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Friday, October 31, 2014

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Going Mad

By On October 31, 2014

 It’s Time for Israel to Recognize the Royal Republic of Ladonia



ONE GOVERNMENT UNDER ALLAH

The Secretary of State of the United States just ordered Israel to limit prayers in a particular place to Muslims, not Jews. And apparently to ban other non-Muslims too.

Remember when the United States used to uphold religious freedom? These days it sends people to jail for offending Muslims and orders other countries to engage in religious discrimination on behalf of Muslims.

Kerry Says Only Muslims, Not Jews, May Pray at Jewish Holy Site




80% of London Muslims Support ISIS




REMEMBER THE USSR

This is the corrupt ocean that the Clintons swim in. Expecting Hillary to know how jobs are created is like expecting an ex-con to go straight. Crime is all he knows. It’s all that the Clintons, the Obamas and the Warrens know. We are dealing with people who have no concept of how earning a living even works.

Like McAuliffe’s GreenTech, which in true Clinton style involved Hillary Clinton’s brother, dirty Chinese businessmen, an international fugitive, endangering national security, insider lobbying, an SEC investigation, millions in government loans and 2,000 union jobs for Virginia that never materialized.

And those million cars a year that it was supposed to build are nowhere in sight. But that’s how you create jobs in Hillary’s world.

The ‘You Didn’t Build That’ Party




Man Says Islam is Violent, Muslims Violently Beat Him




TRIGGER WARNING

Goldberg’s story was another brick in the wall for a narrative characterizing Netanyahu as “the problem” in the US-Israel relationship. It was supposed to lift the blame for Obama and sell him and the Democrats to Jewish voters.

It might have done that if not for the story being condensed down to a member of the administration calling the Prime Minister of Israel a “coward” and “chickens__t”.

It’s hard to take that money quote and blame Israel.

Jeffrey Goldberg scored his media moment, again, while unintentionally vaporizing his own narrative. Instead of Netanyahu being the problem, suddenly the pettiness and personal antipathy of the administration looks like the problem.

Obama and Jeffrey Goldberg Took Aim at Netanyahu, Shot Themselves in the Foot




Pentagon: Maybe General Susan Rice Shouldn’t be Running War on ISIS




THE VAST JEWISH/CHRISTIAN DOG CONSPIRACY

Mr Syed Azmi Abhalshi, the man behind the controversial “I Want To Touch A Dog” event, has apologised for the furore it has caused.

However, the social activist stressed that the programme was meant to be educational, and not to promote liberalism as alleged by certain quarters.

“I organised this event because of Allah, not to deviate the people’s faiths, try to change the Islamic rules of law, poke fun at the ulama or encourage pluralism,” he told a packed press conference at Kelab Sri Selangor here on Saturday.

By pluralism he means Christianity. Even though he’s Muslim, Muslims accused him of secretly being a Christian.

Why? I’m sorry, you weren’t expecting any of this to make sense, were you?

The user said the dog-familiarization event was part of “a Jewish agenda to Christianise Muslim-Malaysians through subtle measures.”

Very subtle. Subtle in a way that only the mentally ill or Muslims can grasp.

Muslim Authorities Warn of “Terrible Consequences” from Petting Dogs




Obama Spending $1.6 Mil to Prosecute ISIS for War Crimes




WARMAPHOBIA

Why should Americans be worried when their government waves ISIS Jihadists and Ebola patients through the airport? You have to be a hysterically panicking nut to be concerned about two deadly phenomena that have already killed thousands of people within recent memory entering the country.

The same talking heads shaking their heads over those wacky Americans worried that they’ll die just because the man sitting in the seat next to them is vomiting Ebola into a paper bag or reading the bloodiest parts of the Koran while adjusting a wire that leads to his shoe, are not immune to panic.

Throw something serious at them like Global Warming or Gamergate, the Redskins, Voter ID or children praying in school and they will hysterically panic so hard that the chyrons scrolling under their sweating faces will turn red.

Government-Mandated Hysteria




Is Malala a Marxist and Does It Matter?




OLD YELLERS

The real lesson is that despite their tough guy routines, Christie and Cuomo are wimps who folded to Obama in 24 hours.

They folded even though they had public opinion on their side. And they folded because they likely never cared to begin with. They weren’t really all that concerned about the public. They wanted to do the popular thing. And when they came under enough fire, they backed down.

Voters will remember how their safety was sold out by Cuomo and Christie and how both men, who like to yell on camera, folded when the cameras were turned off.

Lessons from the Christie/Cuomo Surrender to Obama on the Ebola Quarantine




CDC had Time to Set Up Site About Zombies, No Time for Ebola Protocols



BULLETS OVER KOSOVO

Bay has a bit of a Republican rep, but he’s mostly apolitical and met with Obama. It’s being produced by Erwin Stoff who is a reliable Dem donor and seemingly donated to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.

The actual script was written by Chuck Hogan who appears to have donated to Elizabeth Warren. On Twitter he has claimed that, “No BS politics in the book, just an account of actual American heroes.”

Whether he’ll bring any politics into it is open to question. His Twitter feed makes it clear that he really hates Republicans.

Will Pre-Election Benghazi Movie Produced by Hillary Donor Tell the Truth?




Ebola Docs and Nurses Care About Africans, Don’t Care About Americans




WHY WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT WHAT WE CAN'T TALK ABOUT

So you can make a video about the harassment of women, just don’t talk about black men. You can condemn rape culture, as long as you limit it to white Ivy League men and don’t talk about hip hop or rape rates in minority communities. There are subjects that feminists place off limits because they aren’t there for women’s causes, their true allegiance is to the larger agenda of the left.

Feminist Author Claims Exposing Minority Sexism is Racist




Apple CEO Uses Slave Labor, Tells Alabama it Needs Gay Rights - Two things that are illegal in Alabama; gay marriage and slave labor. Apple likes them both.



How Much Cholera Will Obama’s 100,000 Haitians Bring to America?




...INSIDE EVERY LIBERAL

Forget “Inside Every Liberal is a Totalitarian Screaming to Get Out” and try “Inside Every Liberal is an Overweight Emperor Eager to Squeeze His Gut Into Some Plastic Armor and Play Emperor”.

But considering his lesbian wife’s costume, they may actually be Antony and Cleopatra. And they may just be historically illiterate and sympathetic enough to afro-historical revisionism to think that’s accurate.

But if Bill de Blasio had been Antony, Cleopatra would have gone for the asp on meeting him. And if that were Cleopatra, Antony would have jumped on the first trireme and kept rowing on his own until he ended up in America.


Socialist NYC Mayor Dresses Up as Caesar for Halloween




Even Liberals Don’t Trust ThinkProgress




REPRESENT

Bears don’t leave if you keep feeding them. Political hacks whose knowledge of the law is somewhere below that of actual rap stars (with good reason) don’t retire if you turn them into celebrities.

Ginsburg is so desperate for fame that she’s collecting her meme-of-the-moment shirts because it’s the closest she’s ever come to being popular or relevant. She follows a Tumblr page dedicated to her.

It’s pathetic, but her narcissism may help turn the Supreme Court further to the right. Then she’ll really be notorious.

If Liberals Keep Feeding Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Ego, She’ll Never Leave




Millionaire Who Doesn’t Use ObamaCare Thanks God She Doesn’t Believe In for its Existence




THE ROUNDUP

 THE CRIMINALIZATION OF EVERYTHING

In addition to violating Articles I and III of the Constitution, Heritage says the ‘deceptively named’ Violence Against Women Act of 2013 would “reauthorize and expand the 1994 law that made domestic violence – typically handled by state and local governments – a federal crime.”

Consider this scenario:  You are going through a very difficult divorce and your husband (or wife, for that matter) accuses you of spousal abuse.  Whether it’s true or not, would you want the federal government—say, Eric Holder and his DOJ—handling your case?

VAWA would also broaden the definition of domestic violence to include causing ‘emotional distress.’  Heritage says, “This expansive and vague language will increase fraud and false allegations, for which there is no legal recourse.”  In other words, even allegations of emotional distress could be taken to the federal level and used against you.

Ann Marie Murrell writing about the Violence Against Women Act



 TWILIGHT

In my neighborhood in Seattle many don't believe in anything sacred other than, at best, Obama. Their entire belief system centers on that tin god then on themselves and their "only one life to live, live, live!." All of which makes for an empty skin sack of existential desolation that they try to fill every Halloween with the greatest of American secular concepts: fun.

"Fun" is a curiously American concept that seems to have begun its invasion of all aspects of our shared life shortly after the end of WWII. I suppose that after the Great Depression and the war, the nation felt it could use a little fun. And, as usual, that great American axiom, "If it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing," came into play. Nowhere do we see the idea that life should be "fun" pumped up into bigger balloons of pure vanity than on Halloween.

