Friday Afternoon Roundup - The Shape of Things to Come

How neatly the pieces seem to fall into place. Specter announces his party switch, strengthening the Democrats in the Senate, just as liberal Republican Supreme Court Justice prepares to retire from the court. Coincidence? Sure.

This gives Obama a free hand with his first Court appointment, now who could possibly fill Souter's slot? Well there is Noah Feldman, Souter's own former law clerk, who's been tipped for the court despite his young age for some time now.

Feldman has numerous assets to recommend him. He writes for the New York Times Magazine. He rabidly hates Jews and he's a proponent of Sharia Islamic law. What else can you ask from a Supreme Court Justice?

Even if isn't Feldman now, I'm sure Obama will dig through his radical grab bag to find someone just as ugly to hijack the court to the far left. And we may not be too far away from the first Muslim Supreme Court justice and the real onset of Sharia law in America.

And just to give us a preview, Tariq Ramadan, the official voice of "moderate Islam", whose refused visa to the US generated outrage during the Bush Administration, has told women, "they should “garder toujours les yeux fixés sur le bitume” (keep their eyes fixed on the pavement)" when walking down the street.

Tariq Ramadan is not some sort of cave dwelling cretin in Afghanistan or lunatic ranting Imam out of Sydney or medieval cleric out of Egypt's Al Azhar Islamic University. He's smooth, suave and polished. Prospect and Foreign Policy ranked him as 8th among the world's top 100 intellectuals and wishful thinkers have described him as the Martin Luther of Islam. He is the product of a European university education and is billed as the face of Islam in Europe.

He's also the grandson of the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, which helped create Al Queda and Hamas, and a supporter of stoning and terrorism.

And this face of Islam in Europe warns women to keep their eyes on the sidewalk when walking outside. This is the same warning given to many women who travel to Muslim countries, where making eye contact with a man is considered a brazen and insolent act and justifies physical and sexual violence against her-- in the Muslim mind.

And now from the Dar Al Islam to Eurabia, that standard still holds true.

Meanwhile an interesting new documentary has come out (not currently on the internet) that describes the experience of Soviet officers in the Lebanon War, and reveals that numerous Warsaw Pact or Warpac officers were functioning on the ground during Israel's first invasion of Lebanon. Of course these days Russia's presence in the region is less subtle, with a naval base in Syria and troops in Lebanon.

Israpundit meanwhile has an interesting article by a former KGB Lt Colonel detailing why Russia is allied with Islam, and it really is worth a read

A key distinction between Russian and American attitudes towards Islamic terrorism is that while for America terrorism is largely seen as an exterior menace, Russia uses terrorism as an object as a tool of the state for manipulation in and outside the home country. Islamic terrorism is only part of the world of terrorism. Long before Islamic terrorism became a global threat, the KGB had used terrorism to facilitate the victory of world Communism.

This leads to the logical connection between Russian and Islamic terrorism. The late Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London in November, 2006, told me that his former FSB colleagues had trained famous Al-Qaeda terrorists Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Juma Namangoniy during the 1980s and 1990s. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, has been responsible for the murder of U.S. nationals outside the United States. Before his death, Juma Namangoniy (Jumabai Hojiyev), a native of Soviet Uzbekistan, was a right-hand man of Osama bin Laden in charge of the Taliban’s northern front in Afghanistan.

Juma Namangoniy was once a student of the Saboteur Training Center of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB in 1989-91. The school was notorious for the international terrorists who matriculated from it. It now belongs to the FSB, and since only KGB staff officers were allowed to study there, Juma Namangoniy’s presence clearly suggests that he was much more than a civil collaborator.

Mohammed Atta, the pilot of the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, had met with a senior Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, Czech Republic, five months before the attack. But Iraqi intelligence was just a client of Russia’s intelligence service. It brings a new understanding to the fact that President Putin was the first foreign President to call President Bush on 9/11. One may conjecture that he knew in advance what was to happen.

