern whatsoever for the deaths of his own people. All this allowed the Nazis to gain a great foothold in Russia, which combined with Hitler's refusal to retreat, ended up inflicting huge casualties on German forces as well. But let there be no doubt, that the war between the USSR and Nazi Germany was a war between former allies.
Reading all this it should be obvious why Soviet history turned Russia into the victim and practiced Holocaust denial. It was in the USSR's interest to pretend that Nazi atrocities began in the summer of 1941, because it had been complicit in Nazi atrocities up until that point. This focus also turned the USSR into the chief victim of the Nazis, as a way of deflecting the accusation that the USSR had actually been collaborating with Hitler. All the prattle about the horrors of war and the huge numbers of Russians killed, resurrected by Oliver Stone, was and is meant to mask what had been an alliance between Soviet Communism and German Nazism.
Furthermore the USSR had a compelling reason to quash any general talk about atrocities, considering its own extensive history of massacres up until and during WW2. And since Soviet Commissars had been conducting executions of Jews, back when Hitler was still trying his hand at being a painter-- any talk about the mass murder of Jews would have been unhelpful. Particularly as Stalin had liked the Holocaust, enough to try and copy it in the 1950's with the "Doctor's Plot", which would have wiped out most of the surviving Jews in the USSR.
Post-war Soviet history would insist that America and England had actually been the ones to ally with Hitler. This theme would be fused with anti-Semitism when in the 1950's, Stalin's minions launched the opening of his planned Holocaust by accusing Zionist Jews of being agents of America and England to bring down the Soviet Union. Oliver Stone's narrative is virtually the same, except that he reverses the equation by accusing America and England of being agents of the Jews. And claiming that America and England had empowered Hitler.
The emphasis on seeing Hitler "in context" and arguing that he was really no different than any Western leader, is typical of the Soviet line that there was no real difference between FDR, Churchill or Hitler. In the Soviet narrative accepted by the left, they were all capitalists who made war for greed. This rhetoric was embraced by the anti-war left in the 30's and 40's to argue that war against Hitler would be just another capitalist war to enrich the arms merchants.
What does all this have to do with the left? Because the American and European left was complicit in it by allowing itself to be manipulated by the Soviet Union. Left wing groups, many of them Communist fronts, conducted propaganda against the war-- up until the Soviet Union itself was invaded, at which point they switched to a rabidly pro-war theme, and even helped the authorities suppress remaining Trotskyist anti-war groups and labor unions.
Many principled leftists broke with with the USSR and Communist front groups over the Hitler-Stalin pact. Most however did not. It would not be until Khrushchev's revelations much later as part of the official Soviet Communist line, that there would be a larger exodus. And even so, the Soviet narrative remains embedded in the left-- as Oliver Stone's propaganda demonstrates. And that narrative has been behind the left's historical revisionism.
That historical revisionism has been expressed in the attempt to "Hitlerize" every Western leader and every political movement hostile to Communism and the left's agenda. When liberals in 2006 were comparing Bush to Hitler, they were unknowingly echoing a Soviet narrative which equated all capitalist countries and their leaders. When in 2010, they accuse Israel of being just like the Nazis, they make use of Soviet rhetoric developed during the Doctor's Plot, which was meant to culminate in a second Holocaust.
If one looks at Soviet propaganda, it is virtually identical to liberal attacks on Israel in the present day. For example;
For example the following from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia rather obviously mirrors Stone's own rhetoric about the Jewish dominated media;
"The main posits of modern Zionism are militant chauvinism, racism, anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism...
International Zionist Organizations own major financial funds, partly through Jewish monopolists and partly collected by Jewish mandatory charities... influences or controls significant part of media agencies and outlets in the West"
Serving as the front squad of colonialism and neo-colonialism, international Zionism actively participates in the fight against national liberation movements of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America."
Everything you really need to know about Stone's views on Israel and the Jews is contained in the above sentences. It also sums up everything in his documentaries. As well as the dominant view now among the left. Which is completely indistinguishable from the Communist view.
The left's "secret histories" are really Soviet histories. After making a show of breaking free from Soviet domination, they parrot Communist memes out of Moscow without even realizing it. The left has not had a new idea since 1916, and it shows. Its universal "Hitlerization" is nothing more than historical revisionism, whether it's presented as Oliver Stone's "Hitler with Context" or Ward Churchill's "Little Eichmanns".
The great mistake of the 20th century was the failure to hold the Soviet Union accountable for its crimes, and those due to its collaboration with Nazi Germany. And to hold its leftist collaborators morally accountable for the aid and comfort that they provided to the USSR and indirectly to Nazi Germany. That failure has allowed the left to claim a moral high ground that is both dishonest and an obscene insult to the dead.
When Showtime airs Oliver Stone's latest batch of rantings, it is not only airing material from a bigot, but recycled propaganda from a regime that committed some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. If you wish to protest Showtime's actions, feel free to drop them a line at robin.mcmillan@showtime.net or jackie.ioachim@showtime.net.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Fourth Try at a Two State Solution
At a joint press conference with Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron stated that we "desperately need a two-state solution". German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reportedly downbeat about the prospects for a Two State Solution, but insists that it is the only "reasonable solution". J-Street, the radical left wing anti-Israel group intimately tied up with the Obama Administration, has released an ad praising Congressman Joe Sestak, one of the "Hamas 54", for his support of a "Two State Solution". Alan Dershowitz responded with an Op Ed insisting that he had always been in favor of a "Two State Solution" and denouncing J-Street for daring to imply otherwise.