From a minor tradition of sending kids out for to pick up some free candy, Halloween has mushroomed into a major American auto-fornication festival in which we regularly -- and with increasing intensity -- celebrate the meat state of life while pretending to vaguely celebrate the spiritual part. If you've noted, as I have, the increasing lust for gruesomeness in costumes at every new Halloween, you might have reflected that dark humor has taken a back seat to darker fascinations. One new costume around this year allows you to dress us as a corpse in a body bag complete with wounds and autopsy slashes. And that's a mild one.
...from Gerard at American Digest.

What better expression of Carpe Diem could there be? Cultural obsessions with death invariably accompany a deeper despair and a sense of the limitations of materialism.

Death, mortality, drive the unbeliever into greater extremes of pursuit of fun, momentary joy, because night hovers around the corner. The more gruesome the display, the more self-evident the deeper despair of immortality.



POST-FACT AMERICA

Ebola is so hard to catch that there is no reason to worry about causal exposures to those without clear symptoms. But then why do health authorities still try to hunt down anyone who had even a brief encounter with supposedly asymptomatic carriers?

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi were caused by a video that sparked a riot, and then apparently not. Various narratives about corruption and incompetence at the VA, IRS, NSA, GSA and Secret Service are raised and then dropped. The larger truth is that these scandals must be quarantined from infecting the president’s progressive agenda.

Laws used to be real, not abstract. Again, not anymore. The administration sort of enacts some elements of Obamacare but ignores others. Enforcement of federal immigration law is negotiable, likewise depending on the campaign cycle.

... from the great Victor Davis Hanson.




CONTINUATION

The ark was built from scratch. It incorporated no stolen property. It was done in true partnership with G-d and served as a symbol of everything that the world should have been and no longer was.

Noach's ark was a small world in miniature as it should have been. It was a miniature earth. A model for the relationship between humans and animals and between man and G-d. In partnership with G-d, man had made a world, and G-d had responded by making that world able to bear life.

Noach invested physical property with moral value. He made the ark more than wood, he made it into a temple. Through his honest partnership with G-d, he showed that physical objects could become sacred again in a world too corrupt for sacredness to exist.

...from The Sultan's Parsha, You Did Build That

Thursday, October 30, 2014

The Islamization of Jerusalem

By On October 30, 2014
Chaya Zissel Braun was murdered on her first trip back from the Western Wall where the indigenous Jewish population of Israel continues to pray in the shadow of the shrine established there by the Muslim conquerors from which the racist Muslim settlers rain down rocks on the Jewish worshipers.

The three-month old baby girl died when a Muslim terrorist rammed a car into a crowd hurtling her into the air and headfirst into the pavement. Her death did not take place in isolation. It was not caused by a tiny minority of extremists. Her blood was spilled on the street for the Islamization of Jerusalem.

The Islamization of Jerusalem is an international cause. It does not just come out of Gaza City or even Ramallah. Nor Doha or Istanbul. The politicians and diplomats of every major country demand the Islamization of Jerusalem. When they talk about a Palestinian State with its capital in Jerusalem, what they are really demanding is the restoration of the Muslim ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem in 1948.

They are demanding it with words and boycotts. But the Muslim settlers, on whose behalf they cry for the Apartheidization of Jerusalem, are writing their own demands with the blood of little girls.

The baby girl was murdered to Islamize a city. She died as the Israeli soldiers had died reunifying Jerusalem after the Arab Legion had ethnically cleansed the Jewish population and as ordinary Jerusalemites had died at the hands of Jordanian snipers searching the city for Jewish and Christian targets.  The victims of those years of Muslim occupation included Yaffa Binyamin, a 14-year-old girl sitting on the balcony of her own house and a Christian carpenter working on the Notre Dame Convent.

Like Chaya, I was born in Jerusalem. Like Yaffa, I lived in a building targeted by Muslim snipers. But the Six Day War had ended the reign of Muslim snipers over the city. The building where my parents made their home had been cheap once because living there could mean instant death for anyone looking out of a window at the wrong time. The liberation and reunification of Jerusalem had made it a place where Jewish children could play on balconies and Christians could repair churches without being murdered.

Under Muslim occupation, while Jordanian snipers were cold-bloodedly murdering their children, the Jewish residents living under fire couldn’t so much as put in an outhouse without being reported to the UN for illegal construction. That is no exaggeration. In one case a UN observer organization held four meetings to discuss an outhouse for local residents before condemning Israel for illegal construction.

It did not however condemn Jordan when one of its soldiers opened fire on a train wounding a Jewish teenage girl.

Muslim outrage over Jewish outhouses mattered more than the Muslim murder of Jewish children. It still does. Today the State Department calls the murder of that little girl a traffic incident while warning Israel that Jews living in Jerusalem will end any possibility of peace.

The hysterical condemnations of “illegal construction” did not end when the Muslim occupation did. The great outhouse of the United Nations and the smaller outhouses of the foreign ministries of countries whose leaders tremble whenever Muslims grow agitated over a cartoon or a YouTube video fill the air with the vilest of substances whenever a Jewish family moves into a home in Jerusalem.

Hillary Clinton spent 45 minutes shrieking at Netanyahu over the phone after a planning committee allowed new housing in Jerusalem to advance to the public comment stage,  and told the media that the proposal that Jews live in a part of Jerusalem that she believes should belong to Muslims is “insulting” to the United States.

The latest firestorm exploded over seven Jewish families moving into homes that they had bought legally in an area from which Jews had been ethnically cleansed by racist Muslim violence in the twenties and thirties. Before that the State Department and White House warned that Israel was alienating “even its closest allies” by proposing to build houses on Airplane Hill, a place mainly known for having an Israeli plane crash there during the Six Day War and had formerly hosted temporary housing for Russian and Ethiopian immigrants.

Meanwhile when Chaya was murdered, the State Department urged “all sides to maintain calm and avoid escalating tensions in the wake of this incident.” It wasn’t as if anything important had happened. Just an Israeli-American baby murdered in pursuit of the same State Department goal of Islamizing Jerusalem.

Secretary of State John Kerry did not call President Abbas, the unelected president of the PLO’s Palestinian Authority, to berate him when one of his advisers called the murderer of that child a “heroic martyr”. Hillary Clinton did not come out of retirement to shriek at him over the phone when his party suggested that the killer would be receiving his 72 virgins in paradise.

Joe Biden, who had taken the time four years ago to specifically “condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem”, had nothing to say. If only something more important had happened than a presidential advisor to an Obama-backed terror state calling the murderer of an American child a hero, like planning for new housing “advancing”.

No one objects when Muslim settlers build houses in Jerusalem or anywhere else. But the objections pour in when the indigenous Jewish population builds so much as a house or an outhouse.

What we are talking about here is not peace, but ethnic cleansing. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Their synagogues were blown up by the Muslim occupiers. Their tombstones were used to line the roads traveled by the racist Muslim settlers. In 1948, the Jews were ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem to Islamize the city. Whether they were Zionists or anti-Zionists did not matter. They were not Muslims. That was all that counted.

Their synagogues were blown up by the Muslim occupiers. Their tombstones were used to line the roads traveled by the racist Muslim settlers.

“For the first time in 1,000 years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter,” Abdullah el-Talal, a commander of the Muslim invaders, had boasted. “Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews' return here impossible.” In his memoirs he wrote, “I knew that the Jewish Quarter was densely populated with Jews who caused their fighters a good deal of interference and difficulty…. Only four days after our entry into Jerusalem the Jewish Quarter had become their graveyard. Death and destruction reigned over it.”

Life magazine published photos of the atrocity writing that, “Muslim censors, not only in Palestine but in neighboring Arab countries which have major communication outlets, tried for a fortnight to keep the news from leaking out.” The photographer who took the photos was sentenced to death by the Arab High Committee.

This ethnic cleansing is what Hillary Clinton, what Joe Biden and John Kerry have been defending. The Islamization of Jerusalem is the thrust of all the peace plans put forward. Jews living in Jerusalem outrages them as much as it outraged Abdullah.

The entire phony “Palestinian” narrative in which the regional Sunni Arab Muslim majority, that is busy slaughtering Christians, Kurds, Shiites and anyone else it can get its hands on, acts as if it’s the victim because its racist ethnic cleansing plans were frustrated when its Jewish victims fought back and won.

The Muslim occupiers have added insult to injury by pretending to be the indigenous population to aid in their attempts at displacing the indigenous Jewish population through terror and lies.

Abdullah el-Talal, who became the military governor of occupied Jerusalem, said, “I have seen in this defeat of the Jews the heaviest blow rendered upon them, especially in terms of morale, since they were evicted from the Western Wall and from the Jewish Quarter, for the first time in fifteen generations.”

Every politician who denounces Jews building houses in Jerusalem, but not Muslims doing the same thing is endorsing Abdullah’s genocidal vision and all the terrorism that goes with it. Abdullah had done his dirty work under the command of a British general. The British parliament’s endorsement of an Arab-Muslim occupying ethnostate under the Palestinian flag is the continuation of an old and ugly history.

