While Israelis are fighting and dying, families huddling in bomb shelters and soldiers going off to face death, the men and women in suits and power suits moving through the great halls of diplomacy are using them as pawns in a larger game.

During the Cold War, Israel was a pawn in a larger struggle between the US and the USSR. Now it is back to being a counter in a larger game.

Israel’s function within the great halls of diplomacy was always as a lever on the Arab states. It was not an end, but a means of moving them one way or another. When the Arab states drifted into the Soviet orbit, the “Special Relationship” was born. The relationship accomplished its goal once Egypt was pried out of the Soviet orbit. It has lingered on because of the emotional and cultural ties of Israel and the US.

Now Obama is using Israel as a lever to push Egypt back into the Islamist camp. Egypt’s rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood broke the Arab Spring. Political Islam, which seemed to be on the ascendance, is back to being a freak show represented by terrorists and Turkey’s mad mustachioed dictator.

Egypt was where Obama went to begin the Arab Spring. Egypt is still his target. Israel is just the lever.

The reason Israel was never allowed to truly win any wars was because it was being used as a lever. By being a “good lever” during the Cold War, it could damage Egypt enough that the latter would come to the negotiating table overseen by the US and move back into the Western sphere of influence.

Israel couldn’t be allowed to win a big enough victory because then there would nothing to negotiate. Likewise, Israel wouldn’t be allowed to keep what it won because then there would be no reason for Egypt to come to the negotiating table. Sometimes Israel would even be expected to lose, as in the Yom Kippur War, to force it to come to the negotiating table.

Swap Egypt for the PLO and that’s how the disastrous peace process happened. Then swap the PLO for Hamas and that is where we are now.

Obama’s initial support for Israel’s war on Hamas was only to the extent necessary to bring the terrorist group to the negotiating table. And then once Hamas comes to the negotiating table, the White House will back its demands against Israel in exchange for getting the Brotherhood on board with its agenda.

Israel is just the means; the Muslim Brotherhood and political Islam are the objective. That objective may mean the end of the West, but those striding boldly through the halls of diplomacy are not worried.

The real target of the Hamas campaign wasn’t Israel; it was Egypt.

Egypt’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood had included Hamas. That crackdown worried Hamas far more than anything that Israel was doing. Meanwhile the Muslim Brotherhood’s loss of power meant a major setback for the sugar daddies of the Arab Spring; Qatar, Turkey and their Western allies.

The new alignment had placed Qatar, Turkey, Obama and the EU in one row, while Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel and the PLO were in another row. The latest phase of the Gaza War between Israel and Hamas was meant to break apart that alignment.

Obama’s tilt toward Iran had encouraged Sunni Muslims to throw their backing behind ISIS leading to significant gains in Iraq. Qatar and Turkey, backers of both Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, then used ISIS to push the myth that the only counter to Al Qaeda was the Brotherhood’s political Islam.

Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, political Islam and the Jihadist bands, have always been two sides of the same coin, but the argument remains a persuasive one in the great halls of diplomacy.

Egypt had bottled up Hamas to avoid a repetition of the jailbreaks, terrorist attacks and street violence that had freed Morsi and Brotherhood leaders and later enabled Morsi to attempt a takeover of the Egyptian military.

The path to putting the Muslim Brotherhood back in power in Egypt runs through Hamas.

Hamas attacked Israel. There was enough backing for Israel’s attack on Hamas to get it to the negotiating table. But once a ceasefire offer was on the table, Egypt would no longer be calling the shots. Instead the deal would come through two of Hamas’ state sponsors; Qatar and Turkey.

For this to work, Obama had to keep a leash on Israel, giving it permission to fight and then pulling it back at the critical moment. Meanwhile Egypt would be surprised to learn that it was no longer setting the terms of the ceasefire based on the same old arrangement, but that its place would be filled by Qatar and Turkey. Their ceasefire terms, approved by the US, would loosen the blockade around Hamas.

Egypt had attempted to hold Hamas to the original ceasefire terms. That was not in the interests of the White House. The ceasefire negotiations had to be sabotaged with a political intervention on behalf of Hamas. And who better to conduct that political intervention than Secretary of State John Kerry?

Egypt, Israel and the PLO had not wanted Kerry to come. Israel’s former ambassador to the US had said that he was not invited. But he was caught on a hot mic saying that he was going to come anyway.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was even more unwanted, but Qatar transported him to Israel.

Kerry, the UN and Hamas had all become projections of Qatari state power into Egypt and Israel.

The US and the UN pushed for an urgent and immediate ceasefire. Israel accepted the ceasefire several times, but Hamas resumed firing each time. While Israel thought that this demonstrated its peaceful intentions, what it actually did was give Hamas the power to set the terms of the ceasefire.

Once Hamas had that power, meeting its demands became the key element of ending the violence.

One of Egypt’s remaining political assets had been the ability to turn off Hamas violence. Now Qatar and Turkey had demonstrated that it could no longer do that. With Qatar, Turkey and the US undermining Egypt, it could no longer pressure Hamas. Meanwhile the UN and the US were pressuring Israel to accept the Qatar/Turkey ceasefire terms favorable to Hamas and unfavorable to Egypt and Israel.

But diplomacy was never Kerry’s strong suit. His blatant Qatari intervention instead alienated everyone.

Netanyahu has chosen to extend the operation against Hamas. Backing him up are poll numbers which show that the vast majority of Israelis want the job done. The PLO now suspects that Obama is about to back a Hamas coup against it. And Egypt’s military has gotten a lot of recent experience watching Obama’s botched diplomatic strategies blow up in his face.

The real objective of this war was to undermine Egypt. Egypt was supposed to scramble into the new alignment by developing closer ties with Hamas and cutting a deal with the Muslim Brotherhood.

And if Egypt’s government wouldn’t cooperate, the Muslim Brotherhood might be able to tap into enough of the anti-Israel and pro-Hamas sentiment to topple the government a second time. But if Egypt remains opposed to Hamas and Israel pushes forward with a plan to demilitarize Gaza, then the goals of those in the great halls of diplomacy who are behind this war will fail.

"Military Colonist" is a term that has gone out of fashion in this brave new world of "No Human Being is Illegal" and "Every Refugee Deserves to be Resettled."

The university history professor with an office full of fake Indian jewelery and a view of the parking lot will lecture on the military colonies of the Roman period, always careful to emphasize their eventual fate. And he may even get up to the 16th century. But he'll stay away from the present.

But if you are going to take land or seize power, you will need military colonists to hold it. The military colonist may be an ex-soldier, but he's more likely to be someone the empire, present or future, doesn't particularly need or have a use for. The Czars used serfs. The present day military colonist who shows up at JFK or LAX may also be a peasant with even less value to his culture.

Mexico's military colonists are not military. Often they aren't even Mexican. But they have managed to take back California without firing a shot. Unless you count the occasional drive by shooting.

While the United States sent tens of thousands of soldiers to try and hold Iraq and Afghanistan only to fail; Mexico took California with a small army of underpaid handymen who claim entire cities and send back some 20 billion dollars a year. As conquests go, it's not hard to see who did more with less.

In 2009, 417 Mexican migrants died trying to reach America, and 317 American soldiers died in Afghanistan. But Mexico has more to show for it than America does. Every Mexican who settles across the border is a net gain who sends back money and spreads political influence. Meanwhile America is spending trillions on a much smaller army in a country whose land no one actually wants.

In 2009, the year Obama approved a 30,000 man troop surge, 3,195 Afghans received permanent legal status in the United States.

In the decade since the US invaded Afghanistan, 24,710 Afghans successfully invaded the United States and received permanent legal status. That is an occupying force larger than US troop numbers were at any point in time in Afghanistan until the very end of the George W. Bush's second term.

During this same period there were also 19,000 Afghan non-immigrant admissions. As invasions go, the Afghan invasion of America was far more successful than the American invasion of Afghanistan.

That is even more true when you consider birth rates. Military colonists are not a mere invading army. They are generational footholds.

The American birth rate was at 13.5. The Afghan birth rate was at 37.3 at the time. American soldiers go home when their time is up. Sometimes they come home with a Muslim wife after converting to marry her. Afghan immigrants come with a birth rate that is nearly three times that of the country they are invading.

Across the ocean, the Algerian War is still going strong and France is losing badly. There are fewer bombs and bullets. Only men and women showing up and expecting to be taken care of. An army of millions could not have landed in France and begun pillaging the countryside. Not unless they came as immigrants. If you are going to invade a Socialist country, the best way to do it is as a charity case.

Unfortunately that holds true for us as well.

