Thursday, March 31, 2011

British Muslims for Israel

What a refreshing voice. In the following video you will hear from Hassan, a British Muslim saying exactly what millions of his coreligionists should be saying. If more Muslims voiced his opinions, a Palestinian state would have been in existence a long time ago.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

The Fogel Massacre

Although I am not in the habit of putting morbid pictures in my blog, I feel that the pictures below must be seen. These are some of the pictures of the Fogel family who was massacred by Palestinian terrorists. Building a house in East Jerusalem is condemned by the world as an obstacle to peace. Massacring a family of five is totally ignored.  YouTube removed a video showing these pictures.  I guess that they didn't want us to believe that the religion of peace is not so peaceful after all.

Below the pictures, you will be able to read an article by Caroline Glick that summarizes what so many of us feel.

Three of the victims

4 years old Elad




Father and baby daughter, 4 months old Hadas

11 years old Yoav

Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when the Palestinian terrorists pounced on her husband Udi and their three-month-old daughter Hadas, slitting their throats as they lay in bed on Friday night in their home in Itamar.

The terrorists stabbed Ruth to death as she came out of the bathroom. With both parents and the newborn dead, they moved on to the other children, going into a bedroom where Ruth and Udi's sons Yoav (11) and Elad (4) were sleeping. They stabbed them through their hearts and slit their throats.

The murderers apparently missed another bedroom where the Fogels' other sons, eight-year-old Ro'i and two-year-old Yishai were asleep because they left them alive. The boys were found by their big sister, 12-year-old Tamar, when she returned home from a friend's house two hours after her family was massacred.

Tamar found Yishai standing over his parents' bodies screaming for them to wake up.

In his eulogy at the family's funeral on Sunday, former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau told Tamar that her job from now on is to be her surviving brothers' mommy.

In a rare move, the Prime Minister's Office released photos of the Fogel family's blood-drenched corpses.

They are shown as they were found by security forces.

There was Hadas, dead on her parents' bed, next to her dead father Udi.

There was Elad, lying on a small throw rug wearing socks. His little hands were clenched into fists. What was a four-year-old to do against two grown men with knives? He clenched his fists. So did his big brother.

Maybe the Prime Minister's Office thought the pictures would shock the world. Maybe Binyamin Netanyahu thought the massacre of three little children would move someone to rethink their hatred of Israel.

That was the theme of his address to the nation Saturday night.

Netanyahu directed most of his words to the hostile world. He spoke to the leaders who rush to condemn Israel at the UN Security Council every time we assert our right to this land by permitting Jews to build homes. He demanded that they condemn the murder of Jewish children with the same enthusiasm and speed.

He shouldn't have bothered.

The government released the photos on Saturday night. Within hours, the social activism website My Israel posted a short video of the photographs on YouTube along with the names and ages of the victims.

Within two hours YouTube removed the video.

What was Netanyahu thinking? Didn't he get the memo that photos of murdered Jewish children are unacceptable? If they're published, someone might start thinking about the nature of Palestinian society.

Someone might consider the fact that in the Palestinian Authority, anti-Jewish propaganda is so ubiquitous and so murderous that killing the Fogel babies was an act of heroism. The baby killers knew that by murdering Udi, Ruth, Hadas, Yoav and Elad they would enter the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. They can expect to have a sports stadium or school in Ramallah or Hebron built for them by the Palestinian Authority and underwritten by American or European taxpayers.

And indeed, the murder of the Fogel children and their parents was greeted with jubilation in Gaza.

Carnivals were held in the streets as Hamas members handed out sweets.

Obviously YouTube managers are not interested in being held responsible for someone noticing that genocidal Jew hatred defines Palestinian society - and the Arab world as a whole. But they really have no reason to be concerned. Even if they had allowed the video to be posted for more than an hour, it wouldn't have made a difference.

The enlightened peoples of Europe, and growing numbers of Americans, have no interest in hearing or seeing anything that depicts Jews as good people, or even just as regular people. It is not that the cultured, intellectual A-listers in Europe and America share the Palestinians' genocidal hatred of the Jewish people.