Strategically Russia is surrendering to the Muslim world. The Russian population is declining rapidly, being undermined by 70 years of Communist experiment and the cold indifference of post-communist rulers. Annually, Russia is losing 900 thousand people who are being replaced by Muslims from the Caucasus and Central Asia. Islam is now the second-largest religion in Russia, where it may total up to 28 million adherents. Because of this, Russia was able to join the Organization of the Islamic Conference in 2003.

Russia’s great qualitative population change represents both a departure from the past and a strengthening link with it. The synergies between the history of Russia’s national policies of terrorism and the radical Islamic terrorism that it is spreading around the world are natural partners that may severely impact on America’s own future.

I don't necessarily endorse everything in the article, but the USSR using the KGB unambiguously created much of the modern pre-Islamic terrorist infrastructure, particularly in the Middle East. There would be no Palestinian Arab terrorism epidemic as we know it, without the USSR.

Furthermore when you consider how Putin's Russia financially profited from the high oil and gas prices during the War on Terror, there is more than one motivation at work here.

However in the practical tug of war between Islam and Communism, Islam is clearly winning. Just as it did in the Middle East. Left wing political systems are mainly in vogue among failed states in Latin America and faltering ones in America and Europe.

Putin's Russia is National Socialist rather than Communist, though the lines between the two can be blurry, and Putin has no problem exploiting Communism or Islam, to damage America and American allies, while expanding his sphere of influence.

That makes this a complex game indeed.

Meanwhile in Israel the Samaria Regional Council head is wisely pointing out that Israel needs to decentralize its urban populations in order to address the threat of rocket attacks and possible nuclear strikes.

This was an issue for the US during the Cold War that was never acted on. The USSR however did take steps to decentralize its population, building entire cities dedicated to certain types of production, and pushing well into the Arctic.

Samaria (Shomron) Regional Council head Gershon Mesika says that the wide open expanses of the hilltops and valleys of his municipal council are the answer to the dangerous population density in the Tel Aviv region.

The army and other government bodies recently held an exercise for emergency scenarios in Samaria. Among them was a drill for the emergency absorption of thousands of Jews in the region.

“At present,” Mesika writes in an article that will appear in the Our Land of Israel weekly publication this Friday, “the reality is that over five million people live in Gush Dan, the area known as ‘between Hadera and Gedera’ [roughly 540 square miles which encompass Greater Tel Aviv]. Aside from the environmental and planning problems this causes, it sharpens the dangers we face from non-conventional weapons.”

“The more we encourage citizens to leave the low-lying and crowded Gush Dan area and move to Samaria, the more the State of Israel will thus reduce the non-conventional threat it faces – especially the threat emanating from Iran’s nuclear plant in Bushehr.”

“It’s true: We should enact the Yitzhar-for-Bushehr plan – but not in the sense in which some anti-Israel forces would have it [Israel’s withdrawal from Yitzhar and the other Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria in exchange for Western pressure to close down Bushehr], but the opposite. The government of Israel must initiate a large-scale construction campaign in the Samarian region and start building new communities in its wide expanses, which are ready and waiting to absorb millions of Jewish residents.”

Naturally this is perfectly logical, and completely "unacceptable" to the "peace process" that is built on shoving every Jew in Israel into the equivalent of the Tel Aviv bus station. When the US ambassador proclaims that Jews should forget about living in Jerusalem, and when a family in the Shomron builds a new house for their son to move into, the international press screams about EXPANDING SETTLEMENTS and justifies the next terrorist attack by Arab terrorists on a Jewish family by pointing to that EXPANDING SETTLEMENT-- the battle against a logical solution is truly uphill.

The political war against Jews living in the territories has been brutal, ugly and irrational. And the concentration of large populations into urban areas poses grave strategic dangers. A more concentrated population is more vulnerable and less mobile. That was a strategy the Nazis utilized to great effect with the ghettos. Now international diplomacy insists on rounding up Jews into new ghettos inside Israel itself, virtual Bevingrads hammered out in "The Name of Peace".

