Friday Afternoon Roundup - Whack-a-Democracy

Finally France has a leader you can set your watch by. (Feel free to contribute your own caption.) (Dissident Frogman)

WHACK

The Arab Spring, the Tahrir Square, the entire works boiled down to a choice between a military dictatorship and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Those of us who actually understood the region warned that this would happen, warned people not to listen to the Arab Springers or the Twitter activists and not to agonize over the latest riot casualties. We said the Neo-conservatives were wrong. We said the democracy promoters were full of hot air. We said that anyone claiming that the United States could not hold back "democratic change" was an idiot without a clue about the region.

Now it looks like the whole glorious circus is about to end with a limited military dictatorship pushing the reset button back to where it was before, but without Mubarak. And that's a best case scenario.

It means that things are still worse than they were before. The economic liberalization that Mubarak's son might have carried out is gone. The Muslim Brotherhood has gained a lot of momentum. Any hope of political reforms has been foreclosed, because Egypt is now stuck between its military and the Muslim Brotherhood. Anyone who advocates reform is choosing the Brotherhood.

The one thing we should take away from this, is that the entire history of the last two years, every news article, from the glowing celebrations of the people's revolution to the rise of the Brotherhood to the dissolution of the new reforms, should be printed up, rolled up into a newspaper and used to whack anyone who calls for "democratic change" in Egypt, or any relatively stable Muslim country that isn't openly at war with us, across the nose.

Hard. Keep whacking them across the nose until they reread the entire history of their disaster and learn something from it.

Oh and Syria, all the people telling you that intervening to overthrow Assad and replace him with the Muslim Brotherhood would be a terrible idea... they're right too.

But why listen to us, when you can listen to Thomas Friedman and John McCain ?

“There’s always, ‘We don’t know who they are.’ I’ll tell you who they are. They’re a direct repudiation of Al Qaeda,” McCain said three weeks ago. “Al Qaeda believes in acts of terror to change governments. These people believe in peaceful demonstration.”

Sure, go with it. What's the worst that could happen?

I don't want to bash the people on my side. I don't want to get into article wars or blog wars with them because it's unproductive, but the people pushing for arming the Syrian Jihadists are being wildly irresponsible. And they're pushing Romney into siding with their disastrous policy.

There is absolutely no political profit in hitting Obama from the neo-conservative side on Syria. The American people don't want another war and when Obama does something on Syria, they will only look like idiots for complaining that he wasn't doing anything.

There is no choice between a secular moderate national regime and a dictatorship. There is a choice between a dictatorship and Islamists. Choose one or the other, but don't pretend that there's a third option on the table. Not unless you can show us where that option has taken root.

Syria is not our war. There is nothing to gain from it.

...one of the few mainstream conservative commentators who gets it; is Andy McCarthy who has been pressing this issue over and over again warning against misguided intervention on behalf of rebel Jihadists.



ARAFAT, ABBAS AND THE 40 THIEVES OF PALESTINE

This week, I wrote an overview of the extensive corruption and thievery in the upper ranks of the Palestinian Authority. It's up now at Front Page Magazine as "Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous"

Mahmoud Abbas, Arafat’s successor, has been accused of hoarding a fortune of 100 million dollars and of owning palaces and property across the Middle East. Those accusations come from Mohammed Rashid, Arafat’s former financial advisor, who knows the ins and outs of Palestinian Authority finances like no one else, and whose own net worth is estimated at being around half a billion dollars.

The Palestine Investment Fund is as much Abbas’ playground, as PA finances before it were for Arafat. Mohammed Dahlan, the former Security Minister, had claimed that 1.3 billion dollars had vanished from the Fund since it was turned over to Abbas’ control. Dahlan charged that the PIF should have held 2 billion dollars, instead of only 700 million.