The murder of little girls like Chaya Zissel Braun does not take place in a vacuum. The Islamizers of Jerusalem gain confidence when they see that the international community stands behind their demands. In 1920, racist Muslim settler mobs in Jerusalem had chanted "Mohammed's religion was born with the sword", “Death to the Jews” and “the government is with us” as Muslim policemen under British colonial rule had joined with them in the rape and murder of the indigenous Jewish population.

Too many governments are still with those who wave the sword of Mohammed and cry death to the Jews. They encourage them, defend their agenda and issue weak rebukes when blood is spilled in the name of Islamization in Jerusalem, as it is in Kobani by ISIS and a thousand other places. Those who endorse the Islamization of Jerusalem cannot escape responsibilities for the crimes of the Islamizers.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

The Fat Terrorist Will Sing

By On October 28, 2014
The protest has been held and the Death of Klinghoffer will go on. The fat terrorist will sing, the media will chant his praises and the old sad story of failed Jewish activism in America will go on.

After the behind-the-scenes lobbying and the ignored letters to the editor, a protest rally fronted by two out of work Republican politicians brought more attention to the Met's pro-terrorist opera without doing anything to actually stop it from going forward.

Rudy Giuliani, the protest's marquee name, wrote an article expressing his admiration for the composer, called the Met's cancellation of HD broadcasts a "harder and more courageous decision than is recognized by those who oppose this opera" and promised to continue patronizing the Met.

And if hard-hitting rhetoric like that doesn't make the Met shake in its boots, I don't know what will.

None of this is a new story. It's the repetition of a very old story.

In 1914, the Gary Plan was the Common Core of its day, a highly controversial radical educational reform that both dumbed down the curriculum and made it ridiculously confusing. Like Common Core, the Gary Plan was backed by major business interests, including the Rockefeller Corporation, liberal newspapers and wealthy busybodies. It was championed by the progressive quasi-Republican mayor of New York, John Purroy Mitchel, the Bloomberg of his day.

The schools targeted by the Gary Plan were primarily Jewish. Among its other charming features, the Gary Plan made it difficult for students from working class families to work part time or obtain a religious education. And it killed their hope of a higher education by dumbing down their classes.

Immigrant Jews took on the liberal establishment. And the liberal establishment ignored them and mocked them.

The Jews formed committees and leagues, attended every meeting, wrote letters to the editor, pleaded to be heard. And for two years the newspapers, including the New York Times, refused to report on the opposition. A coalition of parents associations and chambers of commerce  asked for hearings on the plan and the Board of Education replied that it saw no evidence that the public wanted hearings.

The Jewish establishment had its shot and it failed. It had gone through all the decent motions of democracy and was brushed off by the liberal establishment.

So Jewish students and parents instead began boycotting classes. Thousands of students marched through the streets. School windows were smashed. Board meetings were hijacked by protesters. Police fought students and parents in the street. The opposition could no longer be ignored.

Mitchel lost the election. The Gary Plan disappeared into history. Both are mourned obscurely by progressives for not doing a better job of "messaging".

All that may have happened a century ago, but the lesson has yet to be learned.

The American Jewish establishment's narrow toolbox of meetings, lobbying and letters to the editor utterly failed during the Holocaust. The Nazis were not impressed by them and neither was FDR. It took rogue elements like Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht to actually bring the issue to public attention through abrasive and angry rhetoric targeting FDR and the establishment.

The impotent establishment which had written letters and engaged in backdoor lobbying while millions died denounced them for it.

The same thing happened again with Soviet Jewry. For two generations, the Jewish establishment had issued meaningless formal protests when the USSR closed synagogues, shot Rabbis and then went straight to mass murder. Soviet Jews were only truly able to leave once another group of rogue activists hijacked Soviet attempts at detente by vandalizing Soviet embassies and airplanes and releasing mice at Soviet cultural events.

In 1972, when Soviet dancers appeared at the Metropolitan Opera, activists of the Jewish Defense League threw chicken blood at them. "Soviet culture will not be allowed in New York while Soviet Jews languish in concentration camps", their statement said.

In 1986, a Soviet dance troupe's appearance at the Met was emptied out with a tear gas grenade. The Soviet ambassador had to be evacuated from the building with tears in his eyes. By the next show, the Met had to be packed with security, patrons were being all but strip searched and bomb sniffing dogs were circulating through the audience. Going to the Met was now like going into a prison.

The establishment condemned them. Koch called them "the scum of the earth" for making the Soviet ambassador cry. But their tactics worked when those of the establishment had failed.

The same story repeated itself when it came to Israel. Except the left has monopolized militant activism while the Jewish establishment scurries around with reactive responses, defensive editorials and the occasional rally. These tactics are not useful when it comes to people throwing blood at you and they are useless even when opposing the high culture's endorsement of the mass murder of Jews encoded in pro-terrorist events like the Death of Klinghoffer.

American Jewish activism remains rooted in checking boxes. The establishment lobbies, comes away with some sort of compromise, like the ADL's cancellation of the Met's HD broadcast, and declares victory. Angry letters are written. A protest takes place. And nothing changes except for the worse.

The other side knows that activism is meant to lead to something. Our side runs cargo cult activism in which going through the motions of activism is supposed to lead to results without actually having a plan. It's an organizational loop that leads to nothing. We protest to register our protest. These aren't actions. They're comforting rituals.

Protesting to register displeasure is a middle class reflex. It's the response of those who think that the institutions we deal with are basically democratic and just aren't hearing us. It's not a movement of real change. Like the Tea Party, it goes through the middle class motions of democracy without recognizing that the system is fundamentally broken and will not be fixed at that level.

Expecting the rituals of middle class outrage to register against the militants of the left who are now in charge or their useful idiots is a faint hope. It would take far larger numbers to even make a dent in their arrogance and their certainty that their network of media and political support will hold on.

The Death of Klinghoffer protests got some things right, like the wheelchairs, a coalition with the Catholic League and the badges and signs, and some things wrong, like Giuliani, but it made the same basic mistakes that the various pro-Israel and anti-Terrorist protests that I used to attend regularly over the years did. It was protest as catharsis. It had no real objective that it could hope to accomplish except to embed mention of it somewhere in a story. It was registering opposition and moral outrage, rather than forcing change.

And as noble as that is, it's also impotent.

If the Met had decided to put on an opera in which Jews were the victims and Muslims were the villains, activists from the left would have chained themselves inside with bullhorns, they would have poured fake blood on themselves and on the patrons, they would have done their best to disrupt every performance turning the story around from the opera to their message.

And they would have gotten their way.

The left would have looked at such a situation not as another hopeless attack, but as a platform for getting out their message by turning themselves into the victims. Their end goal would not have been to merely disrupt the opera, but to get the Met to give equal time to their agenda by putting on an opera of their own. Not to reassure themselves that they still matter.

Despite how this may sound, I am not criticizing the organizers of the protest. I have been to countless protests like it overseen by very nice and committed people who think that they have succeeded if they can get the City Comptroller or Public Advocate to come on stage and condemn terrorism. Their hearts are in the right place and they are doing their best against the odds.

But the left does not view activism as a middle class ritual. It doesn't protest and expect things to change. It protests to mobilize and radicalize. It has an agenda every bit as developed as that of any corporation, and usually funded by corporations, even if it doesn't seem like it sometimes. Activism to it is a science. A protest rally or a letter is one stage in a comprehensive plan of action.

Our side does not have a plan. We react in outrage to something and we express our outrage with words, with letters, articles and speeches. We fail to effectively change things at the top because there is never anything at stake for an institution like the Met. They have nothing to lose. We do.

The Met is vulnerable through its government funding. And it's vulnerable to disruption. It's an institution with financial problems faced with angry unions and accusations of waste. The left would have had a field day with any of those things. It would not have wasted its money getting Giuliani and Pataki up on stage to cloak the protest in middle class respectability.

Militant tactics aren't the only option, but you either have a goal and a plan for accomplishing it or you're going through the motions of outrage. You're not going to win an argument with the liberal establishment with a protest rally featuring two retired politicians. You're not going to get people to take the murder of Jews by Muslim terrorists seriously by doing the same things that failed when it came to Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Activism is about accomplishing short term goals or using outrage to build a movement. If you're not doing either of these things, then the fat terrorist will go on singing.

Saturday, October 25, 2014

The Left's Worst Crime in the Middle East

By On October 25, 2014
The left's worst crime in the Middle East has been its support for the region's Arab-Muslim majority at the expense of its minorities. It has supported the majority's terrorism, atrocities, ethnic cleansing and repression of the region's minorities. Very rarely has it raised a voice in their support, and when it has done so, it was in muted tones completely different from their vigorous defenses of the nationalism of the Arab Muslim majority.

The left backed the Arab Spring which rewarded the ambitions of Arabist and Islamist activists at the expense of Coptic, African and other minorities. Its great regional obsession is statehood for the Arab Muslims of Israel, (better known by their local Palestinian brand), but has little to say about the Kurds in Turkey or the Azeri in Iran. The million Jewish refugees and the vanishing Christians of the region never come up in conversation. They certainly don't get their own lefty protest rallies. 

