A Reply to Congressman Grayson

Two can play the same game. 

The video I posted yesterday shows how by taking words out of context, Grayson offers a commercial where the words uttered by his opponent are the exact opposite of what the candidate actually said.

Here is a video, where using the words of Grayson in the same manner he uses those of his opponents, one can present him as a candidate who hates children, the elderly and loves Satan.

The most despicable member of Cogress

To call Rep. Grayson reprehensible would be actually elevating him. He is by far the most despicable member of Congress. Here he is questioned by MSNBC in an interview that summarizes everything that is wrong with this congressman. Personally, I really believe that Grayson is mentally ill.

Two Papers in One!

Zero Tolerance for the New York Times!

• "The administration has estimated that [medical insurance] premiums should rise no more than 2 percent because of the new [ObamaCare] consumer protections, and warned this month that it would have 'zero tolerance' for efforts to blame the law for larger increases."--New York Times, Sept. 23

• "Blue Shield recently filed rate increases of less than 2 percent, on average, for all of its policies, and a little more than 4 percent in the individual market, largely to address the expanded benefits under the new federal law."--New York Times, Sept. 23


Two Papers in One!

• "The Senate, of all places, should be sensitive to the fact that this large and diverse country has never believed in government by an unrestrained majority rule. . . . A decade ago, this page expressed support for tactics that would have gone even further than the 'nuclear option' in eliminating the power of the filibuster. At the time, we had vivid memories of the difficulty that Senate Republicans had given much of Bill Clinton's early agenda. But we were still wrong. To see the filibuster fully, it's obviously a good idea to have to live on both sides of it. We hope acknowledging our own error may remind some wavering Republican senators that someday they, too, will be on the other side and in need of all the protections the Senate rules can provide."--editorial, New York Times, March 29, 2005

• "President Obama, the House and a majority of senators clearly support an end to 'don't ask, don't tell,' but that, of course, is insufficient in the upside-down world of today's Senate, where 40 members can block anything."--editorial, New York Times, Sept. 21, 2010

Thank you James Taranto at Best of the News

Worth Reading

Thank you Texas! In an act of courage, the Texas Board of Education has passed a resolution curtailing references to Islam in textbooks.  As a retired educator and school supervisor I greet this with delight.  In the last decade references to Islam had to be vetted by Muslim professors, and if you followed what the textbooks published you would think that Islam found Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Theresa too violent.  References to violence were limited to Christianity and the West.  I guess that Islam expanded from India to Spain by distributing leaflets in caravan stations.

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In a meeting of his Global Initiative, the ubiquitous Bill Clinton gave an analysis of the situation in Israel and the prospects for peace.  He went on to explain that Russian Jews in Israel are a major obstacle to peace.  In his always-embellishing style, the former president went on to recall a conversation with Nathan Sharansky, who opposed Clinton’s peace proposal at Camp David.  Of course, Sharansky, who was not present at Camp David at the time, refuted the dialogue recalled by Mr. Clinton.  I hope that Clinton remembers that It was Arafat who rejected the most comprehensive offer Israel ever made.

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Emirates TV reports that a Saudi man beat and divorced his wife when she stuffed cheese instead of meat into his Sambosa pies.  I am now debating whether to show the article to my wife in the hope that it would motivate her to cook exactly the way I like my food.  If I had to bet, it would motivate her to send me to the neighborhood restaurant three times a day.  This if she doesn’t divorce me first.

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Charles Krauthammer analyzes the Democrat plan to attack the Tea Party, and their rationalization that the Tea Party will lead to a Democrat victory in November.  As usual, Krauthammer is brilliant.

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Los Angeles Times v. Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times published the following excerpt on June 4, 2009:

For the ‘funemployed,’ unemployment’s welcomed


These jobless folks, usually singles in their 20s and 30s, find that life without work agrees with them. They’re not sending out resumes, but instead lazing at the beach and taking long trips abroad.

Michael Van Gorkom was laid off by Yahoo in late April. He didn’t panic. He didn’t rush off to a therapist. Instead, the 33-year-old Santa Monica resident discovered that being jobless “kind of settled nicely.”

Week one: “I thought, ‘OK . . . I need to send out resumes, send some e-mails, need to do networking.”

Week two: “A little less.”

Every week since: “I’m going to go to the beach and enjoy some margaritas.”

What most people would call unemployment, Van Gorkom embraced as “funemployment.”

While millions of Americans struggle to find work as they face foreclosures and bankruptcy, others have found a silver lining in the economic meltdown. These happily jobless tend to be single and in their 20s and 30s. Some were laid off. Some quit voluntarily, lured by generous buyouts.

Buoyed by severance, savings, unemployment checks or their parents, the funemployed do not spend their days poring over job listings. They travel on the cheap for weeks. They head back to school or volunteer at the neighborhood soup kitchen. And at least till the bank account dries up, they’re content living for today.

September 21, 2010, they published the following:

Jobless workers dispute claim that unemployment benefits foster complacency


The idea that extended benefits discourage people from seeking work is an insult, unemployed workers say. ‘Let ‘em walk a mile in our shoes,’ one jobless woman says of unemployment critics.

It’s an old theory that’s gaining new political currency: By cushioning the blow of unemployment for nearly two years, jobless benefits discourage recipients from looking for work.