And with all that noise and clamor for a Two State Solution, people would be forgiven for assuming that this was something a little more feasible than flapping your wings and flying to Mars. They would be forgiven for assuming that because they are naive enough to believe that leading politicians wouldn't step forward to propose something completely insane, just because it was the same thing that had been proposed for the last 20 years, and proposing it again has become the thing to do. They would be forgiven for also assuming that the media would be able to fact check completely impossible proposals before they actually become de facto policy. And it's a sad testament to the current state of the policy debate, that they would be wrong on both points.
It is easy enough to understand why a "Two State Solution" not only didn't work then and won't work now, but why it makes absolutely no sense to propose.
The original Two State Solution was implemented back in the 1920's, when the British imported Abdullah, the Governor of Mecca, and gave him %76 of the territory of the Palestine Mandate, in exchange for his silence when the French invaded Syria. Yet turning over three quarters of the territory of the Mandate to Muslim rule did not bring peace. Arab pogroms of Jews continued throughout the 1920's. In a single week of August of 1929 alone, 113 Jews were murdered. (That is more than the number of Arabs who died in Jenin or Deir Yassin, yet you will find that the same "historians" who constantly mention those places, couldn't be bothered to care, let alone make noises about genocide and Arab colonialism.)
But one failure proves nothing. So in in the 1940's, the United Nations tackled an official Partition Plan that would have created two states, one Jewish and one Arab, within the tiny remains of the Mandate. The split would have been 43 to 56, with the Jews getting the Negev desert, and the Arabs getting the water supplies. Jerusalem would have been internationalized. The Jews said, "Yes." The Arabs said, "Jihad." The War of Independence followed, and the new borders of all sides were determined by armed force.
By the middle of the 20th century, there had already been two partitions within a single generation. Neither of them had brought anything resembling peace. So naturally the only solution was another Two State Solution. Surely two failures didn't mean anything. Nothing worth learning from anyway.
And here we are today in the midst of the "Two State Solution" number 3, and any solution that didn't work twice, isn't much of a solution, and isn't going to work a third time. And unsurprisingly it hasn't. And it won't. And none of that will stop the political zombies chanting, "Two State Solution" over and over again, as if it was a magic formula that would fulfill all their dreams.
Right now there are two Palestinian Muslim mini-states within Israel. That makes it hard to implement a Two-State Solution with Three States. Every time there's trouble in Gaza, it is once again a reminder that it is ruled by Hamas, and the West Bank is ruled by Fatah, two terrorist groups that don't get along with each other. Naturally every politician who talks about the importance of a "Two State Solution" completely ignores this minor problem, even though they created it. Or perhaps because they created it.
Each time the assumption is that if Israel sits down at the table and negotiates with Fatah leader Abbas, and makes enough concessions, there will be a Two State Solution, and the problem will be solved. Which seems easily enough done, when you ignore the fact that Gaza is not only run by Hamas, but that the only reason Hamas isn't running the West Bank is because the US is propping up Abbas with weapons, and Israel has cut off Gaza from the West Bank. Yet the same people who call for a "Two State Solution" also demand that Israel stop blockading Gaza-- when Fatah and their "Two State Solution" wouldn't last two weeks if Hamas militias showed up in force in Ramallah.
But even if we ignore all this, there's still one major problem-- Abbas doesn't want to negotiate. Yes that's right, one more thing in the way of the "Two State Solution" is that the leader of Fatah, who is backed by billions of dollars in foreign aid, American diplomatic protection, and Israeli military protection, who was the recipient of Obama's first phone call to a foreign leader on taking office-- refuses to actually negotiate. Instead Abbas wants Israel to just give him things without negotiating first. Like setting the borders of his state, before he agrees to sit down to negotiate the borders of his state. That isn't a negotiation, it's a hold up. It's also absurd to demand the outcome of the negotiations as a concession to just show up at the negotiations, which might be the point.
The Arab Muslim side has been willing to take land, but not to concede their claims on the rest of the land. That was why the second attempt at a Two State Solution didn't work, it's why the third attempt at a Two State Solution has gone nowhere, over and over again. Every attempt at dividing up the territory between Arabs and Jews in a way that would force both to concede the rights of the other, has been sabotaged and rejected by the Arab side over and over again. The UN found that out in the 40's. Bill Clinton found that out in the 90's. There is no way forward on this without triggering an internal civil war in the Muslim world that would be much more destructive, than its current conflict with Israel.
Meanwhile Abbas is completely incapable of making a decision about anything. Especially something controversial like a Final Status Agreement that would force him into an immediate showdown with Hamas and factions within his own terrorist organization, unwilling to accept any legal concession even as part of a phased plan to destroy Israel. So he does the safest thing he can do, which is to constantly denounce Israel, while sabotaging the negotiations, and trying to avoid getting caught up in the fighting. He knows that sooner or later he will be removed by one or another faction within Fatah, when they manage to finally stop their internal infighting. And if that doesn't happen, sooner or later Hamas and its Iranian and Syrian backers will have a car bomb with his name on it, just as they did for so many Lebanese politicians.