The military colonists flooding our shores are part of an unacknowledged partnership between their political leaders and ours. Their political leaders are fighting a war to redress the wrongs of centuries or millennia. Our political leaders are looking to shift the voting balances in a ward or a district for the next election. When they resettle the next shipment of Afghans in an otherwise conservative area with a view to tilting the electoral balance, they are using them as military colonists for the short term while their homelands use them as military colonists in the long term.  

War is about controlling land, resources and populations. Land just sits there. It's the populations that cause the trouble. The military colonist makes a more enduring occupation possible by settling the land and giving the conquering power a deeper foothold in the enemy territory.

There was a time when American settlers acted as military colonists holding down lands in Florida and Texas. Today America is being colonized by the settlers of other nations and ideologies. And we will find ourselves in the same position as the Spanish did in Florida and the Mexicans did in Texas.

Mexico invited American settlers to move in to Texas on the understanding that they would learn Spanish and otherwise fit in. Instead language and culture proved to be stronger than land and oaths of citizenship. Many of the Texas settlers might not have had much use for the United States at the time, but creed and culture made them American military colonists whether they knew it or not. The same holds true for the present state of affairs there today.

It's more than just cultural or ethnic differences that make one a military colonist. It's a cause. Whether it's Manifest Destiny or the Reconquista or the Caliphate. Underlying it all is that sense of destiny. The power of an exceptionalism that makes it impossible for the settler to sink in and abandon his roots and beliefs to the tidal pull of a new culture when his grudge against it is more than the mere personal dissatisfaction of the new immigrant or his children caught between two worlds.

Integration is hopeless in the face of that  sense of destiny. European nations struggling to defend some notion of secular space misunderstand the problem as one of extremism. Some of the more visible terror attacks may indeed be associated with what can be described as extremism in the sense that its participants are willing to push the envelope harder and further in more violent ways.

But Islamic terrorism is only the foam on the surface. It's the bubbles at the edge of the pot. A minor symptom of a much bigger problem. Ir's simply the most violent expression of a widely shared belief that Islamic law is superior to Western law. Most peoples feel that their ways and customs are best. It doesn't become a problem until they become the majority and won't take no for an answer.

American liberalism and European republicanism have no answers to Islamic terrorism. Their embrace of the Arab Spring was motivated by the need to believe that the Muslim world was ready to "advance" to the same postmodern level of existence eliminating the need to worry about women in Burkas or Al Qaeda. The same misreading of the power of tribe and religion that led to the foolish belief that Saudi Arabia's military colonists could safely be turned into Labour voters led to the Arab Spring's  equally misplaced confidence that the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to be just like Europe.

It isn't only a tiny minority of extremists who believe that Islamic values are superior to Western values and who would like the law to recognize that assumption. It's a tiny minority of extremists who try to prove their devoutness by jumping the gun and killing people over it before the full demographic impact of the military colonists would make a Burka ban into the next Syrian Civil War.

Think of two armies maneuvering into position. The extremist is the one who fires before the enemy is fully in range ruining the strategic effect of the surprise attack. Trying to understand the extremist not only misses the point, it misses the whole chain of events in motion. The schemes for integrating the disgruntled youth and countering violent extremism is symptom control.

Terrorism is an early warning in the clash of civilizations and all our leaders can think to do is hold a meeting with the heads of the opposing army asking them to get their hotheads to stop shooting at us  because it's bringing our civilizations into conflict. Our civilizations are in conflict and have been as far back as they have both existed. The occasional plane hijacker is the first snowflake of a winter storm. Instead of preparing for a storm, we're trying to figure out how to stop snowflakes.

The conflict is primal. It isn't about American foreign policy or War X or Country Y or Cause Z. These are all "arguments" that explain the conflict once it's already under way. It's simpler than that. It's about the incompatibility of cultures, religions, political and economic systems. And it's about countries with a lot of oil and not much else trying to buy their way to an empire by using their own impoverished brethren as cannon fodder. And finally it's about what happens when birth rates fall.

Western countries have achieved individual comforts with an unsustainable system.

This unsuistainability is both economic and demographic as budgets and children are both lacking. Meanwhile the countries and cultures that have failed have achieved a perfectly sustainable state of misery. They may not have much income, but they also don't have much to eat. They may have high infant mortality rates, but they have even higher childbirth rates.

America of 2013 cannot go on being this way indefinitely. It probably can't even manage another two decades without major changes of some kind. Afghanistan 2013 however can go on being the way it is indefinitely.  And that sustainability is what makes its people effective military colonists. Living the Afghan lifestyle in London or Los Angeles is even sustainable because food and housing are free.

That just leaves large packs of nomadic youths roaming the streets, selling drugs and rioting at the slightest provocation until it's time for them to get married and make more nomadic youths of their own. It's not that different from Afghanistan. It's the tribal life transplanted to the West. It's a culture with no real purpose except to produce young males eager to fight and expand tribal power and a religion with no real purpose except to affirm that as a religious duty.

Islam embodies expansionism. Its directives of male violence and female subjugation have no other end. They protect the tribal imperatives of endogamy and violence, of inbreeding and the feud. It has no ideas except to get bigger and that makes its followers into ideal military colonists.

UNDERSTANDING OBAMA

What both men have in common is a hard left background which has taught them that the only defining principle in politics is Lenin’s “Kto-Kovo”. Kto-Kovo or Who-Whom reduced all interactions to warfare. The Bolsheviks ushered in the end of rules, decency or honor. All that mattered was who would be able to destroy whom. It didn’t matter whether you had justice on your side, but what you would do about it.

Obama and Putin have the same message for America. “Kto-Kovo.” “Sue me.” “So what?” “I won.”

A Kto-Kovo leader, whether in the 7th century or the 21st century, operates by rallying his followers through bold acts that expand their power and humiliate and destroy the morale of their enemies.

Obama and Putin’s Savage World Order




Amnestiers: The Bible Doesn’t Say Strangers, It Says Resident Aliens




IN THE NAME OF ISLAM

The Muslim Brotherhood’s battalion attacked the village of Kfar Darom and forty-five Israeli militia members protected 400 men, women and children. The Brotherhood’s attacks were beaten back with determined resistance until its Jihadists were forced to retreat leaving behind seventy of their dead.

After the village came under attack from Egyptian armor and air power, it had to be abandoned for decades until Israel liberated the territory on which it had stood. Then the diplomats and reporters  who hadn’t cared about the tiny village before, suddenly declared that Kfar Darom was a settlement and the Jews who lived there were occupiers for resettling the land that Muslims had conquered in 1948.

When Kfar Darom was ethnically cleansed again in 2005, the media and the diplomats cheered. Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar entered the Kfar Darom synagogue and laid claim to it in the name of Islam.

Israel’s War with the Muslim Brotherhood




Washington Post Muslim Reporter: Was Hamas Expected to Turn the Other Cheek?




VANITY UNFAIR

Mark Levin has called Jon Stewart a self-hating Jew. That’s a mostly inaccurate term that needs to be put to bed. Jon Stewart likes himself. It’s us he doesn’t like.

Jon Stewart doesn’t hate himself. His fake neurotic routine is just a hack comic’s mashup of Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld. It allows him to pose as a non-threatening figure while he’s saying nasty things.

Stewart, like many leftists, does hate being Jewish.

The real problem isn’t Stewart, who was doing bit parts in sitcoms until he lucked into the Bush Administration, and would in a better world be desperately hoping to get to play the delivery boy on an episode of Modern Family.

The problem is that far too many American Jews have become so  cut off from their culture that they identify a hack comedian with three facial expressions and a watered down version of a Borscht Belt routine as a cultural lodestone…

Jon Stewart Isn’t a Self-Hating Jew, He Just Hates Being Jewish





Are the Gazans Who Voted for Hamas Ever Responsible for their Actions?




Video Note: I was on Dr. Gina' show this week. I can't find the video of that appearance, but here's the trailer for the new book by our friend Ann-Marie Murrell of Politichicks and Dr. Gina.


The book has already been endorsed by Sarah Palin.




CAN ANYONE SOLVE THEIR MYSTERY?

If you were hoping to catch a disease from your pizza and support Islamic terrorism, the fire that burned down Halal Mojoes Chicken & Pizza means that you’ll just have to settle for any one of a thousand other Muslim fast food joints where diseased rats are passed off as kebabs and the profits are contributed to Al Qaeda and Hezbollah.

Firefighters are still trying to determine what happened and while it’s easy to blame Islamophobia, Mojoes was also hated by black people due to its involvement in the sexual abuse and grooming of young boys.

New York’s Worst Terrorist Pizza Shop Burns Down in Islamophobic Fire



SAVING GENERAL OBAMA

1. No one wants to send troops into Iraq

2. The only person who can send troops into Iraq is Obama

3. Susan Rice, presumably representing Obama, wants to be prevented from sending soldiers to Iraq (even though some are already there as advisers and there’s US air power there.)