The claim, most frequently advanced by conservative pundits and politicians aligned with the conservative “tea party” movement, is seen as a fresh insult by the nation’s suffering unemployed workers.

Thank You Patterico's Pontifications

Don't question politicians. They never lie.

Here is how "We the People" are treated by many of our representatives.  They can throw figures of the top of their heads, but we cannot question them or their integrity.

Memo to representative Ciro Rodriguez: Next year you and many of your democrat colleagues will have plenty of time to "defend" yourself.  

Mollifying Muslims, and Muslifying Mollies

The folowing is an article by Mark Steyn on Islam and the West.  It is as perceptive and brilliant as ever. 

While I've been talking about free speech in Copenhagen, several free speech issues arose in North America. I was asked about them both at the Sappho Award event and in various interviews, so here's a few thoughts for what they're worth:

Too many people in the free world have internalized Islam’s view of them. A couple of years ago, I visited Guantanamo and subsequently wrote that, if I had to summon up Gitmo in a single image, it would be the brand-new copy of the Koran in each cell: To reassure incoming prisoners that the filthy infidels haven't touched the sacred book with their unclean hands, the Korans are hung from the walls in pristine, sterilized surgical masks. It's one thing for Muslims to regard infidels as unclean, but it's hard to see why it's in the interests of us infidels to string along with it and thereby validate their bigotry. What does that degree of prostration before their prejudices tell them about us? It’s a problem that Muslims think we’re unclean. It’s a far worse problem that we go along with it.

Take this no-name pastor from an obscure church who was threatening to burn the Koran. He didn’t burn any buildings or women and children. He didn’t even burn a book. He hadn’t actually laid a finger on a Koran, and yet the mere suggestion that he might do so prompted the President of the United States to denounce him, and the Secretary of State, and the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, various G7 leaders, and golly, even Angelina Jolie. President Obama has never said a word about honor killings of Muslim women. Secretary Clinton has never said a word about female genital mutilation. General Petraeus has never said a word about the rampant buggery of pre-pubescent boys by Pushtun men in Kandahar. But let an obscure man in Florida so much as raise the possibility that he might disrespect a book – an inanimate object – and the most powerful figures in the western world feel they have to weigh in.

Aside from all that, this obscure church’s website has been shut down, its insurance policy has been canceled, its mortgage has been called in by its bankers. Why? As Diana West wrote, why was it necessary or even seemly to make this pastor a non-person? Another one of Obama's famous "teaching moments"? In this case teaching us that Islamic law now applies to all? Only a couple of weeks ago, the President, at his most condescendingly ineffectual, presumed to lecture his moronic subjects about the First Amendment rights of Imam Rauf. Where's the condescending lecture on Pastor Jones' First Amendment rights?

When someone destroys a bible, US government officials don’t line up to attack him. President Obama bowed lower than a fawning maitre d’ before the King of Saudi Arabia, a man whose regime destroys bibles as a matter of state policy, and a man whose depraved religious police forces schoolgirls fleeing from a burning building back into the flames to die because they’d committed the sin of trying to escape without wearing their head scarves. If you show a representation of Mohammed, European commissioners and foreign ministers line up to denounce you. If you show a representation of Jesus Christ immersed in your own urine, you get a government grant for producing a widely admired work of art. Likewise, if you write a play about Jesus having gay sex with Judas Iscariot.

So just to clarify the ground rules, if you insult Christ, the media report the issue as freedom of expression: A healthy society has to have bold, brave, transgressive artists willing to question and challenge our assumptions, etc. But, if it’s Mohammed, the issue is no longer freedom of expression but the need for "respect" and "sensitivity" toward Islam, and all those bold brave transgressive artists don’t have a thing to say about it.

Maybe Pastor Jones doesn't have any First Amendment rights. Musing on Koran burning, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer argued:

[Oliver Wendell] Holmes said it doesn’t mean you can shout 'fire' in a crowded theater... Why? Because people will be trampled to death. And what is the crowded theater today? What is the being trampled to death?

This is a particularly obtuse remark even by the standards of contemporary American jurists. As I've said before, the fire-in-a-crowded-theatre shtick is the first refuge of the brain-dead. But it's worth noting the repellent modification Justice Breyer makes to Holmes' argument: If someone shouts fire in a gaslit Broadway theatre of 1893, people will panic. By definition, panic is an involuntary reaction. If someone threatens to burn a Koran, belligerent Muslims do not panic - they bully, they intimidate, they threaten, they burn and they kill. Those are conscious acts, at least if you take the view that Muslims are as fully human as the rest of us and therefore responsible for their choices. As my colleague Jonah Goldberg points out, Justice Breyer's remarks seem to assume that Muslims are not fully human.

More importantly, the logic of Breyer's halfwit intervention is to incentivize violence, and undermine law itself. What he seems to be telling the world is that Americans' constitutional rights will bend to intimidation. If Koran-burning rates a First Amendment exemption because Muslims are willing to kill over it, maybe Catholics should threaten to kill over the next gay-Jesus play, and Broadway could have its First Amendment rights reined in. Maybe the next time Janeane Garafolo goes on MSNBC and calls Obama's opponents racists, the Tea Partiers should rampage around town and NBC's free-speech rights would be withdrawn.