Charles Krauthammer meanwhile challenges the liberal consensus on using torture to extract information from terrorists

Did it work? The current evidence is fairly compelling. George Tenet said that the "enhanced interrogation" program alone yielded more information than everything gotten from "the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency put together."

Michael Hayden, CIA director after waterboarding had been discontinued, writes (with former attorney general Michael Mukasey) that "as late as 2006 . . . fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of al-Qaeda came from those interrogations." Even Dennis Blair, Obama's director of national intelligence, concurs that these interrogations yielded "high value information." So much for the lazy, mindless assertion that torture never works.

Could we not, as the president repeatedly asserted in his Wednesday news conference, have obtained the information by less morally poisonous means? Perhaps if we'd spoken softly and sincerely to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, we could equally have obtained "high-value information."

There are two problems with the "good cop" technique. KSM, the mastermind of 9/11 who knew more about more plots than anyone else, did not seem very inclined to respond to polite inquiries about future plans. The man who boasted of personally beheading Daniel Pearl with a butcher knife answered questions about plots with "soon you will know" -- meaning, when you count the bodies in the morgue and find horribly disfigured burn victims in hospitals, you will know then what we are planning now.

The other problem is one of timing. The good cop routine can take weeks or months or years. We didn't have that luxury in the aftermath of 9/11 when waterboarding, for example, was in use. We'd been caught totally blind. We knew there were more plots out there, and we knew almost nothing about them. We needed to find out fast. We found out a lot.

The only real rebuttal left is a Shephard Smith style rant WE'RE AMERICANS, WE DON'T TORTURE. The question of course is why not. Being Americans means protecting our own, not protecting terrorists. The very idea that being American means choosing to coddle terrorists at the cost of American lives is a left wing perversion of American values.

The ADL meanwhile is condemning Wilders for his speech suggesting that Islam be banned. Considering that the United States was never even able to outright ban the Communist Party per se, even at a time when Communist agents were actively operating in the US and Europe, engaging in espionage, sabotage, assassination and even possibly planting nuclear bombs on US soil. Certainly conveying the information needed to build nuclear bombs that could have killed a hundred million Americans.

We didn't ban the Communist party, but we should have. Freedom of Religion is absolute, but it does exist on the assumption that the religion in question is not a criminal ideology dedicated to the destruction of the United States. And that is exactly what Islam, like Nazism or Communism is.

Freedom of Religion was meant to protect religious freedom, not protect religious terrorism.

The biggest argument for banning Islam... is the way Islam treats non-Muslims. Islam does not recognize the freedom of other religions, and it seeks to rule by force or guile anywhere it goes. These facts are not in argument.

The myth of a moderate Islam, one whose adherents reject all violence and terrorism, is just that... a myth. A myth fostered by cleverer Muslim Brotherhood agents such as Tariq Ramadan and the "moderates" and liberals in America and Europe, who keep hunting for the moderate Muslim like Diogenes with his lamp for the one honest man.

See also Atlas Shrugs' passionate defense of Wilders

So does Yid with Lid, via the JIDF

My own take is that ADL represents Jews the way NOW represents women. The ADL is basically the outgrowth of a fraternity lodge that once filled a need, but today is just another liberal organization that exists to pay its officers six figure salaries and mostly toes the liberal line. The left has gotten very good at creating or co-opting organizations that claim to represent various groups, and then use them to project its own propaganda outward. We're overrun with groups representing various professions, genders, ethnicities and races... which in reality only represent the same old agenda.

Meanwhile there's an interesting Spectator article looking at how Obama is coddling Pakistan and endangering India.

Today, Pakistan’s rapid Talebanisation tops India’s concerns. After all, the brunt of escalating terrorism from Pakistan will be borne by India, which already has become, in the words of ex-US official Ashley Tellis, ‘the sponge that protects us all’.

