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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

There Will Be No Peace

By On August 31, 2010
On Monday all the talk in the news was of an Israeli Rabbi who had called on G-d to strike down Abbas, the head of the terrorist Palestinian Authority, and the rest of his gang. On Tuesday, terrorists murdered a pregnant woman and three other people. The same media that dedicated a great deal of time and energy to condemning Rabbi Yosef for inciting violence, wasted no such time on discussing the constant incitement to violence practiced by the Palestinian Authority media under Abbas' authority. Earlier this month Abbas had participated in a ceremony honoring the Munich Massacre terrorists. But the media has never been particularly interested in discussing Muslims calls to violence, only in tarring any opponents of Muslim terrorism in the darkest and ugliest shades.

The murder of four Israelis and an unborn child was described not in terms of their human toll, but their political toll. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs condemned the terrorists as "enemies of peace". The six orphans no doubt thank him for his concern for "peace". State Department spokesman PJ Crowley dispensed with the human side entirely, warning that, "There may well be actors in the region who are deliberately making these kinds of attacks in order to try to sabotage the process". A statement that could have been produced by a particularly unfeeling computer.

Gibbs boasted that the Palestinian Authority had condemned the attack. In reality what the Palestinian Authority had said was that the attack went "against Palestinian interests". As condemnations go, this is right up there with, "Don't sell drugs while the police are watching my house" and that all time champion, "I am completely against adultery in an election season". The Palestinian Authority did not condemn terrorism. It condemned the attack because it wasn't in their interest today to murder the Ames' and their friends today. Tomorrow it might be again.

Meanwhile the US is funding a Palestinian Authority ad campaign aimed at Israel, which suggests that Abbas and his terrorist gang is interested in peace, and Israel isn't. So while Obama talks about being evenhanded, he is actually funding a series of domestic attack ads against Netanyahu, and for Abbas.

The media coverage has proven to be every bit as human as Gibbs and Crowley, focusing on the murders only in terms of their potential for disrupting the negotiations. This has been the modus operandi for almost two decades now, as articles have run off the press treating every murder of Israelis not in terms of the dead, but in terms of what it will do to the prospects for a terrorist Palestinian Arab state.

There is of course not a word of regret from any of Hamas' useful idiots in Code Pink or any of the other leftist supporters of the flotilla. The Huffington Post, which ran a puff piece promoting Khaled Meshaal, has no regrets either. Neither do any of those who called for an end to the blockade of Gaza. The same people who can spend pages moaning about the plight of the people of Gaza showed their true humanitarian colors with their silence. Ordinary Arab Muslims meanwhile filled the comments section of newspapers with cries of "Allahu Akbar". As they have in response to the murder of Jews for over a thousand years.

There is of course no talk permitted of that. No context given beyond that of the omnipresent "occupation". No acknowledgment that murdering Jews is part of the Koran, which dehumanizes Jews in particular, and other non-Muslims in general. Meanwhile within Israel itself, the left has conducted a hateful campaign of incitement against those Jews they brand as settlers. While the Ames' were being murdered, leftist radical writers like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua were calling for a boycott of settlements. Like the ghetto police and the Kapos who responded to being confined to ghettos and concentration camps by beating the Jews that the Germans had placed under their authority, Israel's leftists respond to European boycotts by finding Jews within their own country to boycott.

But to the left the Jews are occupiers, much as they were to the Nazis. The murder of Jews is discussed only in terms of whether the latest bodies of men, women and children will dissuade Israeli from making more concessions to terrorists. In their eyes Arab Muslims are human, Israeli Jews are not. Will the murder of a pregnant woman keep Israeli negotiations away from the table for an extra day? An extra hour. An extra minute. That is all that matters.


The negotiations are a sham. The Arab Muslims voted for Hamas and they still support Hamas. They do not support Abbas or Fayyad, whose party barely registered in the last election. They are the "moderate terrorists" chosen by Washington D.C. and Brussels, with no popular support or right to rule. Israeli is being bullied by Obama into making concessions to a terrorist group that does not even represent Palestinian Arabs. A terrorist group that has never renounced violence or chosen peace. The whole thing is a farce within a sham.

Right now Obama is pretending that Abbas and his minions are the good murderers, and that Hamas and their ilk are the bad murderers. This despite the fact that unofficial contacts between Obama's people and Hamas date back to the election. But Hamas is not willing to do what Fatah is, which is pretend to be moderate terrorists. And so billions of US and EU dollars go to Fatah, while Iran and the rest of the Muslim world takes care of Hamas. The killing goes on. And Israel takes the blame.

A day from now, this story will already be gone from the headlines. Swept away by the latest manufactured scandal used by the media to target Israel in the non-stop orgy of hate directed at the Jewish state. Perhaps it will be a soldier's Facebook photo. Or an offhand remark by some Rabbi. Or Noam Chomsky will be denied the right to enter PA territory to incite more violence and terrorism. But no doubt it will be some other thing entirely. There are enough NGO's and reporters working hard to smear Israel, and they are bound to turn up something. But even if there is nothing, the story will vanish quickly anyway. Because while a number of dead Turkish Islamists who tried to beat and stab Israeli soldiers to death may trigger an international outcry and calls for an investigation-- but the murder of four Israelis will trigger none.

And that tells you all that you really need to know about what is going on here.

If Israel does succeed in killing the terrorists responsible, then there will be immediate condemnations of Israel for endangering peace. Most likely however Israel will not. Few if any media outlets will ever write about the fact that this year Israel dismantled the vast majority of security checkpoints in the West Bank this year. A factor which doubtlessly played a major role once again in enabling Muslim terrorists to murder Israelis. In response to the attack, a few of the checkpoints may go up again for a short time, and the left will cry out in outrage, and condemn Israel as an apartheid state. Obama will pressure Israel and the checkpoints will go down again. And the whole sad bloody farce will replay itself from the beginning again.

Because that is the way it has been all along. 18 years ago when Israel expelled the Hamas leadership, the media and the world's politicians demanded that Israel take them back. And Israel did. The dead are on their conscience. That of the Hamas enablers and Israeli politicians who have repeatedly chosen to give in, rather than make a stand. And now the remaining territory for making a stand is dwindling. And the farce still grinds on.

Terrorism does not exist because there is no peace process. Terrorism exists because there IS a peace process, or a possibility of one. Hamas murdered five Jews because it wanted to make a point to all the parties that it could not be ignored. At other times it is Fatah that has done the same thing. Israel's willingness to negotiate stimulates terrorism like nothing else, because it creates a tangible reward. Without the peace process, terrorism would fade away on its own. As it had become a fading problem, before Clinton and Rabin plucked Arafat out of obscurity and gave him a country to play with. Paradoxically as long as the peace process holds out the possibility of victory for the terrorists, there can be and will be no peace.

Monday, August 30, 2010

The Media Loses Readers and Viewers to its Own Radicalism

By On August 30, 2010
Whether it's Newsweek being sold to the husband of a Democratic congresswoman for a dollar, or ABC deciding to turn "This Week" into a BBC program by turning over to Christiane Amanpour, last week the dying media itself provided us with two examples of why it's dying. By choosing radicalism over readers, the media continues narrowing its own readership and viewership, pursuing ideological purity, not only over integrity, but even over its own profits and future viability.

Take ABC's news division, which has always been notorious for its political radicalism and distaste for the average American viewer. Whether it was Peter Jennings comparing American voters to "a nation two-year olds" throwing a tantrum for voting in a Republican congress in 1994 (expect this metaphor to make a comeback after these midterm elections) or Ted Koppel turning the names of dead servicemen into an anti-war statement (Koppel was the alternative candidate to take over "This Week"), this has been the ABC way. But turning over This Week to Christiane Amanpour is part of the growing blend of ABC News and the BBC.

The question though is who is Christiane Amanpour meant to appeal to? To viewers who wanted another foreign talking head snootily reading the news at them, not to them. Who were desperately longing for an ABC News on air personality sympathetic to Islamic terrorists? And why would those people even bother with ABC News, when they already have the BBC.

The problem with the American media is that it doesn't speak to Americans. That's why FOX News is successful, and CNN is in the basement. Network news exists underwritten by medication and mutual fund commercials, and even so it's losing money. ABC News is making severe cutbacks even while cutting Amanpour a 2 million dollar paycheck for a show hardly anyone watches anymore. And despite investing in a splashy media rollout for the Amanpour branded This Week, she finished a distant third, well behind "Meet the Press". While viewers normally tune in to see a new host, the addition of Amanpour couldn't even compete with CBS or NBC's own similarly decaying programs on the day of her own debut.

The left is furiously blasting Washington Post TV Critic Tom Shales for stating what was obvious to everyone, that Amanpour is out of place, completely clueless about US politics and insists on internationalizing domestic issues. But shooting the messenger won't save Amanpour. Her hiring is only the latest manifestation of a media that is too radicalized to save itself. Bringing in a personality from the sinking ship that is CNN was obviously a bad idea on commercial grounds alone. Amanpour left CNN, for the same reason that Campbell Brown did. And ABC News taking Amanpour in, demonstrates that they share CNN's bad judgment.