...

5. Is everyone in Obama Inc. on drugs?

Obama: Stop Me Before I Invade Iraq!




Ex-Israeli Ambassador: Kerry Uninvited to Ceasefire Talks - “We’ve got to get over there…. I think John, we ought to go tonight.”




A DISTURBING LACK OF FAITH

Hillary still comes out ahead of Emperor Palpatine with a 31 to 24 favorable to unfavorable. The Emperor however may be suffering from a lack of name recognition with 19 percent unfamiliar and 26 percent neutral. His favorable to unfavorable split is still better than Hillary’s.

Obama is currently running at 51 percent unfavorable to 46 percent favorable, putting him below Hillary Clinton and Darth Vader. As evil overlords go, he’s proven to be disappointing even to many of those who voted for him.

Darth Vader has Higher Favorability Rating than Hillary Clinton or Obama




Socialist Dictator Murdering His Own People Accuses Israel of Genocide




NAPOLEONIC

Moreover before I attacked the town, I sent there a flag of truce. Immediately afterwards we saw the head of the bearer elevated on a pole over the walls. Now if I had spared them again, and sent them away on their parole, they would directly have gone to St. Jean d’Acre, where they would have played over again the same scene that they have done at Jaffa.

In justice to the lives of my soldiers… I could not allow this. To leave as a guard a portion of my army, already small and reduced in number, in consequence of the breach of faith of these wretches; it was impossible. Indeed, to have acted otherwise than as I did, would probably have caused the destruction of my whole army. I therefore, availing myself of the rights of war, which authorize the putting to death prisoners taken under such circumstances

How Napoleon Dealt w/Muslim Atrocities in Gaza and Israel




BUY OBAMA, GET SOLYNDRA FREE

Obama is a lame duck and sees likely to lose the Senate.

Once that happens, his dollar and cents value to his backers (and despite their leftism, they are in it for the money, just ask Warren Buffett, Tom Steyer or George Soros) drops through the floor.

That’s why Hillary is picking up the huge piles of money now.

80% Off: Price of Lobbying Obama Cut to $5K




UN Sec General Flew to Israel on Plane Financed by Hamas Backer




DISPROPORTIONATE

The most terrifying detail is being uncovered that Hamas had a plan to attack all the settlements and kibbutzim in the area this year on Rosh Hashanah with an invasion of over 200 terrorists into almost all the settlements in the area. The tunnels went under the kibbutzim under the kindergartens and dining rooms and other areas within the kibbutz perimeters. They planned to occupy the whole area and kill as many Israeli as possible.

This could have been the worst terror attack in the history of terrorism. Thousands of people, including women and children would have been slaughtered in this planned attack.

Hamas Used Terror Tunnels in Plot to Massacre of Thousands of Israelis





Obama has Plan to Slow Number of Central American Migrants… by Importing More Central American Migrants




HOMEFRONT

The firefighters from Los Angeles, Texas and Washington DC, have been working around the clock in Israel’s south in extinguishing blazes and helping to find the rockets that land in open areas.

“We were all part of the massive tragedy that was 9/11. There we undertook search and rescue missions. When we heard that hundreds of rockets are falling on Israel, we decided to join forces and come and help,” firefighter 51-year-old Hirth said.

“The rocket fired by Hamas hit homes in Ashkelon, Sderot and other communities. We have already been at scenes in a number of such communities, our mission is not simple, hard and exhausting, but we must help, the situation here is insufferable.”

US Firefighters Volunteer to Help Put Out Hamas Terror Rocket Fires in Israel




LAWLESS

“They’re technically renouncing their U.S. citizenship. They’re declaring they are based someplace else even though most of their operations are here,” Obama said at a technical college in Los Angeles. “You know, some people are calling these companies corporate deserters.”

Deserters, you say?

Maybe if we release 5 high ranking Taliban leaders, we can bring them home.

Obama: “I Don’t Care If It’s Legal”




Working Class Hero Michael Moore Owns 9 Homes




MAYBE IT WAS ALIENS

The shootings are reported as if they’re natural events. As if the guns just started shooting. There is no context.

'Violence continued to strike the Chicago area this weekend with at least 18 people shot in a little more than 12 hours overnight, bringing the number of people shot since Friday to 40.'

Darn that violence. Why does it always keep striking? If it’s not bad enough that guns are unilaterally shooting people, now we’ve got violence acting on its own.

Chicago Haunted by Unexplained Shootings of Gang Members




DRONE!

There are otherwise intelligent people who lose their minds when they hear the word “Drone”. Drone has become to the 21st century what the atomic bomb was to the 20th century with much less justification.

The article then goes on to describe “a huge drone buildup” along with the claim that “Japan is not so quietly building a huge drone fleet”.

So what does this huge drone fleet buildup consist of? Two drones.

Can We Stop the Drone Hysteria?

There are two dimensions to fighting a War on Terror. One is fighting terrorists and the other is fighting terrorism. In conventional warfare there isn't that much of a difference between fighting men and their tactics. There is a wider space between fighting terrorists and their tactics.

Conventional armies use tactics to defeat enemy forces and seize territory. Terrorists however use tactics to take over mental territory. A suicide bomber is not out to take over a particular block. He is out to change how the enemy and his side think about that city block and the larger conflict.

Terrorism has succeeded in accomplishing that goal in Israel. The scale of terrorism turned every piece of land into a mathematical equation. How many lives was this village in Gaza worth? How many lives is this West Bank town worth? How many lives is East Jerusalem worth?

This emotional calculus is misleading because it is an immediate response to a set of deaths. However terrorists are not trading an end to violence for a village or a town. They are calculating how many deaths it will take to force Israel to abandon that village or town. And once they have it, they will use it to inflict more terror on another town or village, this time using rockets.

Israelis were convinced that a price in lives had been put on Gaza and that if they withdrew, the killing would end. But Gaza was just the beginning. Not the end. There is never an end.

The goal of a terrorist movement is to change the relative perceptions of strength and the freedom of movement of both sides. Terror tactics create the perception that the winning side is losing. This perception can be so compelling that both sides come to accept it as reality. Terrorists manufacture victories by trapping their enemies in no-win scenarios that wear down their morale.

That is what has been happening to Israel. The entire carrot and stick of the peace process and the suicide bombing, the final agreement that never comes and the final solution that is coming, were designed to wear down Israelis, to make their leaders and people chase down empty hopes and argue among themselves over who is to blame because there is still no peace.

The last few decades were meant to create a sense of helplessness among Israelis.

Taking hostages is one form of the no-win scenario. If the winning side can't cut the Gordian Knot by rescuing the hostages, it faces a choice between releasing terrorists or having to watch its own people held captive or killed. Either one creates a sense of helplessness and defeat.

Terrorists are not attacking land or buildings. They are targeting morale. Their goal is to destroy the mental and spiritual resistance of a people by wearing it down with acts of terror, tying it down with moral and legalistic debates, and finally finishing it off with negotiations that are also designed to wear down the other side without ever concluding a final agreement.

As important as it is to defeat terrorists as individuals, it is even more important to defeat their tactics.

The first and best way to defeat terrorist tactics is to refuse to negotiate with terrorists. Terrorist tactics work best when they create complicity on the other side. The first wave of complicity comes from leftist activists and sympathetic terror lawyers making human rights arguments. But the second wave of complicity has to come from the authorities for terrorism to be successful.

Negotiating with terrorists makes the negotiators complicit in whatever plans the terrorists have. Once negotiations begin, the terrorists will force the negotiators to violate their own side's values and to sell out portions of their own population or those of allied countries. These tactics allow the terrorists to divide and conquer the enemy. And to use one enemy against another.

A terrorist group that seizes hostages from Country X in exchange for Country Y freeing prisoners has managed to turn two of its enemies against each other with a small investment of resources. If Country Y frees the prisoners, the terrorists win. If Country Y doesn't free the prisoners, they still win because Country X will now blame Country Y, rather than the terrorists, for what happened.

Swap the two countries for two groups of people inside a country and it becomes easier to understand what the terrorists are trying to accomplish by taking hostages.

Once you negotiate with terrorists, they will leverage those negotiations to make you complicit in their own violence against you. If you negotiate with them long enough, you will end up  defending and even validating their acts of terror.

Israelis were convinced that they could buy their way out of the problem by betraying their fellow citizens living in the West Bank and Gaza. And then by betraying the families of terror victims. European leaders are convinced that they can have peace in their time by pressuring Israel and restraining America. American leaders are convinced that peace will come if they can pressure the Europeans and Israelis to stop offending Muslims.

This is classic divide and conquer.