Meanwhile, in smaller ways, Islamic intimidation continues. One reason why I am skeptical that the Internet will prove the great beacon of liberty on our darkening planet is because most of the anonymous entities that make it happen are run by people marinated in jelly-spined political correctness. In Canada, an ISP called Bluehost knocked Marginalized Action Dinosaur off the air in response to a complaint by Asad Raza, a laughably litigious doctor in Brampton, Ontario. Had his name been Gordy McHoser, I doubt even the nancy boys at Bluehost would have given him the time of day. A similar fate briefly befell our old pal the Binksmeister at FreeMarkSteyn.com: In other words, a website set up to protest Islamic legal jihad was shut down by the same phenomenon. In America, The New York Times has already proposed giving "some government commission" control over Google’s search algorithm; the City of Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence was adopted and the Constitution signed, is now so removed from the spirit of the First Amendment that it's demanding bloggers pay a $300 "privilege" license for expressing their opinions online. The statists grow ever more comfortable in discussing openly the government management of your computer. But, even if they don't formally take it over, look at the people who run publishing houses, movie studios, schools and universities, and ask yourself whether you really want to bet the future on the commitment to free speech of those who run ISPs. SteynOnline, for example, is already banned by the Internet gatekeepers from the computers at both Marriott Hotels and Toronto Airport.

But forget about notorious rightwing hatemongers like me. Look at how liberal progressives protect their own. Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She's the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up "Everybody Draws Mohammed" Day, and then, when she realized what she'd stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark's Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:

You may have noticed that Molly Norris' comic is not in the paper this week. That's because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she's been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization's sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine's Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris' own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: "There is no more Molly"? That's all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims?

Who knows? Given his highly selective enthusiasms, you can hardly blame a third of Americans for figuring their president must be Muslim. In a way, that's the least pathetic explanation: The alternative is that he's just a craven squish. Which is an odd considering he is, supposedly, the most powerful man in the world.

Listen to what President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, The Seattle Weekly and Bluehost internet services are telling us about where we're headed. As I said in America Alone, multiculturalism seems to operate to the same even-handedness as the old Cold War joke in which the American tells the Soviet guy that "in my country everyone is free to criticize the President", and the Soviet guy replies, "Same here. In my country everyone is free to criticize your President." Under one-way multiculturalism, the Muslim world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west's inheritance, and, likewise, the western world is free to revere Islam and belittle the west’s inheritance. If one has to choose, on balance Islam’s loathing of other cultures seems psychologically less damaging than western liberals' loathing of their own.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it. Every time Muslims either commit violence or threatens it, we reward them by capitulating. Indeed, President Obama, Justice Breyer, General Petraeus, and all the rest are now telling Islam, you don’t have to kill anyone, you don’t even have to threaten to kill anyone. We’ll be your enforcers. We’ll demand that the most footling and insignificant of our own citizens submit to the universal jurisdiction of Islam. So Obama and Breyer are now the “good cop” to the crazies’ "bad cop". Ooh, no, you can’t say anything about Islam, because my friend here gets a little excitable, and you really don’t want to get him worked up. The same people who tell us "Islam is a religion of peace" then turn around and tell us you have to be quiet, you have to shut up because otherwise these guys will go bananas and kill a bunch of people.

While I was in Denmark, one of the usual Islamobozos lit up prematurely in a Copenhagen hotel. Not mine, I'm happy to say. He wound up burning only himself, but his targets were my comrades at the newspaper Jyllands-Posten. I wouldn't want to upset Justice Breyer by yelling "Fire!" over a smoldering jihadist, but one day even these idiots will get lucky. I didn't like the Danish Security Police presence at the Copenhagen conference, and I preferred being footloose and fancy-free when I was prowling the more menacing parts of Rosengard across the water in Malmö the following evening. No one should lose their name, their home, their life, their liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won't be there for you.

Mark Steyn on Danish TV: European elites drew wrong conclusion after WWII

Mark Steyn, in an interview for Danish TV. The introduction is for about thirty seconds in Danish, and the rest is in English. By the way, if you have not read America Alone, you are missing a great book.

Blowing the Shofar at the Kotel on Yom Kippur

During the Mandate, in what was then Palestine, Jews were prohibited from blowing the shofar in the Kotel on Yom Kippur, as to not offend the Muslim population.

Jewish volunteers risking their lives and freedom smuggled shofars and every year and ensured the its sound was heard in the Kotel on Yom Kippur.

Here are some of the surviving volunteeers who blew the shofar at the Kotel telling us their story:

Mosque Shock: School Rocked by Field Trip Vid of Kids Bowing to Allah

Having worked in public schools, I remember the difficulties encountered by anyone who wanted to put a bulletin board with some religious images, or the complaints by teachers over a small Christmas tree on secretary's desk. Social Studies teachers had to bend over backwards when teaching elements related to religion. But all this began to change in the last decade when anti-religious criticism was allowed only when teaching Judeo-Christian topics. With respect to Islam, social studies textbooks had to be approved by Muslims who whitewashed any references critical of jihad or Islam. As chair of the social studies department, I was inundated with invitations to get free books, magazines and field trips that upon careful investigation, I found were financed by the Saudi embassy.

