Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Media Barks, but the Caravan Moves On

The media celebrated Obama's sudden fiscal minded reforms in cutting money for the F-22's, using that defense cut to pretend Obama wasn't wasting money like a drunken sailor on the fourth of July, and pluging America deep into trillion dollar deficit territory.

But luckily we won't be wasting money on any F-22's to defend America. We will however be sending 200 million dollars to the terrorist leaders of Fatah.

As it turns out, and wouldn't you know it, the good folks at Fatah are having a budget crisis. Just like us! Except we actually fund Fatah and have been for some time. Since Fatah, better known as the Palestinian Authority led by "President Abbas" has a budget which consists of

Intake: Money from Western governments

Output: Payments to terrorist militias and Fatah leaders, a workforce that totals over 200,000 people. Or 1 in 4 Palestinian men is on the Palestinian Authority payroll. A payroll for which we pay for.

Lest you think that 200 million is the whole shebang. That's a down payment on a promised 900 million. That's about the cost of four F-22's. But who needs a top next generation fighter jet for the Air Force, except you know Russia or China, who are busy working on their own.

Instead we get to spend 900 million dollars to keep one of the world's foremost terrorist groups in business. Isn't that special?

Meanwhile over at the dentist's office, I couldn't help but overhead a conversation between a patient and the longtime officer manager. Quoting her loosely, "Socialized medicine is coming down the pike now, and people have to call their governors now and speak out, because this looks good but it isn't going to work. Doctors can't work this fast, and when it's all free, the only thing they'll really offer you for free is to pull the teeth out."

Which would still put America ahead of the UK where a British patient had to pull his own teeth.

Debbie Schlussel meanwhile has a sad preview of ObamaCare

Back to "Religion of Pissed Off Madmen" news, the Times has a great article on the Ugly side of Dubai.

To understand what the lives of your children and grandchildren would be like under the Ummah, take a look at Dubai, where Islam rules.

Mohammed is an Emirati who owns a big dive shop a hundred miles across the burning sand to the east of Dubai, at Khawr Fakkan, in the slightly more conservative province of Sharjah. Khawr Fakkan, circled by stark and beautiful mountains, is on the Gulf of Oman and there is good diving to be had, plenty of tourists. Mohammed is a divorcee and he employed young western babes and chicks to run his business, because working in a dive centre is a sort of halfway house between backpacking and the real world for a certain sort of young postgrad western chick. Roxanne Hillier worked for him: young, blonde, pretty and half South African, with an English dad called Freddie. Roxanne’s in the rather bleak Khawr Fakkan prison right now, and will be for the next few months, following an unsuccessful appeal against her sentence in late June. Would you like to hear what she did to get herself there?

It was about 2am when the old bill arrived. Mohammed had been filling up the 80 or so oxygen tanks he needed for the next morning’s dive; Roxanne had returned from the last dive of the day, helped out for a bit, then, exhausted, took a nap in an anteroom. Outside, Mohammed heard a disturbance, so he went down to check it out.

“It was local people, gathered around the door to the dive centre,” he told me. “They were angry, saying, ‘Who have you got in there? You’ve got a woman in there, haven’t you?’ I told them, ‘No, no, the dive centre is closed.’ They said to me, ‘Where is the key?’ Later the police arrived. I told them there was nobody there, but they took my key and opened the door and searched the place and that’s when they found Roxanne.” The two of them were carted off to Khawr Fakkan prison (separate cells, natch) and held on remand for a week until the case came to court. Did you have sex with Roxanne, I ask Mohammed. “No, no, no, never!” Did you kiss her? “No, of course not. It is not true. It is all a misunderstanding.”

Well, as regards the first denial, we don’t have to take Mohammed’s word for it, because the Sharjah judicial authorities were kind enough to check the whole business out for themselves. They stripped Roxanne Hillier bare and invaded her with swabs and scrapes; a little bit of Mohammed’s DNA found inside her would have hugely increased the eventual sentence. As it was, she received a sentence of three months for the crime of being alone in the same building as a man who was not her husband. She didn’t know this was the sentence, because the court proceedings were conducted in Arabic and therefore she could not put her case across, either. It was later they told her what had been decided.