The Africans of Sudan could have used an entire UN organization dedicated to their welfare, which the Arab Muslims who had failed to wipe out the region's Jewish minority are the beneficiaries of. But they had to make do with third tier aid.

Unlike the Arab nationalists and Islamists of Libya, the French, English and American air force did not come to their rescue. It came to the rescue of the Libyans who showed their gratitude in the time honored way of the Arab majority by massacring the African minority and then killing some Americans. But what's a little genocide between friends?

The left embraced Pan-Arabism, a race based nationalism, in line with the Soviet Union's expansionist foreign policy. Pan-Arabism's socialism made it easy for the left to ignore its overt racism along with the admiration of many of its leading lights for Nazi Germany. The same left which refused to see the Gulags and the ethnic cleansing under the red flag, turned an equally blind eye to the contradiction of condemning Zionism for its ethnic basis, while supporting Pan-Arabism, which was ethnically based.

Under Zionism, Israel retained a sizable Arab minority. The Pan-Arabists however drove their Jews out with mob violence, political repression, prisons and public executions. The left's criticisms of Zionism are rendered moot by their own support for Pan-Arabism, and their own longstanding hostility to Jewish national identity, insisting that socialism demands that Jews assimilate into the dominant race, whether in Russia or Western Europe. In the Middle East and North Africa, Arabization has led to repression of non-Arab minorities and the destruction of other cultures through the insistence on unity through race.

As the sun of Pan-Arabism sets, the left has turned its attention to Pan-Islamism with equal enthusiasm. While Pan-Arabism allowed Christian Arabs some representation, Pan-Islamism excludes based on religion. Having endorsed a racial tyranny, the left has fallen so low that it now champions majority theocracies.

The left's fledgling support for Kurdish nationalism has faded as Turkey has gone from a secular ally of the Western powers, to an Islamist tyranny dreaming of empire. This perverse twist of affairs has the left abandoning the national struggles of an oppressed people when their rulers align themselves more closely with the bigoted regional majority.

The War on Iraq, which the left hated, removed a tyrant aligned with the region's Sunni majority and the Libyan campaign, which the left supported, removed a tyrant who had deviated too far from the positions of that majority. So too in Egypt, where Mubarak's excessive tolerance for minorities, led the left to endorse the Pan-Arabist and Pan-Islamist calls for his overthrow. And in Tunisia, where a government tolerant of minorities has been replaced by the Islamists.

The pattern repeats itself over and over again as the left rises in support of racial and theocratic rule. And for all the left's critiques of American and European foreign policy, its own foreign policy which endorses racial and theocratic rule and works to bring it about is a true crime and blot on the region.

It is no coincidence that the one country in the region that the left hates above all else, is neither Arab nor Muslim. Just as it is no coincidence that the Arab Spring replaces regimes tolerant of minorities with Islamists and Arabists. The left's true regional agenda is the racist agenda of its Arab members. The Arab Socialists and the Islamists who have defined its regional positions have turned the left into a vehicle for their racial and theocratic agendas.

For the left to shout racism when Americans empowered the Kurds in Iraq, or when Israeli soldiers stand watch over tiny strips of land where the region's oldest and most frequently oppressed minority finds shelter is the height of hypocrisy. It is the left which is racist. It is the left which backs theocracies and always supports the majority's oppression of the minority.

The idiots in their Keffiyahs eager to give everyone a lesson on the Middle East think the Assyrians vanished in ancient times, have no idea who the Circassians are, or the Arab Gypsies, think the Zoroastrians are a traveling circus, and couldn't begin to tell you anything about the Druze, the Bahai or the Ahmadis-- except that American foreign policy or Israel are probably to blame.

In the meantime they proudly wear a garment associated with the Pan-Arabists and their rejection of Turkish reforms-- while stupidly believing that it's all-purpose garments of revolution. But why should they care that they're endorsing a romanticized neo-feudalism that led to mass murder and the rise of a theocratic reactionary movement disguised as nationalism. Or that these movements have inevitably led to the repression of minorities and the ethnic cleansing and attempted genocide of the region's native inhabitants by their Arab Muslim conquerors.

The left relies on the intellectual laziness of its followers not to notice that the nationalism they support is the nationalism of medieval conquerors and the resurgence of their colonial descendants. The only two nations with any historical roots in the region are Israel and Persia. In North Africa, where the Arab Spring has burned fiercest, the left is cheering the resurgence of an Arab Pretoria, racist regimes turning into even more racist theocracies run by the great-great-grands of the men who invaded the region and destroyed much of its history and culture.

The Arab Spring, with its purges of Coptic Christians and Africans, its outpouring of hostility toward Jews, is as perverse as if the left had suddenly decided that Africa needed proper Boer rule. It's the senseless behavior of racist idiots and totalitarian hypocrites who think that if they call you a "racist" first then they win the argument.

The left has endorsed Arab and Islamic rule over the Middle East, which means that it is in absolutely no position to criticize anyone or anything. It will talk your ear off about Gaza or Fallujah, but it won't have anything to say about Turkish chemical weapons raids into Kurdish areas of Iraq. The tens of thousands of political prisoners in Turkish jails, some there for no other crime than the use of the Kurdish language, don't exist for the left. Erdogan's casual threat to ethnically cleanse the Armenians again doesn't stir their interest.

It is no secret that the left is totalitarian and that it is attracted to totalitarian movements. But few have been willing to say it openly and clearly when it comes to its politics in the Middle East.

The left picked Pan-Islamists over secularists in Iran and Turkey. It picked racialist fascists in Egypt, Iraq and Syria-- and their local Palestinian militias. It backed Islamist and Arabist revolts again in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. And after backing every totalitarian majoritarian regime that wasn't too closely aligned to the United States-- their one great enemy is the region's only democratic state.

The left's worst crime in the Middle East is its craven love for tyranny, for grand empires built on race and religion, over the national and political rights of the minority. These Apartheid states are all they care about. Their greatest effort has been set not on resolving the stateless problems of the Kurdish minority, on the national borders of Armenia or ending the Turkish occupation and settlement of Cyprus-- but on adding yet another Arab-Muslim state to the region.

Palestine, the cynical project of Pan-Arabist and Pan-Islamist thugs, is the great obsession of the left. Because if there's one thing that the Middle East doesn't have enough of, it's totalitarian regimes built on Arab and Islamist identity. And the one thing it has too much of is democratic state with a non-Arab and non-Muslim majority. And that one thing is what they are committed to destroying.

Friday, October 24, 2014

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Dogs, Tornados and Jews

By On October 24, 2014


PARDONS FOR PEDOS

Covering up for Gutman’s sexual abuse of children would have been about more than just the State Department’s usual white wall of silence. Like many European ambassadors in the new administration, Gutman was not a diplomat — he was a donor. A man like Christopher Stevens might be sent to Libya, but positions in European capitals were mostly reserved for major contributors to the Democratic Party.

When it came to money, Howard Gutman, a top Washington lawyer, brought in the cash by raising $500,000 for Obama’s campaign committee and another $275,000 for his inauguration committee.  And Gutman was not just an Obama boy. He had donated the legal maximum to Hillary’s presidential bid.

That was a lot of money. Enough to let a donor molest as many children as he cared to.

Clinton’s Pardons for Pedophiles




Palestinian Authority President’s Advisor: Murderer of American-Israeli Baby is “Heroic Martyr”




COWARDICE AND CRUELTY
ISIS is using the same tactics with America as it did with the Iraqi Army. Beheadings and humiliations of captured prisoners. It is showing its members and its supporters that it is stronger than America.

This is what terrorists do.

ISIS hasn’t won battles against enemies that stood and fought. It broke the morale of its opponents by humiliating them. This is a powerful thing in the Middle East’s honor/shame cultures where fighting forces have poor professionalism and draw their morale from a false sense of confidence. You’ve seen all those videos of Jihadists running out of cover or accidentally blowing themselves up.

This is the attitude that keeps the enemy going. They don’t really follow orders. They don’t really learn how to do things. What unites them is a sense of inevitability. Puncture that by humiliating them and they collapse. Their macho shows are all hat and no cattle. There’s nothing underneath the bravado except cowardice and cruelty.

Why is ISIS Provoking America? To Humiliate It.




Americans just gave every Gazan $200



AN ISIS MAN

In an interview with radio shock-jock Howard Stern, Canadian rocker Neil Young suggested a fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) is not worth the release of greenhouse gases from military vehicles.

“And yet we are fighting what? ISIS…al-Qaeda. And we are fighting these wars against these organizations and their carbon footprint has got to be like 1% of our huge army and our navy and all of this stuff that have with all our big machines. We’re doing more damage to the earth with our wars.”

While Neil Young spoke to a Calgary news conference at the Jack Singer Concert Hall prior to his Sunday night show, five rock star-style motorhomes were left running outside, spewing fumes into the Calgary air, even though they were mostly unoccupied.