Unlike ABC producers, Americans are not interested in an "outsider's perspective" on American politics. They can get that from the White House. Threatening to stab Tom Shales with a knife won't change that either. Amanpour's promise to "open a window on the world" for what she imagines are parochial American viewers is condescending even to those who agree with her. It's grating to those who don't. Because Amanpour's window is the parochial European left-wing window from which you can see Brussels, but not Iowa, a stifling world that is upper class in its arrogance, and low class in its empathy for terrorists. ABC News producers may be determined to bring that tiny dollhouse of a world to Americans, but who exactly is supposed to underwrite this project? The BBC and its outrageous salaries are funded by taxpayers. ABC has to pay its own way.

And that is why the media is doomed. By putting politics over profitability, the media left alienated viewers and readers exactly during the critical transition period when it needed them most. And the worse its fortunes grow, the more radical its politics have become.

Ruling out NewsMax as a buyer, while selling Newsweek to the husband of a Democratic congresswoman for a dollar (still more than it's worth) will allow it to keep grinding along for a time as a source of lifestyle tips and left wing rants. It is however only a matter of delaying the inevitable. The media cannot survive as a pity project. Not while it is alienating its remaining viewers and readers. And even a government bailout cannot sustain a financially unsustainable industry. And finally there are only so many jobs available at PBS and NPR.

When the left turned magazines, newspapers and TV news into its own bully pulpit, they helped drive away consumers, while locking up those same publications and broadcasts into a liberal ghetto, that was still not liberal enough for them. As print publications increasingly turn their websites into masses of blogs, it becomes hard to tell the difference between Time Magazine, Foreign Policy and the New York Times-- and the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. All of them have angry left wing bloggers denouncing Republicans, America and Israel. The difference is that the official media outlets have more prominent names like Joe Klein or Robert Mackey blogging for them.

The Jornolist scandal is the tip of the iceberg that shows just how thin the line between the press and the policies that they advocate really is. But that's not news to anyone. The liberal media is not some right wing talking point, poll after poll shows most of people who read newspapers and watch the news have come to that conclusion on their own. Because while the media elite may sneer at them, the public knows quite well what they stand for. And the more the media goes left, the less the public trusts it. Not just Republicans, but Democrats too. Because bias is bias, even when it does lean your way, it reduces the credibility of its purveyors as an information source. And the more they lose their audience, because the right tunes out and the left gets bored agreeing all the time, and heads to MSNBC in search of some red tofu.

Lenin called on Communists to seize the telegraph offices, telephone stations and post offices in order to control the means of communication. The American left has seized the means of cultural communication, hijacking the media, the educational system and entertainment, and turning them into vehicles for their brand of political indoctrination. And they've managed to badly devalue all three. The American educational system is a shell of what it used to be, the media is imploding and the entertainment industry keeps hitting new lows. Just as in the USSR and Venezuela and everywhere else, what the radical left controls, it also destroys.

The left's hijacking of American culture has turned institutions into rags and rubble, and it will only get worse. Because the left does not know when to stop. Does not understand that it should stop. That is why left wing revolutions that do succeed, eventually culminate in multiple levels of purges that exterminate many of the original revolutionaries, or send them off to fight and die somewhere else, turning them into convenient martyrs who look good on blood-red T-shirts.

Obama's vision of the media was as purveyors of his talking points. To that end he kept it at arms length, even while using it non-stop to promote himself. By turning the media into his publicists, he helped accelerate a rapid slide that had already been under way, ending any real distinction between news and celebrity news, between opinion and reporting, and between the liberal media and the liberal government. And when Ezra Klein tried to occasionally draw a line between themselves and the politicians they cover, it was a line that was no longer there anymore, because the media had found its mission in the advocacy of liberal domestic and international policies, of convincing the public that their political way was best. How many lines could be crossed in the name of that advocacy was by this point a subjective matter, a question of what individual members of the press were comfortable with. while still retaining the illusion of their independence.

When it came to a showdown between the principles of journalism and the principles of liberalism-- journalism never stood a chance. And all that was left was shrill political advocacy, propaganda if you will. Numerous stories praising their politicians and their cultural figures. Numerous other stories damning opposition politicians and elements of culture that displeased them. And the costs to the nation were high. The same media that did everything possible to destroy McCain and Palin, also portrayed Obama as a visionary leader, even though he had barely nailed down 100 days in the Senate before running for President.

The tripled deficit, the economic and political disasters, the greed, corruption and misrule can all be laid at the media's door. And plenty of people are doing just that. The media fervently championed an unqualified candidate, lied about him and his opponents, and then went on lying about his policies and their consequences. They sold the public a bill of goods, and that same public will also hold them responsible. When the media tore up any distance between themselves and the story, they became the story. Jornolist was the story of how the story was made, of how the lies were told and the talking points developed. And there will be more like it.

The disconnect between those who set the agenda and those who cash the checks, makes it so that the owners of media corporations will suffer for the actions of employees who care more about pushing their point of view, than about the survival of their medium. And the readers and viewers have more incentive than ever to go elsewhere, because the media monopoly is only over.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

The Liberal-Islamist Alliance

By On August 29, 2010
The Ground Zero Mosque debate is only the latest in a long series of incidents in which liberals have chosen to side with Islamists, while denying their victims a fair hearing or any hearing at all. Opponents of the mosque are painted as "Islamophobic Extremists" representing nothing but bigotry and hate. This is much the same way that the liberal cultural elite has placed the blame for over a thousand years of Muslim persecution of Jews on "Zionist Extremism". While a Koran in the toilet becomes a front page story, the ongoing persecution of Hindus, Zoroastrians and Christians in Muslim countries is only a footnote in the State Department's human rights report.

This ugly bias is the product of a political alliance between Liberals and Islamists. And the cost of that alliance may be the world as we know it. That alliance is the reason why the US and Europe attacked Yugoslavia on behalf of a Muslim separatist group in the name of a non-existent genocide, while refusing to take any action against the very real and very horrifying Sudanese Muslim genocide of Africans. It is why Israel is constantly barraged with hateful propaganda from the same left, which defended Saddam's sovereignty in Iraq. The very same media propagandists who champion the flotilla on behalf of Hamas rule in Gaza, have next to no interest in Saddam's rape rooms, his ethnic cleansing of the Marsh Arabs, or his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. While the American media becomes wildly exercised over a Disney employee's right to wear a Hijab or some other trivial bit of Islamic lawfare-- hardly any newspaper outside of Der Spiegel has covered allegations that Turkey may be using chemical weapons against the Kurds.

This is worse than mere bias. It amounts to ignoring mass murder and genocide because it is inconvenient. It means that the United States entered a war on behalf of a Muslim terrorist organization over a lie widely promoted by the media, which refused to call for armed intervention in the actual genocides taking place in Africa. The media has eagerly demonized entire ethnic and religious groups, because of Islamic hostility to those groups. The persecution and assaults on Jews in Europe today, can be added to the ugly tab of a media that has vigorously taken the Muslim side, and promoted their hatred of a minority group in Europe and the Middle East.

The excuses do not hold water. In the name of fighting racism, the media has been unapologetically racist. In the name of tolerance, it has been wickedly intolerant. In the name of preventing persecution, it has turned a blind eye to ethnic cleansing and genocide by Muslims-- while provoking and perpetuating Muslim separatist conflicts In Asia, Europe and the Middle East. And tricking the American public into a war on behalf of one such separatist group under false pretenses. These are crimes. More than that, these are the actions of bigots whose biases are rigid and fixed, and who like the Nazis, use a political ideology as the basis for valuing some lives below those of others, based on ethnic and religious criteria.

But the question is why. What is so appealing about the Islamists and their ideology, that the left is willing to go to such horrifying lengths to champion their cause. The answer may lie in the liberal view of religion as a tool of social change. The theology behind this goes by many names in different denominations and religions, from Liberation Theology to Prophetic Justice to Tikkun Olam, the common denominator is that they hijack religion to serve as a vehicle for social justice. Indeed the Communist party itself was born out of The League of the Just, a Christian organization. The common denominator is religion becomes reduced to the lyrics of the The Internationale, its only mandate to uplift the "downtrodden" and usher in a utopian age of mass equality and brotherhood.

Seen from that angle, it is not surprising why the Islamist agenda would appeal to liberals. It is after all also religion used as a tool of social change. Islamist groups are revolutionary, they want to overthrow the existing order in order to build a perfect society as defined by Sharia law. They operate social services centers for their followers and claim to be fighting for justice. But what liberals fail to understand is that while for them religion is a means, to the Islamists, religion is an end. Both liberals and Islamists equate religion with social justice. But for liberals, social justice is equivalent to religion, for Islamists religion is equivalent to social justice. While liberals talk about religion in order to bring about what they believe is a better society, Islamists talk about a better society in order to impose their religion on all Muslims and non-Muslims alike. If liberals were able to understand this, they might wake up long enough to realize the "deal with the devil" they had made.


