Showing posts from February, 2008

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Friday Afternoon Roundup - Obama, Osama, Kosovo and Israel

With the final lap in the Democratic race approaching, Obama's triumph in Texas seems likely, which means that a racist who hates America and Israel is set to be the candidate of choice for the Democratic party, completing that party's degeneracy into the fifth column of America's enemies. Obama exceeds Jesse Jackson only by his Muslim sympathies and affiliations, which is the equivalent of electing a member of the Bund President during WW2. That is just how far the Democratic party has sunk. Jewish Democrats who continue to carry water for Obama, who apologize for him and defend him, even though in many cases they are doing so reluctantly, are behaving in a blatantly depraved manner in helping to bring to power a man who has the deaths of their brothers in his heart. One might ask them, as G-d asked of Kayin. Israpundit has been extensively covering the Obama mess with a lot of must read articles and this latest Bill Levinson one is decidedly included . Along with this vir...

Conservatives and the Mainstream Consensus

And so what happens now? The fundamental problem of conservative leadership is that while conservatives win elections, the liberals have won the culture war leaving a thin pale imitation of conservatives as the opposition. By successfully changing the consensus, conservatives have been split into moderates who have watered down the conservative message until it is crowd pleasing but virtually meaningless and radicals who have no hope of being elected and whose very existence is exploited to further batter the moderate conservatives into further watering down their message. America, Israel and England teeter on the precipice of new elections, yet as dissatisfied as we are with our current leadership, the potential conservative opposition that has made gains in the polls offers little hope. Perhaps that is because John McCain, Benyamin Netanyahu and David Cameron are a long way from what either of the three countries really needs. They excel at rhetoric but the primary reason that actual...

Deterrence Only Works When They're Not Shooting at You

The revelation that the Iron Dome system can't protect Sderot is only the latest bad card played by the Olmert government as it goes through all its options for dealing with the problem of rocket attacks from Gaza, except the only one that will actually work-- reoccupying Gaza. Month after month, Hamas has made the political and strategic case for reoccupying Gaza. Yet even with Israeli soldiers being held hostage in Gaza and Sderot continually under fire, it's the one card off the table as far as the Olmert government is concerned. And that is why Hamas has boldly made the case for reoccupying Gaza, because it knows this government is too weak to actually do it. The pursuit of passive solutions was always futile, the Separation Wall to Disengagement to Iron Dome are all part of the same dead end, the attempt to find an alternative to engaging the enemy. But there is no alternative to engaging the enemy and the Iron Dome's inability to defend Sderot only highlights the natu...

Obama is not a Candidate but a Performance

Sunday's Oscar night awards handed out its awards to movies that hardly anyone saw and to obscure actors and actresses, none of them Americans. Americans responded by not watching the Oscars which are estimated to have received the lowest ratings in history, down 21 percent from last year when identifiable actors and movies were featured there. The Oscars represent the fundamental culture gap between ordinary Americans and the cultural elites. Following the usual pattern, the more the cultural elites take something over, the less relevant it becomes to ordinary Americans. We have seen that pattern in modern art and poetry, in literature and now we are seeing it in movies. Increasingly the foreign box office has become more definitive than domestic ticket sales, as Americans continue to ignore movies that don't meet their interests. Call it Blue State vs Red State or John Edwards' Two Americas, but it could just as easily be Two Englands, Two Irelands or Two Israels, it'...

Socialism, the Greatest Obstacle to Resistance Against the Jihad

Those who are baffled by the failure of so many countries and governments to offer any meaningful resistance to the Jihad must begin looking at the root causes of the mindset that makes appeasement and concessions seem so much more appealing than resistance. When the US first proposed action against Saddam, the unanimous condemnation was led by a single word, "Unilateral". That same word, "Unilateral" typically winds up in criticism of any Israeli action taken against terrorists. Reasonable people found themselves baffled as to how a relatively neutral word such as "Unilateral" had become a epithet. But for a bureaucracy there is no uglier word than "Unilateral". Bureaucracies pride themselves on achieving consensus through meetings and committees, nothing made Bush more hated than his willingness to take "Unilateral" action. Let's examine another key epithet in the politically correct lexicon. "Extremist". Extremist liter...

George Washington's Rejection of Tolerance

One of George Washington's more famous letters is his letter to the Newport, Rhode Island synagogue famously remembered in Longfellow's poem, "The Jewish Cemetery at Newport". Of that letter the most famous line quoted is Washington's statement, "the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance" yet it is another line in the letter that is far more important. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. Washington's wording is often confusing to modern ears and as a result, " it is now no more that toleration is spoken of " is often glossed over, yet it is at the heart of Washington's statement, his rejection of tolerance. The idea of George Washington rejecting tolerance in a letter dedicat...

Parshas Ki Tisa - The Wisdom of Rock

Ki Tisa contains some of the more baffling events in the Torah as the Jewish people, shortly after hearing the ten commands, proceed to create an idol and worship it. Various explanations have been given for what happened but I think it is instructive to explore the mindset behind these actions. It is Moshe's failure to return on time that encourages the construction of an idol to take the place of Moshe saying, "Rise and make us a god who shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we know not what is become of him." The statement contains two admissions, that Moshe is a man and yet that he brought them out of Egypt. If they simply wanted another man to take Moshe's place, they would have elected a leader. Clearly while they believed that Moshe was a man, they did not believe that he was merely a man. At the Sea, it is said, "Vayaminu Be'Hashem U'Be'Moshe Avdo", "They Believed in G-d a...