Here we have a video of a middle school in Massachusetts who did not do its homework. Watch it and imagine the same event taking place in a Baptist, Catholic or Jewish house of worship.

The rest needs no comment:

In the news...

Remember Pelosi promising to drain the swamps? Here is House Member Eleanor Holmes Norton making a fundraising call to a lobbyist. Listen to the recording and read the analysis of the laws broken.  The swamp if thriving.

Listen to Eleanor Holmes Norton's phone message.

French Senate passes ban on full Muslim veils

In a report from France, AP reports about France's senate passing a ban on veils and burkas that completely cover women's faces.

What caught my attention in this report was the need that this news agency had to insert commentary and moral equivalency. In particular, I was appalled by the following paragraph:

Many Muslims believe the legislation is one more blow to France's No. 2 religion, and risks raising the level of Islamophobia in a country where mosques, like synagogues, are sporadic targets of hate.

If the reporters would have done their homework, they would have mentioned that the "sporadic" attacks on synagogues, Jewish organizations and Jews wearing yarmulkes or stars of David, are in their vast majority perpetrated by Muslims.

My prediction is that if this law is declared constitutional, France will not enforce it.  As it is now in France, whole neighborhoods are closed to French non-Muslim authorities.  No French cop will dare to fine persons wearing face covering veils.  I write persons, because we don't know who is underneath a veil.  There were instances of terrorists and criminals attempting to avoid recognition by wearing Muslim garb that covers the face.

Memo to veil wearing Muslims around the world:  It is not mandatory to immigrate to the West.

Europe Reverts to Type: The EU's response to anti-Semitism? "No comment."

This article by Bret Stephens was published September 14, 2010, in the Wall Street Journal


If a top European mandarin mouths off about Jews and the rest of Europe's political class acts like it's no big deal, does that make them cowards, accomplices—or just politically astute? Probably all three.

Earlier this month, Karel De Gucht, the European Union's trade commissioner and a former foreign minister of Belgium, gave an interview to a Flemish radio station in which he offered the view that the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations were sure to founder on two accounts: first, because Jews are excessively influential in the U.S; second, because they are not the sorts to be reasoned with.

"Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill," Mr. De Gucht said, dispensing with the usual fine-grained, face-saving distinction about the difference between a "Jewish" and an "Israel" lobby. "This is the best organized lobby, you shouldn't underestimate the grip it has on American politics—no matter whether it's Republicans or Democrats."


Nor was that all the commissioner had to say on the subject. "There is indeed a belief—it's difficult to describe it otherwise—among most Jews that they are right," he said. "And it's not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East."

Here, then, was a case not of "criticism of Israel" or "anti-Zionism," the usual sheets under which this sort of mentality hides. Mr. De Gucht's target was Jews, the objects of his opprobrium their malign political influence and crippled mental reflexes. If this isn't anti-Semitism, the term has no meaning.

But perhaps it no longer does, at least in Europe. "I regret that the comments that I made have been interpreted in a sense I did not intend," Mr. De Gucht said, by way of non-apology. "I did not mean in any possible way to cause offense or stigmatize the Jewish community. I want to make clear that anti-Semitism has no place in today's world."

The comment admits of two interpretations: (1) that it is insincere, and therefore an act of political expediency; (2) that it is sincere, and Mr. De Gucht thinks that casually bad-mouthing Jews doesn't quite reach the threshold of "anti-Semitism"—defined, as the saying has it, as hating Jews more than is strictly necessary.

I suspect the latter interpretation, which has an old European pedigree, is closer to the mark. But whatever Mr. De Gucht's motives, the more interesting phenomenon has been the European non-reaction. "No comment," says a spokesman for German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. "Our position on anti-Semitism is very clear but we have no comments on other people's statements," says a spokesman for Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini. "High Representative [Catherine] Ashton is confident [De Gucht] didn't mean any offense, and that he apologized," says a spokeswoman for the EU's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. "He made personal comments for which he expressed his personal regret and there is no further comment to make," says a spokesman for the European Commission.

Now imagine that Mr. De Gucht had made analogous comments about Muslims: What would have been the reaction then? Actually, it's not hard to guess. For weeks, Germany has been in an uproar over a book by Bundesbank member Thilo Sarrazin that has unflattering things to say about Muslim immigrants and what they portend for Germany's future. I have no brief for Mr. Sarrazin (who also made a somewhat cryptic comment about Jews sharing "a particular gene"). But why has Mr. Sarrazin been forced to quit the Central Bank and is now being drummed out of his Social Democratic Party at the same time that Mr. De Gucht has been given a pass?

One answer is that there are about 1.5 million Jews in the EU today, as against some 16 million Muslims, and politicians are responsive to numbers. Fair enough. The other answer is that Europe—and not just Muslim Europe—is pervasively anti-Semitic.

If that sounds over-the-top, consider that last year the Anti-Defamation League conducted a survey of European attitudes toward Jews in seven different countries. Do Jews have "too much power in the business world"? In France, 33% said this was "probably true"; in Spain it was 56%. Were Jews to some degree responsible for the global economic crisis? In Germany, 30% thought so; in Austria, 43% did. A separate 2008 Pew Survey also found that 25% of Germans, 36% of Poles and 46% of Spaniards had a "very" or "somewhat" unfavorable opinion of Jews.