The paradox of champions of equality allying with a religious cult that seeks to impose unequal rights on all seems absurd. However, this is nothing new for liberals, who have frequently allied with narrow interest liberationist groups such as the Black Panthers or La Raza, who did not believe in universal equality, but were fueled purely by racial or sectarian anger. Most have forgotten the racist origins of socialism, whether it was Jack London proclaiming, "I am a White Man first, and only then a Socialist", Marx sneering at the "Lazy Mexicans" or Woodrow Wilson and FDR promoting segregation. The socialists frequently pandered to racism, both in the US and Europe, in order to win over a working class and rural base. Then they jettisoned that base, for another, while still employing racist tactics.

Within a generation, the Democrats went from protecting racist white rioters to protecting racist black rioters. It did not make much difference to them. They had come to think of people as groups that they could manipulate like building blocks for political coalitions. The socialists too went from arguing that working class solidarity was urgently needed to prevent racial and ethnic minorities from taking the jobs of white workers, to championing racial warfare. The differences were not so much philosophical, as tactical. In the same way, Russian Communists were for the rights of minorities before they took power, and morphed into Russian Nationalists once they were in power, and needed to consolidate their grip on an empire.

As I wrote last week in Why the Left Hates Democracy,when liberals talk about equality, they mean "Actual Equality", not "Legal Equality". That means Constitutional equality or a state of affairs in which everyone has the same rights under the law, is not what they are after. Their goal is "Actual Equality", a state of affairs in which they overthrow all the existing power structures, in order to build a society where no one has any advantages over anyone else anymore. So naturally arguments which point out that Islam is discriminatory have minimal impact. Cuba after all has racial segregation. That hasn't stopped liberals from flocking to kiss Fidel's ring, no more than the USSR's ethnic cleansings prevented the socialists of their day from doing the same.

Liberals are not concerned with Islam's treatment of women or gays. Eldridge Cleaver's description of his serial rapes as an "insurrectionary act", did not dissuade liberals from gushing over the Black Panthers. The Nation didn't fire Eric Alterman for his homophobic remarks. To liberals, these like all other minorities, are just building blocks in their political coalition. Not people, building blocks. They still think of Muslims the same way. And the Islamist way seems to them to coincide with their own social justice agenda.

Joining forces with the Islamists, helps build a new left wing consensus in the West, and Islamic revolutions across the Middle East that will topple the old royalist and military regimes associated with the West. That is how the left sees it anyway. And the growing power of the Lib Dems in the UK and Barack Hussein Obama's rise to power in the US seem to be testaments to the power of the Liberal-Islamist Alliance. Anti-Semitism helps seal the deal and silence the cries of pain from their first victims. Hurling insults at the troops gives the Muslim Rage Boys and Leftist Rage Girls something in common besides their Keffiyahs. A common enemy for a temporary alliance.

Both Liberal and Islamists believe in a mandatory overhaul of society from top to bottom, but they differ in the details and the question of the final authority. And collaborations between them before in the Middle East have invariably ended with leftists in prison cells and Mullahs on the throne. The liberal betrayal of the First World will end the same way, given enough time and leeway. The Islamists feed leftist radicalism, and vice versa, but such political and cultural vandalism eventually runs into a wall, when both sides have amassed sufficient power so as not to need the other anymore.

European Socialists think that Islamic immigration will give them for rearranging their countries any way they please, in reality they will find that Islamic immigration means that their Islamist allies have a base, and they have Dhimmis and rape victims. Israeli leftists think that terrorism will lead to a dismantling of Israel in favor of a one state solution, they are right about that, but their role in such a state will be the same one as the Jews in Iran, and the token minorities that any genocidal regime displays to prove it really isn't as monstrous as its actions suggest. American liberals think that Islam is their latest wedge against the establishment and the rights and freedoms of ordinary Americans, they are correct, but what they have not considered, is that when the dust settles, it will be with them firmly at the bottom.

The Liberal-Islamist alliance is the death sentence of the free world, an alliance between a fifth column and the barbarians at the gate.



(Spanish language translation at)
REFLEXIONES SOBRE MEDIO ORIENTE Y EL MUNDO

Saturday, August 28, 2010

The Real Incitement to Violence

By On August 28, 2010
Pro-mosque media advocates have of course gleefully jumped on the stabbing of a Muslim cabbie to accuse anyone critical of a massive Islamic structure being built near Ground Zero of inciting violence. Bloomberg has already invited the cabbie to City Hall to honor him. Apparently getting stabbed in New York City is now an honor, at least if the stabbee is politically convenient talking point.

Just this March, Mahmoud Seck, a New York City Muslim cabbie was robbed at gunpoint, and repeatedly bitten by his assailant. But the story wasn't interesting, despite the vampirism angle, because the attacker was Latino, and Bloomberg and the media weren't feeling the heat over their support of a mosque, whose Imam is blatantly hostile to America, and willing to make excuses for terrorism.

The trick isn't to be a Muslim cabbie who gets attacked in the course of his job, but to be attacked at a moment when a politician and his press lackeys need you to make a point.

But if we're going to talk about Muslim cabbies, why draw the line there. We could discuss Pir Khan, one of the men arrested in the probe of the attempted Al Queda Times Square bombing. Then there's New York cabbie, Zarein Ahemdzay, who was part of an Al Queda subway bombing plot, with the goal of causing "the maximum number of casualties". His accomplice in the plot, Najibullah Zazi, was not a cab driver. He drove an airport livery shuttle.

While the media is feverishly speculating what might have caused a Muslim cabbie to be stabbed, perhaps we should also take a look at what causes Muslim cabbies to try and kill others. If anti-mosque protesters can be accused of inciting violence because of their negative statements toward Islam, it is only fair to look at what negative statements Islam has to make about Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims.

Let's begin by looking at the opening chapter of the Koran which contain the verses.

"Guide us the straight way, not (the way) of those who earned Your Anger (such as the Jews), nor of those who went astray (such as the Christians). (Koran 1:5-6)

Those same words appear in the daily prayers of Muslims. The reference to Allah's anger against the Jews has been commonly used to justify Muslim violence toward Jews.

Let's flip to the next chapter of the Koran, and there you find the following

Jihad has been enjoined upon you even if it is hateful to you. But perhaps you hate a thing and it is good for you; and perhaps you love a thing and it is bad for you. And Allah Knows, while you know not. (Koran 2:216)

Even if a Muslim doesn't want to kill anyone, the Koran tells him that Allah knows best. Western apologists for Islam might jump in with the usual claim that Jihad means religious striving, but the next verse makes it quite clear that it means fighting men. And if there is still any doubt, Tafsir al-Jalalayn, one of the two most popular exegeses on the Koran, clears it up.

Perhaps, then, even if you are averse to it, you will find much good in fighting, as a result of victory, booty, martyrdom or reward; while, if you were to reject fighting, even if you would like to do so, you will find much evil, because then you may be subjugated, impoverished and denied the reward

So even if you're not in the mood to kill, you get in the mood. And you might be able to make off with someone else's property or wife. And even if you die, you get 72 virgins in paradise.

Let's move on to the third chapter of the Koran. Here's what it has to say about Jews and Christians.

They shall be humiliated wherever they are overtaken, without a covenant from Allah and a rope from the Muslims. And they have drawn upon themselves anger from Allah, and, consequently, they are destined to disgrace.(Koran 3:112)

If there's any doubt about how this teaches Muslims to treat Christians and Jews, here's the Tafsir al-Jalalayn to clear it up.

Abasement shall be cast upon them, wherever they are found, so that they have no strength and no protection, save, if they be [clinging to], a rope of God, and a rope of the, believing, people, this being the latter’s covenant of security for them on the condition that they pay the jizya, in other words, they have no protection other than this

What this means is that they are damned to be Dhimmis, dependent on Muslim rule. They may not have their own armies or means of defending themselves. Jews and Christians must be dependent on Muslims.

Here is the root of the Muslim war on Israel in general, and Al Queda's war on America specifically. An independent non-Muslim nation cannot be allowed to exist in territory conquered by Muslims, because it rejects the Koran's commandment that Jews must be kept humiliated and dependent as Dhimmis. That is why Muslims immediately launch into fairy tales about how everything was peaceful under their rule.

Meanwhile the dependency of Muslim countries on America for protection, weapons and money is even more infuriating, because the Koran states that Christians are supposed to be dependent on Muslims, disgraced and humiliated. Instead it's the other way around. US troops defending Saudi Arabia, caretakers of Mecca, drove quite a few Muslims around the bend, including Bin Laden.

Christians and Jews who fail to accept second-class Dhimmi status, are offensive to Muslims, and trigger a Koranic imperative to force them to submit.

A few verses down, Muslims are taught not to have Christian and Jewish friends, because non-Muslims hate them and will betray them.

