The Weekend Roundup - An Olympic Defeat and a Silent Smear

Obama's latest bit of overseas diplomacy has fizzled once again, with Chicago not only losing the bid to host the Olympics, but actually getting the least votes and being the first city to be eliminated. Considering Obama's personal appearance in Copenhagen, this loss represents another slap in the face for his "kinder, gentler America" world tour.

With his failure to gain any more active troop commitments for Afghanistan, snubs by most of his preferred negotiating partners, failure in Israel... and now in Copenhagen... Obama is batting zero for six. And while the idea of Chicago hosting the Olympics was as absurd as Bloomberg's plan to have New York City host the games, probably even more so, this is yet another sign that Obama's halo does not actually translate abroad.

Or it might just be a question of victory going to the biggest leftist. And Obama was just no match for Da Silva.

Meanwhile the ADL has finally noticed some of the anti-semitism leaking out of the Zelaya camp, but Foxman's press releases underplays it, particularly censoring David Romero's comments about the Holocaust and minimizing them to only statements about Jewish officers in the army. While the full list of quotes does include the full transcripts of Romero's statements, Foxman's press release underplays and keeps the question of which side is making those statements rather vague.

Meanwhile my post on the topic, Zelaya's Chief Propagandist Endorses Hitler and the Holocaust was picked up by Jack Kemp in an American Thinker blog.

None of this has however stopped the American media from turning former terrorist, convicted child molester and rabid bigot, David Romero Ellner into a hero. Publications like the Christian Science Monitor continue running laudatory stories praising Radio Globo and David Romero Ellner, for example

Radio Globo director David Romero says the station has over 400,000 listeners online, four times its regular following. "It is frustrating the government," he says, laughing. "They can´t stop us."

Other radio stations have also been picking up their internet coverage and airing it. But loyal listeners are still frustrated. "It´s like I lost a family member," says Maria del Carmen Nunez. Her twin sister, Maria Rosario Nunez, has no internet in her home. She says she listened to Radio Globo programs while doing the dishes or ironing, and relied on it to find out where protesters are meeting. "They want us deaf, mute, and blind."

Clearly the Christian Science Monitor and Sara Miller Llana don't care and don't want to report the sort of vile ugliness that Radio Globo is broadcasting.

Amnesty International in turn is running a sympathetic piece from a Radio Globo broadcaster. Reporters Without Borders has also stepped in. What is particularly repulsive is that these same usual left wing suspects were AWOL when Chavez shuttered an opposition television station, instead they justified the shutdown using the same argument that the Micheletti administration is making, that the station was inciting a coup. Yet oddly the justification that passed for Chavez, doesn't fly for Micheletti.

I guess you have to be a Marxist thug like Chavez or Zelaya to have the right to shut down opposition stations.

At the Business Insider, a remembrance of how recently deceased conservative columnist William Safire got the White House to return his phone calls.

If White House officials [won’t] call you back, leave them a single-word message about what you wanted to talk about: “Malfeasance.”

It's an attitude we need more of today, at a time when the media is giving the Obama admin a regular pass. Meanwhile HotAir, which let Robert Stacy McCain pen two pieces on the front page about terrorist supporter Robert Novak, ignored Safire's death, just as they ignored Irving Kristol's.

In the roundup, Faith Freedom International has an article by Lee Jay Walker on the Internal Islamic Threat

The United States is now gradually waking up to a growing internal Islamic menace which desires to kill in the name of Islam. In the past week you have had three different cases involving Islamists who desired to kill and intimidate the people of America. In the United Kingdom the same problem exists but just like in America, under President Obama, both nations are pandering to Islam and propagating false lies about this religion. Therefore, it is time to focus on the real factors behind the growing Sunni Islamic threat within America and in other nations.

The first important factor that must be understood is that this threat comes from radical Sunni Islam and not from Shia Islam. In America and the United Kingdom you have many Shia Muslims; however, it is clear that all major global Islamic terrorism derives from radical Sunni Islam.

I would have to question half of that assessment, while Shiite Muslim terrorism is not currently a worldwide threat, Shiite terrorist groups have carried out terrorist acts abroad, including in Paris. Shiite terrorism has caused the deaths of numerous US troops in Iraq. The key difference is that there are far fewer Shiia than Sunni, and they only have one country backing them, Iran, which is currently concentrating on a more local regional Jihad, rather than a global Jihad.

But that is very much a question of the moment, if Iran succeeds in its plans to seize Lebanon and Iraq, things will change very quickly. Furthermore Shiite terrorist groups are already linking up with their Marxist counterparts in Latin America

Dymphna at Gates of Vienna looks over Obama's failed Olympic bid for Chicago

But…but…he’s magic. No one says no to O. Right? Am I right? Notice he flew out immediately, being the busy man he is. Had to get back to ignoring the situation in Afghanistan, where that hopey-change thing is definitely not working. Someone needs to have a serious talk with the Taliban.

Actually, Obama is a sports fan, so the loss must’ve smarted a little. But he wasn’t there on his own dime — it was your dime, my fellow Americans — and he was simply following orders from the guys what brung him to the dance, i.e., the Cook County machine.