As we can see then, there's only one or two, three things standing in the way of a Two State Solution.
1. The fact that it's been repeatedly tried and failed.
2. The fact that there are two Palestinians states already in place and fighting among themselves (this is not counting Jordan, which was the original Palestinian state, and will join the fight if the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds in taking it over.)
3. The fact that Abbas does not want to negotiate
Naturally none of this discourages politicians from chanting "Two State Solution" over and over again, or media pundits from suggesting that Israel needs to implement it right now-- when the only conceivable way Israel could make that happen is to close the border, throw the keys across the fence, and let anyone who wants to make a Palestinian state fight for it. But the Two State Solution proponents frown at any such ideas as "unilateral", which is slang for "It's wrong to form a state without the consent of the puppet regime currently running one Palestinian state, or the the terrorist organization running the other Palestinian state-- which they won't consent to anyway, but that just means we must try harder to convince them".
Meanwhile Abbas and some of the loonier Israel bashing crowd are playing with the idea of a One State Solution. Foreign Policy Journal condemns Israel for everything, and suggests it be replaced with "a single, united, democratic state with a constitution and representative government that recognizes the equal rights of all and protects the rights of the minority." A state that the writer claims "the Arabs proposed before Israel existed". Which is rather curious considering that none of Israel's neighbors was a democratic state that protected the rights of minorities -- as the million Jewish refugees from Muslim countries would tell you. Of course such quibbles are petty when it comes to the main task of damning the "Racist Zionist colonial entity", as innumerable Soviet Ambassadors to the UN and left wing bloggers describe Israel.
But the prospect of turning Hamas and Fatah into part of a state with Israel is about as likely to lead to a united democratic state with protection for anyone's rights, as throwing a hand grenade near a bunch of pots, one of which has a chicken in it, is likely to lead to a chicken in every pot. If the Palestinian Arab Muslims couldn't form a single united government of their own that respected the rights of even their own Christian minority, or even each other-- how exactly would they form one with Israel? Rather than answer the question, proponents will instead blame Israel for that too-- which is their answer for absolutely everything. And I do mean absolutely everything.
Which puts us right back where we started, with an unworkable dilemma that Israel gets all the blame for, because it can't create peace by waving a magic wind and implementing a Two State Solution, a plan that is about as workable as any decent 99 cent magic wand.
But politicians and pundits don't like being told that their pet projects are unworkable. Tell them that water can't run uphill or that money doesn't grow on trees, and they assume you're being deliberately obstinate or obstructionist. And they insist even more "desperately" that you make water run uphill, grow money on trees and implement a Two State Solution. What sort of person are you anyway, that you refuse to attempt something so reasonable with such tremendous benefits for all mankind? And it is difficult to respond to that without telling the politician that he is an idiot, and explaining to him exactly why he is an idiot, and why he would be better off trying to ride chickens, than making decisions for anyone else. And then you're naturally an extremist.
Of course some politicians actually do know better. And that's something they keep to themselves, because the safest way to be a politician is to repeat the same thing that politicians before you repeated over and over again. It doesn't matter whether it can work or not. What matters is that it's "safe", because everyone says it. Occasionally there is a call for new ideas, which usually means brushing off a very old idea, and presenting it as brand new. Like the Two State Solution, which has been a "new idea" since before women were allowed to vote.
Today Israel is stuck in this echo chamber of stupidity, both external and internal, because its own politicians are no brighter than Cameron or Obama. And when they are bright enough, like Merkel, as Netanyahu is-- they keep it to themselves. Because it's not safe to be branded an extremist for speaking common sense. It's safer to go along with what everyone else is saying. To echo, "Two State Solution" over and over again, as if it means something anymore.
But I have a suggestion for finally resolving this whole mess. The Two State Solution. This will be only the fourth time we've tried a Two State Solution and it hasn't worked until now. Which means it's bound to work this time. And if it doesn't, there's always a fifth time. And by then there would be no territory left for Israel to give up, which would truly make it a final solution.
And with all that noise and clamor for a Two State Solution, people would be forgiven for assuming that this was something a little more feasible than flapping your wings and flying to Mars. They would be forgiven for assuming that because they are naive enough to believe that leading politicians wouldn't step forward to propose something completely insane, just because it was the same thing that had been proposed for the last 20 years, and proposing it again has become the thing to do. They would be forgiven for also assuming that the media would be able to fact check completely impossible proposals before they actually become de facto policy. And it's a sad testament to the current state of the policy debate, that they would be wrong on both points.
It is easy enough to understand why a "Two State Solution" not only didn't work then and won't work now, but why it makes absolutely no sense to propose.