"O you who believe! Take not into your intimacy those outside your religion (pagans, Jews, and Christians). They will not fail to corrupt you. They only desire your ruin. Rank hatred has already appeared from their mouths. What their hearts conceal is far worse. When they are alone, they bite off the very tips of their fingers at you in their rage. Say unto them: 'Perish in your rage.'" (Koran 3:118-119)

Again if there's any ambiguity as to the meaning, the Tafsir al-Jalalayn clears it up.

O you who believe, do not take as intimates, as sincere friends, revealing to them your secret thoughts, anyone apart from yourselves, from among the Jews, Christians and the hypocrites; such men spare nothing to ruin you...

What exactly should Muslims who take the Koran as literal truth make of that? How does this color their view of America and Americans?

Let's skip on to Chapter 9.
Fight against those who (1) believe not in Allah, (2) nor in the Last Day, (3) nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger (4) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizyah with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

(Koran 9:29)

And again the Tasfir

Fight those who do not believe in God, nor in the Last Day, for, otherwise, they would have believed in the Prophet, and who do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden, such as wine, nor do they practice the religion of truth, the one that abrogated other religions, the religion of Islam — from among of those who have been given the Scripture, namely, the Jews and the Christians, until they pay the jizya tribute, the annual tax imposed them, readily being subdued, submissive and compliant to the authority of Islam.

Muslims are commanded to fight against all non-Muslims, including Jews and Christians, until they accept their inferior place as Dhimmis, pay tribute and submit to Muslims.

Islamic terrorism is not some sort of fringe extremism, it is literally in the Koran. It is possible to write a book, and entire books have been written about verses in the Koran inciting violence. But there is unambiguously much worse here than anything that critics of Islam can be accused of.

But while the media will gleefully run hostile pieces on critics of Islam, they refuse to investigate the blatant incitement to violence in the Koran. Anyone who wants to understand why so many people are concerned by the violence that emanates from Islam, need only look at verses like these.

A religion that tells its followers that non-Muslims are evil and secretly plotting against them... that commands them to kill and subjugate non-Muslims... that commands Jihad even for those Muslims who do not want to kill... is certainly guilty of incitement to violence.

Bloomberg may proclaim "We are all Muslims", but that is a laughable statement to any Muslim unless he actually accepts Islam. The roots of Islamic violence are not in US foreign policy, but in the words of the Koran. Foreign policy only helps trigger the abiding and embedded hatred of an arrogant ideology which commands that all who do not follow it, must be its slaves. And if they do not consent to be slaves, they must be terrorized until they agree.

If we are to talk of incitement of violence, let us begin with the Koran.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Friday Afternoon Roundup - A Convenient Stabbing, an Inconvenient Bombing

By On August 27, 2010


Wasn't it nice for Mayor Bloomberg to invite the Muslim cabbie who was stabbed over to City Hall, and for the media to give him the high profile treatment.

But here are a few other New York stabbing victims who could have used that attention and concern. Unfortunately they weren't Muslims, whom Bloomberg could exploit to score political points.

There was Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax who saved a woman from a knife attack, only to be stabbed himself. He lay dying in a pool of his own blood for over an hour, while people walked by, until finally an ambulance came. Tale-Yax died. And Bloomberg didn't even notice.

Meanwhile this April, Ricardo Williams and Darnell Morel were stabbed on the Number 2 train. Their stabber, Brenddy Garcia claimed that he had been defending himself and got off. Bloomberg did not invite either Williams or Morel to City Hall. But then he couldn't have, because both men were dead.

Anthony Maldonado was stabbed to death in Harlem. He was 10 years old. That little boy's murderer was an ex-con who had been paroled. If Bloomberg invited his family to City Hall, no one heard about it. If he apologized for a parole board that let the little boy's killer roam free, we never heard about it either.

Mohamed Jalloh, a Muslim African immigrant was killed with a machete after a fight in Washington Heights. He was Muslim, but his attacker was Latino. Naturally neither Bloomberg nor the press showed much interest in his death, or lavished a fraction of the interest that they have on our politically convenient cabbie.

Claudia Montoya was stabbed 17 times and had her throat cut. She left behind a 1 year old daughter. Perhaps Bloomberg could invite her to City Hall.

This summer Kelvin Buggs, an off duty FDNY EMT was stabbed to death while trying to break up a fight. Then there was Kirk Holgate, stabbed to death on New Year's Eve. 70 year old Fumitaka Kurita stabbed by his own son in his own apartment. All awful stories. None of their families seem to have gotten. the Bloomberg "star treatment"

Then there was Naief Al-mateiry, a charming Saudi fellow who invited a 69 year old man to his Manhattan apartment, choked, beat and raped him. Then Naief Al-mateiry threatened him with a knife and forced him to withdraw 1,200 dollars from his bank account. The Saudi embassy offered to cover his bail. His high powered three man legal team painted his victim as a liar who took money in exchange for sex. It worked. Naief Al-mateiry is a free man.

Bloomberg of course showed absolutely no interest in his victim. So take the media frenzy over the conveniently stabbed cabbie with a grain of salt. Bloomberg doesn't care about stabbing victims. He cares only about the Ground Zero Mosque. Stabbing victims who don't happen to be Muslim at a convenient time, hold no interest for him.

Regarding the Cabbie stabbing, the knife supposedly used in this stabbing has supposedly not been found. The accused stabber was drunk, and with a history of run ins while drunk. He probably isn't going to be able to give any kind of accounting of what happened. After Enright's attack, the police found him sitting in the middle of the street blocking traffic. That does not suggest a man who had much of a clue as to what was going on.

Calling this some kind of premeditated hate crime is a joke. If Enright didn't have enough sense to flee the scene of the crime, or at least not sit down in the middle of the street, he obviously wasn't functioning on anything resembling a conscious level. He was dead drunk. It's possible he could have stabbed a man in that condition. It's not possible that he could have done it because he read some negative news stories about Muslims.

The cabbie has insisted that he was stabbed because he was a Muslim. That doesn't add up. Enright was relating to the cabbie positively as a Muslim, by the cabbie's own testimony. Greeting him in Arabic and asking about Ramadan, is exactly the kind of behavior you would expect from an art school liberal. Unfortunately Enright was drunk. His checkpoint reference suggests he might have thought he was in Afghanistan. Or the real version of events might have been a drunken Enright squabbling with a cabbie over the fare, which would also explain why the partition was open. And until the knife is found, it's an open question of whose knife it even was.

Enright has become a convenient tool for an Anti-American media narrative. And that's all that really counts. That he was a drunken liberal who got into a fight with a cab driver, a ridiculously common event in NYC, doesn't matter. Because this fight turned violent, and it all happened at a politically convenient time. There's no real evidence for most of the charges against Enright, but again that doesn't matter, because a politically convenient case means everyone patting themselves on the back.

Sheik Yermani at Winds of Jihad notes that the Muslim cabbie actually opposes the Ground Zero Mosque

Also as Sweetness and Light points out,

What swift and severe justice. Compare and contrast to the ‘Beat Whitey’ attacks at the Iowa state fair, which have yet to even be deemed to be ‘bias crimes.’

But of course we're only concerned about politically convenient attacks, such as the Mexican robberies on Staten Island. And that is the problem with Hate Crimes in a nutshell, they're political charges used when politically convenient. Politicians love hate crimes because they allow them to claim credit for fighting bigotry, but not all bigotry is created equal, and hate crimes mainly become an issue when someone has something to politically gain from bringing attention to an attack. Meanwhile ordinary people of all races, colors and creeds who are attacked don't get the same benefit of attention and political pressure to get justice.

Earlier this week the media made much of the murder of Yoseph Robinson. While his murder was indeed tragic, and his story was compelling, he was mainly a top story because of that story, rather than because of his death. It's unfortunate when 72 people can be gunned, but they're not interesting, unless one of them is individually interesting. Had Yoseph Robinson not converted to Judaism, or had he just been an Orthodox Jew, but not black, he would have never made the front of the daily tabloids. Being a curiosity made his death newsworthy. But people's murders shouldn't be newsworthy because they have a less common background, but because murder is an evil, a wrong that people should be aware of, and because murderers should be stamped out. Instead murder is a form of celebrity.

Meanwhile while all the attention is on the Muslim stabby cabbie, opening statements began in the trial of 4 Bronx terrorists who wanted to burn synagogues and shoot down military planes. There is of course far less media interest in the case. And you can understand why. It's politically inconvenient.

Four would-be Bronx synagogue bombers prayed for success before setting out on their murderous mission, according to U.S. prosecutors.

The four, 44-year-old James Cromitie, 34-year-old Onta Williams, 29-year-old David Williams and 28-year-old Laguerre Payen, were charged with conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction and attempting to use missiles to kill U.S. officers and employees.

In his opening statement to the Manhattan Federal Court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Hickey told the jury, “They were prepared to go all the way through with their destructive and murderous plan,” which included shooting down military planes.

The prosecution said it would show the jury a video of the defendants praying for success prior to setting out to attack two New York synagogues in May 2009.