Inside the concert hall, the 68-year-old rock ‘n’ roll legend was talking about the “elephant in the room,” which he later explained was man-made global warming. The only elephant I could see was his enormous carbon footprint and his even bigger hypocrisy between his walk and his talk.

Neil Young: Al Qaeda More Moral Than US Army Because of Smaller Carbon Footprint



GOOD CALIPH, BAD CALIPH

Islamic terrorism benefits Muslims directly and indirectly. The direct benefits are obvious. The indirect benefits are more subtle. Whether it’s ISIS and the FSA, Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia, the “extremist” mosques that openly preach death and the “moderate” mosques that dress it up a little, Islamic violence benefits both sides in the game of “Good Caliph” and “Bad Caliph”.

Islamic “extremism” creates a market for “moderates”. The more bombs go off, the more the affected countries scramble to ally with cooler heads who claim to be able to defuse the anger of the radicals.

Jihadists set off bombs in Boston and the state partners with local mosques. The Taliban kill girls and the United States pumps more money into Pakistan. ISIS massacres non-Muslims and we ally with the FSA.

How the Muslim World Benefits from ISIS




WORKPLACE JIHAD

Obama Says Muslim Terror Attack on Canada is “Senseless Violence”

Canadian Parliament Attacker was Son of Libyan Muslim Jihadist

Muslim NYPD Ax Attacker: “Sit Around and Do Nothing or Jihad in the Cause of Allah”





KEEPING UP WITH THE WARRENS

Actual polling though shows that Warren has twice as much support among the $50,000 and over group than she does at the under $50,000 level. Warren is also least popular with 18-29 year olds. She’s so unpopular with them that even seniors, a traditionally conservative group, like her more than they do.

Class warfare is a game for those with money. The family that is just scraping by doesn’t have the time to worry about how many times their annual salaries a CEO makes. Envying billionaires is the occupation of millionaires. Envying them is the occupation of the upper end of the
middle class.

Instead of being some kind of revolutionary, Elizabeth Warren’s main appeal is to rich white men.

Elizabeth Warren: The Rich White Man’s Candidate




FIRST YOU GET THEM TO PET A DOG, THEN THEY'LL CONVERT

More than 1,000 people attended the “I Want to Touch a Dog” event in the affluent Bandar Utama neighborhood on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur. But the event’s planner, Syed Azmi Alhabshi, has now been forced into hiding after hard-liners insisted he “should be stoned to death.”

One Facebook user’s comment — as reported by the Malaysian Insider — illustrates the level of paranoia in the hard-line camp. The user said the dog-familiarization event was part of “a Jewish agenda to Christianise Muslim-Malaysians through subtle measures.”

It’s so subtle that I don’t know how this conspiracy is supposed to work.

1. Muslims pet dogs.

2. Then they convert to Christianity.

3. The Jews win?

 Muslims Blame Malaysian Tornado on Petting Dogs, Call for Stoning Dog Lover

...from the comments

truebearing • This is fantastic! If only we'd have known sooner. We now have the solution to Islam...force them to pet dogs, which will turn them into Christians, thereby reducing the Muslim population, and then tornados will wreak havoc on the Muslim countries.

Of course, there are a lot of Muslims, so we'll have to platoon the poor dogs so they aren't petted till bald.



Obama Offers to Let Iran Run Three Times as Many Nuke Centrifuges




THE UNINDICTED PARTY

Among the speakers is Kathleen Rice, who is currently the Nassau County District attorney, and is a Long Island Congressional candidate…

…Ms. Rice is speaking alongside Imam Siraj Wahhaj of the Muslim Alliance of North America. Mr. Wahhaj was named in court papers as an unindicted co-conspirator of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Also he proclaimed in a May 1992 sermon: “I would cut off the hands of my own daughter [if she stole] because Allah stands for Justice.”

Someone should ask Kathleen Rice what she thinks of Allah’s hand-cutting justice. I hope Kathleen Rice is a moderate Democrat and not one of that tiny minority of radical extremist Dems we keep hearing about.

New York Dem Candidate to Appear w/Unindicted World Trade Center Bombing Conspirator




Dem Chief of Staff Mohammed Resigns After Saying “All White People Have a Little Hitler in Them,”




NEW JOB

Petlakh said that as he left the arena with his sons, aged 10 and 14, his way was blocked by protesters yelling “Free Palestine” and “Your people are murderers.”

At that point, one of the protesters — allegedly Shawn Shraeder  — punched him, resulting in a broken nose and a cut above the eye, requiring eight stitches.

Shawn Schrader is an activist with Occupy Wall Street who goes by a number of different names including Shawn Carrié. Shawn had cashed in during the OWS heday by claiming to have been the victim of police brutality.

His Twitter account shows that Schader/Carrie had recently headed to Ferguson to participate in the ugliness there. In an attempt to make money off OWS, he tried to describe Tweeting about OWS as his “full-time job”.

Occupy Wall Street/Ferguson Thug Arrested for Beating Jewish Man at Anti-Israel Protest




Communist Dictator of Cholera-Ridden Country Offers US Help Fighting Ebola




SPEAKING OF COMMUNIST DICTATORS...

When Al Sharpton wants to protest something, then its current mayor supporter of the notoriously anti-Semitic Sandinistas is always on call. But when it comes to Jews taking a stand against terrorism and anti-Semitism, Bill de Blasio is a self-righteous no show.

Mayor de Blasio defended the Metropolitan Opera’s right to show “The Death of Klinghoffer,” and criticized predecessor Rudy Giuliani’s protest against the controversial work.

“I really think we have to be very careful in a free society to respect that cultural institutions will portray works of art, put on operas, plays, that there will be art exhibits in museum,” de Blasio said Monday at an unrelated press conference.

And yet if the Met were saying putting an opera that portrayed black people as apes who deserved to be enslaved, Bill de Blasio would have a thoroughly different view.

Bill de Blasio: Sharpton Rally “Yes”, Rally Against Terrorism “No”




UK Deals w/Muslim Trojan Horse Plot by Asking Jewish 9-Year-Old Girls If They Know Gays




CAPITALISM IS RESPONSIBLE FOR SOCIALISM

The International Marxist Tendency, in a piece whose related articles include Karl Marx is the “Best Scientist of Them All” and Quantum physics, dialectics and society: from Marx and Engels to Khrennikov and Haven (For some folks, the USSR never fell” has an article which claims that “Ebola: an epidemic made in the capitals of Europe and America”.

That must explain the massive Ebola epidemic overrunning London.

“The labour movement must make clear, however, that the whole Ebola problem is not and has never been a medical or a scientific one. It is an issue of under-development and exploitation,” it states.

Well obviously. Marx was the best scientist of them all. And thanks to his wisdom, we know that disease isn’t a medical problem. It can only be solved when we put the Commies in charge.

Just look at Cuba.

“Capitalism is Responsible for Ebola”




Don’t Worry, It’s not a Carbon Tax, It’s a “100 Percent Returnable Emissions Tax”




CLINTON CRIME FAMILY RIDES ON

“Sources close to AdvaMed don’t expect Clinton to come out in favor of eliminating the medical device tax, but her appearance before the group is a key indicator the powerful industry is ready to spend money to derail the tax in the near future and build key bipartisan coalitions.”

We’re talking about a six figure speech. And possibly more of those to come. Reason enough for Hillary to go on playing coy about the pacemaker tax.

Hillary Clinton Cashes In by Refusing to Take Position on Pacemaker Tax




Thomas Friedman Desperately Running Out of Non-Islamic Metaphors for ISIS




HE'S GOT MY VOTE

Undocumented President Omar Gonzalez, a military veteran with more useful career experience than the current occupant, was found incompetent to stand trial after he was expelled from the White House.

Despite a national policy of letting in everyone who wants to enter the country and declaring them merely “undocumented”, President Omar Gonzalez was denied his right to remain in the White House.

But while President Gonzalez may have been found incompetent to stand trial, there is little doubt that he is more competent to run the country than the man on whose behalf he was expelled.

White House Fence Jumper Not Competent to Stand Trial, Might be Competent to be President




QUICK AND DIRTY OR NEVERENDING AND CLEAN

As I wrote in The Great Betrayal, “the number of Afghan civilian casualties caused by American forces had dropped between 2009 and 2011, but civilian casualties caused by the Taliban steadily increased… 2009 proved to be the deadliest year for Afghan civilians with over 2,400 killed… with the Taliban accounting for two-thirds of the total. While the percentage of casualties caused by US forces fell 28 percent, the percentage caused by the Taliban increased by 40 percent making up for American restraint.  This fell into line with the increase in NATO combat deaths which rose from 295 to 520.”

“By 2011, the ISAF forces were responsible for only 14.2 percent of Afghan civilian deaths, while the Taliban were responsible for 79.8 percent of them.”