The powerful newspaper editors, television commentators, playwrights, fashion designers, filmmakers and professors don't spend time thinking about how to prepare the next slaughter. They don't teach their children from the time they are Hadas and Elad Fogel's ages that they should strive to become mass murderers. They would never dream of doing these things.

They know there is a division of labor in contemporary anti-Semitism.

The job of the intellectual luminaries in Western high society today is to hate Jews the old-fashioned way, the way their greatgrandparents hated Jews back in the days of the early 20th century before that villain Adolf Hitler gave Jew hating a bad name.

Much has been made of the confluence of anti-Semitic bile pouring out of the chattering classes. From Mel Gibson to Julian Assange to Helen Thomas to Charlie Sheen to John Galliano, it seems like a day doesn't go by without some new celebrity exposing himself as a Jew hater.

It isn't that the beautiful people and their followers suddenly decided that Jews are not their cup of tea (or rail of cocaine). It's just that we have reached the point where people no longer feel embarrassed to parade their negative feelings towards Jews in public.

A DECADE ago, the revelation that French ambassador to Britain Daniel Bernard referred to Israel as "that shi**y little country," was shocking. Now it is standard fare. Everyone who is anyone will compare Israel to Nazi Germany without even realizing this is nothing but Holocaust denial.

The post-Holocaust dam reining in anti-Semitism burst in 2002. As Jewish children and parents like the Fogels were being murdered in their beds, on the streets, in discotheques, cafés and supermarkets throughout Israel, fashionable anti-Semites rejoiced at the opportunity to hate Jews in public again.

The collective Jew, Israel was accused of everything from genocide to infanticide to just plain nastiness.

Israel's leaders were caricatured as Fagin, Shylock, Pontius Pilate and Hitler on the front pages of newspapers throughout Europe. IDF soldiers were portrayed as Nazis, and Israeli families were dehumanized.

No longer civilians with an inherent right to live, in universities throughout the US and Europe, Israeli innocents were castigated as "extremist-Zionists" or "settlers" who basically deserved to be killed.

Professors whose "academic" achievements involved publishing sanitized postmodern versions of anti-Jewish Palestinian propaganda were granted tenure and rewarded with lucrative book contracts.

Today, when properly modulated, Jew hatred is a career maker. Take playwright Caryl Churchill's 1,300- word anti-Semitic monologue "Seven Jewish Children."

The script accuses the entire population of Israel of mass murders which were never committed.

For her efforts, Churchill became an international celebrity. The Royal Court Theater produced her anti- Jewish agitprop. The Guardian featured it on its home page. When Jewish groups demanded that The Guardian remove the blood libel from its website, the paper refused. Instead, it left the anti-Semitic propaganda on its homepage, but in a gesture of openmindedness, hosted a debate about whether or not "Seven Jewish Children" is anti-Semitic.

From London, "Seven Jewish Children" went on tour in Europe and the US. In a bid to show how tolerant of dissent they are, Jewish communities in America hosted showings of the play, which portrays Jewish parents as monsters who train their children to become mass murderers.

"Seven Jewish Children's" success was repeated by the Turkish anti-Semitic action film "Valley of the Wolves- Palestine," which premiered on January 28 - International Holocaust Memorial Day. The hero of that film is a Turkish James Bond character who comes to Israel to avenge his brothers, who were killed by IDF forces on the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara last May.

No doubt owing to the success of "Seven Jewish Children" and "Valley of the Wolves-Palestine" and other such initiatives, anti-Semitic art and entertainment is a growth sector in Europe.

Last month Britain struck again. Channel 4 produced a new piece of anti-Semitic bile - a four-part prime-time miniseries called "The Promise." It presents itself as an historical drama about Israel and the Palestinians, but its relationship with actual history begins and ends with the wardrobes.

In what has become the meme of all European and international left-liberal salons, the only good Jews in the mini-series are the ones who died in the Holocaust. From the show's perspective, every Jew who took up arms to liberate Israel from the British and defend it from the Arabs is a Nazi.