As part of his defense, Mr. De Gucht insisted he was only offering his "personal point of view," and not those of the European Commission as a whole. He shouldn't be so modest. He has his constituency. It's why he remains in office. It's why Europe's future is beginning to look increasingly like Europe's past.

Time to Declare War on Israel

This article was written by A. Barton Hinkle and published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch on September 10, 2010.

The latest issue of Time purports to explain "Why Israel Doesn't Care About Peace." (Hint: Blame the money-grubbing Jews!) There will be earnest efforts to point out why this is nonsense, but they will fall on deaf ears. These days a defense of Israel requires stronger measures. And perhaps nothing could do Israel more good than for the United States to declare war on it.

After all, if you want to win the support of American academics, journalists, and movie stars -- if you pine for the approbation of the U.N. Security Council and NGOs the world over -- then you should get on the wrong side of U.S. foreign policy.

This has been true at least since 1933, when The New York Times' chief Stalinist, Walter Duranty, called reports of famine in Russia "malignant propaganda." Throughout the Cold War, Americans were instructed that communism was "fundamentally a more uplifting idea than capitalism" (Andy Rooney). That "most Soviets do not yearn for capitalism or Western-style democracy" (Dan Rather). That Fidel Castro was a "dashing," "larger-than-life personality" who not only "delivered the most to those who had the least" but who turned his nation into "paradise," a "peaceable society that treasures its children" (Diane Sawyer, Peter Jennings, Rather again, CBS' Giselle Fernandez, and Newsweek).

When the Iron Curtain began to fall, Americans were told that "the transition from communism to capitalism is making more people more miserable every day" (CBS News). That "in the old Soviet Union, you never saw faces like these: the poor, the homeless . . . .[I]s this what democracy does? . . . [T]he price of freedom can be painfully high" (Barbara Walters). And so on, ad nauseam.

If you wanted agitprop about the evils of anti-communism, Hollywood was happy to oblige. If you wanted to learn about the horrors of the gulag or Soviet psychiatric prisons, Hollywood was happy to change the subject. And while you would be hard-pressed to find much regard for Ronald ("Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!") Reagan in academic circles, admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev was so high that it required the coining of a new word, Gorbasm.

We see the same thing shaping up today with regard to radical Islamic extremism. Thanks to the debate over the Park51 mosque in Manhattan, the news media suddenly are full of stories about America the Intolerant -- reporting on a "torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism," as The New York Times put it, not long before its front-page story, "American Muslims Ask: Will We Ever Belong?" "Protesters Use 'Sharia' as a Slur and Rallying Cry Against Islam," reports The Washington Post. "Is America Islamophobic?" asks a Time cover story.

Three decades after Jimmy Carter lectured Americans about their "inordinate fear of communism," his intellectual heirs are lecturing the public about their inordinate fear of radical Islam.

"Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s," an American Muslim tells The Times. Such as? Oh, maybe this: "There is indeed a belief . . . among most Jews that they are right. So it's not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is happening in the Middle East." Whoops! That wasn't from the 1930s -- it was from last week. The speaker was Karel De Gucht, the chief trade negotiator for the European Union. Never mind.

A single whackjob in Florida decides to burn the Quran, and everybody from the president to the pope to Gen. David Petraeus to Sarah Palin to the nearest blogger in Starbucks lines up to denounce the deed. And rightly so. Yet from all the furor you would scarcely know that for every bias crime against a Muslim in the U.S., there are 10 bias crimes against Jews. (E.g., in 2008 the FBI logged 7,783 hate crimes; 105 of them targeted Muslims, and 1,013 targeted Jews.)

Likewise in academia, one simply cannot be considered right-thinking if one does not deem Israel -- America's staunchest Mideast ally -- an imperialist, racist, illegitimate state that terrorizes innocent Palestinians. Hence, inter much alia, the move at Harvard to divest from Israeli companies. As for the thousands of Qassam rockets lobbed at Israeli civilians by Hamas "activists," or the fact that the Palestinian Authority's "moderate" Fatah government recently named a square in Ramallah after an infamous terrorist -- well, best not to speak of those things. Not if you want tenure, anyway.

So you can easily see what Israel would gain from a formal American declaration of war. Ideally, the declaration should come from a Republican Congress -- preferably introduced by a Tea Party insurgent, at the behest of Glenn Beck -- but that's icing on the cake. The main thing is to put the Jewish state in the same position vis-à-vis the United States as Fidel Castro or the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

Overnight, violent pro-Israel demonstrations would break out in San Francisco and New York. The press would term them "mostly peaceful." Counter-demonstrations would be described as angry mobs. Sean Penn and Michael Moore would collaborate on a movie glorifying the Israeli Defense Forces' raid of the "Freedom Flotilla's" Mavi Marmara. Campus centers of Middle Eastern studies would discover the virulent anti-Semitism of the official Arabic press, catalogued with depressing thoroughness at Memri.org. In English departments across the land, Zionist literary criticism would become the hot new thing. Posters of Che Guevara would come off college dorm walls, to be replaced by images of David Ben-Gurion.

Who knows? If the war dragged on for a few years, maybe Time might even come to its senses.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.--Robert Nozick.