American soldiers were killing fewer Afghan civilians, but more Afghan civilians were dying. The rules of engagement allowed the Taliban to win which meant that they would be able to kill more civilians. Instead of helping Afghan civilians, we were causing more of them and more of us to be killed.

You Can’t Stop Genocide Without Killing Civilians




Will ISIS be Next to Jump the White House Fence?



LIBERABOLA

This may be the single dumbest article written about Ebola. And that includes anything written by Al Gore blaming Ebola on Global Warming. The unfathomable stupidity of this Rick Hampson piece may actually be worse than Ebola because there’s no cure.

"Once defamed as “the city that killed Kennedy,” this community used the assassination’s 50th anniversary last year to declare its name cleared once and for all. Now Dallas faces a new libel: Ebola capital of the USA."

USA Today Blasts Racist Dallas for Killing JFK, Ebolaphobia




UGH

A woman whose only claim to fame is committing adultery with the President of the United States “survived” the “suffering” of being mocked in newspapers and now wants to use her story to fix our culture.

Lewinsky is acting as if being called “Portly pepperpot” makes her a survivor of something. It doesn’t.

That’s what our “I Feel” culture has forgotten. Some people should be shamed. We can disagree on which people, but I don’t really see there being much of a Monica Lewinsky lobby here.

Monica Lewinsky is a Victim Who Wants to Use Her Suffering to Fix Our Culture




Jewish Girl Converts to Islam, Begins Getting Bad Grades, Plotting to Kill Parents



TROLLNART

Is Beinart really incapable of grasping the difference between self-criticism and external attack?

If Beinart were to call himself a “miserable self-loathing hack”, no one would claim that he’s engaging in personal attacks. But if I were to call him that, I would be engaging in a personal attack.

There’s a difference between Hillary Clinton saying something negative about America and Vladimir Putin or Angela Merkel saying something negative about America.

If Beinart really doesn’t get it, he should try doing Chris Rock’s “Niggas vs. Black People” routine in front of a black audience.

Is Peter Beinart Just a Troll?




Racist Muslim Settlers Attack Black Israeli Soldier in Jerusalem



MENTAL

There’s something seriously wrong when an interview question runs two paragraphs and the response runs a sentence. There’s something even more wrong when the question consists of rants like this from Oppenheimer.

“I’m not someone who, I’m no AIPAC Jew. I’m the person who in many situations is the one saying, you know, there are Palestinians who were thrown out of their homes. And I read your letter and I thought to myself, “That’s not what you want to say.”

In court this is what is known as leading the witness. Also it’s known as the counsel having a mental breakdown. In this case the mental breakdown is caused by Oppenheimer’s pathological self-hatred. “I’m no AIPAC Jew” is a deeply telling phrase, not about AIPAC, but about Oppenheimer’s ghetto state of mind.

Yale Chaplain Ousted for Supporting Hamas, Hating Jews, Claims to Have “Jewish Soul”




THE ROUNDUP


ELEPHANT MAN

Islam, after closer examination, was and still is all about Muhammad. And about nothing else.  You had to take his word for everything he said had happened or will happen. He insisted on it, forcefully. Like a berserker. There isn’t a single totalitarian regime that wasn’t also a personality cult. Islam fits that description. Muhammad is its personality, and Islam is his cult.

He was the Billy Sunday of his time in that region, or if you like, a supreme showman in the way of P.T. Barnum. By the time of his death in July 632 at the age of sixty-two, Muhammad had converted all of the Arabian Peninsula to Islam, by hook, crook, military conquest, banditry, torture, extortion, genocide, terror, and murder. He was born in 570, the “Year of the Elephant,” but very likely had never seen or heard of an elephant. But Islam, especially after his demise and because of the missionary efforts of his successors, spread through the Peninsula and all compass points like scalding coffee through a cheap paper towel.

Another appropriate comparison would be that Muhammad was the Jim Jones of his time, skillful in manipulating the gullible, but his Kool-Aid was Islam, which didn’t poison men, but instead their minds, and turned them into “Walking Dead” zombies.

Or, picture Muhammad as a kind of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, ranting to his congregation about hell and damnation and God-damning the Jews and Christians and all unbelievers, his Koran-thumping eliciting vocal expressions of spontaneous fervor among the flock. That was, more or less, Muhammad’s preaching style. He was a master of working his credulous converts into near hysterics, if not into a revival tent, rolling-on-the-ground lather and foaming at the mouth for salvation.

Edward Cline's take on Mohammed.



KERRY'S EAR

Kerry should have anticipated what he’d hear. Hatred of the Jewish state in varying degrees of ferocity and of flaunted belligerence has consistently been the only glue to hold together the squabbling and mutually destructive sons of Arabia in their various guises and incompatible religious adherences.

Therefore, Kerry – had he actually had even a superficial a smattering of elementary historical comprehension – should have expected precisely such slander. Moreover, had Kerry even a superficial smattering of elementary intellectual integrity, he’d have rejected the crude attempt to reproach Israel for Arab/Muslim barbarities. He could have denounced it as the crass opportunism and as the morally abhorrent copout that it is.

Had Kerry any rudimentary decency in the role of go-between he so fancies, he’d have told his regional interlocutors that they cannot persist in portraying Israel as the source of all evil. Had he possessed a smidgeon of the statecraft he boasts about, he’d have fearlessly stood up to the host of Mideastern dictators and potentates. Instead he lent them his sympathetic ear.

from Sarah Honig...



A MERE SUGGESTION

That is outright religious hatred. He’s not talking about the mosque. He’s talking about the entire Temple Mount. You know, the holiest site in Judiasm. And “suggested”? really? You know what a suggestion is? “Hey, I think you should try putting a purple streak in your hair and see how it looks.” That’s a suggestion.

This? This is outright saying Jews have no right to their own holy place. No right to the site where both Temples stood, where the Ark of the Covenant resided, where Jewish priests blew the shofar on Rosh Hashanah–the site, in fact, where Judaism was practiced for centuries before Islam existed. This is part of the Palestinian strategy to pretend that the area was wholly Muslim and Jews have nothing to do with it. It is, straight out, a lie. And the AP calls it a suggestion.

Meryl on AP bias





BUT IF WE DON'T GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT...


What makes the picture even more bizarre is that while a lot of aid is going into ISIS-controlled areas, very little is going into Kurdish areas in northeast Syria where the Kurds are now defending Kobani with the support of U.S. warplanes. Last November, tellingly, Syrian Kurds complained that they were not included in the U.N. polio-vaccination campaign.

A State Department official is reported to fear that if the aid convoys were to be stopped, there would be an humanitarian crisis for which the West would be blamed. We don’t think fear of blame should be of any concern. Why are all these sentimental Western policy makers and executives so afraid of being blamed? It is blame by Muslims that they particularly fear. What is withholding aid from an enemy state compared to what the Muslims of ISIS are doing? It’s an absurd consideration, but it distorts policies, both domestic and foreign, over and over again. 

...from Jillian





Wednesday, October 22, 2014

You Can’t Reform Islam Without Reforming Muslims

By On October 22, 2014
Every few years the debate over reforming Islam bubbles up from the depths of a culture that largely censors any suggestion that Islam needs reforming.

But Islam does not exist apart from Muslims. It is not an abstract entity that can be changed without changing its followers. And if Islam has not changed, that is because Muslims do not want it to.

Mohammed and key figures in Islam provided a template, but that template would not endure if it did not fit the worldview of its worshipers. Western religions underwent a process of secularization to align with what many saw as modernity leading to a split between traditionalists and secularists.

The proponents of modernizing Islam assume that it didn’t make the jump because of Saudi money, fundamentalist violence and regional backwardness. These allegations are true, but also incomplete.

If modernizing Islam really appealed to Muslims, it would have taken off, at least in the West, despite Saudi money and Muslim Brotherhood front groups. These elements might have slowed things down, but a political or religious idea that is genuinely compelling is like a rock rolling down a hill.

It’s enormously difficult to stop.

Muslim modernization in the West has been covertly undermined by the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood, but for the most part it has not been violently suppressed.

It suffers above all else from a lack of Muslim interest.

Muslims don’t spend much time fuming over a progressive mosque that allows gay members or lets women lead prayers. Such places occasionally exist and remain obscure. They don’t have to be forcibly shut down because they never actually take off. The occasional death threat and arson might take place and the average ISIS recruit would happily slaughter everyone inside, but even he has bigger fish to fry.

The best evidence that Muslim modernization has failed is that even the angriest Muslims don’t take it very seriously as a threat. The sorts of people who believe that Saddam Hussein was a CIA agent or that Israel is using eagles as spies have trouble believing modernizing Islam will ever be much of a problem.

They know instinctively that it will never work. Instead Muslims are far more threatened by a cartoon mocking their prophet for reasons that go to the heart of what is wrong with their religion.

Islam is not an idea. It is a tribe.

Talking about reforming the words of Islam is an abstraction. Islam did not begin with a book. It began with clan and sword. Even in the modern skyscraper cities of the West, it remains a religion of the clan and the sword.