WHAT ALL this shows is that Netanyahu was wasting his time calling on world leaders to condemn the murder of the Fogel family. What does a condemnation mean? France and Britain condemned the massacre, along with the US. Does that exculpate the French and British for their embrace of anti-Semitism? Does it make them friends of the Jewish state?

And say a British playwright sees the YouTube censored photographs. No self-respecting British playwright will write a play called "Three Jewish Children" telling the story of how Palestinian parents do in fact teach their children to become mass murderers of Jews.

And if a playwright were to write such a play, The Royal Court Theater wouldn't produce it. The Guardian wouldn't post it on its website. Liberal Jewish community centers in America wouldn't show it, nor would university student organizations in Europe or America.

No, if someone wanted to use the photographs of Yoav's and Elad's mangled corpses and clenched little fists as inspiration to write a play or feature film about the fact that the Palestinians have no national identity outside their quest to annihilate the Jewish state, he would find no mass market.

The headlines describing the attack make all this clear.

From the BBC to CNN the Fogels were not described as Israelis. They were a "settler family." Their murderers were "alleged terrorists."

As far as the opinion makers of Europe and much of America are concerned, the Yoavs and Hadases and Elads of Israel have no right to live if they live in "a settlement."

So too, they believe that Palestinians have a right to murder Israelis who serve in the IDF and who believe that Jews should be able to live freely wherever we want because this land belongs to us.

Until these genteel Jew haters learn to think otherwise, Israel should neither seek nor care if they condemn this or any other act of Palestinian genocide. We shouldn't care about them at all.

Caroline Glick
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Good News, No Inflation

Can you imagine a doctor saying that other than for pancreatic cancer, the patient is in good health?  Well, the AP is reporting exactly like this.  Here is a quote from their last report:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wholesale prices jumped last month by the most in nearly two years due to higher energy costs and the steepest rise in food prices in 36 years. Excluding those volatile categories, inflation was tame.
So yesterday I paid $55 dollars to fill my tank with gasoline, and $64 for some groceries, and I have to celebrate that inflation is low?  CD's are paying less than 1%, and half of it goes to taxes.  The time has come to demand that the real rate of inflation be deducted from our taxes.  For those of you ignoratnt of economics, inflation is a hidden tax that benefits the government, but destroys any incentives to save.


Click here for the complete AP report. 

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Palestinian Brutally Murders Family in Israel

A family of five, mother father and three children were brutally murdered in Israel. This act of savagery was greeted with celebration in Gaza, where Palestinians distributed candy in celebration. Prime Minister Salam Fayyad condemned the murders with the usual qualifiers noting that he condemns the attacks “just as I have denounced crimes against Palestinians.”

The mainstream media, busy with the Japanese earthquake has barely mentioned this event, and no emergency meeting of the UN Security Council has taken place. The reports keep hammering the fact that the victims were settlers in the West Bank, as if this somehow mitigates the crime. A reminder to all of them; these type of brutality has taken place in settlements and in Israel proper for decades.

Click here to read Reuters report

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Debunking Krugman

As a former school administrator, I am always fascinated by the use of statistics in order to explain either educational progress or failure. I remember sitting in countless meetings cringing while listening to such manipulations. But we were just amateurs when it came to using data to justify conclusions. For a real master at this game one has to read Paul Krugman at the New York Times.

In his last column, Krugman uses ACT and SAT data to show that Texas students are performing below Wisconsin students. Ergo, Wisconsin students are the beneficiaries of teachers that have a right to collective bargain, while Texas students suffer because their teachers have no such right.

Thank God for the age of the Internet.  In a short period after the publication of the article, Iowahawk published an entry that shows how similar data can be used to demonstrate that students in Texas are performing better than those of Wisconsin when taking into consideration ethnic breakdown and the perorfomance of different ethnic groups on the national level.

Read the article by clicking here: Longhorns 17, Badgers 1

Mark Steyn: Why are we still in Germany?