The original Two State Solution was implemented back in the 1920's, when the British imported Abdullah, the Governor of Mecca, and gave him %76 of the territory of the Palestine Mandate, in exchange for his silence when the French invaded Syria. Yet turning over three quarters of the territory of the Mandate to Muslim rule did not bring peace. Arab pogroms of Jews continued throughout the 1920's. In a single week of August of 1929 alone, 113 Jews were murdered. (That is more than the number of Arabs who died in Jenin or Deir Yassin, yet you will find that the same "historians" who constantly mention those places, couldn't be bothered to care, let alone make noises about genocide and Arab colonialism.)
But one failure proves nothing. So in in the 1940's, the United Nations tackled an official Partition Plan that would have created two states, one Jewish and one Arab, within the tiny remains of the Mandate. The split would have been 43 to 56, with the Jews getting the Negev desert, and the Arabs getting the water supplies. Jerusalem would have been internationalized. The Jews said, "Yes." The Arabs said, "Jihad." The War of Independence followed, and the new borders of all sides were determined by armed force.
By the middle of the 20th century, there had already been two partitions within a single generation. Neither of them had brought anything resembling peace. So naturally the only solution was another Two State Solution. Surely two failures didn't mean anything. Nothing worth learning from anyway.
And here we are today in the midst of the "Two State Solution" number 3, and any solution that didn't work twice, isn't much of a solution, and isn't going to work a third time. And unsurprisingly it hasn't. And it won't. And none of that will stop the political zombies chanting, "Two State Solution" over and over again, as if it was a magic formula that would fulfill all their dreams.
Right now there are two Palestinian Muslim mini-states within Israel. That makes it hard to implement a Two-State Solution with Three States. Every time there's trouble in Gaza, it is once again a reminder that it is ruled by Hamas, and the West Bank is ruled by Fatah, two terrorist groups that don't get along with each other. Naturally every politician who talks about the importance of a "Two State Solution" completely ignores this minor problem, even though they created it. Or perhaps because they created it.
Each time the assumption is that if Israel sits down at the table and negotiates with Fatah leader Abbas, and makes enough concessions, there will be a Two State Solution, and the problem will be solved. Which seems easily enough done, when you ignore the fact that Gaza is not only run by Hamas, but that the only reason Hamas isn't running the West Bank is because the US is propping up Abbas with weapons, and Israel has cut off Gaza from the West Bank. Yet the same people who call for a "Two State Solution" also demand that Israel stop blockading Gaza-- when Fatah and their "Two State Solution" wouldn't last two weeks if Hamas militias showed up in force in Ramallah.
But even if we ignore all this, there's still one major problem-- Abbas doesn't want to negotiate. Yes that's right, one more thing in the way of the "Two State Solution" is that the leader of Fatah, who is backed by billions of dollars in foreign aid, American diplomatic protection, and Israeli military protection, who was the recipient of Obama's first phone call to a foreign leader on taking office-- refuses to actually negotiate. Instead Abbas wants Israel to just give him things without negotiating first. Like setting the borders of his state, before he agrees to sit down to negotiate the borders of his state. That isn't a negotiation, it's a hold up. It's also absurd to demand the outcome of the negotiations as a concession to just show up at the negotiations, which might be the point.

Meanwhile Abbas is completely incapable of making a decision about anything. Especially something controversial like a Final Status Agreement that would force him into an immediate showdown with Hamas and factions within his own terrorist organization, unwilling to accept any legal concession even as part of a phased plan to destroy Israel. So he does the safest thing he can do, which is to constantly denounce Israel, while sabotaging the negotiations, and trying to avoid getting caught up in the fighting. He knows that sooner or later he will be removed by one or another faction within Fatah, when they manage to finally stop their internal infighting. And if that doesn't happen, sooner or later Hamas and its Iranian and Syrian backers will have a car bomb with his name on it, just as they did for so many Lebanese politicians.
As we can see then, there's only one or two, three things standing in the way of a Two State Solution.
1. The fact that it's been repeatedly tried and failed.
2. The fact that there are two Palestinians states already in place and fighting among themselves (this is not counting Jordan, which was the original Palestinian state, and will join the fight if the Muslim Brotherhood succeeds in taking it over.)
3. The fact that Abbas does not want to negotiate
Naturally none of this discourages politicians from chanting "Two State Solution" over and over again, or media pundits from suggesting that Israel needs to implement it right now-- when the only conceivable way Israel could make that happen is to close the border, throw the keys across the fence, and let anyone who wants to make a Palestinian state fight for it. But the Two State Solution proponents frown at any such ideas as "unilateral", which is slang for "It's wrong to form a state without the consent of the puppet regime currently running one Palestinian state, or the the terrorist organization running the other Palestinian state-- which they won't consent to anyway, but that just means we must try harder to convince them".
Meanwhile Abbas and some of the loonier Israel bashing crowd are playing with the idea of a One State Solution. Foreign Policy Journal condemns Israel for everything, and suggests it be replaced with "a single, united, democratic state with a constitution and representative government that recognizes the equal rights of all and protects the rights of the minority." A state that the writer claims "the Arabs proposed before Israel existed". Which is rather curious considering that none of Israel's neighbors was a democratic state that protected the rights of minorities -- as the million Jewish refugees from Muslim countries would tell you. Of course such quibbles are petty when it comes to the main task of damning the "Racist Zionist colonial entity", as innumerable Soviet Ambassadors to the UN and left wing bloggers describe Israel.