The left has misread Islamic terrorism as a response to oppression when it is actually a power base. It is not the poor and downtrodden who are most attracted to the Jihad. Instead it is the upper classes. Bin Laden wasn’t a pauper and neither are the Saudis or Qataris. Islamic terrorism isn’t a game for the poor. It becomes the thing to do when you’re rich enough to envy the neighbors. It’s a tribal war.

To reform Islam, we can’t just look at what is wrong with the Koran or the Hadiths. We have to ask why these tribal calls for violence and genocide, for oppression and enslavement, appealed to Muslims then and why they continue to appeal to Muslims today.

The modernizers assume that Western Muslims would welcome a reformation of Islam. They are half right. The reformation that they are welcoming is that of the Wahhabis trying to return it to what it was. It’s hard to deny that ISIS touches something deep within Muslims. The gay-friendly mosques don’t.

Understanding Islam only in terms of the Koran makes it seem as if Muslims are unwillingly trapped by a tyranny of the text, when the text is actually their means of trapping others into affirming their identity.

There is no reforming Islam without reforming Muslims. The reformers assume that most Muslims are ignorant of their own beliefs, but even the most illiterate Muslim in a village without running water has a good grasp of the big overall ideas. He may hardly be able to quote a Koranic verse without stumbling over it, he may have added local customs into the mix, but he identifies with it on a visceral level.

Its honor is his honor. Its future is the future of his family. Its members are his kinfolk. Like him, it ought to have been on top; instead it’s on the bottom. Its grievances are his grievances.

The rest is just details.

The progressive diverse mosque is the opposite of this tribal mentality. It is the opposite of Islam. Its destruction of the tribe is also the destruction of the individual. The Western Muslim who already has only a shaky connection to the culture of his ancestral country is not about to trade Islamic tribalism for anonymous diversity. Islam tells him he is superior. The progressive mosque tells him nothing.

Whether he is a Bangladeshi peasant watching soccer matches on the village television or a Bangladeshi doctor in London, it is the violent, racist and misogynistic parts of Islam that provide him with a sense of worth in a big confusing world. That is how Islam was born.

Islam began in uncertain times as empires were tottering and the old ways were being displaced by strange religions such as Judaism and Christianity, when its originators mashed bits of them together and then founded their own crazy wobbly murderous empire built around a badly plagiarized religion.

It was horrible and terrible for everyone who wasn’t a Muslim man, but it worked.

Islam is less of a faith and more of a set of honor and shame responses. It’s a cycle of oppression and victimhood. It’s the assertion of identity by people who see themselves as inferior and are determined to push back by making themselves superior. The responses are familiar. We saw it in Nazi Germany as the defeated nation became a master race by killing and enslaving everyone else.

But it’s not those at the bottom most driven by such dreams. It’s the desert billionaires who have money, but no culture. It’s the Western Muslim doctor who still feels inferior despite his wealth. It’s a merchant named Mohammed with a lot of grudges who claims an angel told him to kill all his enemies in Allah’s name.

It’s Islam. And it’s Muslims.

The things that we believe, bad or good, reflect the bad or good inside us. When Muslims support killing people, it’s simplistic to assume that they are robotically following a text and will follow any other text slipped in front of their faces, instead of their passions and values. Religions may make people kill, but it starts when people make religions kill.

The good devout Muslim may kill because the Koran tells him to, but he would not do so if the Koran’s justifications of violence did not speak to him on a deeper level. The Nazis were following orders, but they wouldn’t have followed them if Nazism didn’t connect with their fears, hopes and dreams.

The text is only half the problem. The other half is in the human heart.

Reforming Islam is not a matter of crossing out certain words and adding others. Religions carry a powerful set of values that appeal to people on a deep level. To change Islam, we would have to understand why its ugliness still speaks to Muslims. To change it, we have to change them.

When we talk about reforming Islam, what we are really talking about is reforming Muslims.

Monday, October 20, 2014

The Progressive Pajama Boy Era is Over

By On October 20, 2014
Obama’s approval ratings and MSNBC’s viewer ratings are in a close race to the bottom of Death Valley. It’s only a question of which set of obnoxious hipsters with a head full of bad policy ideas and no real life experience will be fired first; the Maddow crew or the White House staff.

The progressive pajama boy era is over. The asexual messenger bag toting wonk has met an ISIS Jihadist and run home to its non-traditional family. Liberalism isn’t over, but its contenders are trying to butch up their act.

The second coming of Hillary is accompanied by bellicose rhetoric about Putin and Syria. Leon Panetta, her gnomish errand boy, is sneering at Obama as an egghead too busy dithering about what not to do to be able to actually do anything about ISIS.

Democrats are adjusting to a new reality of less nuance and more centrist politics. So is MSNBC.

If Obama loses the Senate, then his leftist backers also lose their death grip on the Democratic Party. And that’s why they’re panicking so badly. Progressives proved that money and media bias could let them get away with anything. But then they lost in 2010, barely hung on in 2012 and are heading for a beating in 2014. If they can’t buy the Senate now, the Democratic Party will have to correct its course.

A sober analysis of the Big Billionaire Left shows that they were good at getting Obama elected, but not much else. Like the USSR, they could pour a lot of energy and capital into inefficiently getting one big thing done, but they aren’t much good at doing a lot of little things. Their hijacking of democracy ran into trouble the moment they tried to push past the White House. It was only the White House’s hijacking of democracy by trying to function as a unilateral dictatorship of pen and phone that extended their influence beyond their initial defeat in 2010. And that came with its own price in popularity.

Obama’s arrogance isolated him politically. He insisted on running everything and is stuck with the bill. In countless speeches he demanded more power and authority; his sinking approval ratings reflect the growing willingness of even his own supporters to hold him responsible for his unilateral policymaking.

As the election approaches everything that could have gone wrong has gone wrong. Not only did Obama’s aggressive efforts to stoke racial unrest on the border and in Ferguson to turn out the minority voters who generally sit out midterm elections backfire, but the resulting messes deepened the popular impression that he was in over his head. Now instead of pivoting from Global Warming to a minimum wage to some offensive thing that some local Republican somewhere said, the media is stuck in an Ebola-ISIS cycle that reminds Americans on a daily basis that everything really is out of control.

The critiques from even friendly media outlets keep throwing around words and terms like “detached”, “in over his head”, “flailing” and “too smart for his own good”. That word salad adds up to the same message as the one being peddled by Leon Panetta; America needs strong experienced leadership.

And Obama isn’t it.

Obama is already receding into the imagination of liberals as the youthful folly of a political Age of Aquarius when millennials tried to levitate the Pentagon by electing a brash inexperienced community organizer to fix the world. They are writing him off as an act of political naiveté by a war-traumatized generation still unaware of the practical limits of the real world.

And that infuriates and terrifies the left worse than anything else. The left can thrive on hostility, but it hates being dismissed by its fellow travelers as naive idealists who don’t understand the real world.

But that’s the historical revisionism that had been prepped and waiting in the wings all along for Obama. What the right does wrong is always attributed to malice, while the left’s worst atrocities from the Gulags to the killing fields are put down to idealism gone wrong. Obama takes his place somewhere between Mao and Eugene McCarthy as the Democratic Party rushes to reinvent itself as the adult party of serious experienced political leaders like Hillary Clinton. Its message is that it’s time for the Obama pajama boys to grow up and compromise on their progressive politics by voting for Hillary in 2016.

The left has few options left. Money can only buy so many votes. If Obama’s base stays home, then the magical turnout operation starts looking like a lot of political consultants taking credit for the Oprah tilt of black women coming out to vote for Obama. And there is no obvious replacement for Obama.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio was supposed to inaugurate a new era of progressive politics by pushing so far to the left as to make Obama look like Bob Dole. Instead Bill de Blasio has been tagged by the same progressive incompetent moniker as Obama. The analogy is being drawn explicitly by liberals even in left-of-center publications like the New York Times and the Daily News.

Bill de Blasio didn’t extend the progressive lifespan. He was elected just in time for everyone to be primed to expect the Obama progressive cycle of self-righteous cover-ups, thin-skinned media wars and grandiose policy announcements that go nowhere. The political future of the progressive mayor has been Obamanized off the scene. And that leaves few great hopes for the progressive cause.

Elizabeth Warren still fakes left, but she seems to know her limitations. 2018’s midterm election without a president on the ballot and a different demographic makeup for the electorate could easily topple her. If she tried for the big chair, she would be run over by harder Democrat candidates faking centrist. And without Warren, all that’s left are clown acts like Bernie Sanders and Seattle Socialist Kshama Sawant.

The progressive resurgence was powered by leftist billionaires and non-profits chasing power. They have the money and the organization, but they don’t have the candidates. Six years of Obama produced compelling conservative figures like Ted Cruz, Trey Gowdy and Mike Lee. There’s no equivalent to them on the left. It’s why liberal billionaire election spending is characterized more by the candidates that they are against rather than the ones that they are for. They have spent so much time and money battling the Tea Party that they have failed to build a post-Obama political future for their movement.