And what's the media's take on this. The same media which has been running non-stop and uncritical coverage of the cabbie stabbie case. How do you think the media covers politically inconvenient trials?

"Controversial Trial of 4 Terrorist Suspects Begins in New York" proclaims Voice of America. Just to be clear VOA doesn't mean that being a Muslim terrorist or burning synagogues is controversial. It means that putting the 4 terrorists on trial is controversial.

The article by Adam Phillips is extraordinary for not actually quoting what the government prosecutors said, despite the story being about the opening day of the trial with the government making its case. Instead the story quotes one of the lawyers, and one of the defendant's aunts, and then dedicates half its length to allowing a Columbia law prof to discuss whether the men are unfairly on trial because of entrapment.

What's missing? Unlike the Muslim cabbie stabby stories, there's no discussion of whether hatred in mosques feeds anti-Semitic violence. Such stories hardly if ever come up. The theme is that the men are probably unfairly on trial. The story questions the government case, giving a benefit of the doubt, that has not been extended to Enright.

And considering the attitude of Judge Colleen McMahon, the Newburgh 4 don't have anything to worry about.

“I have referred to the case for a number of months in the privacy of my chambers as the ‘un-terrorism case,’” U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon said. “It turns out I was right.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jason Halperin was quick to say that a lack of connections didn’t mean the men weren’t terrorists.

“I think that’s an open question,” Halperin said.

Of course if they were Americans trying to bomb mosques, it would be an open and shut question if they were terrorists or not. And the case would be high profile news. Obama himself would be making a statement. But they were just trying to attack synagogues, which is basically not so bad.

Colleen McMahon incidentally is a Clinton appointee. Her husband Frank Vincent Sica is a Senior Advisor to Soros Private Funds Management. Colleen McMahon is known for "having fun" in court, and pulling the usual Judge Judy antics that entitled judges tend to do when given a lot of power, and no standards of conduct to go with it. Colleen McMahon has been hostile to the government's case on the Newburgh 4 from the very beginning. She won't be able to just thrown open the door for the Newburgh 4, but defense isn't going to have much resistance from the bench.

But compare the two cases. One attempted murder vs four men who planned a reign of terror. Enright is charged with hate crimes, the There's no talk of charging them with hate crimes, even though their crimes were motivated by hate and prejudice. But who cares about things like this?
Cromitie told Hussain on the tape that “the best target in New York had already been hit” – an apparent reference to the World Trade Center that was destroyed during the 9/11 attack on New York by al-Qaeda terrorists in 2001. He added that he would like to hit another target, like the George Washington Bridge, a large military transport plane, or a synagogue.

“Above all, Cromitie said he wanted to hit a synagogue,” Hickey said.

And there you see the difference between the way crimes by Muslims are treated, and the way that crimes against Muslims are treated. The truth is that attacks on Muslims have been down, see the analysis on hate crimes at Elder of Ziyon.

Can you imagine Time magazine having a cover story on the relatively large number, and increase, of anti-semitic crimes in America (at the very same time that anti-Islamic crimes were going down)?

In New York State, the very spot where Islamic terrorists murdered nearly 3000 people, the number of anti-Islamic crimes were a mere six in 2008. The number of anti-semitic crimes? 129.

But meanwhile in what is a true triumph of Separation of Church and State, New York City comptroller, John Liu said that the city might subsidize the Ground Zero Mosque.

The Muslim center planned near the site of the World Trade Center attack could qualify for tax-free financing, a spokesman for City Comptroller John Liu said on Friday, and Liu is willing to consider approving the public subsidy.

The Democratic comptroller's spokesman, Scott Sieber, said Liu supported the project. The center has sparked an intense debate over U.S. religious freedoms and the sanctity of the Trade Center site, where nearly 3,000 perished in the September 11, 2001 attack.

This isn't too surprising as John Liu is a radical extremist and affiliated with ACORN, SEIU and the WFP. And possible controversial ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese-Americans have protested against Liu in the past charging that he's in the pay of Communist China. And the situation is potentially even uglier.

Bizarre incidents have been afoot in Flushing, a city on the outskirts of Manhattan, over the last five months, as organized attacks against Falun Gong practitioners began taking place. Over 15 individuals have been arrested, and similar incidents are still occurring.

Soon after the attacks began, a recorded phone conversation revealed that the Chinese consul general in New York had boasted of having encouraged and congratulated the attackers. City Councilmember John Liu and State Assemblywoman Ellen Young were also found to have met with and supported those accused of the attacks.

Before John Liu took his peculiar stand toward the violence against Falun Gong in his district, he was honored in China by the Chinese Communist Party and its media as a rising political star, even though his only political activities have been here in New York City.

When Falun Gong practitioners were being attacked by large, organized crowds on the streets of Flushing, New York, they had tried to meet with their elected officials to ask for support.

Attempts to meet with Council Member John Liu and State Assemblywoman Ellen Young were unsuccessful. It was then discovered that Liu and Young had others they preferred meeting with, giving advice to, and supporting—the very individuals who had been attacking the Falun Gong practitioners.

The meeting was announced on June 29, when an article published by China Press said that on the following day, John Liu would be holding an open office for any resident who wanted to present their cases. On June 30, during a press conference at his office, Liu denied knowledge of violence of the attacks. He also refused to condemn the attackers or offer support to the victims.

Following the press conference, Liu kicked out Falun Gong practitioners who had come to his office to present their cases, and instead met with the attackers.

Among those who met with Liu in his office that day was Victor Yao (a.k.a. Qiu Wei), who was arrested for allegedly attacking a Falun Gong practitioner with a metal steering wheel lock in Brooklyn.

John Liu is the District 20 council member in charge of Flushing. He is also the first Chinese city council member in New York.

With all this ugliness behind the scenes of the corrupt and rotten Democratic Party, it's no wonder that Obama's popularity is sinking fast. In January of 2009, Obama's approval ratings were in the 70's for everyone but Protestants and Mormons. Today the only people who still hold a 70's approval rating for Obama... are Muslims.

Obama Akbar indeed.

At Sheik Yermani in Winds of Jihad, Daisy Khan says the money isn't in the bank.

Steve Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism, which has been doing much of the lead investigative work on this case, is asking the real questions.

The backers of the Ground Zero Mosque have virtually no money, one of the group’s leaders says, and plan to create another nonprofit organization that would further complicate the already labyrinthine financial network surrounding the project.Daisy Khan, one of the leaders of the project, told supporters over the weekend that the mosques organizers have “nothing in the bank” for their effort. Khan said there is no money and that she doesn’t know of anything that has been raised.

The finances are a sieve, as Emerson shows

Federal tax records show Rauf and Khan direct the two groups supporting the mosque project – the Cordoba Initiative and the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA). Those two organizations, along with Soho Properties, which owns the site of the proposed mosque and community center, are coordinating the project.

However, federal tax records show the Cordoba Initiative has not listed contributions from at least two charitable foundations that have supported its activities. In another case, a foundation gave money to Cordoba's sister group, the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), that was supposed to go to Cordoba; that money was also not listed in Cordoba's tax records.

Cordoba has failed to list almost $100,000 in charitable donations since 2007, federal tax records show.

Keep reading

During that time, ASMA reported receiving $1,382,194 in grants, the financial statement shows. Donors included the United Nations Population Fund, $53,664; the Dutch government's MDG3 Fund, $481,942; the Hunt Alternatives Fund, $15,000; the Carnegie Corp. of New York, $122,000; the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, $50,000; and the Qatar government fund, $576,312.

This is a sieve and the money could be going absolutely anywhere.

And now the US government is paying for Imam Rauf to go on a fundraising tour to the Middle East for his Ground Zero Mosque project.

But while they're doing that, Z Street, a pro-Israel lobbying group charges that a special DC unit has been set up to investigate the tax exempt status of pro-Israel groups that are not in agreement with Obama Administration policies.

From the Z Street complaint.

14. In a letter dated May 15, 2010, IRS Agent Diane Gentry, to whom the Z STREET file had been assigned, sent an IRS Letter 2382 requesting additional information to aid her in her review of Z STREET's IRS Form 1023 (the "Application"). Z STREET, by its corporate counsel, submitted a response on June 17, 2010, providing all of the requested information, most of which had already been provided in Z STREET’s initial application, including information about each of Z STREET’s board members. In fact, detailed personal information about each Z STREET board member had to be supplied to the IRS three times, a number in excess of the experiences of Z STREET board members for any other board on which they sit.

Detailed personal information, huh.

21. Agent Gentry also informed Z STREET’s counsel that the IRS is carefully scrutinizing organizations that are in any way connected with Israel.

22. Agent Gentry further stated to counsel for Z STREET: “these cases are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization's activities contradict the Administration's public policies.”

The radical anti-Israel Forward paper of course penned an article justifying such a move, though if the Bush Administration had treated the ACLU similarly, the left would have lost its collective mind in one long shriek of uncontrollable rage.