But the prospect of turning Hamas and Fatah into part of a state with Israel is about as likely to lead to a united democratic state with protection for anyone's rights, as throwing a hand grenade near a bunch of pots, one of which has a chicken in it, is likely to lead to a chicken in every pot. If the Palestinian Arab Muslims couldn't form a single united government of their own that respected the rights of even their own Christian minority, or even each other-- how exactly would they form one with Israel? Rather than answer the question, proponents will instead blame Israel for that too-- which is their answer for absolutely everything. And I do mean absolutely everything.
Which puts us right back where we started, with an unworkable dilemma that Israel gets all the blame for, because it can't create peace by waving a magic wind and implementing a Two State Solution, a plan that is about as workable as any decent 99 cent magic wand.
But politicians and pundits don't like being told that their pet projects are unworkable. Tell them that water can't run uphill or that money doesn't grow on trees, and they assume you're being deliberately obstinate or obstructionist. And they insist even more "desperately" that you make water run uphill, grow money on trees and implement a Two State Solution. What sort of person are you anyway, that you refuse to attempt something so reasonable with such tremendous benefits for all mankind? And it is difficult to respond to that without telling the politician that he is an idiot, and explaining to him exactly why he is an idiot, and why he would be better off trying to ride chickens, than making decisions for anyone else. And then you're naturally an extremist.
![]() |
Arafat getting intimate with Hamas leader |
Today Israel is stuck in this echo chamber of stupidity, both external and internal, because its own politicians are no brighter than Cameron or Obama. And when they are bright enough, like Merkel, as Netanyahu is-- they keep it to themselves. Because it's not safe to be branded an extremist for speaking common sense. It's safer to go along with what everyone else is saying. To echo, "Two State Solution" over and over again, as if it means something anymore.
But I have a suggestion for finally resolving this whole mess. The Two State Solution. This will be only the fourth time we've tried a Two State Solution and it hasn't worked until now. Which means it's bound to work this time. And if it doesn't, there's always a fifth time. And by then there would be no territory left for Israel to give up, which would truly make it a final solution.
Future Biographies by Former Members of Congress
Congressmen, if there's one thing they do well, it's take your money. But once they're out of office and deprived of the power to make bad laws for good money-- they'll have to find another way to do it. And the easiest way is the biography. Because who doesn't want to read a sanitized and ghost-written account of a man or woman who spent 20 years not showing up to votes without being bribed first. Especially if it doesn't include the names of some of those who bribed him or her.
But with midterm elections coming up, many current Senators and Representatives will be finding some free time in their enforced retirement to write their biographies. And here are a few possible titles we might be seeing shortly.
But with midterm elections coming up, many current Senators and Representatives will be finding some free time in their enforced retirement to write their biographies. And here are a few possible titles we might be seeing shortly.
Senator Harry Reid, the man who looks like a gravedigger and set his spade deep in the hard earth of Washington D.C. and tried to bury America's economy. Now that it's time for him to write his memoirs, expect them to be as lively, upbeat and fun as Harry Reid himself. No one will make it past the first 5 pages as he recalls his childhood in a salt mine, but that's because no one will buy the book.
When it comes time for a successfully unsuccessful, (or is that an unsuccessfully successful?) politician like Nancy Pelosi to leave office, that also means it's time to find someone to blame. Someone just waiting to be made a scapegoat. Someone like aliens.
And how do we know aliens didn't do it? There's no proof is there. Which will be a major selling point in San Francisco. Learn the story of how Nancy Pelosi fought valiantly against the aliens controlling her brain and making her pass all sorts of crazy laws. It's a testament to the political courage of a woman who takes credit for nothing and everything at the same time. Good work, if you can get it.
Sure some politicians might turn in dry biographies, recounting their imaginary childhoods, the time in their first campaign when they thought about getting a real job but decided to stick it out in politics instead, and those 40 pages that are ripped off from Neil Kinnock, but not Chris Dodd.
As the ultimate insider, Senator Dodd offers a page turning guide to getting great deals from banks and mortgage lenders by being elected to the Senate. This compelling biography will tell you just how much you can profit from being on the Senate Finance Committee, not to mention writing your own Financial Reform Bill. For anyone who loves savings and discounts, don't miss this book.
(Warning: Only works for US Senators.)
Out of the Sewers of DC and into the sewers of DC, California's favorite Bat Boy lives again! Thrill to the horrifying saga of Congressman Waxman. Gasp at the sight of his horrid birth! Faint dead away as he passes a bill to have the government regulate all Vitamins! Shudder and scream as he forces global warming offsets on hardworking farmers!
Everything horrible you've ever imagined is here. Bat boy is real and he's living and working (formerly) in Washington D.C.
What job could Congressman Alan Grayson be qualified for, once out of office? Soccer hooligan? Drunken Idiot Number 3 in a movie? Working at the DMV?
Sadly Grayson instead will go corporate to become the new face of McDonalds. We always knew he was a clown. Now he's a real clown with real greasepaint.
We don't know what the future holds for Congressman Nadler, but it probably will involve buildings with elevators. And french fries. And hamburgers. And steaks and salads. We're kidding about the salads of course. But without all the pork in congress, the good Representative will probably have to waddle twice as hard to the nearest buffet.