But Dahlan, who ran on an anti-corruption ticket, would also know something about embezzlement, as his own net worth is estimated at 120 million dollars. Abbas’ people have accused Dahlan of corruption and of everything from plotting a coup to poisoning Arafat. More seriously he has been accused of helping fund Al-Qaeda in Gaza as a lever against Hamas. That would mean that American aid to the Palestinian Authority went to Al-Qaeda.

There's lots more in there and it's worth remembering the next time you're told about the Zionist oppression of the poor downtrodden people in the West Bank and Gaza.



AND WITH PANDERING FOR ALL

Gays got gay marriage.  Now Latinos have gotten a mini-dream act. Rarely has an election campaign so transparently flowed directly into policymaking.



FREEDOM FROM ISLAM

In Turkey, Fazil Say, an internationally acclaimed pianist, has been charged with blasphemy for joking about Islamic paradise on Twitter.

In Kuwait, a blogger was sentenced to 10 years in prison for insulting Mohammed. In Indonesia, Obama's wonderful country, a blogger received 2.5 years in prison for a similar case.

In Bangladesh, an arrest warrant was issued for an author accused of blasphemy and his publisher burned the book to disavow it.

In the United States, the Red-Green alliance between Leftists and Islamists denounces the idea that Islamic law is in any way a threat to our civil liberties. But the cases of Molly Norris and Kurt Westergaard show that we are not as far away from Turkey, Kuwait, Indonesia and Bangladesh as we might like to be.

Bosch Fawstin has put out Infidel #2, the second issue of his series on the confrontation between Islam and the West that blends our day-to-day reality in the Clash of Civilizations and a superhero named Pigman. Bosch was not able to distribute the comic through ordinary channels due to censorship and timidity, and so is distributing it himself.

I'm adding the cover image and a panel excerpt from Infidel #2.

In an environment where censorship and self-censorship are common, Infidel is the rarest of things, it is a graphic novel which goes directly to the heart of the issue. Comics routinely pander to Islam. Infidel #2 stands up to it in the most direct way possible.



WHAT IF THERE WERE A GENOCIDE AND THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION LIED ABOUT IT?

That's exactly the situation in Nigeria today where Christians are being exterminated by Muslim terrorists while the Obama Administration refuses to acknowledge either the terrorism or the genocide. And even pressures the Nigerian government to stop resisting the Islamic genocide.

Had a non-Muslim group carried out numerous attacks on mosques and Muslim worshipers, and then ordered Muslims to leave an area, it is absolutely inconceivable that the Obama Administration and its media allies would deny that these were religiously motivated attacks. It is even more inconceivable that its preferred solution would be to tell the government to stop fighting terrorism. But what is inconceivable when it comes to Muslims is Obama Administration policy for Christians.

At the end of April, Daniel Benjamin, from the State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, testifying at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stated that the State Department’s response to the Islamic genocide of Christians by Jihadists in the Muslim north was “to press for a change to its (Nigeria’s) heavy-handed approach to the security threats in the north”.

Johnnie Carson, the Assistant Secretary at the Bureau of African Affairs, in his remarks on Nigeria, claimed bizarrely, that despite a campaign of violence focused heavily around attacks on churches, “Religion is not driving extremist violence in either Jos or Northern Nigeria” and warned the Nigerian government to “avoid excessive violence”.

That same month, Don Yamamoto, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of African Affairs, testifying at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and reading from the same script, said that, “Religion is not the primary driver of extremist violence in Nigeria”, like Carson, claimed that Nigeria’s “religious and ethnic diversity is one of its greatest strengths” and demanded that the Nigerian government spend more time teaching its security forces to respect Muslim human rights.

There's a good deal more there and it's very ugly. Anyone who thinks that the Obama Administration would not actively ignore an Iranian attack on Israel while crippling its ability to resist, should read this article.



AND HE SAID UNTO HIS PEOPLE, "BEHOLD THE PEOPLE OF THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL ARE TOO MANY"

I'll have more on this in next week's Front Page Magazine article, but the Jewish Population Survey has some significant numbers for Jews in New York and across America.