But if true, this is a shocking case of the Obama Administration using the authority of the government to suppress dissent, and turning government agencies into Political Commissars. This isn't completely surprising though. The New York Times penned a huge story which attempted to make the case against pro-Israel charities, and pushing for an investigation. The recently leaked CIA docs suggest that what we're seeing may be a larger project within the government.

But while the Obama Administration and his media allies go after pro-Israel groups, the Ground Zero Mosque's misplaced finances get a perfect pass. Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

Much as trying to shoot down planes and attack synagogues merits a shrug, while a Muslim cabbie being slashed is the end of America as we know it.

Daisy Khan charges that opponents of the Ground Zero Mosque are just like Anti-Semites, but if that were so, then the media would be giving them a pass, they way they do Muslims who try to attack synagogues.

Robert at Seraphic Secret says;

The left, reliable idiots for transnational jihad—and yes, Daisy, in spite of her cute all-American name, is a stealth jihadist—always fall back on the same tedious attacks.

If you oppose Barack Obama's policies, it's not because you have legitimate policy differences, but it's because you are a bigot.

If you identify Islamist terrorists as, um, Islamist terrorists, that means you hate all Muslims.

If you oppose the Ground Zero Mosque, it's not because you think it's inappropriate, boorish, and an insult to the memory of the murdered, no, it's because you're un-American, a hater, and an Islamophobe.

Look, the majority of Americans are tolerant, decent people. They do not appreciate being demonized at every turn of the newscycle. Nancy Pelosi calls the Tea Party, “astroturf.” Barack Obama bloviates about those who “cling to their guns and religion.” And now the political class is telling normal Americans that the desire to protect and honor the memory of 9-11 victims is, at the core, hatred.

This is Orwellian poison.

Orwell of course foresaw the perversion of language as a tool for the perversion of culture and government. And that is an all too accurate assessment of what we're experiencing. Language as a weapon with no pretense of law or justice behind it. Just a worldview that justifies inequality in the name of politics. And there is no limit to how far that can go.

In England the clock is slipping back to the 1930's. Boycotts of Jews and the legal assaults on Jewish property have now become routine. Elder of Ziyon advises a response to it.

Elder of Ziyon Blog offers free advertising to victims of anti-Israel aggression

In reaction to the vandalism of the Ahava store in London, the Elder of Ziyon blog announces free advertising for every Israeli store that is attacked.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

PRLog (Press Release) – Aug 26, 2010 – On the night of August 25, 2010, the Ahava cosmetics store in central London was attacked by vandals who splattered red paint on its windows.

The vandals were part of a movement that wants to boycott all Israeli products.

These groups are not interested in equality, or fairness, or even in the Palestinian cause. They simply want to put a self-righteous veneer on their hatred for the existence of a Jewish state and their opposition to the Jewish right of self-determination.

In reaction, the Elder of Ziyon blog has announced a new policy: all stores and organizations that are similarly attacked will get free advertising in the blog.

It is to be hoped that all right-thinking blogs will follow suit, so that these sorts of anti-Israel and often anti-semitic stunts end up helping the intended victims.

The Elder of Ziyon blog is a popular Zionist website that draws thousands of pageviews daily.

I'm reminded of the story of the menorahs of Billings, Montana, when in response to attacks on Jewish homes with menorahs in the windows, thousands of people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, put up menorahs in their windows. But it will take more than that here. A good deal more.

Now in the days of the European Union, a personal dream of Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, Mosleylike behavior is becoming commonplace. As Mosley's ideas about socialism have become the norm, his New Party is now the true dominant party, though it is long gone. And his violence has become the norm among those who adhere to Mosley's socialism.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

The Media's Anti-Semitic Hate Machine

By On August 25, 2010
The Nazi propaganda rag Der Sturmer may have gone out of publication around the time that the Fuhrer's ashes were smoldering in his bunker beneath the Wilhelmstrasse, but its motto is present today in almost every liberal newspaper in the Western world. Der Sturmer's daily invocation of "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" or "The Jews are our misfortune!" is omnipresent in the media coverage of almost anything involving the Middle East or Islamic terrorism.

The theme is much the same now as it was then, the Jews are responsible for all our problems. The presentation is of course much more subtle, but then Der Sturmer was considered vulgar even by much of the Nazi hierarchy, which preferred the more staid Völkisch Observer. Today's papers prefer to be in the Observer mode, the Storming they leave to the "plausible deniability" blogs of an Andrew Sullivan or a Glenn Greenwald, material that they pay for, but like a lot of the Nazi hierarchy and Der Sturmer, don't necessarily want to be too closely associated with.

The ideas however are not particularly original. The Jews are to blame both for the wars and for losing them, a propaganda paradox put to good use by the Nazis. The idea that the Jews were physically responsible for 9/11 is an area that the media leaves to the fringe, but the suggestion that the Jews provoked Bin Laden's anger against America shows up in countless columns and op-ed's. One is a radical conspiracy theory, while the other is a mainstream media talking point, but in terms of consciously stoking hate, what exactly is the difference. Only that the latter is vague enough to be defensible, especially when bolstered by a few selectively chosen quotes from the man himself.

By linking Islamic terrorism to some form of Israeli provocation, and from there to the support for Israel by American Jews-- the same media which would commit seppuku rather than blame Muslims for Islamic terrorism, instead blames Jews for Islamic terrorism. The steady drumbeat of such rhetoric, which exonerates Muslims but indicts Jews, for the actions of Muslims, is brilliantly perverse. And it also puts the lie to the media's defense that it avoids attributing terrorism to Islam because it does not want to stoke bigotry. In reality, the media has no problem with using Islamic terrorism to stoke bigotry. It just has a different target in mind.

Behind the media's long ugly history of misreporting terrorism against Israel, has been that one fundamental narrative, that it is not Muslims who are responsible for Muslim terrorism, but the Jews. When a Muslim terrorist attack happens in Tel Aviv, Madrid or New York-- it turns out that the Jews are the ones to blame. It really doesn't matter whether an Israeli soldier kills a Muslim terrorist, or a Muslim terrorist kills a Jewish father of four driving home from work, it is never the Muslim that is at fault. Always the Jew. Forget about even splitting the difference. There is never any difference to split. It is always Israel's "humiliation" of Arab Muslims that is at fault for provoking their righteously murderous anger. A familiar theme that recalls Hitler's constant invocation of "German humiliation" at the hands of the Jews.

But all the talk of the Jews "humiliating" other peoples hinges on the topic of the Jews as a "Chosen Master Race". A superior people. A role that Nazis and Arab Nationalists both reserved for themselves. The theme is taken up in numerous outlets, Jonathan Cook who appears in The Guardian writes: "Israel’s apartheid system is there to maintain Jewish privilege in a Jewish state". In a Hitlerian formulation, Philip Weiss who appears at the Huffington Post claims that Jeff Greene's criticism of the Ground Zero Mosque, "how privilege and power have transformed Jewish identity". Not that Jeff Greene opposes the mosque because he is following the polls as so many other politicians have done, but because he is a Jew. The Guardian charges that Israel is an "an enclave of Israeli Jewish privilege". That kind of rhetoric should be familiar. It is what Hitler described as "The anti-Semitism of reason" which "must lead to the systematic combating and elimination of Jewish privileges".





The Issue is Rarely the Issue



That is why the issue is rarely the issue. The media began with the narrative that Israel had attacked a flotilla full of human rights activists trying to deliver food and medicine to starving children in Gaza. After demonstrating conclusively that the human rights activists were actually violent Turkish Islamists calling openly for the murder of Jews. That Israeli soldiers had only fired in self-defense. That the medicines were expired, a useless sham by a ship that was actually coming to support Hamas. And finally that no one is starving among Gaza's well stocked supermarkets and shopping malls. But did that conclusively put the issue to bed? Not at all, because the issue was never the issue.

The media responded that, yes the flotilla was not there to ferry supplies, but run the blockade. And that was entirely justified, because look at how Israel is humiliating the people of Gaza. And yes, the activists may have attacked first, but that was because... look at how Israel is humiliating the people of Gaza. And yes there may be a shopping mall in Gaza, but it isn't nearly as good as Target, and look at how Israel is humiliating the people of Gaza. The goalposts always get moved until they wind up back in the same place-- justifying violence against the Jews, because some people that fancied themselves the master race are feeling bad over their failed attempt to kill Jews.

When most of the Arab countries of the Middle East invaded Israel, and Israel beat them back, the Jews were accused of humiliating the Arabs. In 1970, when Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser died, the AP ran a wire story which explained that Israel had made peace with Nasser impossible by twice defeating him on the battlefield, both times after Nasser had committed acts of war. Nasser is quoted as saying; "Israel is a country of two million people, and we are a country of 30 million people. For Israel to be able to fly its warplanes over Cairo any time it wants is as humiliating to me, as it would be to you if the Cubans were able to fly over Washington and your armed forces were powerless to stop them."