Keith Ellison. America's first Muslim congressman. What can the future possibly hold for him? America kicked him out office. Now the Great Satan must pay! Recommended by Atlantic Magazine, Pacific Weekly and the New York Times, this passionate screed about the way to reform Islam by killing even more Americans has been hailed as groundbreaking and explosive-- but mostly explosive.
Journey along with Ellison, as he meets up with Jihadis and tries to get on a plane despite being on a No Fly list, and having pants packed full of dynamite. This is a memoir that really gets under the skin of anyone who's wanted to kill a bunch of Americans.
Guam hasn't sunk has it? And there's only one man to thank for it. Congressman Hank Johnson! Battling the forces of ignorance on his own, Johnson alerted America and various confused military officials to the peril facing Guam. And since Guam hasn't sunk, clearly his efforts succeeded. Hank Johnson may no longer be in congress, but for as long as Guam shall live, its people the Gumaites, will remember him as their savior. Unless it sinks anyway. Glug. Glug. Glug.
Barry. Poor Barry. No he's not a Senator anymore, though he hardly ever was one to begin with. And without a Democratic Congress, the big chair won't be almost as fun. Sure he'll still be able to golf. Fly to exotic places on the taxpayer dime. And have crowds of adoring liberals follow him around, and fight for the privilege of buying him some arugula, but still... it ain't the same without the power.
And that can be said for all of our biography subjects. They did a heck of a job, didn't they?
Now let's look forward to the day when they finally have the time and leisure to write their biographies.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Friday Afternoon Roundup - Changing the Conversation
The entire Breitbart-Sherrod-NAACP-Tea Party mess is a lesson in how the left tries to sabotage and undermine conversations that don't suit it. It's a real time event version of what the Daily Caller chronicles in the Jornolist archives show about the media strategizing against Palin.
The Democrats used their NAACP organization to try and brand the Tea Party as racist, thereby changing the conversation from criticisms of the Obama Administration, to an attack on the Tea Party itself, in order to delegitimize it, and discourage people from participating it. Breitbart's Sherrod attack was the equivalent of the "plate glass window" strategy that Jornolist members proposed to use by protecting Jeremiah Wright, by going on the offense against a Republican figure. The entire Sherrod soap opera served as a warning about the political uses of racism, and it changed the conversation from whether the Tea Party is racist, to whether the NAACP is racist. Breitbart understands this. Many of his critics at some conservative blogs don't.
These are ugly tactics, but they may be the only kind that work in an environment dominated by ruthless far left agendas in both the media and the political sphere.
Similarly the Daily Caller's Jornolist archives have made the invisible wizards behind the media coverage into the subjects, which is something they don't want to be, unless it's the occasional flattering profile. The Jornolist archives going public undermines the wall of silence surrounding the media club.
In the 2008 election, the media left kept changing the conversation over and over again. It won in part by being able to do that enough times, that the real issues were never heard. But now the left is having trouble doing it. They've tried to launch attacks on the opposition. They've tried glamor and photo ops. But it's still the economy, stupid. And they have found no real way to change the topic for very long.
So now it's come down to bare knuckles. And Breitbart has demonstrated that with a limited budget, and no official political backing, he can still change the conversation. And seriously impact what is going. Which is more than many of his conservative critics have been able to do.
And until they can do that, it might be time to get out of Breitbart's way.
Moving on, remember when George W. Bush was being blasted by liberals for saying, "You're either with us, or you're against us." Bush was talking about the terrorists. But liberals have revived the term for a domestic purge from the party.
He said he supports primaries as needed to keep the party's moral compass. "We have to do our vetting process. You're either with us, or you're against us in the progressive movement in America," he said.
So "You're with us or against us" is wrong when applied to terrorists, but right when applied to conservative Democrats.
And that highlights the differences between Republicans who wanted to use strong tactics to protect all Americans from terrorists, vs Democrats who want to use harsh tactics to win their ideological wars in order to repress all Americans.
As a mirror of what's to come, let's take a look at Germany
"I think it's sensible that people who knowingly live unhealthily carry a responsibility for it in a financial respect," said Mr Wanderwitz, who is also head of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats's group of young parliamentarians
...
Recently the German Teachers' Association recommended weighing children in class each day and reporting the seriously overweight to social services, who would have the power to remove them to clinics.
Although opposition politicians blasted the "fat-tax" proposal, researchers at the Jacobs University in Bremen claimed its work proved that the majority of the public would back a tax on people whose unhealthy lifestyles landed them in hospital or under other medical care.
Crazy? If Michelle Obama had her way, it wouldn't be. And this is what the Culture of Mandatory that the left is imposing leads to. Mandatory government controls over everything. Constant repression and divide and conquer tactics to keep the population from turning against them.
And what else is Germany leading the way in... openly surrendering its sovereignty by raising the idea of importing police from Muslim countries to patrol its streets.
The police union for the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) stunned Germans this week when it announced it would bring policemen from Turkey to help patrol the turbulent streets of some immigrant neighbourhoods in NRW cities. With this announcement, the state’s police administration is admitting domestic police forces can no longer handle violent Turkish and other youths of immigrant backgrounds inhabiting these quarters.