The Af-Pak problem won’t go away without a fundamental break from the American policies that helped create this terrifying muddle. The US military can never win in Afghanistan, or even secure a ticket out of that country as Obama wants, without first dismantling the Pakistani military’s sanctuaries and sustenance infrastructure for the Taleban and other state-reared terror groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (the group who carried out the Mumbai atrocities) and Jaish-e-Muhammad. As Bush’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley pointed out just before leaving office in January, ‘You can’t really solve Afghanistan without solving Pakistan.’

As goes Pakistan, so goes the region. If Pakistan goes full Islamist, we can expect to see a quantum increase in terrorism. As it is Pakistan has served as a source of nuclear weapons and terrorism for a while now. But that's nothing compared to what would happened under a true green Islamist regime.

Back in America meanwhile, we can expect euthanasia and the Qualys to come a knocking, see Dog Ross' look at the inevitable euthanasia for the elderly under national health care with the same consequences as in the UK.

In other words, faceless bureaucrats in Washington -- not your family -- will decide whether your grandparents live or die.

While our health care system is certainly imperfect -- because all humans are imperfect, including doctors, nurses, hospitals and insurance companies -- they are more perfect, more competent, more informed, more capable than all of the bureaucrats to whom they'll be forced to report: a bureaucracy that will make all decisions about your health care.

Obama and the Statist Democrats promise health care for everyone, but they will not -- and they can't possibly -- deliver it.

And we know this, because this is what occurs in Canada and Britain and other centralized bureaucracies, where you simply can not have access to advanced health care, period.

And where will Barack Obama be in ten years, when the rest of us are struggling with a massive, out-of-control, federalized medical system that doesn't give a damn about individuals and is busy rationing care, denying care to the elderly?

He will be retired as a very young man; a very wealthy young man, who will have imposed his Marxist ideology upon this society and then walked away from it.

And of course add on the cost of immigrant's health care, and the balance has to come out of the native elderly. See my article Alfred Must Die So that Mahmoud May Live. The names may be different in America, but third world immigration, particularly from Mexico and Somalia, when combined with a national health care system, will mean death for the elderly.

Harry's Place meanwhile has an article taking a look at the embedded progressive anti-semitism in Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children

The anti-Zionist conceit that, as long as you are talking about Israel, you can say whatever you want about Jews, is laid bare here. It is not even possible to discuss whether or where this play crosses a line from criticism of Israel into antisemitism, because the play does not present us with a specific criticism of an Israeli policy or action. The Guardian’s illustration of a Jewish family seder table is far more appropriate than a photograph of the Israeli cabinet table would ever have been.

The dishonesty and amorality of the adult voices in Seven Jewish Children is striking. Nowhere are right and wrong considered, when deciding how to answer their children’s questions. Never does an adult in the play consider whether their suggested answer is true or not, nor whether this should have any bearing on which answer is given. Their only thought is which answers will best shield Jewish children from difficult moral questions. It is as if Jewish children are brought up in a moral vacuum, with Jewish power and vulnerability the only things that matter.

Michael Billington, the Guardian’s theatre critic, noted that the play “shows us how Jewish children are bred to believe in the ‘otherness’ of Palestinians”. Howard Jacobson described this as an example of “how easily language can sleepwalk us into bigotry.”

Billington’s use of the word “bred” should have shaken Guardian readers and editors from their slumber. After all, if used in connection with black or Muslim children, then the racism alarms would sound loud and clear. In fact, wittingly or not, Billington used exactly the right language to describe the message of Seven Jewish Children.

Of course consider that liberal icon Bill Moyers used very nearly the same formulation about Jews, calling violence "genetically encoded" into Jews.

Had Moyers made such a statement about Blacks or Muslims, he would have been fired within 5 minutes making it, followed by profusive apologies from PBS management. Moyers' picture would have been at the security desk to insure he never even enters the building again.