My Turn To Be Offended

With the debate over the building of a mosque near Ground Zero, and the burning of the Koran in Greenville Florida, I couldn’t help but wonder where the pundits, experts and commentators were coming from when commenting on those events. Again and again I listened to variations of the same sentence: “These events will radicalize moderate Muslims,” or “These events will be used as a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda.”

I can just imagine the following scenario. A café in Kabul. A “moderate” Muslim sipping a cappuccino with his wife. He is reading Time Magazine, Le Figaro or Der Spiegel while his wife is looking at the Vogue issue offering the latest designs in Burkas. This moderate Muslim carries in his pocket a copy of the Federalist Papers and uses a copy of the American Declaration of Independence as a marker. While he reads he is softly whistling some notes of The Marseilles. Suddenly, he reads a paragraph in one of the magazines about a preacher with a fifty members congregation in Florida who has decided to burn a Koran on September 11. In the next page he reads that there is a debate over where to place a mosque in downtown Manhattan. A tear is running down the “moderate” Muslim cheek. “I wanted so much to love you, infidels, but you kept putting my faith down.” Death to you!

Next he runs to the nearest Taliban recruiting station and volunteers to go to Times Square where he will place an SUV loaded with explosives.

Well, this seems to be the scenario present by Western Media. The reality is quite different. Let us start by defining moderates. It seems that when defining moderates in the Muslim world the mainstream media and the left seem to refer to Muslims who do not want to decapitate us, but only require that we submit. By this criteria, they show that they hold the Muslims as fragile beings that require preferential treatment. Lets not offend them or they may want to kill us.

But where are the moderates we hear so much about? Where are the demonstrations of the moderates? Where is the Peace Now or the anti War movement in the Muslim world? Well, say my liberal leftists friends. In the Muslim world they live oppressed by dictatorial regimes and are afraid to demonstrate in the streets.

Really?

Then where are the Muslims that live in freedom in Europe, and North and South America? Millions live in free countries where the only time they take to the streets is to threaten and intimidate. Like rabid animals they yell in our faces. And our spineless leaders, and our media, and our college professors keep talking about the peaceful Muslims whose religion was hijacked by a small minority.

Really?

Is this information based on some accurate polls or is it based on typical liberal knee-jerk reaction? Because my poll is the most efficient one. It is the poll of how many Muslims are silent in the face of the violence of their coreligionists. And their number is in the hundreds of millions.

So on this September 11, it is my turn to be offended by Muslim behavior that makes the Greenville pastor look like Mahatma Gandhi.

I am offended whenever I see a hole in the ground where the World Trade Center stood.

I am offended by the decapitation of Daniel Pearl and other westerners.

I am offended by Muslims who burn the American Flag.

I am offended by the burning of the Israeli flag which contains a Star of David. A sacred symbol to Jews.

I am offended by Muslim denial of the Holocaust.

I am offended by the stoning of women and the execution of homosexuals.

I am offended by Muslims burning the Bible in Gaza while persecuting Christian Arabs.

I am offended by the persecution of Copts in Egypt.

I am offended by Muslim violence against non-Muslims in Nigeria.

I am offended by Muslims destroying my civilization because they don’t like a cartoon of Mohammed.

I am offended by Muslim cabdrivers who refuse to take a blind man with his seeing-eye dog because the dog is considered impure.

I am offended by Fordson High School in Dearborn, Michigan scheduling football practices from 11 P.M. to 4 A.M. during Ramadan to accommodate Muslim students.

I am offended by taxpayer-supported public schools in Detroit serving Halal food.

I am offended by channel RTL2 in Germany flashing onscreen notices indicating the start and end of the Ramadan fast while nothing similar is done for other religions.

I am offended by public schools in the United States allocating prayer areas for Muslim students during Ramadan without the ACLU complaining.

I am offended by the municipality of Helsinborg in Sweden allocating 30,000 kronor to subsidize Muslim students disseminating religious information about Ramadan to the public.

I could list more examples of offensive behavior on the part of Muslims, but the ones listed are enough to show where I am coming from.

Since I don't believe in killing those I don't agree with, my way of dealing with those who offend me is simple.  I will give you some constructive advise.

You came to West  voluntarily.  If you are unhappy here, go back to the place that makes you happy.  Don't go around trying to change us.  It took us a long time to achieve freedom and equality under a democratic system, and we are not ready to give it up.

If you find Hollywood or our entertainment offensive, don't go see American movies.  While on the subject, I read that in Saudi Arabia, Wahhabis have a thriving blac market business selling forbidden movies.  Hypocrites.

If you want to live under Sharia law, I am sure that there is a cave in Afghanistan where you can join others in a lifestyle taken out of the Middle Ages.

 And if you are really a moderate Muslim who loves this country, it would be really nice to see you every once in a while waiving the flag in support of the country where you reside. 

Finally, if you are asked by a reporter if you condemn Islamic terrorism, answer without qualifiers.  The question doesnt require mentioning the West Bank or Gaza, where by the way, Arabs live much better than their compatriots in the Muslim world.

You are either with us or against us.  Make up your mind fast because we are losing patience.