...
According to Die Welt, the Turkish police would patrol the immigrant Turkish areas in their own uniforms together with German policemen.
Which would mean a Turkish occupation force functioning in the heart of Europe. And if Germany doesn't go for it, how long before France decides that it might be a good solution. Especially with automatic weapons being used against French police.
Sarkozy's proposed Mediterranean Union might pave the way for Muslim occupation forces patrolling Paris. For European authorities, the advantage of such an arrangement would be no more worries about racism or the use of force. Of course it would also mean an accelerated course to Eurabia, and the last gaps of Europe.
Farfetched, again not really. Let's turn to the UK for a moment...where its defense secretary states that Britain no longer has the cash to defend itself from every threat,
But Dr Fox has given the strongest signal yet that it will have to give up one or more of these capabilities, which have been maintained at the same time as contributing to collective security pacts such as Nato. “We don’t have the money as a country to protect ourselves against every potential future threat,” he said. “We just don’t have it.”
The military had to be configured only for “realistic potential future threats”, he said, hinting at a substantial cut to conventional forces such as tanks and fighter aircraft.
“We have to look at where we think the real risks will come from, where the real threats will come from and we need to deal with that accordingly. The Russians are not going to come over the European plain any day soon,” he added.
...much like the Germans didn't.
Unfortunately the same thing has already happened in the US. We just don't talk about it. Clinton aggressively cut back on the military. The Bush Administration undid some of those cuts, but at the same time refocused on insurgent warfare, and dulled conventional American warfighting capability. We're much better at dealing with insurgents and terrorists, but we may not be ready for a conventional war anymore.
And the Obama Administration run by left wing radicals has redoubled its attack on the US military
Despite the C-17’s military importance and humanitarian utility, the Obama administration has signaled that it will stop purchasing the C-17. Yet the need for C-17s will continue to grow because each year older, less reliable, and less capable C-5A airlifters dating back to the 1960s are being retired from the fleet because they are over 40 years old and beginning to fail. C-17s are needed to fill the void. We will need more C-17s simply to maintain our military and humanitarian capabilities.
Yet if the administration gets its way and effectively shuts down the C-17 program, just a few short years down the road we taxpayers will have to pay out billions to ramp up a new plane and production line or we’ll be forced to go to the Russians or the French in hopes that they will bail us out by selling us or leasing to us second-rate airlift aircraft.
One might assume that the administration is cutting the C-17 program to save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, but the cost of the needed five C-17s in 2011 is as little as $1.3 billion — total, not per plane. Choosing to cut the C-17 program to save only $1.3 billion in 2011, will cost U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars in the years that follow, and possibly make our military dependent upon the Russians or the French.
This “budget cutting” plan is like a homeowner refusing to patch a hole in their roof to arguably save $200 this month, when in the following months the repair costs will skyrocket into the thousands of dollars.
Additionally, with unemployment at or near record levels, why would we want to kill off the wide-body military aircraft business in the United States and effectively export those jobs to France or Russia? C-17 production supports over 30,000 jobs in 44 states and provides an annual economic impact of $5.8 billion to the U.S. economy.
If this sounds familiar, the Obama Administration did the same thing to NASA. The end result is that we have no space program. And NASA is now a self-esteem clinic for Muslims, and a playground for global warming fanatics. Apply that same paradigm to the military, and you wind up crippling international operations. Which may be exactly the goal. Not only today, but years into the future even when Obama is out of office.
But would someone like Rosa "Luxemburg" Brooks really want to do that? Do you even need to ask.
The situation is a good deal worse in Israel, where the IDF has been demoralized by constant "peace is around the corner" propaganda and rules of engagement that restrict soldiers from pretty much doing anything unless they can get the terrorists to sign a notarized letter first. Sharon's purge of generals critical of his Gaza plan and Olmert's reconfiguration of too much of the IDF as a domestic police forced, led to the disaster in Lebanon. There's no telling what might happen in a conventional war.
All this is making the free world look more and more like the 1930's, demoralized and unprepared.
Meanwhile in Israel, the radically activist Supreme Court doubled the jail sentence of Shahar Mizrahi, a police officer who shot a Muslim car thief while the latter was trying to run him over. This isn't that much of a surprise, considering the Supreme Court is radically left wing, anti-Israel, pro-Muslim and in general out of control.
"How children tell a policeman father, law-abiding, going to jail because he did his job as a cop?", He said. "I have a child of three and a half year old child. The little boy still did not understand all the drama going on, but the big boy and know. I'm going to tell him that now."
The truly obscene thing is that this is happening while terrorists are going free.
But the police have been the support for the radical left wing judiciary, and ministry of justice, which could not have terrorized so many conservative politicians, including the transparently fake rape case manufactured against former President Moshe Katzav, without them. So if the police is now starting to feel the sting, they might consider that they have more in common with the people they have been persecuting, than the people who have been giving them their marching orders.
Meanwhile Taysir Hayb, an IDF soldier, was just released after six and a half years in prison for accidentally shooting Tom Hurndall, a member of ISM, a radical pro-terrorist organization, which has endorsed terrorism, yet ISM's terrorist collaborators such as Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall who managed to get themselves killed while aiding terrorists, have been turned into martyrs for blood libels aimed at Israel.