The greatest danger of fighting terrorists is falling into a reactive pattern. The more you react to what terrorists do, the more they set the agenda. Taking hostages is the ultimate reactive trap. The kidnapping of three Israeli boys has sent Israel into the same predictable pattern, rounding up the usual suspects, making temporary arrests and a public outcry that, like the one surrounding Gilad Shalit, can easily be turned into a campaign to pay any price to free them.

The only way to defeat a terrorist tactic is to invalidate it. The act of invalidating it is often painful, but it's less painful than not doing it. Refusing to negotiate with terrorists cripples their ability to set the agenda. It's hard to divide and conquer people who won't talk to you. It's difficult to make them complicit in the terrorism against them if they won't enter into a dialogue.

Human shields proliferate because they work. The only way to invalidate them as a tactic is by reacting to terrorists the same way, whether or not they are using a human shield. Hostages are taken because the terrorists have a realistic expectation of striking a deal.

Eliminate the deal and the hostage taking ends.

Terrorists create a sense of helplessness by forcing a society to experience pain without having any control over it. The experience of being terrorized is not merely horror and death, but the inability to control how it happens. It is this need for control that leads to Stockholm syndrome, identifying with terrorists and accepting their agenda in exchange for having some control over their terror.

It is not enough for a society to endure the pain that terrorists inflict. Every person and every culture has their breaking point. Instead a society must be willing to inflict pain on its own body to prevent greater pain and suffering. A society that is no longer able to do this is caught in its own sense of helplessness and is doomed. It is so focused on avoiding pain that it can no longer fight back.

War is a form of pain that we inflict on our society to spare ourselves the greater pain of conquest and defeat. Resistance to terrorism may also require other smaller forms of martyrdom that allow a society to assert control over its own destiny. One of these is not negotiating with terrorists.

When a society is willing to defy the power that its enemies wield over it by causing its own pain, it destroys their power over it and escapes the helplessness that will otherwise kill it. It breaks free of the chain of concessions that will inevitably lead it to betray its principles and lose its soul.

Israel has already gone too far down the road to helplessness. And it is not alone. Every nation, society and culture confronted with Islamic terrorism seeks ways to spare itself the pain. But the pain can only end when the terrorists are thoroughly defeated. A nation that cannot rouse itself to defeating the terrorists in an overwhelming and comprehensive campaign, must at least learn to defeat their tactics.

Defeating terrorist tactics can be more important than defeating terrorists. It is not that hard for a modern nation to kill a terrorist. It is much more difficult for it to take the harder route, to make a difficult sacrifice, to violate its own sense of itself and to challenge its own morality. Drones allow us to kill enemies from a distance at the push of a button. But drones cannot protect the morale of a nation.

Every society must find its own reasons for continuing on. A conflict forces us to question whether we can go on. It demands that we rise to the challenge with courage, determination and sacrifice. And in doing so, we rediscover ourselves.

Israel is being hanged on a public gallows erected on the grounds of the United Nations with yards of rope gleefully supplied by the Muslim world. But the hangmen are mostly Westerners who still think that the Muslim lynch mob at their doorstep can be pacified with the death of a single victim.

There are three things you can do when you are about to be hanged. You can walk proudly, recite a glorious line or two to embed your martyrdom in historical memory, and then allow yourself to be hanged. Jews have an extensive body of experience with that brand of martyrdom.

Alternatively you can plead your case all the way to the gallows, arguing that a mistake has been made, that your case has been improperly reviewed, begging for someone to listen and do something. This way also ends in a hanging. But it's the hanging of a slave without even a shred of dignity attached to it. A man that dies pleading with his murderers, and puts his fate in the honesty of the liars and hypocrites whose own crimes makes the worst of his look like virtues, is a craven fool.

Because there is really only one thing you can do when the noose is being placed around your neck. Resist. A noose works by tightening around your neck and cutting off your air or breaking your neck. If you resist the tightening of the noose, you may actually survive. On the other hand if you follow through all the procedures, if you allow your hands to be tied behind your back, and the noose to be fastened around your neck while trusting in the system to do right by you-- your death is inevitable.

For two decades Israel has been walking toward the gallows. Its leaders have led it there by empty international assurances. Its people have been led there by refusing to see what is waiting ahead for them, even while the blood was being cleaned off the streets.

Every attempt to reach a peaceful solution, every concession and show of good faith, has only tightened the bonds around its hands and the noose around its neck.

Every concession Israel has made, has further restricted not only its ability to defend itself, but even its ability to do basic things such as build residential housing in the capital of its own nation. Every gesture and agreement Israel has signed has bound it to ever more restrictive terms. And none of them have brought any peace. All they have ever done is set the bar higher for the next round of concessions demanded by the enemy and its aiders and abettors in the next phase of negotiations.

This is not a peace process, and it has never been one. It is a public lynching. It is the lynching of a country whose only real crime is that its existence offends the religious fanaticism and prejudices of a billion Muslims, who control much of the world's oil, and whose followers are willing to riot and kill in the streets of nearly every major city in the world at the slightest offense.

The lynching began as a trial where the murderer wore a fine suit and his victim sat in an orange jumpsuit in the dock. Every day during the trial, the murderer would be allowed to leave the courtroom to kill again. And every afternoon he would return to the courtroom with bloody hands that the judge and jurors would pretend not to see.

If the victim called attention to those bloody hands, he would be told that those murders were also his fault because he had provoked the murderer into committing them.

The endgame is all too clear. The undoing of that "mistake" which allowed the oldest and most persecuted minority in the Middle East to briefly reclaim their homeland from the tyranny of Muslim Caliphs and Sultans as a homeland for their persecuted brethren from the east and the west.

Every time Israel tries to be accommodating, it instead takes a step closer to the gallows. It allows the noose to be tightened around its neck. And every time that happens, it has to fight harder for air.

Eventually there will be no air at all. Only a sad forlorn figure swinging in the hot eastern wind from the desert.

And cries of Ibtach al Yahood among the rubble of cities and gardens of Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv and Ariel.

Israel cannot survive by accommodating a lynch mob. Only by having the courage to defy it. When the international community at the behest of the Muslim lynch mob dictates the parameters of Israel's survival, it must expand those parameters by pushing through them to the other side. If they want to recognize terrorists, then kill those terrorists. If they want to unilaterally create a Palestinian state, then annex those territories. Accommodation is a noose. Defiance is the air of freedom. Every time Israel retreats, it is condemned for it. When it advances, it is condemned for it also, but its freedom of action expands.

The world will always condemn Israel regardless of its intentions. But like any form of name-calling, those condemnations only gain power when Israel allows its actions to be dictated by them. Israel is not condemned because of what Israel does. It is condemned because of Islamic bigotry, left wing radicalism and international dhimmism converging in one place.

This is a pattern that cannot be undone. It can only be ignored.

When you listen to the threats and taunts of those who hate you, you give them power over yourself. If you try to accommodate your behavior to gain their favor, their outpouring of hate for you will only grow. It is not your behavior they hate, it is you. By showing weakness, you invite attack. By giving your enemies power over you, all that you accomplish is to drive them into a feeding frenzy at your vulnerability.

If you go on this way, you will either be a slave or a corpse. A slave if they have any use for you alive. A corpse if they don't. Either way you have put your head into the noose they made for you.

Israel cannot go on this way. No country could for long. Yet it does, marching on toward the gallows, protesting that there has been a terrible mistake here. But there is no mistake here. None at all. The executioners nod sympathetically and promise to look into it, as they bind his hands behind his back. It's a farce and everyone, except the dumbest among the lynch mob and the condemned, knows it.

But like the condemned man refusing a blindfold in the anecdote who's scheduled to be executed, Israel keeps being warned not to make trouble. Go quietly. Breathe deeply. Soon it will all be over. What will the world say, if Israel resists? Exactly what the world says now.  The troublemakers that are the cause of all the troubles of the otherwise peaceful nations of the Middle East. The worm in the lovely healthy apple otherwise covered with Muslim tyrannies.

Every threat that has been made has come about when Israel made concessions, not because it refused to. Every time Israel has chosen the high road, its enemies have ambushed it from the low road. It's past time to wake up and start learning some lessons. The noose is drawn. And the nation is gasping for air. That breath of air was Jerusalem. The next one will be the Galilee. And then what? How many more breaths are left after that?

Before Oslo, Israel was threatened with terror if it did not comply. It complied and the terror increased manifold. And if did not negotiate further, it was threatened with international isolation. It negotiated. It gave. And it was isolated anyway. It was threatened with boycotts, and it gave, and the boycotts came anyway. Now they threaten the unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state. Followed by a One State Solution. Followed by international intervention. Noose, gallows and all.

And does anyone think that all these will not come about anyway if Israel gives Abbas and his terrorist cronies their own official state with a capital in Jerusalem?