The left isn’t going anywhere, but its current incarnation as the party of diversely wimpy progressives who compensate for their lack of experience with their enthusiasm and their political connections is. Obama has done a great deal for the political agendas of the left while doing a great deal of damage to the political ambitions of the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party won’t forget that. Obama was thinking about transforming America, but the Democratic Party is thinking about the next four years.

The liberal verdict on the age of Obama has been written. It may change with history, but for now the Hope and Change period will be praised for its idealism and its innovative political organizing, but dismissed for its policy incompetence and its inability to listen to voices outside its bubble. It was an elitist phenomenon whose diversity was faked with media imagery and the party will now work to try and recapture its lost position among the rest of the country, particularly among white Democrats.

The progressive will continue to haunt American politics, but his current hipster incarnation is headed for extinction.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

The Savage Lands of Islam

By On October 15, 2014
The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia ruled that ten year old girls can be married off, because in his words, "Good upbringing makes a girl ready to perform all marital duties at that age."

The Grand Mufti
The Mufti, who also called for destroying churches in the Arabian Peninsula, is descended from Mohammed Wahhab who gave birth to Wahhabism and whose descendants have controlled the Saudi religious establishment, and through it Islam around the world.

However for all his power and influence, the Mufti is blind and hasn't seen a thing in the last half century years; an apt metaphor for his entire religion.

Saudi Arabia, the heartland of Islam, still tries and executes witches. What sort of religion can come out of a place that marries off ten year old girls and murders old women on charges of witchcraft? The sort that flies planes into skyscrapers, murders teenage girls for using Facebook and bases its entire society on a ladder with Muslim men at the top, Muslim women a few rungs below and everyone else somewhere at the bottom.

The Saudis are not an aberration, they are Islam in its purest and truest form. That is why Al Qaeda was founded by a Saudi and why Saudis, the wealthy citizens of a wealthy kingdom, are its best recruits. It is not poverty or oppression that moves them to kill, but wealth and privilege.

This is where Islam originated, whose brutality and cunning spread it across the world, whose clans killed each other, then killed or enslaved minority groups, and then embarked on a wave of conquest that destroyed countless cultures and left behind the seeds of hate of the wars we are fighting today.

Unlike Egypt or Syria, they were never colonized by European powers and the impact of Ottoman influence was limited. Oil has brought in massive amounts of money, but it has changed very little. There are limousines instead of camels, the slaves have foreign passports, though they are often still slaves, there is still a brisk trade in imported luxury goods, harems for princes and clans staggering under the weight of their indolent progeny.

Religiously, Wahhabism has done its best to recreate the "pure" Islam of its origins. Economically, oil has allowed the Gulf Arabs to prosper without reform or change. And if Mohammed were to ride out of the desert tomorrow, he would have little trouble fitting in, as soon as he developed a taste for Porsches. Anyone who wants to see the world as it was in Mohammed's day can visit Saudi Arabia and see inbred clans, slave labor, veiled women and thugs enforcing the will of Allah on every corner.

But you don't even need to visit Saudi Arabia because diluted forms of it can be found everywhere from Cairo to London and from Islamabad to Los Angeles. A hundred and fifty years after the United States freed its slaves, Muslim immigrants have brought back slavery, importing young girls to live as their slaves. Ninety years after American women won the right to vote, the ghosts of Islam tread the streets in sheets that hide their personhood and mark them as property.

The religious wars of the desert have not stayed there as the immigration Hegira has brought them here and everywhere. And that is the source of the Clash of Civilizations. Immigration has brought Muslims into closer contact with different cultures and religions who don't defer to them or give Islam the privileged status that its adherents are used to enjoying.

To know the truth of this all you have to do is measure the respective tolerance levels of America  against the average Muslim country. There is no comparison with even the more secular Muslim countries, not in law and not in public attitudes. The sole benefit of the Arab Spring has been to expose the fraud of the moderate Muslim country. Egypt's transition to theocracy reminds us that a moderate Muslim state is a completely unrepresentative dictatorship. The alternative is majority Muslim rule.

The endgame of the Arab Spring and the immigration Hegira is to reduce the entire world to the level of Saudi Arabia. And that means eliminating outside influences in a long march to purification.  Islamists know that they cannot enjoy complete cultural dominance over their own people until their rivals in the West are obliterated. To turn Egypt and Malaysia into Saudi Arabia, and to purify Saudi Arabia, the infidels must be brought down, their religions subjugated and their nations replaced with proper Islamic states.

Islamic leaders are under no illusion that religion is a spiritual matter, they know that it is a numbers game. Wage enough wars, terrorize enough nations, marry enough barely post-pubescent girls and use them to crank out an endless supply of babies, intimidate or trick enough infidels into joining up and you win. That was how Islam took over so much territory and spread around the world, that is how it is doing it again now.

Islam is not a spiritual religion, even its paradise is a materialistic place, a fantasy harem where the physical pleasures of life can be enjoyed without restraint. That gives it an advantage over Judaism and Christianity, just as it gives the Saudis and the Pakistanis an advantage over the Americans and Israelis. There is no angst in Islam, no spiritual seeking and no room for doubt. The marching orders are always clear and individual deeds and thoughts matter less than a willingness to always obey.

Islam came out of the desert and it has never left the desert, instead it has brought the desert with it along with its codes, its deep hatreds, its constant deprivation, its deceptiveness and its nomadic expansionism. Where Islam goes, the desert rises, its tents, its red knives and its insecurities. It was backward even at the time of its birth and it has only become more so, but its singlemindedness is an advantage in an age of effete leftectuals and eurocrats dreaming of a transnational world.

While the leftectuals dream of windmills, the Saudis hire foreigners to pump their oil and then sell it to them, the money goes to fund the Hegira, its mosques in every city from Dublin to Moscow to Buenos Aires and Toronto, the fatwas, the bombs, the websites where the masked faithful hold up AK-47's, the Islamic science courses and sessions on learning to love the Hijab and then the Burqa,

The Saudis just want what everyone wants, for everyone to acknowledge their greatness and live like them. They can hardly be blamed for that when the West spends almost as much money promoting democracy and its own way of life to people who still execute witches and blasphemers. They may be savages, but they fell ass backward into enough black gold to fuel a global religious war, and they're using it cleverly and cunningly to transform our societies and wage war against us even while attending dinners at the White House. It's smoother work than our diplomats are capable of.

You can hardly blame the desert bandits for being what they are, but you can blame the apostles of reason for preaching about a golden age of tolerance and enlightenment from every purloined pulpit and then turning away the heartland to a religion that is nakedly brutal and intolerant at home.

An honest look at Saudi Arabia, at its cruelty, its slaves, its intolerance of other religions and even of women, should be enough to tell even the dimmest Eton or Harvard grad exactly what the West is in for. No matter how many specialists in Muslim tolerance show up at universities, there is the Grand Mufti explaining that Mohammed commanded the eradication of Jews and Christians from the Arabian Peninsula, and therefore there can be no churches allowed there.

Even few apologists for Islam will defend Saudi Arabia for the simple reason that it is indefensible. The media will run the occasional story about the House of Saud's commitment to reform, much as Charles Manson keeps committing to becoming a better person, but even they don't really believe it. Yet even though Saudi Arabia is the heartland of Sunni Islam, and its fortunes shape and control mosques and teachings around the world, they insist on treating Islam and Saudi Arabia as two separate things.

It is brutally telling that the two centers of Islam, Saudi Arabia for the Sunnis and Iran for the Shiites, are genuinely horrifying places. Neither can remotely be associated with tolerance or human rights. It is simple common sense that the spread of Islam will make Western countries more like Saudi Arabia and Iran, rather than less like them.

If Saudi Arabia is not an example that we wish to emulate, then why must we bodily incorporate the religion of Mecca and Medina into London and Los Angeles? What other possible outcome do we imagine that there will be but fewer rights and more violence, dead women, abused children, bomb plots and polygamy?

There are two Islams. The real Islam of the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia and an imaginary Islam that exists only in the mosques of air and card table Korans of academics apologists and political pundits who have decided that Islam cannot be bad, because no religion can be bad, not even one which kills and kills, it must just be misunderstood.

But then why not tell the Grand Mufti that he has misunderstood his own religion, the religion that he and his ancestors have dedicated themselves to purifying and reforming back to its roots? Telling him that would be a dangerous thing on his own turf, but it would also be foolish. The Grand Mufti's controversial statements contain nothing that Mohammed had not said.

Can the founder of a religion misunderstand his own teachings?

Islam is savage, intolerant, cruel and expansionistic, not due to a misunderstanding, but an understanding of the worst aspects of human nature. It is what it is and no amount of wishing will make it otherwise.

We have opened the door to the desert and a hot wind blows through into the northern climes. Either we shut the door or get used to living in the Saudi desert.

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