New York City's demographics have titled sharply. 40 percent of Jews in New York are Orthodox, and more significantly 74 percent of Jewish children are Orthodox. The number of Hassidic children alone equals the number of non-Orthodox children. The significance of that baby boom will transform politics as we know it. It will change the nature of the Jewish vote as well.

Demographics is destiny. That's a point that I've always made. This is what the demographics look like now.

That shift appears quite likely to grow even more pronounced. Now, 40 percent of Jews in the city identify themselves as Orthodox, an increase from 33 percent in 2002; 74 percent of all Jewish children in the city are Orthodox.

Between 2006 and 2011, the study found, one out of two marriages in which one partner was a non-Orthodox Jew was to a person who was not Jewish and did not convert to Judaism.

As the New York Times sniffs,

Members of these Orthodox groups also have been known to be far more likely to adopt more conservative positions on matters like abortion, same-sex marriage and the Israeli approach to the Palestinians.

Indeed. And the Sienna College poll is full of bad news for liberal Jews. It shows that New York Jews are significantly more conservative than the national average.

But if you want to understand the rising wave of attacks, the spew of media hysteria, the abuse smear and the hostile reporting on anything Orthodox Jews do (in sharp contrast to media reporting on Muslims), you just have to look at the numbers.

People who attack you feel threatened. Like Pharaoh, the Liberal Jewish Pharaohs feel threatened by the rise of the Orthodox Jewish population.



NATIONAL JEWISH DEMOCRATIC COMMITTEE BECLOWNS ITSELF... AGAIN


The NJDC is attacking what is describes as "the so-called Emergency Committee for Israel" accusing it of having no goal except to defeat Barack Obama.

This is a silly attack for a group like the NJDC to make, since it exists only to elect Barack Obama and other Democrats. If, according to the NJDC, the Emergency Committee for Israel, is not to be believed because it exists only to back the agenda of a specific party, then the NJDC has just made the case for why it shouldn't be believed.

This is what the NJDC says,

"ECI has a clear record of focusing their attacks solely on the President and Congressional Democrats. Further, they've stayed silent when Republicans espouse and support policies detrimental to the U.S.-Israel relationship."

The NJDC has sent out several hit pieces on Eric Cantor,  but nothing on Charles Barron. It actually congratulated Bill Pascrell on his victory. The NJDC has no interest in dealing with Anti-Semitism on its own side or with defending Jews. It only exists to attack Republicans.

Why then should anyone believe anything that the NJDC has to say when it comes to Israel?

But, to answer the NJDC's question, what would Mitt Romney do differently from Obama on Iran?

For one thing, he would stop sabotaging Israel's prep work for a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.




THE ROUNDUP

My article, What Bill Clinton Knows, was nominated by the Watcher's Council and won as its non-council winner.  It was also an honor to have my article, Israel's Heroism of Survival, linked to by the great Caroline Glick, one of the few English language writers who truly is an expert on Israel and the region.

Debbie Schlussel remembers the anniversary of the torture-murder of Robert Dean Stethem



...and this isn't the only bill he stuck us with

We've got to get the corporate money out of politics... and into apolitical non-profits like American Bridge and Media Matters.

Denial, it's just not the river flowing between Washington D.C., Cairo and Athens.

Sometimes mugging a liberal does make him come to his senses. Who knew?

Left Wing Israeli Journalist, Guy Maroz, slammed right-wing MKs for wanting to deport or create internment camps for these economic infiltrators. He was among the most vocal activists demanding that Israel not deport these African mostly Muslim illegals who have swarmed in by the tens of thousands, causing crime and rape rates to soar.

Until it hit home for him. He got muged by

Lisa Graas will be discussing whether the Republican Party betrayed Christians. I have to wonder when it was ever loyal to them or to any religious people.

Selling Obama... and boy is it a tough sell.

Adam Taxin takes on Obama's "Got Your Back" ad.



Finally the anthem of the Obama foreign policy campaign leakage from Latma.