No compromise has worked until now. Which means no compromise will work. A process in which one side repeatedly compromises and the other side repeatedly threatens and takes, is not a process, but a holdup. If a man threatens you with a gun, then you might think that you can buy him off. Until he returns again and again. And then it is no longer a threat, it is a process. Israel is in that process, or rather it is being processed. At the end of the process is death. If you pay attention only to the gun, and not the pattern of threats, you may keep giving in, until you have given up your home, your wife and your children, and you have nothing left but your life. And then you will lose that as well. That is the nature of the process. To survive, you must not see the gun alone, but the process it is part of.

When Israel withdrew from Gaza, allowed Hamas to control it, and did nothing but prevent Hamas from having outside access, the world howled as if Israel had filled the country with graves from end to end, as Sudan or Iran or some of the other members and former members of the UN Human Rights Commission have. Now that Israel sacrifices the lives of its soldiers to minimize Muslim civilian casualties while Hamas does everything to increase those casualties, the howling has become a din.

That is not justice. That is a lynch mob.

We are no longer talking about negotiations. Or any serious discussion of a state. We are talking about the world rising up in one voice to defend the rights of a genocidal organization whose charter includes the words; "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."

The pretense is over and done with. This is not about anything resembling peace. This is about death. This is a lynch mob. Some come willingly. Others think that they have no choice. That a single murder will buy them the tolerance of the Dar Al Islam.

This is what a noose looks like. These are the gallows. As its hands are bound, Israel loses the ability to defend itself. As the noose tightens, Israel dies. Only by resisting the noose, can it survive. Only by fighting to free its hands, can it resist.

The way of surrender is the way of death. And after Israel dies, its own hangmen will be next.

The lynch mob has only begun. Its appetite is whetted by death. Its hunger will only be sharpened, not sated, by blood. And it will cover the world in blood, if it is not stopped. But now the noose draws tight. Only a little more air is left.

What will Israel do with that air? Appeal for justice, or fight with all its strength to rip the noose away. For now the choice is still hers. When the noose has done it work, it no longer will be.

From Berkeley to Boston and from Paris to Sydney, the season is upon us again. Hipsters twirl  Keffiyahs from some Shanghai factory around their necks, don army surplus jackets and Decembrist t-shirts and head to the nearest Israeli embassy to scream about a new Holocaust.

Shiites and Sunnis temporarily put aside their blood feuds and entire families of Syrian Alawites and
Turkish Sunnis stand in London or Berlin screaming "Death to the Jews".

Joining them are elderly Trotskyists and aging Stalinists, normally as mutually hostile as Shiites and Sunnis, who put aside their differences to feebly wave cardboard signs about the Zionist war machine.

Fake blood is everywhere. Aspiring art students who can't draw try to figure out new ways of intersecting a Swastika and a Star of David. Latuff cartoons are printed out along with bloody photos  of dead people from Syria, Hollywood horror movies and on the rare occasion, Gaza, and shoved in everyone's faces.

The organizers take a break from submitting angry Truth Dig articles about Brazilian cocoa exploitation and dive headfirst into a rally that, unlike all their other rallies, the media will actually cover. They prowl the police barriers like hungry hyenas looking for a reporter.

Any reporter.  

On the last few struggling Pacifica affiliates, Amy Goodman invites Noam Chomsky to talk about the war. Chris Hedges phones in to promote his new book, which is only 90 percent plagiarized from a Hemingway novel he thought he once read. Max Blumenthal shows up to lead a Students for Justice in Palestine protest while shouting about colonialism. Then he tags himself on Instagram.

At the Israeli embassy, the hipsters imagine that they're guerrilla fighters. They scream themselves hoarse about oppression, duck into a Starbucks, come out with a few cinnamon lattes and then begin screaming again. Recruiters for the International Socialist Organization, the World Revolutionary Front, the International Workers Fourth Front Uprising and the always popular Brotherhood of Revolutionary Workers and Peasants push smeared pamphlets into their pockets hoping for a bite.

Joseph Massad mounts the stage to explain that Zionism is the real Anti-Semitism. Muslims in the crowd begin chanting that Mohammed's army is coming back. "O Jews, O Jews," they scream. Rage Boy is somewhere among them. They are all Rage Boy now.

An old Trotskyist waves a sign quoting Marx's slur that the god of the Jews is money. But he changed it to Zionists so it's not anti-Semitic anymore.

Finally the puppets are raised up. They might be of Netanyahu or Rabin. Sometimes they do double duty as Harper or Cameron. Now their blood-soaked suits have been decorated with stars of David to avoid confusing anyone unsure of who the generic white male with vampire teeth might be.

An agent for the Iranian regime goes to the microphone to denounce the nuclear Apartheid that is preventing Iran from getting the bomb. Old CNDers who spent their twenties screaming about the madness of plunging the world into atomic death cheer him on. Quakers who are old enough to have stood in the Red Square holding up signs denouncing American militarism nod along.

A Hijabi in dark glasses and heavy makeup positions her mouth a centimeter away from the microphone and shrieks that her family is being murdered in Gaza even though she's from the UAE and a member of one of its more powerful families. The POC students she "organizes" the campus janitors with shake their firsts in the air. "People power! People power!"

A member of Jewish Voices for the Utter Destruction of Israel staggers up next. She's a Sarah Lawrence grad and a top lawyer from a family of top lawyers going back six generations. Her sister is the rabbi of a temple in Beverly Hills. Her son is somewhere in the crowd wearing a Hamas t-shirt.

"Not in my name," she screams.

And she can't think of anything else to scream, so she screams it again.

The cops, from New York to Berlin to London, yawn and scratch their stomachs. They've had it up to here. They don't care anymore.The hipsters try picking fights with them, taking their photos and screaming in their faces. Angry 90 pounds girls, their faces screwed up in hate, spit at their polished shoes.

Eventually a small group of pro-Israel protesters, teenage boys and girls with large flags and a few old men pass by. The crowd gasps in outrage and like a maddened beast surges toward them.

"Khaybar Khaybar Ya Yahood," cry the Muslims. "Down with Zionist Supremacism," scream the Marxists. "Death to the Jews," shouts everyone else.

The cops push back against them like Greek warriors confronting a ragged barbarian band. Crumpled up pamphlets soar up into the air and fall short. Video is taken documenting police brutality and quickly uploaded to Vimeo. Hipsters cuddle up on the floor, smear fake blood over their noses and scream that they're dying. The cops hustle the pro-Israel protesters away to avoid any more problems.

To the side a small group of befuddled men dressed in what most passerby inaccurately think is Hassidic fashion stand holding signs that they can't read. Once a week they are each paid twenty dollars or euros and bussed from their community to hold signs denouncing Israel. The signs and the website are produced by a small group of Marxist activists funded by Iran.

Their leader, the only one of them who can even read the signs, claims to be a Rabbi, though he's actually an international con artist who owes money to a dozen banks across Europe.

He shouts something into the microphone, but the crowd is restless. A Palestinian slam poet shoves him aside and chants about hate and suffering, blood and oppression. The poet is replaced by a drum circle. The drum circle is replaced by a live phone call from Alice Walker. Alice Walker is replaced by a sign language activist silently delivering her own speech that no one can understand.

In the back of the crowd, they start burning Israeli flags. Bored Yemeni teenagers peel off to throw stones at a synagogue. The Marxists get into an argument over the Fourth International. Someone begins loudly reading their own self-published poetry through an unauthorized megaphone. ISIS sympathizers fly the black flag of the Jihad over the crowd where it tangles with a Hezbollah flag.

Punches and kicks are thrown. Sunnis and Shiites pull each other's beards. "Comrades, comrades," an elderly leftist cries, but no one pays any attention to him. "Revolution," the hipsters yell.

The cops break it up. The crowd turns on the cops. The reporters go home and report none of it except the condemnations of Israel and the police brutality. The Hijabi appears in almost all of the photos where she is described as a Palestinian refugee. The conservative blogs that dig up her Facebook profile and prove that she's a liar are stubbornly ignored by the New York Times, The Daily Mirror and the Sydney Morning Herald.

It's another fine day in the dying West.

HAMAS IS A 7TH CENTURY PROBLEM

To understand why, let’s step into a time machine and go back to the spring of 632. The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius is engaged in the first of a series of wars with Mohammed’s maddened followers. England is divided into seven quarreling kingdoms. Across the water, the Merovingians are killing each other in ways that would give George R.R. Martin nightmares. Meanwhile in a more civilized part of the world, China’s fading Sui Dynasty fields an army of over a million men in a failed effort to invade Korea.