Nasser, leader of a country that was 20 times the size of Israel, and had 15 times the population, had 300,000 troops, nearly 2,000 tanks, over 500 aircraft and combat helicopters, felt humiliated by Israel. And rather than feeling sorry for the country that he had attacked, a country that you could drop into the Sinai desert without anyone being the wiser, the media felt sorry for Nasser's "humiliation". That despite his huge military, massive population and territory-- he was the victim. Because the Chosen People had once again humiliated a man whom the French and British governments had described as a New Hitler.

All the media's talk about Israeli disproportionate force in relation to Muslim terrorists in Gaza and the West Bank has nothing to do with it. Back when Israel was fighting wars for survival against enemies that vastly outnumbered it, the Jews were still to blame for humiliating their enemies by refusing to die. That is "Jewish Privilege". To go on living, even when people who fancy themselves nobler and better, who have wonderful ideas about a Third Reich or a Pan-Arab or Pan-Islamic union want them dead.

Back in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War, while Israel was desperately fighting for its survival, the Deseret News was worried that an Israeli victory would lead the "humiliated Arab world" to refuse peace negotiations. The Wall Street Journal editorialized, "the Arabs may be more willing to talk peace when they can look proudly across a bargaining table, rather than after a humiliating defeat". The Nevada Daily Mail warned that "humiliation can only lead to more fanatical dreams of revenge". Israel might be allowed to survive. It might even be allowed to fight to a draw. But not to win. Winning decisively would humiliate the Arab Muslims. It would undermine their sense of superiority in relation to the people who had formerly been second-class citizens under their dominion.

It is a common phenomenon, a short hop and skip, from the Nazi press ranting about the humiliating professional successes of Jews in Germany, to the Liberal press ranting about the humiliating military successes of the Jews in Israel. The underlying narrative is not so much that Jews came by their success unfairly, as that they have no right to it because they are foreigners, outsiders and interlopers. And that too is a fundamental part of the media's Anti-Israel narrative. That despite a history dating back thousands of years, Jews are outsiders in the region. That they have no right to "Arab land", just as they had no right to "Aryan jobs". And who decided that all the land belongs to the Arabs and all the jobs belong to the Aryans?

That is where Der Sturmer or Der Guardian comes in, to demonize millions of people as greedy usurpers bent on seizing what belongs to others. And so a complex regional history is reduced to, "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" To a narrative in which arrogant Jews displace their betters, subjugate and abuse them. One that is more ancient than Rome, when Cicero echoed it, that rolls back to the ancient Pharaohs, one of whom proclaimed that the Jews must be enslaved because they had become too prosperous and numerous, and will otherwise take over all of Egypt. Over 3000 years later, Anti-Semitism has not changed very much.

The dirty little secret is that it is an upper class bigotry with populist overtones. Rulers and would be rulers, employ it with the people to legitimize their tyranny. Hitler's Third Reich and Stalin's USSR, like Nasser's Pan-Arabist dreams, Iran's Shiite expansion or the Muslim Brotherhood's Caliphate all require a defeatable enemy close at hand. Pharaoh had his construction projects, Hitler had Albert Speer's fortresses and Islam has the skyscrapers of Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Their visions are grandiose, but inhuman. They are bent on a united world under their authority. And somehow the Jews always prove to be in the way. The foreign element that spoils their plan for a homogeneous empire.

The media's liberalism has made it notoriously sympathetic to dreamers of that sort. It is not sympathetic to ethnic or religious separatists. Just ask the Kurds or the Basque. Even the Tibetans for all their non-violence have hardly gotten more than a casual shrug. If the issue of Muslim terrorism in Israel were really a matter of another Middle Eastern minority looking for rights or a state of its own, the media could not be paid enough to care. But the issue is not separatism, but unity. To the left, it is not the Arab Muslims in Israel who are separatists, but the the Jews living in the Middle East who are the real separatists. Who insist on their own state, their own laws and their own identity. The Jews who obstructed socialism with their separatism in Europe and Russia, are now obstructing those who would regionally unite Arabs and Muslims, as a prelude to global unity.

That is the issue. That has always been the issue. That will always be the issue. It is why Jews are hated. It is why Israel is hated.



The Media Hate Machine Grinds On




And so the media hate machine grinds on. With a touch of paint and the whisk of a brush, Der Sturmer's cartoons of greedy murdering Jews defined by the Star of David, have been reborn in the pages of the Guardian, the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. Except now they're greedy murderous Israelis, who often seem to have the same hooked noses and fat necks that they did in the pages of Der Sturmer, and are back to their old tricks again. When they're not menacing innocent women and children, they're corrupting politicians and arrogantly shoving their weight around-- all favorite themes that would have been met with a knowing smirk from Julius Streicher himself.

The modern professional cartoonist has generally studied enough to be familiar with the work of Fips and Seppla and knows exactly what he is doing. Associating Nazi imagery with Jews serves not only as a vicious smear, but as his best defense against accusations that he is recycling Nazi imagery. Even when he's caught doing it, his defense is that he's doing it to indict Jews for their Nazi-like behavior. It is not a defense that a Nazi cartoonist like Fips could have used, but it is an easy defense for a post-Nazi cartoonist like Pat Oliphant or Dick Locher. The obsessive use of Nazi themes allows them to project their own use of Nazi ideas onto Israel. The more they associate Israel with the Nazis, the less anyone will notice whose pencil they borrowed to draw those cartoons with.

And so the Jews become the "Real Nazis", just as they are the real "Religious Terrorists". The crimes committed against Jews, become the crimes of the Jews themselves. Because the guilty never want to take responsibility for what they have done. And so when Muslims set off a bomb in Jerusalem, their clerics announce that Islam abhors violence, and that Israel is the real terrorists-- while Jewish clerics rush to the scene of the bombing to scrub fragments of skin and bone, pull fingers out of trees, in order to bury what's left of the dead in the same place. And the media in all its studied liberalism nods its head and agrees. The Jews indeed are the ones responsible. After all by thwarting the dreams of Arab Nationalists and Islamists to build a superstate, by refusing to make enough concessions at the negotiating table to insure their own destruction-- the Jews bring terror on themselves.

The media has not gotten better, it has gotten better at packaging its bigotry. It has learned that using Jewish pundits allows it to serve as a platform for ideas on the same level of discourse as Streicher, without being vulnerable to accusations of bigotry. After all Greenwald, Klein and Blumenthal are Jewish names, aren't they? It's not a new idea. The Soviet Union routinely used press conferences by Jewish writers and artists to legitimize the persecution of Jews. These were the "Good Jews", loyal Communists and devoted to the Soviet Union, who were here to condemn the Judaism, Zionism and Cosmopolitanism of the "Bad Jews". The "Good Jews" worked at magazines like Krokodil, drawing Soviet versions of Der Sturmer's cartoons of greedy murdering Jews wearing the Star of David. The "Bad Jews" died. Tens of thousands in Holodomor. Hundreds of thousands in the Gulag. Millions of more might have died, had Stalin's plan for a Soviet Holocaust come to fruition. But the Soviet Union had, what Nazi Germany did not have, but the modern day left wing hate machine does, men and women with Jewish last names, up in front to defend its bigotry.



Howl Like the Wolves




The constant drumbeat of the media hate machine against Israel has the same effect on Europeans and some Americans that Der Sturmer's hate sheets did on ordinary Germans. Bias, hate and bigotry free some to be Nazis, and teach others that it is best to go along with the crowd. Max von der Grün wrote about his childhood growing up in Nazi Germany. The title of his book was Howl Like the Wolves. When the wolves are howling you had better join them, or be prepared to take on the entire pack. And eventually most people begin to howl too. Some howl quieter than others. Some howl just for show. But others get into it all the way. Some who were once lambs become the worst of the wolves, because they find strength in being a wolf.

What the Nazis knew is that weak people are drawn to identities that give them strength. So many timid people looking for a way to express their anger. A chance to be wolves rather than sheep. A chance to hurt someone, rather than be hurt. To release all their decades of grievances and grudges on a deserving target. To whine like a mosquito while drinking their fill of blood. The ecstasy of crowds at Hitler's speeches, was the pathetic and disgusting sight of weak-minded people eagerly transfigured with a feeling of strength. The Jihadist who kills himself among a crowd of the innocent feels that same ecstasy. The savage joy of a manipulated sheep who thinks that participating in violence somehow makes him a wolf.

Allah Akbar or Heil Hitler, it makes no real difference. Both mean the same thing. It means that I am strong because I am the tool of those who are stronger than me. Who are more ruthless than me. Who give me orders that I will follow, because I lack the initiative to make my own decisions. Tell me what to do, and I will kill, a single man, or a million. It makes no difference. What matters is that sense of strength that comes through unity. A billion bodies and one mind. One will. One Fuhrer. One Reich. One dream. And in the middle of that dream is the Jew.