This is what justice looks like under Islam. This is what the Sharia law that its proponents are so keen on bringing to Europe, America and Canada looks like.

This is what life for Dhimmis looks like under Islam. No rights. No justice. Just chains and bars.

But good news, the UK may be getting its own Muslim police force. (Via Jihad Watch)

MUSLIM crime victims could gain the right to have their cases overseen by police from their own religion, it emerged last night.

Police in London already give victims the right to ask for a Sikh officer to be involved in an investigation but the scheme could be introduced for other religions elsewhere.

Chief Supt Joanna Young, from the Met’s Criminal Justice Policy Unit, said: “If it’s a success, I would encourage the other (police) associations to do likewise.”

The project is intended to help investigate “honour” killings and forced marriages but Metropolitan Police Federation chairman Peter Smyth said: “We’re stretched thin enough already. Are Sikh officers going to have their rotas changed so there’s always one on duty?

“It’s political correctness gone mad. We talking about the creation of a separate force within a force.”...

And the force within a force would actually cover up honor killings, and the like.

The New Centrist takes on J Street . Quoting James Kirchik

Who keeps preventing the full flowering of the necessary American leadership? In the J Street narrative, it’s establishment Jewish organizations, which distort American foreign policy by shielding Israel from pressure that would otherwise lead to peace. And who better to counter the influence of the so-called “Israel Lobby” than other Jews? J Street and the constellation of far-left “pro-Israel” organizations put a kosher stamp of approval on Obama’s bizarre hectoring and moral equivalence.

To this end, J Street seems to spend almost all of its resources bashing supporters of Israel. Those who disagree with the organization’s positions are routinely denounced as “right-wing” or “extremist.” Rather than draw attention to the murderous antisemitism, terrorism and impending nuclear-armed theocracy that Israel must confront, J Street prefers to churn out countless blog posts, press releases and op-eds denouncing the people who it believes are the real impediments to peace: stalwart defenders of Israel

Of course J Street doesn't really stop there. Like many on the left it believes Israel's existence itself is the impediment to peace. Rather than seeing a two sided conflict, J Street is a proponent of a one sided Israel bashing narrative in which the problem is ever and always Israel.

Which is why calling J Street Pro-Israel is like calling the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Pro-American.

Yoram Ettinger meanwhile has what would have been Prime Minister Begin's response to Obama's demand for Yerushalayim.

"At the very end of Prime Minister Begin's successful Camp David talks with Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat in 1978, literally minutes before the signing ceremony, the American president had approached [Begin] with "Just one final formal item." Sadat, said the president, was asking that Begin put his signature to a simple letter committing him to place Jerusalem on the negotiating table of the final peace accord.

"I refused to accept the letter, let alone sign it," rumbled Begin. "'If I forgot thee O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning,' said [Begin] to the president of the United States of America , 'and may my tongue cleave to my mouth.'"


"Admonishment of the British foreign secretary, [Lord Carrington], telling him in almost so many words to mind his own business, and… saying [Carrington] should open his Bible 'and read the First Book of Kings, chapter two, verse eleven, where you will find that King David moved his capital from Hebron, where he had reigned for seven years, to Jerusalem where he ruled for another thirty-three years, and this at a time [3,000 years ago] when the civilized world had never heard of London.'”

' Jerusalem is an epic. It is the wellspring of a civilization. Without Jerusalem 's civilization the spiritual history of the world would be stagnant. To us Jerusalem is family. Has anyone ever heard of a daughter or a son of a Saladin ever fasting each year in memory of ancient Jerusalem 's anguish? Not a one! Has anybody ever heard of a son of a Crusader who breaks a glass at his wedding ceremony in memory of ancient Jerusalem 's torment? Not a one! How could you have heard, when throughout its three thousand year-long history Jerusalem has been capital to no one but to the Jews. So it was. So it is. And so it shall ever be.'"