Back in Medina, Mohammed had come down with the sniffles. He had a fever and a headache and there wasn’t any Tylenol around for miles. Mohammed hadn’t been a very good man and he made a very bad patient. Upon being told that he had pleurisy, he claimed that only people possessed by Satan came down with that disease so he couldn’t possibly have it and instead blamed the Jews for poisoning him.

His own homemade cures, such as bathing in seven skins of water from seven different wells, didn’t help. But before he died, he managed to make the Middle East an even worse place by ordering the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians.

Israel Is the Victim of Mohammed’s War Against the Jews




How Can Justin Amash be the “Conservative” Candidate if he Supports Illegal Alien Amnesty?




SHAMELESS

The biggest problem with Hard Choices was always the title. The Clintons don’t make hard choices because they have no impulse control.

That’s what led Bill Clinton to harass every woman within a hundred mile radius and it’s also why Hillary Clinton allowed herself to be recorded laughing about the time she helped a rapist who beat a 12-year-old girl into a coma beat the rap. It’s why the greedy couple stole White House furniture, traded pardons for cash and grabbed every bit of loose change that they could get their sweaty hands on.

The Clintons have always been oblivious to their own vulgarity. They have never understood how they embarrassed their own political allies. Hillary’s gaffes about money, like Bill Clinton’s gaffes about sex, are symptoms of their obliviousness to their lack of self-control.

Hillary’s Greed is Destroying Her Presidential Campaign




Hillary Clinton Suggests Hamas Backer Mediate Between Israel and Hamas




THIS IS THE NATURE OF THE ENEMY

“There were people – babies – thrown through the window and covered with blood,” an eyewitness described the horrifying scene.

“The worst thing I saw, which I think will haunt me all my life, is a baby that was sitting in a stroller outside a shop and was dead,” another eyewitness related.

One of the Hamas terrorists involved in the attack described her reaction and the Muslim reaction.

“While I was on the bus and everybody was congratulating one another, they said on the radio that there had been a martyrdom attack at the Sbarro restaurant, and that three people were killed. I admit that I was a bit disappointed, because I had hoped for a larger toll. Yet when they said ‘three dead,’ I said: ‘Allah be praised.’”

“Two minutes later, they said on the radio that the number had increased to five. I wanted to hide my smile, but I just couldn’t. Allah be praised, it was great. As the number of dead kept increasing, the passengers were applauding.”

The Baby Killers of Gaza


You can find a Hebrew translation of this article at my Hebrew blog, undertaken by Dan Bornstein. And there are plenty of other translated articles there.

Lawyer for Muslim Who Killed Wife for Not Cooking Goat, Says Prison Life Without Goat Will be Hard




ARE THERE REFUNDS FOR CONGRESS?

Sometimes I buy things and I’m disappointed when they don’t work right. I can just imagine how someone would feel when they bought Congress.

But that’s the tragic situation that Messrs Buffett, Adelson and Gates nee Microsoft find themselves in. They bought Congress and it isn’t giving them amnesty. What’s wrong with Congress, they ask in a New York Times editorial. They paid good for money it. Why won’t it work?

Billionaires Who Bought Congress Say They Feel “Shortchanged”




Who’s Ready for a 3rd Hillary Clinton Book?




CIVILIZATION'S END

“What I saw this afternoon in front of the synagogue of La Roquette, Paris:

-I saw a hundred pro-Palestinian activists rushing to the synagogue

-I saw a group of forty Jews outside defending 160 worshipers inside in an atmosphere of pure urban guerrilla.

-I’ve seen a dozen men, 50-55 years, Gil Taieb, dripping with sweat after the fight. I saw Fabien limping after a nasty blow to the leg. I was told after he was over 60.

-I saw a 40 year old woman say “I threw a chair at their faces, these bastards.”

Eyewitness Accounts of Muslim Attack on Paris Synagogue



David Brock Claims Hillary’s Bad Book Sales are a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy




THEY'LL HAVE TO SETTLE FOR PEPSI

He’d had enough of the hundreds of rockets in the sixth day of Operation Protective Edge, and the thousands before then, and for three hours refused to move his vehicle parked across the two-lane road leading to the crossing point, at the southern end of the Strip.

He said one of the bombs landed between two houses in the community, near the shelter where the children slept.

“I have no problem with them receiving humanitarian aid,” he told Israel’s Channel 2 News. “Gas, fuel, medical supplies – no problem,” he said. “But cola and all these other luxuries? They fire at us and we’re giving them goods so they can keep firing?”

“At night, my children cry, but the goods pass”

Israeli Truck Driver Blocks Coca Cola Shipment to Gaza




DUH

Shlomo Avineri is an expert on Marx and Engels. He was a fervent advocate of negotiating with the PLO and ended up heading Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

A Likud MK even compared him to “Lord Haw-Haw”, the British traitor who had broadcast from Berlin during World War II and was later executed)

Avineri’s awakening process was really slow.

“We were incredibly stupid…. We thought they wanted a state, and a two-state solution, but it turns out that they want to destroy Israel, because they cannot/will not accept any form of Jewish national self-determination.”

Israeli PLO Sympathizer: “We Thought They Wanted a State…. But it Turns Out They Want to Destroy Israel.”




FEAR NOT

Maybe the Iranians developed some special Jew-guidance system or Jewdar for Hamas’ rockets, but considering how many times those rockets have fallen on Muslim houses and hit Muslims, the system seems to be a little defective.

Or maybe those Muslims are really secret Jews.

Hamas Tells Israeli Muslims Not to Worry, Their Rockets Only Hit Jews




UK Jihadist Who Appeared in “No Life Without Jihad” Loses Life




IS IT A BIRD, IS IT A PLANE...

On Sunday, the M75 missile hit the front yard of Taher Tameem, 32, leaving a crater in the ground. The bomb’s blast blew out his living room windows, and pierced the entrance to the home and its interior with shrapnel.

At the time of the explosion, late Sunday afternoon, Tameem, his wife and three young children were seated in the kitchen, a dark interior room, preparing food for the evening’s Iftar, the meal that breaks the daily Ramadan fast.

“This is so good,” agreed Tameem, the homeowner. “I saw the missile as a blessing from the sky, because it comes from Hamas. Good for Hamas!”

West Bank Muslims Thrilled that Hamas is Bombing Them




More Foreigners Than Americans Have Confidence in Obama




IF AMERICA WERE MORE LIKE BULGARIA

The 3m-high fence, which has taken a week to build and was completed on Thursday, has already reportedly brought the number of illegal arrivals down to 300 per month compared with 2,000 people each month this time last year.

So Bulgaria can put up a 30 kilometer fence in a week, but we still can’t close off the border.

Bulgaria Puts Up Fence to Keep Muslim Illegal Aliens Out



BRAVE NEW WORLD: Government Wants Talking $30K Shopping Carts to Tell Food Stampers to Eat Healthy



NO SALE

Non-Jews found it easier to immigrate to some Latin American nations. Mexico admitted only 400 Jewish refugees between 1933 and 1945, but issued at least 16,000 immigration visas to Spanish loyalist refugees between 1938 and 1945, and over 1,400 visas to Catholic Polish refugees between 1939 and 1941.

Daniela Gleizer emphasizes the selectiveness and discretionary implementation of post-revolutionary Mexican immigration policy, which sought to preserve mestizaje—the country’s blend of Spanish and Indigenous people and the ideological basis of national identity—by turning away foreigners considered “inassimilable” and therefore “undesirable.”

Using the Holocaust to Argue for Illegal Alien Amnesty




Harry Reid: The Border is Secure, Now We Need Illegal Alien Amnesty




WELL LIBERALS HATE IT

Maryland State Police have classified anti-immigration graffiti spray painted on the former Army Reserve Center in Westminster as a hate crime.

The graffiti was sprayed sometime Saturday night or early Sunday morning, according to Lt. Patrick McCrory, commander of the state police Westminster barracks. The graffiti said “NO ILLEAGLES [sic] HERE NO UNDOCUMENTED DEMOCRATS.”

Condemning Illegal Immigration Now Prosecutable as a Hate Crime




TO RULE THEM ALL

What we are seeing is an emerging ideological authority that uses the state as one of its mechanisms of power, alongside everything from cultural institutions to organized activism. It makes no meaningful distinction between governments, non-profits, elected officials or activists. It sees itself as omnipresent and omninterventionist.

When everything is politicized, then nothing is private. That’s one of the creepier and nastier things about the left. Nothing is truly interior. Everything is subject to external regulation, whether through the power of the state, through mob power, through cultural power, or any other number of social justice interventions.

The Infinite State is Our New Religion




Neither Egypt nor Israel Want Kerry to Come

... from the comments

 Borax • Can we add the USA to that list? We don't want Kerry to come back here either.