Friday Afternoon Roundup -Burning Embassies, the Oriental Imagination and the Jihad

The US embassy has been evacuated in Belgrade after a Serbian mob attacked and torched the embassy. Considering that Clinton had ordered the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, with fatalities, the principle of the non-combatant status of embassies went out the door some time ago. I certainly hope that no Marines were or will be injured in the course of this, the diplomats however are the ones who caused all this in the first place, they have brought down America's work in liberating Iraq, they determined to create a Muslim Albanian republic by force and they've backed terrorists around the world from Kosovo to Gaza to Afghanistan to Kashmir to Thailand. As such I have no sympathy for the diplomats, not that any appears to be needed. Had a Muslim mob rampaged again, the press would no doubt be blaming us for it. The only positive side of this mess appears to be that the press had found a rampaging anti-american mob that they won't get behind. At home the leader of o...

Just 4 Years

Some conservative commentators led by Ann Coulter who are arguing that it's better to accept a hypothetical 4 years of Hillary Clinton or Obama than 4 years of McCain. Here's how Coulter breezily puts it; If Hillary is elected president, we'll have a four-year disaster, with Republicans ferociously opposing her, followed by Republicans zooming back into power, as we did in 1980 and 1994, and 2000. Just that easy. This "Only 4 Years" nonsense is wishful thinking from the same people who were sure Hillary Clinton would never get this far. Hillary won two Senate terms in New York and her husband served two Presidential terms. The odds are that once Hillary is in office, she'll be there for eight years and her VP will be an incumbent in the next race with good odds of turning 8 years into 16. Only one Democratic incumbent has lost an election in the 20th century and that was Jimmy Carter and he was running against Ronald Reagan. But let's take that 4 years fo...

Kosovo and Islam's Balkanization of the World

Even as the world rushes to embrace the newly manufactured Kosovo as a country, the rise of a splinter Muslim country in Europe can't help but give hope to Islamic terrorists fighting to create breakaway states in Thailand, the Philippines, Israel, India and Kenya among many others. Balkanization, or divide and conquer, has always been a key element in bringing down countries and with a global Islamic war, each country with a Muslim minority, natively converted or imported, is on the same track as Yugoslavia. What Hitler did with the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans, across Eastern Europe, his former Muslim allies are doing across the world with Muslim populations. With the Volksdeutsche, before a single soldier of the Reich even set foot in a country, the Volksdeutsche would radicalize and foment unrest that would either carve up the target country or justify military intervention to "liberate" them. When the country was conquered, the Volksdeutsche would quickly become...

5 Lies About Israel, Fatah, Hamas and the Peace Process

Lie #1: Fatah and Abbas represent a moderate Palestinian faction we must negotiate with while Hamas represent an extreme faction we must alienate. Since Hamas came to power, the vast majority of terrorist attacks on Israelis have come from Fatah. The last several terrorist attacks including the twin suicide bombing in a cafe in Dimona was carried out by Fatah. Hamas has been shelling Israel from Gaza, but it is Fatah which has been waging a terrorist campaign inside Israel. Hamas has been concentrating on Egypt meanwhile because it is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood which hopes to come to power in Egypt. That is why America views Hamas as dangerous and extremist, because it represent a regional threat to America's Arab allies, while Fatah is considered to be a threat only to Israel. That is why America has taken a hard line against Hamas but continuously forces Israel to negotiate with Fatah. Hamas is viewed as regional Islamic while Fatah as nationalistic Palestinian, when ...

Reclaiming a Civilization's Dreams to Save its Soul

The surest way to destroy a people is to kill their dreams because when you destroy a people's dreams, you also destroy their sense of self-worth, their ambitions, their principles and their goals. Men and women are not animals that need nothing but survival and creature comforts, yet the surest way to destroy a people's soul is to reduce them to just that, to gluttons chasing after creature comforts and finally rats living in the walls of their own society struggling to stay quiet and survive. If you think this imagery is farfetched, consider that it is already a reality. Where nations like America, Europe and Israel once lived by dreams of the greatness they could achieve and went out and achieved it, today they walk the edges of their own shrinking frontiers trying to understand how to justify their existence to their own people. While Australia apologizes to the aborigines for its existence, the Archbishop of Canterbury accepts the inevitability of Islamic law in Britain. A...

The Koran and the Flag: What's Really Sacred?

American liberals have traditionally bemoaned the idea of creating a constitutional amendment against flag burning, arguing that freedom is more important than the flag. The death knell of that argument came however when Muslims rioted against the Danish cartoons of Mohammed and the liberal American press, all but unanimously refused to display the cartoons. The decision had been made, the Koran was sacred, the American flag was not. It was not about freedom, it was about a matter of priorities and the media has chosen the Koran over the flag. Choosing the Koran over the Flag has become a pattern across the world and in the wake of that pattern follows the persecution of those who choose the flag. Selling toilet paper with the Koran on it caused a man to be indicted in Germany. There is no crime of course involved in printing the Jewish Torah or the Christian Bible on toilet paper. In Israel a young woman named Tatiana Soskin found herself in solitary confinement and served a prison te...

Friday Afternoon Roundup - Obamania, Mutilation and Islamic Terror

Well it's been another long week. New York is freezing and Obama's candidacy is taking off. If Clinton doesn't stop Obama in Penn and Ohio, we're about to have a pro-terrorist candidate a step away from the White House with the media cheering him on. Personally I find the kind of hysteria that greeted a Ron Paul or an Obama to be disturbing. This is not the response of reasoned voters trying to do their best for their country, it's the shrill insanity of people frantically grasping onto a savior. It reminds me of the mob chasing Brian once his promise of salvation is revealed to be an enigma, except cynical politicians thrive on passing themselves off as saviors and the mob is happy to cheer it on. But people who embrace men as saviors become madmen themselves. Obama is a cipher and a disturbing one. A man whose path has been paved to power through a campaign of dirty tricks. A man with a Muslim background and ties to the Nation of Islam and a member of a racist chu...