The Conference of Major Jewish Organizations meanwhile has taken a stand backing Israel against Obama, on Jerusalem. (Via Israel Matzav)

We find disturbing the objections raised to the proposed construction of residential units on property that was legally purchased and approved by the appropriate authorities. The area in question houses major Israeli governmental agencies, including the national police headquarters. The United States has in the past and recently raised objections to the removal of illegal structures built by Arabs in eastern Jerusalem even though they were built in violation of zoning and other requirements often on usurped land. In addition to the Jewish housing, the project called for apartment units for Arabs as well

It is particularly significant that the structure in question formerly was the house of the infamous Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseni who spent the war years in Berlin as a close ally of Hitler, aiding and abetting the Nazi extermination of Jews. He was also linked to the 1929 massacre in Hebron and other acts of incitement that resulted in deaths and destruction in what was then Palestine. There has been an expressed desire by some Palestinians to preserve the building as a tribute to Husseini.

It hasn't been a great week for Obama. With setbacks on health care at the congressional level, forcing him and Pelosi and Reid to postpone the big push until fall. This not only serves as a weakness for Obama, and opens up a hole in his accomplishments schedule that will have to be filled by more dates or pointless speeches.

Nevertheless it is a demonstration that Obama can falter when he runs into opposition. Naturally the rat's nest of Soros funded 501's will be scrambling like mad to blackmail, threaten and destroy any and all Dem congressmen who have been holding out. So a battle has been won, but the war is only beginning.

The cops want an apology from Obama. And the doctors too.

At a Young Israel synagogue, Rabbi Yeshaya Siff's message has an interesting take on modern morality

Today's society is overwhelmingly defined as a modern progressive society, one in which progress in lifestyle changes has far surpassed that of earlier generations. In technical and political terms the above may be accurate, but morally and spiritually a more definitive expression than "progressive" would be "permissive". The offshoot of "relative" morality is usually "no" morality, or what was once termed "immorality".

Lemon Lime Moon has a post on Rebels Without a Cause, The Left as Adults

Barack Obama is busy showing a whole host of bitter feelings on many subjects and there is an angry, bitter teen aspect of his personality that is coming out. Raised in a fatherless home, with too much feminine influence, he was raised ideologically by Frank Marshall Davis, a dyed in the wool Marxist. Marxism at it's very core is a childish and bitter ideology well suited to the immature. For a young teen or preteen to have this as their rallying point it can embed feelings of bitterness that can be hard to root out. Marxism is founded on fostering racial hatreds and class envy.

Jew with a View writes, "Obama: Can we Fund Hamas. Yes we can.

A question for Americans: would you want a single dollar to get into the hands of Hamas? No?

Then brace yourselves.

Because if changes in American law are pushed through, financial aid will be sent to a unified Palestinian government – even if Hamas officials are part of that government.

Let’s recap. Despite attempts by the liberal media to rebrand Hamas as doe-eyed ‘resistance fighters’, Hamas is a terrorist organisation. Here’s a whopping big clue to the truth of that statement: Hamas was spawned by the radical Muslim Brotherhood. And so was Al Queda.

Bush would never have entertained it. But apparently Obama’s response to the question of whether America can, ethically, give funds to Hamas is ‘Yes We Can!’.

“The administration’s proposal is akin to agreeing to support a government that “only has a few Nazis in it,” Rep. Mark Steven Kirk told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a House hearing last week.

The Democrats have discussed the changes to the law governing funding to Gaza this month, as part of an $83.4-billion emergency spending bill that also contains funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill also would provide $840 million for the Palestinian Authority and for rebuilding in Gaza, following Israel’s Operation Cast Lead earlier this year.

Obama had better hurry that dough to his Hamas buddies, while he still has the time. Because his popularity is sinking fast, as Exposing Liberal Lies writes, citing the Telegraph.

“Are the people rejecting their saviour? Barack Obama’s approval rating has slipped to below that of George ‘Dubya’ Bush at the same stage in his presidency and this is causing some concern among right-thinking (by which, of course, I mean left-thinking) people. This is by no means the death of the dream that began in January – approval ratings slide up and down erratically – but it is at least an early intimation of mortality.