Kerry Tells Congress Iran Sanctions a Good Idea, State Dept Denies He Ever Said It




HAMAS FINAL DESTINATION

The Gaza “child” is veteran horror movie actress Stephanie Honoré who is thirty. The whole point of these bloody photos is to shortcut rational thinking and push an emotional reaction to the fore.

Hamas and its Western defenders know that it doesn’t matter where they get their photos or whether they’re real. They know that if they saturate social media with enough of them, they can create the emotional reality of an atrocity.

Hamas Tries to Pass Off “Final Destination” Horror Movie as Israeli Atrocity





RT’s Abby Martin Hysterically Defending Putin on Twitter




LIBERALS ARE ALL HEART

Yellen is all heart. Sure she’s devaluing the dollar, but she’s doing it for the poor unemployed who will really benefit from higher food prices.

In unusually emotive language for a central banker, she talked about the “psychological trauma” suffered by the unemployed and their families.

So let’s keep hiking up commodities prices while devaluing their savings so they can be really traumatized by being unable to buy food.

Fed’s Yellen Vows to Continue Devaluing Dollar for the “Unemployed”




Leslie H. Gelb: “Fight Islamic Theocracy and Terrorism by Allying w/Iran”





VIVA LA REVOLUCIA

You just know these two are on a faculty somewhere teaching Marxism-Leninism. After this, they’re going to host a little tea at home for their colleagues while talking about how exciting spending an hour screaming about the Jews was.

White British Leftists in Keffiyahs Hate “Cheap Jewish Settlements”




Turkish Dictator Who Looks Like Hitler Compares Young Israeli Woman to Hitler




COUNTDOWN

Ordinarily it would have been rather hard for anyone to have the standing to challenge Obama’s illegal DREAM amnesty. But the attempt to force Arizona to issue drivers licenses to the illegals may have put the case on a path to the Supreme Court.

Will Obama’s Illegal DREAM Amnesty be his Next Big Supreme Court Loss?





THE ROUNDUP

Edward Cline writes about the Cujo Meme of Islamic terrorism.

And here is the Cujo Meme:  It is a cinematic analogy of how our State Department and Hollywood perceive Islam and Muslims, perceptions mirrored in their treatment of Muslims and Islam (and also of illegal immigrants), in film and at the negotiation tables. 

Muslims are just like friendly, docile St. Bernard dogs. But, bitten by the rabid bats of Islamophobic distortions, persecution, isolation, lies, discrimination, and attitudes of moral superiority by Westerners, the lovable dog goes mad and occasionally goes on a rampage against its tormentors.  

It's a tragedy that some people lose their lives in such incidents, but, who can blame the killers? They have legitimate grievances that have not been addressed with any sincere understanding or compassion. The hegemony of Western "civilization" must be challenged and dissolved if there is to be "peace." If there's violence, it's all our fault, not that of those going on rampages. Can one really morally judge dogs infected with rabies?

But Islam is basically a good dog. See? It's that simple. This has been the contextual premise of our foreign policy for a long time, and Hollywood's, as well.

That reminds me of my own piece, Housebreaking Islam...

About the only countries who thwack Islam on the nose anymore are America and Israel, and they do it all too lightly, and hardly say "Bad Dog" anymore. No wonder the house is full of crap, the kids need tetanus shots and the "dog" is running the house.

As the riots, murders, gang rapes and bombings across Europe show, a lot of people would rather learn to live like dogs, than stand up to the pack. But that kind of whipped cur attitude isn't limited to Europe.

Not only can't our governments say "Bad Dog" anymore, even civilians aren't allowed to say it on a freelance basis, let alone deliver a good solid thwack to the nose of the mangy curs. Forget about housebreaking Islam, the way things are going Islam is housebreaking us.

THE WAVE

They assume that the public sector unions, especially teachers, will be OK with this new pool of Democrats--who will vote mind you--as they also keep alive schools, and a range of government benefit programs on which public sector employees increasingly rely for their own employment. The DNC is sticking a big middle finger in the air and waving it at the private sector unions and their members, the black churches and the black middle and working classes, and, of course, nearly the entire non-elite white electorate of the USA. Taxpayers no longer have any clout. The Federal bureaucracy has become the armed implementation wing of the DNC.

We are seeing the Democratic Party openly reinvent itself, without any shame or purpose of evasion, into a party of career bureaucrats, educators, and crony capitalists, kept in power by stupid young people, Hollywood, the growing ranks of dole recipients, and, of course, the wave of  poor hispanics. 

Arguably the worker to clerk reinvention had happened a while ago, and across the West, where even the Reddest parties became the parties of government clerks and non-profit activists.

The labor unions that matter are increasingly government unions. The rest work for the liberal man.



IF...

If you understand Hebrew and can tolerate rap,




ASPIRATION

It is never enough to desire freedom. It is never enough to long for liberty. One must be compelled by their conscience to act to bring about that freedom. Zionism represents both the intrinsic desire within man to be free and the bringing about of that same freedom into fruition.

Chloe Valdary at Times of Israel.

In our modern age, things no longer exist to perform their function. Washing machines aren't designed to clean clothes, but to save water and energy. Food isn't there to be eaten, but not eaten. And armies aren't there to win wars, but to be moral. And the truly moral army never fights a war. When it must fight a war, then it fights it as proportionately as possible, slowing down when it's winning so that the enemy has a chance to catch up and inflict a completely proportional number of casualties on them.

Forget charging up a hill. Armies charge up the slippery slope of the moral high ground and they don't try to capture it from the enemy, because that would be the surest way to lose the moral high ground, instead they claim the moral high ground by refusing to try and capture it, to establish their moral claim to the moral high ground, which they can't have because they refuse to fight for it.

Israel has been engaged in a long drawn out struggle for the moral high ground. The moral high ground is to the modern Israeli what the land of Israel was to their pioneer ancestors who drained swamps, built roads and shot bandits. Then some of the bandits were discovered to be the oppressed peoples of the region, fresh from Syria or Jordan, who then got busy retroactively protesting the settlements built on that stretch of swamp that had been set aside in their revisionist history as belonging to their great-grandparents while dangling oversized house keys to the swamp.

Sadly the only way to win the moral high ground is by losing. Just look at the massive Arab armies who repeatedly invaded Israel, did their best to overwhelm it with the best Soviet iron that the frozen factories of the Ural could turn out, and lost the bid to drive the Jews into the sea, but won the moral high ground. Then their terrorist catspaws spent decades winning the moral high ground by hijacking airplanes full of civilians, murdering Olympic athletes and pushing old men in wheelchairs from the decks of cruise ships.

All these killing sprees accomplished absolutely nothing useful, aside from the killing of Jews, which to a certain sort of mind is a useful thing in and of itself, but that failure won the terrorist catspaws the moral high ground. Their failure to win a war by hijacking buses full of women and taking the children of a school hostage conclusively established their moral superiority and nobility of spirit.

The world was deeply moved when Arafat waddled up to the UN podium, with his gun, wearing a mismatched cotton rag on his head that would decades hence become the modish apparel of every third hipster standing in line with a can of 20 dollar fair trade Lima beans at Whole Foods, because his commitment to killing people in a failed cause that even he didn't believe in, in exchange for money from his backers in the Muslim world showed his deep commitment to the moral high ground.

In the seventies, after Israel had won a few too many wars, Henry "Woodcutter" Kissinger, suggested that it lose a war to gain the sympathy of the world. Golda wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea, but with the old woodcutter in charge of handing out the axes, there wasn't much choice about it. Israel came close to being destroyed in '73, but just when it might have won the sympathy of the world, its armies of young men dashing from synagogues into overcrowded taxis to get to the front lines, turned the tide. Israel won. The woodcutter of Washington lost and Israeli scrapyards filled up with piles of Soviet steel, which was good news for the big sweaty guys who ran them, but bad news for those pining for the lofty fjords of the moral high ground.

In '91 the Israelis went nuclear and decided to beat Arafat at his own game. Rabin and Peres talked the old terrorist out of retirement and down to Washington D.C. where they surrendered to him in an official ceremony at the Rose Garden overseen by a beaming Bill Clinton. Finally Israel had won the moral high ground. And the United States had carved off a chunk of that delicious moral high ground, even though Clinton was forced to fidget in his chair at Oslo when his Nobel Peace Prize went to the greasy terrorist, though perhaps he should have considered that defeat to be another victory of the moral high ground.

But the moral high ground proved notoriously elusive for the Jewish State. There was a brief lull when it seemed that the original sin of kicking ass had been atoned for in the Rose Garden, but then the terrorists started killing Israelis again and the Israelis insisted on fighting back. In no time at all the moral high ground was roped off with a special reserved section for terrorists and a sign reading, "No Israelis Will Be Admitted Unless They Renounce Their Government, Zionism and the Right of Self-Defense."