Egyptian Cleric: We Will Conquer Italy and the Rest of Europe, as Well as North and South America

Here is a sample of the type of preaching that goes on in the Muslim world. This preacher is delivering his message to millions in the Middle East through state sponsored television in Egypt, one of the "moderate" Muslim nations. 

With the help of the left in America, soon this message will be delivered from a mosque located two blocks from the world trade center.

Thank you MEMRI for providing the translation.

They Talk About Me Like A Dog

In an off the cuff remark made by Barack Obama during a Labor Day speech in Wisconsin, he referred to criticisms of his policies by "special interests" as talking about him like a dog.

What did he mean by this comment? Is this the infusion of race into criticism of his administration? After all in the old days, blacks were considered less than human. Is this a remark suggested by Maxine Waters?

In any Third World nation a speech where a president makes a similar comment would be the prelude to armed forces around the legislature and the judiciary. This could not happen here, but I have the strange feeling that deep in his heart Barack Obama would really like fatigues, a cigar, and the ability to implement his agenda a la Chavez.

And this agenda includes now the infusion of an additional 50 billion dollars for stimulus, and the creation of a national bank to finance the the rebuilding of our infrastructure.

Obama, who would you put in charge of this bank? Barney Frank or some of the former Chairmen of Board of Fannie Mae or Freddy Mac?

Barack Obama, it was you and the partisan left to which you belong that talked about Nixon and Reagan, and W. as if they were dogs. And they licked their wounds, no pun intended, and continued fighting for what they believed in, and in Nixon's case, he resigned. But never has any of them said that they were treated like a dog. Because they weren't. They were treated like politicians are treated in a democracy. Criticism is part of the game. Or have you forgotten how you spoke about your predecessor before and after you became president? If he would have said that he was talked about like a dog he would have been a thousand times more justified than you. But he was too much of a gentleman to utter such ridiculous words.

So my advice to you Mr. President, is to stick to prepared remarks and don't take your eyes of the teleprompter, because every time you say something unscripted you offer us material to criticize you. And then you accuse us of talking to you like a dog, which we do not. We talk about you like a failed president. And I mean this with the utmost respect.

The New Netanyahu? by Caroline Glick

Despite a multi-million dollar media blitz, Israelis are not buying the US-financed Geneva Initiative's attempt to convince us that we have a Palestinian partner. A week after the pro-Palestinian group launched its massive online promotion urging people to join its Facebook page, a mere 634 people had answered the call.

The US-funded agitprop involved ads in which senior Fatah propagandists were featured telling Israelis we can trust them this time around. The reason for its failure was made clear by a public opinion poll taken Tuesday night for Channel 10. When asked if they believed that Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas is serious about making peace with Israel, two-thirds of Israelis said no. Only 23 percent said he was serious and 17 percent said they didn't know.

Moreover, most Israelis have had it with the peace paradigm based on Israeli concessions of land and national rights in exchange for Palestinian terror and political warfare. When asked whether the government should extend the prohibition on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria beyond its Sept 26 terminus, 63 percent said no, it should not. A mere 21 percent of the public believes the government should respond positively to the US demand that Jews continue to be denied our property right in Judea and Samaria.

In his analysis of the results, Channel 10's senior political commentator Raviv Drucker said that if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu decides to make a deal with the Palestinians, he will have a hard time convincing the public to support him.

Drucker also argued that the results may have been influenced by the Palestinian terror attack on Tuesday night in which four civilians were brutally murdered on their way home from Jerusalem. That is, Drucker implied that the public is driven by its emotions. But what the results actually show is that the public is driven by reason.

When Palestinian terrorists gun down innocent people on the highway simply because they are Jews, the public's reasoned response is to say that the Palestinians do not want peace. The public's wholly rational reaction to this act of anti-Jewish butchery is to insist that Jews should not be denied our basic civil and human rights in a dangerous bid to appease murderers.

The poll's final question regarded Netanyahu and his intentions at the new round of land for peace negotiations in Washington. Slightly more than half of the public believes that Netanyahu is serious in his pursuit of a deal with the Palestinians and a mere 34 percent believe that he is not serious.

This last response is interesting for two reasons. First it is a strong indication that the public trusts Netanyahu's word. Since taking office a year and a half ago, Netanyahu has said repeatedly that he supports making a deal with Fatah. And a majority of the public believes him.

The second conclusion suggested by the result is more discouraging. With the public convinced that the Palestinians are not to be trusted and that Israel should stop making concessions, the majority of the public believes that Netanyahu is moving in the opposite direction. Netanyahu's statements in Washington give us ample reason for concern.

ON WEDNESDAY evening, ahead of a dinner at the White House with US President Barack Obama, Abbas, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah, Netanyahu made a startling statement.

He said, "I have been making the case for Israel all my life. But I did not come here to win an argument. I came here to forge a peace. I did not come here to play a blame game where even the winners lose. I came here to achieve a peace that will bring benefits to all."

This statement is worth considering carefully. Does Netanyahu truly believe that by "making the case for Israel" he and others who speak out in defense of Israel have merely been argumentative?

Does he think that defending Israel's rights diminishes the prospects for peace and so those that defend Israel are actually harming it?

Does he believe that in calling the Palestinians out for their brutality, barbarism and hatred of Jews and Israel he and his fellow advocates for Israel have merely been playing a blame game?