But of course he made it about Jews, so it was ultimately okay because it reflects the New Anti-Semitism, one that drags back all the tropes of the old, the blood libel, the protocols of the elders of aipac and all that baggage, with a progressive face.

If someone were to dust off a good Nazi production and replace the German names with Arab ones, it would do bang up business in London nowadays.

Speaking of Israel Matzav reports that the AIPAC case has been dropped, but the real mission, besides destroying Larry Franklin's career was accomplished, and that was to intimidate pro-Israel voices in the US. The attack on Harman which appears increasingly hollow, just shows the process moves on to a new stage.

Meanwhile in time for Israel's 61st, Yid with Lid has a roundup of blog posts on Israel.

Islamic Danger to Americans has his own take on my article Winning the War on Terror" from yesterday.

Lemon looks at Israel in the Shark Pool

The Keli Ata Blog talks about Obama fattening up the Jewish turkeys

Shawarma Mayor takes on the World Bank.

Jammie Wearing Fool looks at how another of Obama's smart diplomacy targets just humiliated him.

Fresno Zionism says Hillary Clinton confuses the cart with the horse

Debbie Schlussel takes on Michelle Obama's spending hypocrisy.

After six long and productive years, Boker Tov Boulder appears to be retiring on a somewhat downbeat note.

It's funny/odd that my blogiversary coincides collides with the ever-so-grand culmination of Barack Obama's First One Hundred Days as President. When asked "What does your wife do? " The Husband often answers, "She is saving the world." I wish I could have. I wish I could have saved America from Barack Hussein Obama. In a hundred days he has turned this country upside down and inside out, and ruined it... for generations to come. He will set up a cardboard socialist regime in its place, run by radical leftist baby boomers and Muslims. A cheap dictatorship with no gravitas. There will be no more Thomas Jefferson or Founding Fathers. No more principles. No more freedom. In no time at all, America will be Cuba writ large.

Even now, Government is the only act in town. If you want your business to continue, then you do business with or through the Government. That's where the money is, and the only growth. Soon you will have to go to the Government if you are sick. Good luck with that.

You can feel the freedom seep away (along with relative safety and general prosperity). Sure, you can still smoke cigarettes - the President does - but they are suddenly unaffordable by way of new taxes (another reason I have to quit blogging). The new taxes will go to your government health care for which you won't qualify since you smoke. And sure, you can still build one of those (Ew-dirty) coal-fired power plants, but the government will bankrupt you if you try. Besides, they already have that revenue ($64.5 billion a year) built into the Budget. All in the name of Crises -- cum opportunities.

What's half a million unemployed coal miners, anyway? People don't care for them to begin with, so when the unemployment figures come out, you just repeat some "bushtorture" and Halliburton buzzwords, maybe a little Madoff or "executive bonuses," and get ACORN to whip up a demonstration - duly regurgitated by the media which surrendered truth to power long ago. It's easy... you summon up the ghost of Dick Cheney as Darth Vader and throw some red (herring) meat to the liberal masses. Or you can give a speech about race and vilify the few remaining "typical white people." Meanwhile, you make it nearly impossible for them to buy, sell or have the guns and ammo they're always clinging to. And religion? Pff. How non-progressive can you get? Christians are ridiculed right of out of any conversation in the public forum. And everyone knows the Jews are scared (it seems to be in our DNA now, not to rock the boat while it sinks). And sure, you can protest all this - like the tea partiers did over out-of-control spending and the specter of the hyperinflation to follow - but the media will ridicule and demonize you and the FBI will investigate you. Do you get my drift? Sure, there's a Constitution, but you just ignore it, act like it doesn't exist, and corruption can easily triumph over The People. It already has.

I have stopped by to leave my message of support for her hard work blogging on the things that matter over these years, and the blogsphere will be a poorer place without her.