Peace was the last best hope of the new Israeli Hatikvah, not to be a free people in their own land, but to be a moral people in a land that didn't really belong to anyone in particular, but that they were optimistic everyone could live in harmony in.

But peace with terrorists meant not fighting back and there was a limit to what the 70 percent of the country that didn't go to sleep fantasizing about peace would accept in the name of peace.

And so, terrorists killed Israelis, Israelis killed terrorists, that part of the world located in an ugly modernist building overlooking Turtle Bay, which the turtles would like to have back, condemned Israel and demanded that it resolve things peacefully by surrendering more land to the terrorists in order to build up their confidence in Israel's commitment to a peaceful solution.

The terrorists were not expected to reciprocate and build up Israel's confidence in their commitment to a peaceful solution because they already had the moral high ground by way of losing the last thirty engagements with the IDF, including the battle of the school they set up snipers in, the church they took over and the hospital that they used as an ammo dump.

The great quandary for Israeli leaders is how to win a war without losing the moral high ground. This is a tricky matter because it requires winning the war and winning the peace. And you can't do both at the same time.

Israel's solution has been to fight limited wars while remaining absolutely committed to peace. No sooner does a war begin, then it is pressed to accept a ceasefire. To show its commitment to peace, Israel is expected to accept the ceasefire. At which point Hamas will begin shooting rockets again and the whole dance will begin all over again. But Israel has trouble refusing a ceasefire because its leaders still believe that they can get at the moral high ground by showing that they are more committed to peace than the other side.

The peace is however unwinnable. It's not even survivable in the long term. Peace either exists as a given condition or it is maintained by strong armies and ready deterrence. Peace cannot be found on the moral high ground, only the mountains of the graves of the dead.

Seeking the moral high ground is a fool's quest. Wars cannot be fought without hurting someone and trumpeting your morality makes it all too easy for your enemies to charge you with hypocrisy. The man who spends the most time vociferously protesting that he isn't a thief, that he has never touched a penny that belonged to anyone else and that he will swear on a floor-to-ceilling stack of bibles to that effect, looks far guiltier than the man who scowls and tells his accusers to mind their own business. The more Israel defends its own morality, the more it winds the chains of the accusers around its own neck.

Refining its warfighting with the object of fighting a truly moral war leads to refined techniques that kill terrorists but still cause some collateral damage, and to soldiers that are more afraid of shooting than of being shot at. And all this painstaking effort goes for naught since it really makes very little difference to Israel's enemies whether they have one photo of a dead Muslim civilian to brandish or a thousand. Either one makes for the same manner of indictment. In aiming to win the peace, Israel instead, like all modern states, loses the war.

The father of an Israeli soldier told his son after he was called up for duty that he would rather visit him in prison than visit him in the cemetery. "If you are fired on, fire back." That is good advice not just for that young man, but for his entire country, and for the civilized world. It is better to fire than be fired upon. It is better to be thought a criminal, than mourned in Holocaust museums. It is better to leave the moral high ground to those who worship the romance of endless bloodshed and defeat. It is better to lose the peace and win the war.

Terrorism is a game. The rules are simple. You have three choices. 1. Destroy the terrorists. 2. Live with terrorism. 3. Give in to the terrorists.

There are no other choices.

The first choice comes from the right. The third choice comes from the left. The second choice is
what politicians choose when they don’t want to make a decision that will change the status quo.

Despite all the explosions in Gaza, Israel is still stuck on the second choice. The air strikes aren’t meant to destroy Hamas. They are being carried out to degrade its military capabilities which will buy a year or two of relative peace. And that will be followed by more of the same in the summer of 2016 when Hamas will have deadlier Iranian and Syrian weapons that will terrorize more of the country.

That doesn’t sound like much of a deal, but these kinds of wars have bought more peace than the peace process ever did. The peace process led to wars. The wars lead to a temporary peace.

This status quo became the mainstream choice ever since Israelis figured out that the peace process wasn’t going to work and that their leaders weren’t about to defy the UN, the US, the UK and all the other U’s by actually destroying the terrorists.

When Netanyahu first ran against Peres, the difference between the center-right and the center-left was that he campaigned on security first and appeasement second, while Peres campaigned on appeasement first and security second. The center-right has dominated Israeli politics because most Israelis accepted Likud’s security first as a more reasonable position than Labor’s appeasement first.

Living with terrorism was a viable choice in the 80s. It stopped being a viable choice after Israel allowed terrorist states to be set up under the peace process. It’s one thing to manage terrorism in territories that you control. It’s another thing to deal with entire terrorist states inside your borders. Even physical separation isn’t enough. Not when terrorist groups can shell all your major cities.

Israel responds to that that threat with light air strikes which damage Hamas’ military capabilities. Hamas loses a few commanders, fighters and rockets, but scores a PR victory. Israel buys two years of peace while encouraging its enemies to attack it as a bunch of racist baby killers. Then Hamas replaces the rockets and fighters and launches a new operation and the whole thing begins again.

The left’s argument, framed by Washington Post pundits, Israeli leftists, Obama, assorted diplomats, retired security chiefs, activist busybodies funded by radical billionaires and the entire gang of foreign and domestic enemies, is that Israel has no choice except to default back to choice three; appeasement.

Israel has to gamble on appeasement because its situation is constantly worsening, they argue. What they neglect to mention is that the situation is worsening as part of their pressure on Israel to appease terrorists even though the current problems exist because of earlier appeasement.

“Drink this poison,” the doctors of diplomacy say. “It’ll cure you of all the aches and pains you’re suffering from the last time we told you to drink poison.”

“If you don’t drink more poison, you’ll get sicker and die,” they say. And if you do get sicker after drinking more poison, they’ll say it’s your own fault for not drinking enough poison. If only you had given away all of Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the terrorists wouldn’t be attacking you again.

Israel has been caught between choices two and three, either live with terrorism or make concessions to terrorists, and it has been bouncing between these choices.

People and politicians choose the option that causes the least pain at any given time. Israel chooses appeasement in response to international pressure. And when appeasement leads to terrorism, it does enough damage to Hamas to serve as a temporary deterrent, without leading to too much international outrage, again choosing the least painful option.

This is the true cycle that Israel is caught in. It’s not a cycle of violence. It’s a cycle of expediency.

The first choice, destroying the terrorists, is the most painful option in the short term, but the least painful option in the long term. The third choice, appeasing the terrorists, causes the least pain in the short term, but the most pain in the long term and the medium term. The second choice, living with terrorism, is slightly more painful in the short term, less painful in the medium term, but still quite painful in the long term.

Israelis have accepted short term and long term pain in exchange for a certain amount of relief in the immediate future. The occasional terrorist attack and the more ominous escalating conflict, an example of which we are seeing now, is accepted in exchange for a year or two of relative quiet.

It’s easy to criticize Israel for not finishing off Hamas, but let’s look at what is really standing in its way. Israeli Prime Minister Rabin deported 400 Hamas terrorists, including many Hamas leaders. In a Knesset speech he warned that, “We call on all nations and all people to devote their attention to the great danger inherent in Islamic fundamentalism. That is the real and serious danger which threatens the peace of the world in the forthcoming years.”

Instead the international community decided that the peace of the world was threatened by deporting Hamas terrorists. The media spent months covering the “suffering” of the deported Hamas terrorists. The United States voted for a UN resolution condemning Israel and ordering it to “insure the safe and immediate return of all those deported.”

The United States Ambassador to the United Nations said that deporting Hamas terrorists does "not contribute to current efforts for peace."

In 1988, Israel had deported a handful of Hamas and PLO terrorists. One of them, Jibril Mahmoud Rajub, vowed that if Israel didn’t let them back in that they would “infiltrate in as human bombs with explosives belted around our waists.”

Deputy Secretary of State John C. Whitehead warned Israel that if it didn't reconsider the
deportations "damage to our bilateral relations will occur."

If that was the reaction by the Reagan and Bush administrations to deporting a few terrorists, imagine the reaction by Obama and the EU to a comprehensive effort to force Hamas and the PLO out of Israel. And yet the inevitable can’t be postponed forever.

If Israel had not folded in the peace process, it might have been able to maintain the status quo of the intifada. But the second choice is no longer a viable long term option. The attacks have long since passed the point of mere terrorism and are taking place on a military scale.

Tolerating terrorism has ceased to be a long term strategy. That is something that both the left and the right agree on. The attacks are pushing Israel into choosing either large scale conflict or large scale appeasement. Appeasing terrorists has failed every time. Only destroying them can work.

Israel has a left that is eager to embrace the destructive policies of appeasement without regard to the consequences. It needs a right that is equally heedless of consequences when it comes to war to overcome that pain threshold which prevents it from doing the right thing and reclaiming the future.