Here’s where we get the sense that the I.O.C. got the chance to shove the shiv into America. Who’s going to pass up that opportunity?

Of course I suspect one factor is that Obama, as with Blagojevich, isn't big on sharing the loot. Had he put out Utah style, Chicago might have gotten the games after all.

IsraPundit has the text of Geert Wilders speech,

Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a god, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life. Islam means ’submission’. Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for is sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism, these are all totalita rian ideologies.

Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam ‘the most retrograde force in the world’, and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel . First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.

This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam’s territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines , Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon , and Aceh in Indonesia . Israel is simply in the way. The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.

The war against Israel is not a war against Israel . It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel , Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.

Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel , they can get everything. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’. In my country, the Netherlands , 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat. Yet there is a danger greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing.

A lost voice of sanity in an ocean of appeasement madness

At the Keli Ata blog, informed personal commentary on the Gamaliel Foundation, whose work is coming into light and its connections to Obama, in the wake of the infamous Obama prayer video

In conclusion, to defeat Obama the Republican Party must learn from the Gamaliel Foundation. Everything Obama does it Gamaliel right down the line. A successful campaign to defeat him would be to use Gamaliel tactics against him. But him on the receiving end of the berating. Call him to account for his actions and policies. Knowing how he craves public attention and hates not having the last word, put him on the spot. Hammer him in a debate. Focus on the promises he'd failed to deliver.

Use Gamaliel Foundation leadership material against him.

The Infidel Bloggers Alliance has the disturbing case of Paul Williams

Jane Corbin of the BBC has reported that the engineering department at the University of Cairo remains under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Williams says that he and several of his associates, including a licensed private investigator, met with officials from the Ontario Provincial Police, who confirmed that McMaster has been under scrutiny for a long time; that many of the students have ties to radical Islam and terrorist organizations; and that Islamic members of the faculty have conducted clandestine meetings at an off-campus address in Hamilton.

The officials in question - - Detective Constables Dennis Bryson and Tim Trombley - - were not available for comment.

Williams insists that the problem at McMaster was evidenced by the fact that several of the terrorists who were taken into custody in the plot to kill the Canadian Prime Minister and to blow up Parliament were students at the school.
Supporting Williams’s contentions, Hamid Mir, the only journalist to interview Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11, has testified on tape that Anas el-Liby, a founder of al Qaeda, attended McMaster and managed, along with other al Qaeda operatives, to steal 80 kilos of nuclear material from the poorly guarded facilities at the school.

It does seem as if many of the battles to be fought over exposing the Jihad in North America will be fought on the front lines of Canada.

Finally an old article from Israel by Samantha M. Shapiro, The Department of Lost Objects

When the explosion came from behind the darkened walls, it jarred me completely. It was so much louder than anything I had ever heard; it rocked through the concrete, through the soles of my feet, and I could feel it reverberating in my jaw and chest. Everyone dispersed immediately--it had been just a canister of kerosene after all--and cars were restarted, radios blasting, and people moved through the reopened entrance. I just stood there at the gate, as though I were at attention after some ceremonial shot had been fired.

My great-grandparents moved through Russia, Lithuania, and Poland before they came to America. They were running from pogroms. They got out before the Holocaust, and the town they were from became the second largest ghetto in Poland after they left. In my family no one mentions or mourns this. It is over. It ended in Europe before it ever happened to us. It is buried there safely with all the other Jewish graves and memorials.

But the story in which being Jewish is deadly serious and of daily importance isn't over in Israel. Here people's passports still say they are Jewish, and with Jewish passports there are lots of places they can't go. Everyone serves in the army. People in their early 20s, like me, lose their whole social group. They lose fingers. I went on a date with a man who had spent the last year as an assassin. Who knows what he lost. In Israel, being Jewish (or for that matter, being Christian, Muslim, Palestinian, or Arab) still matters in a way that we are told in America it shouldn't matter; it still binds in a way America refuses--often admirably--to let it bind. The elderly Jewish people here, who move their stocky, barrel frames and speak in ways that are so much like my grandparents, who stop me in the street and tell me to tie my shoelaces, have handwritten numbers sloppily tattooed on their forearms. How to tell them or their children that nationalism is not trendy, that identity is fluid, that ethnicity is mutable and irrelevant in a postmodern era? Or looking at them, still hoarding food in their hotel rooms on vacation, how to tell oneself?

And if the story to this point--Abraham's restless, prolonged searching, Moses' choked, lonely leadership, the bloodletting at the Temple, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Chassidic revival--is just baggage to drop on the way to acquiring liberty and happiness, how then to explain the deep, visceral sense of home I found navigating through cities and texts I had never seen before? How to explain the nearly electric connection to waterfalls, ancient chants, plots of land, strangers? What if the prayer book's claim that something was "sealed in my flesh"--the claim that America undermines relentlessly, nobly--rings true?

This fragment seems timely for the High Holy Days, and for us all, the loss of identity submerged within a cocoon of comfortable postmodern assumptions, emerging from the reality of the Jihad coming for us all.

One by one.

(Note to readers, due to the holiday of Sukkot, this blog will be on hiatus for the weekend, until Sunday night)