The Bad Jew who stands in the way of that overpowering unity. A foreign element. An interloper. The one thing standing in the way of all those people feeling their strength for the first time. All those strong people suddenly made weak by his very presence. Humiliated. And humiliation is the one thing that cowards and the weak-minded can never forgive. It is why they become Nazis and Islamists. To feel strong. To overcome their personal humiliations in a mass identity. When their mass identity cries "Kill the Jew", and the Jew survives, then they feel even more humiliated. Then they feel weak and the only thing that will make them feel strong again, is revenge.

Think about it. Think about Marc Garlasco talking about how an SS jacket is so cool, "makes my blood go cold". Or the Chairman Of Finnish Amnesty International calling Israel a "scum state". Helen Thomas telling Jews to go back to Poland and Germany. Oliver Stone discoursing on how Jewish influence caused Hitler to be misunderstood. The Daily Mail shrieks, "Israel Accuses UK of Anti-Semitism", a headline that echoes, The Daily Express' famous 1933 headline, "Judea Declares War on Germany". Jewish stores and companies are boycotted. Papers from Jewish researchers from Israel are rejected. Wolves must howl. And howl they will. Some are true wolves, eager to spill blood. Some are only weak-minded people looking for an enemy to give them strength. And some only go along out of conformity, echoing the opinions of those around them, clinging to them for comfort. And the drumbeat goes on.

The media's Anti-Semitic hate machine does for the far left, what Der Sturmer once did for the far right. It makes their hatred and bigotry mainstream. It feeds the wolves. It teaches people to be Nazis. To find strength in an age-old hatred for age-old reasons. To howl at the Jew, while the Muslim slits their throat.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Electing Another People

By On August 24, 2010
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

The Solution, Brecht

It is that season again when the high and mighty among the Fourth Estate gaze down in disgust from their skyscraper office windows, and contemplate their onerous task of educating the unruly rabble. From his luxurious digs on Martha's Vineyard, the son of a Muslim Kenyan diplomat and the grandson of the Vice-President of the Bank of Hawaii, turns away from the east for a moment, and regards the West. Those vast stretches of land beneath the setting sun, full of towns and villages of people clinging to their guns, religion and refusal to do what they're told. And he sighs. Soon he will have to go back and deal with them again. Too soon. What is it with those Americans anyway?

Leaf through the pages of just about any politically oriented magazine this summer, and you come away with the impression that you are reading the complaints of British officers managing India or the staff of a Roman viceroy in Gaul. There are a great many complaints about how awfully ignorant, dangerous and violent these Americans are. How they don't know what's good for them, even when they're carefully instructed by their betters.

You have to put microchips in their bins that track when they're taken to the curb, just to get them to recycle. And ban trans fats and corn syrup to get them to eat right. They have to be forced to buy health insurance, and then you have to take away their asthma inhalers in order to save the planet from another of those problems we invented in order to control their lives. You have to tax everything in sight, and then tax the taxes, just to get them to turn over the money they insist on hoarding for themselves and their families. Sales taxes, phone taxes, death taxes, boat taxes, archery taxes and vaccine taxes. And somehow no matter how hard we tax them, they still hang on to their money.

It all reads like the commentary of an occupying force, disgusted by the mulish obstinacy of the natives in refusing to see that their way is better. It is the British Raj or the Norman Conquest, a culturally isolated group of invaders who wonder if they can ever bring civilization to the heathens. And yet it is what passes for the official discourage of the American cultural elite. A cultural elite that endeavors to at once express its disgust with America, while insisting that its values are American, and those of the rest of the country are not.

On the Ground Zero Mosque, Barack Hussein Obama and the media have insisted that their attitude is American, and that of the majority of the country is Unamerican. But if most Americans are actually Unamerican, and the country's leading American is a fellow whose church rang to gentle cries of "God Damn America", who fancies that there are 57 states and whose favorite reading material is The Post-American World (by another great American, Fareed Zakaria), then it's clear that being Anti-American is the new definition of American. But then who exactly are those hundreds of millions of people living between the oceans. If they're not to be considered Americans, then who and what are they?

The political and cultural elite insist that they are the real Americans, and that the majority of Americans are Unamerican. The majority of Americans have decided that it is the political elite that is Unamerican. There are legal mechanisms in place for the people to enforce their decision by electing a new government. And while the months roll around, the political elite is scrambling for ways to elect a new American people.

That suggestion isn't as far-fetched as you might think. A while back the Labor Party decided that it was time to elect a new people. So that was what they did, by importing large numbers of Muslims into England. The result was New Britain, a charming place with ever so many stabbings and mosques, and stabbings conveniently adjacent to mosques. Terrorists no longer speak with Irish accents, but raise their arses to Mecca, and load the latest lecture from Al Queda on their iPods before voting for the Liberal Dems. But that is the problem when governments try to elect a new people by way of immigration, that new people might just decide to elect a whole new government anyway.

It's not a perfect world, if you happen to be a pensioner trying to buy some ham during Ramadan or get treated by an NHS dentist without having to cover your face if you're a woman. It's not even a great world if you're Tony Blair, and you were driven from office because you thought it was possible to use military force to civilize some of the same folk in Afghanistan, that your own immigration policies were filling up London and Manchester with. British soldiers returned from trying to hold down unruly Muslim provinces in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the jeers and protests of unruly Muslim provinces at home in the UK. Many of them have probably realized that their next service is less likely to be overseas or even across the Irish Sea, but in the very cities where they grew up.

But America's own progressives have been trying to elect a new people for some time now. If they haven't fully succeeded yet, it's only because the unruly natives still insist on reproducing in large enough numbers to stymie the hourly load dropped off at JFK airport. And with regional representation, angry voters can still hold politicians accountable for lost jobs and high taxes, even if the new pols they trade them in for, are no better than the old lot. The program is on track, even if it may take a while to see the matter through.

In the meantime, the political and cultural elite insist on describing the natives as Unamerican. Having appropriated their culture and system of government, the elites have decided that they and not the hoi poloi are the arbiters of "Americaness". Which is convenient as that makes it rather hard to question their patriotism. But what they mean by America, has little to do with the actual country, its traditions, its history, its laws or its people. They may mention those once in a while, the way liberal Supreme Court justices try to reference some random letter or crease in the Constitution, before creating an entire body of law on their own initiative, but they don't care very much for those things. The Constitution means as much to them as the Magna Carta does to Cameron and Clegg. It's an interesting historical document yes, but the EU Constitution is far more relevant, isn't it. Our own overlords similarly regard the globalist mandates of the UN far more seriously than the scribblings of some bewigged plantation owners centuries ago.

There is a growing divide between ordinary Americans and the country's political and cultural elites, who not only have different priorities, but an entirely different sense of identity. Communicating with them would be much like the Saxons trying to explain to the Normans why their way of life matters. The Normans might pretend to listen, if it saves them the trouble of dismembering the malcontents, but they don't particularly care. If aping the customs and manners of the locals is temporarily in their interest, they might do it. But they prefer to impose their own customs and manners on the barbarous natives. Because that is where the gap lies, in a political and cultural elite that fancies itself superior to the people it rules over.

Our new overlords think globally and act locally. They may have been born in America, but they attach no particular significance to that identity. When election seasons force them to play the patriot, they talk about American virtues, in the way that a candidate with national ambitions runs for the Mayor of Pittsburgh, talks about the uniqueness and greatness of Pittsburgh. He is going through a ritual that he does not take seriously, in order to pander to local sentiments about what he considers to be another city. Pittsburgh is just another part of America to him. And to the people who run America, the entire country is just another part of the world, and they wish that the natives would get with the program.

But what kind of people think this way? Local pride is natural to people who live in a place and govern it. But it is not natural, to people who view the world in terms of an emerging empire of bureaucracy, and a global political mandate for change. Such people see themselves as viceroys, stuck in the backwaters of California or Ohio or Washington D.C., dealing with rubes and primitive natives, that don't understand that they have no voice in the coming future.

Americans think in terms of America, but the people who rule America, increasingly think in terms of the world. And so Americans think that their opinion of whether there should be a Ground Zero Mosque matters, but the people who rule over them, are far more concerned to Muslims that America is a great place for them to come and a convivial partner in the world community. Rude protests irritate them. As does the ominous possibility that the natives may actually get their way.

Since January 2009, these people had become confident that the country was in their hands again. A long eight year nightmare, in which a man who mispronounced common words, snubbed the UN and refused to throw parties in D.C., was running the country, was finally over. The Tea Parties and the Ground Zero Mosque, and their own sinking polls are horrid reminders that they natives still wield some power in this arrangement. While the EU has passed the stage in which a minor event such as an entire country voting against the Lisbon Treaty could upset the applecart. The solution was to go ahead anyway without allowing a referendum. But the United States still insists on holding elections. And while the opposition party hardly has the courage of its convictions, and may tweet one thing and do another, but it still has too many members who think of themselves as Americans, rather than citizens of the world who happened to be born within the geographical confines of the political entity historically known as the United States of America.

And so they insist again, that America is theirs, and that the rebellious natives had better fall in line and behave. Because their ultimate efforts are directed at dissolving the American people, and electing another in their place.

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