Does he think that a peace forged on the basis of ignoring Israel's case will be a viable peace?

If Netanyahu does believe all of these things - and his statement on Wednesday evening indicates he does, then the public should be very worried. Indeed, if this is what the premier believes, then it is just a matter of time before he begins echoing his predecessor Ariel Sharon and tells us that we are too dimwitted to understand him because the world looks different from where he is sitting than from our lowly perches on the ground, in Israel.

AND THIS brings us back to Tuesday evening's highway massacre. Predictably, the Obama administration led the way in framing the terrorist violence as a bid by Hamas to derail the newest round of negotiations. For example, after meeting with Netanyahu Wednesday Obama said, "The tragedy that we saw yesterday where people were gunned down on the street by terrorists who are purposely trying to undermine these talks is an example of what we're up against."

The only party that rejected the administration's rationalization of the attack was Hamas, whose operatives reportedly carried it out. In an interview Thursday with the London-based Asharq al Awsat, Hamas leader Mahmoud A-Zahar said that the talks have nothing to do with the attack. As he put it, "The bid to link this operation to the negotiations is completely wrong. When people have the opportunity, the capability and the targets, they act."

The truth is probably found neither in A-Zahar's claim nor in Obama's assertion. In all likelihood, Hamas was testing the waters. Iran's Palestinian proxy wanted to know whether the regular rules for peace processes have kicked into gear yet. Those rules -- as the families of the hundreds of Israelis murdered by Palestinian terrorists during the peak years of peace processes will attest -- involve Israel giving free rein to terrorists to murder Jews during "peace talks."

Since Yitzhak Rabin first shook Yassir Arafat's hand on the White House lawn 17 years ago, successive prime ministers have opted to not to retaliate for murderous attacks when peace talks are in session. They have justified their willingness to give the likes of Hamas a free hand to murder by claiming that fighting back would be tantamount to allowing terrorists to hold the peace process hostage. Conducting counter-terror campaigns in the midst of negotiations, they have uniformly argued, would endanger the talks and so, Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad must all be given a carte blanche to murder.

Echoing these sentiments precisely, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin all reportedly objected to launching any response to Tuesday's attack. According to the media, the three closed ranks against Netanyahu who reportedly wished to attack Hamas targets in Gaza following the massacre.

Wednesday's roadside shooting attack, in which a man and his wife were wounded, was a clear indication that Hamas and its ilk received the message. Just as A-Zahar said, they are always looking for an opportunity. And in not responding to Tuesday's attack, Israel told them that for the duration of these negotiations, Hamas can again kill with impunity.

Whether Hamas renewed its terror attacks this week because it likes to murder Jews, because it was trying to derail negotiations or because it was testing Israel, the fact of the matter is that from Hamas's perspective, it stood only to gain from attacking. Terror is always popular with the Palestinian public. As the Jerusalem Post reported on Wednesday, when news broke of Tuesday's attack, mobs of Palestinians in Judea and Samaria took to the streets to celebrate.

Part of the reason that Palestinians love terrorism is because they have never had to pay a real price for killing Jews. To the contrary, they have been richly rewarded. The Palestinians believe that it was terror, not negotiations that convinced Israel to withdraw from Gaza. So too, as they glance at the international response to their acts of wanton murder, they see terror has only benefitted them. International monetary assistance and political support for the Palestinians have always risen as terror levels peaked.

Obama's insistence that the talks go on after Tuesday's attack showed the Palestinians that the game is still theirs to win. The US will continue to side with the Palestinian demands against Israel regardless of their behavior.

IN NETANYAHU'S defense, his speech on Wednesday evening was not simply a repudiation of his life's work on behalf of Israel. Netanyahu seemed to hedge his bets when he said, "We left Lebanon, we got terror. We left Gaza, we got terror. We want to ensure that territory we concede will not be turned into a third Iranian sponsored terror enclave aimed at the heart of Israel. That is why a defensible peace requires security arrangements that can withstand the test of time and the many challenges that are sure to confront us."

The problem with this statement is that in light of the free pass he gave Hamas for Tuesday's attack, Netanyahu already conceded this crucial principle. If he believes that the only way for the talks to advance is to stand down in the face of attack rather than aggressively strike back, then Netanyahu has already committed himself to a peace that will create "a new Iranian sponsored terror enclave aimed at the heart of Israel."

Likewise, if he believes that only by ceasing to make Israel's case can he make progress with his "partner" Abbas, then Netanyahu has already conceded his demand that a peace agreement contain security arrangements that will defend Israel's national rights and other vital interests.

The most distressing aspect of Netanyahu's enthusiastic participation in a process the Israeli public rationally opposes is that it is him doing it. With Netanyahu now joining the ranks of those that attack Israel's defenders as enemies of peace and claim that defending the country is antithetical to peace, who is left to defend us?

Must Read

In a brilliant article, Mark Steyn writes about Labor Day, the conditions of the working masses, prophets of doom, and the earth. Wonderfully dated despite having been published eight years ago.

Click Here to Read Article

When will we have another black president? Dan Miller analyzes.

Click Here to Read the Article

Free Healthcare Biatch!

“The danger to America is not Barack Obama but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the presidency. It will be easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails them. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their president.”

Author unknown