Israel has meanwhile put on trial and convicted a number of soldiers and commanders. None of this has helped its image any. Instead every conviction is used by left wing groups as proof that Israel really is evil. Meanwhile stories such as the Arab rape case involving Sabbar Kashur are transformed into more propaganda ammunition to feed the raging endless hate against Israel and Jews.
As Lee Smith at Tablet magazine points out, this mainstreaming of hate operates via key media blogs that focus in on anti-Israel material, and then redistribute it.
If not quite as popular as adult-content sites, the anti-Israel blogosphere is a dirty little thrill that major U.S. media outfits have mainstreamed for the masses, the intellectual equivalent of the topless “Page Three” girls that British tabloids use to boost circulation. Among the dozens of blogs and websites obsessed with Israel and the machinations of the U.S. Israel lobby, Phillip Weiss’ Mondoweiss (a project of The Nation Institute), Glenn Greenwald’s blog on Salon, and Stephen Walt’s blog on ForeignPolicy.com (owned by The Washington Post Company) sit atop the junk-heap.
“Whenever one of these guys writes about me, I can tell without having looked at their blogs, because my inbox quickly fills with anti-Semitic invective,” says The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor and a frequent target of Weiss, Greenwald, and Walt. “Whenever I see a subject line with something like ‘You fascist Zionazi,’ it’s pretty much assured the link in the email will lead back to a post from one of these guys.”*
Some of these bloggers, like Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, were widely published journalists prior to their careers as Jew-baiters...
Jeffrey Goldberg believes that big media companies have morally blinded themselves to the ramifications of using anti-Semitism to attract readers. “I suppose that to the managers of Foreign Policy, traffic is traffic,” Goldberg says. “But in the course of building that traffic they’re surfacing some fairly dreadful invective about Jews. I don’t think they’d be comfortable surfacing the same kind of invective about African-Americans or other groups. But there seems to be a high tolerance for hosting a Jew-baiting blog.”
...
While it is difficult and in some cases perhaps undesirable to keep reader-comment sections completely free of insults, racist slurs, paranoid rantings, and threats of violence, it is also the case that some authors and certain subjects, regardless of the author or argument, are more likely than others to stir up the cesspool. Robert Mackey’s The Lede blog at The New York Times serves up a steady diet of Israel-related stories that give hardcore anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic commenters a home at the paper but is energetic in removing the most egregious posts.
One might say that anti-semitism has become the new pornography of the left.
Via Boker TOv boulder, America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
At Real Americans Defend Israel, America - It is Time to Step Away from the Trash Heap ...
Most Americans grew up listening to the warnings of their parents "You will be judged by the company you keep" and "Choose your friends wisely". Common sense, correct?
For the past year and a half, since Obama took office, we have slowly slipped further away from commons sense teachings of not only our parents, but also away from the high morals and teachings of our founding fathers.
As the President has apologized to the world and many Islamic leaders, for America's existence, it has suddenly made me think that much like Iran's willingness to see Israel wiped off the face of the map, Obama has taken up that same banner of ideology, only he uses that banner against the very country he was elected to protect and defend - the United States of America.
Just as no person on earth is perfect, neither is any country led by imperfect men. However, America usually learned lessons from its mistakes and carried on and marched forward, always prepared to assist other nations whenever that "call" became necessary.
What has changed?
I believe what has changed is the friends America has been keeping lately. You know, those terrorist organizations that would not blink an eye to see you, me, our families and our nation destroyed. One example would be Sept. 11th, the darkest day I have lived through in over 65 years and what made the grief even more sorrowful was watching our enemies dancing the the streets, rejoicing while close to 3,000 American citizens died on one sunny morning in September.
...the entire thing is worth reading
Israpundit looks at a backlash in the IDF toward the constant probes
At Seraphic Secret, the horror of life in Gaza has been finally exposed... and there isn't a Starbucks anywhere in sight.
On a horrible closing note, here's a 2 year old Muslim girl being taught to hate Jews and Christians already. And this isn't happening in Gaza. It's happening in New York.
It's no wonder that concerns about a new American born generation of terrorists are rising. Because this is now here. All the way. Incidentally the little girl's replies about Jews and Christians are from a basic prayer that Muslims say every day and is at the beginning of the Koran.
Then he recited the Fatiha, which is the most common prayer in Islam: “In the name of god, Allah, the beneficent, the merciful. All praise is for Allah, our lord, the lord of the worlds, the compassionate, the merciful, master of the day of judgments. Oh, god, Allah, you alone we worship, and you alone we call on for help. Oh, Allah, guide us to the straight path, the path of those whom you have favored, not of those who have earned your wrath or of those who have lost the way.”
...
Allah asserted that the two paths He described here are both misguided when He repeated the negation ‘not’. These two paths are the paths of the Christians and Jews, a fact that the believer should beware of so that he avoids them.
...
This is why they were led astray. We should also mention that both the Christians and the Jews have earned the anger and are led astray, but the anger is one of the attributes more particular of the Jews.
This is not some random extremist craziness. This is mainstream Islam.