According to Bismarck's best-known maxim on Europe's most troublesome region, the Balkans are not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Americans could be forgiven for harboring similar sentiments after the murder of two U.S. airmen in Germany by a Kosovar Muslim.

Remember Kosovo? Me neither. But it was big at the time, launched by Bill Clinton in the wake of his Monica difficulties: Make war, not love, as the boomers advise. So Clinton did — and without any pesky U.N. resolutions, or even the pretense of seeking them.

Instead, he and Tony Blair and even Jacques Chirac just cried "Bombs away!" and got on with it. And the left didn't mind at all — because, for a modern western nation, war is only legitimate if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever war you're waging.

Unlike Iraq and all its supposed "blood for oil," in Kosovo no one remembers why we went in, what the hell the point of it was, or which side were the good guys. (Answer: Neither.) The principal rationale advanced by Clinton and Blair was that there was no rationale. This was what they called "liberal interventionism", which boils down to: The fact that we have no reason to get into it justifies our getting into it.

A decade on, Kosovo is a sorta sovereign state, and in Frankfurt a young airport employee is so grateful for what America did for his people that he guns down U.S. servicemen while yelling "Allahu akbar!"

The strange shrunken spectator who serves as President of the United States, offering what he called "a few words about the tragic event that took place," announced that he was "saddened," and expressed his "gratitude for the service of those who were lost" and would "spare no effort" to "work with the German authorities" but it was a "stark reminder" of the "extraordinary sacrifices that our men and women in uniform are making . . ."

The passivity of these remarks is very telling. Men and women "in uniform" (which it's not clear these airmen were even wearing) understand they may be called upon to make "extraordinary sacrifices" in battle. They do not expect to be "lost" on the shuttle bus at the hands of a civilian employee at a passenger air terminal in an allied nation.

But then I don't suppose their comrades expected to be "lost" at the hands of an army major at Fort Hood, to cite the last "tragic event" that "took place" — which seems to be the president's preferred euphemism for a guy opening fire while screaming "Allahu akbar!"

But relax, this fellow in Frankfurt was most likely a "lone wolf" (as Sen. Chuck Schumer described the Times Square Bomber) or an "isolated extremist" (as the president described the Christmas Day Pantybomber).

There are so many of these "lone wolves" and "isolated extremists" you may occasionally wonder whether they've all gotten together and joined Local 473 of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves and Isolated Extremists, but don't worry about it: As any Homeland Security official can tell you, "Allahu akbar" is Arabic for "Nothing to see here."

Bismarck's second best-known maxim on the region is that the Balkans start in the slums of Vienna. The Habsburg imperial capital was a protean "multicultural society" wherein festered the ancient grievances of many diverse peoples.

Today, the Muslim world starts in the suburbs of Frankfurt. Those U.S. airmen were killed by Arid Uka, whose Muslim Albanian parents emigrated from Kosovo decades ago. Young Arid was born and bred in Germany. He is a German citizen who holds a German passport. He is, according to multicultural theory, as German as Fritz and Helmut and Hans. Except he's not. Not when it counts.

Why isn't he a fully functioning citizen of the nation he's spent his entire life in? Well, that's a tricky one.

Okay, why is a Muslim who wants to kill Americans holding down a job at a European airport? That's slightly easier to answer. Almost every problem facing the western world, from self-detonating jihadists to America's own suicide bomb — the multi-trillion dollar debt — has at its root a remorseless demographic arithmetic.

In the U.S., the baby boomers did not have enough children to maintain their mid-20th century social programs. I see that recent polls supposedly show that huge majorities of Americans don't want any modifications to Medicare or Social Security.

So what? It doesn't matter what you "want." The country's broke, and you can vote yourself unsustainable quantities of government lollipops all you like, but all you're doing is ensuring that when, eventually, you're obliged to reacquaint yourself with reality, the shock will be far more devastating and convulsive.

But even with looming bankruptcy America still looks pretty sweet if you're south of the border. Last week, the former director of the U.S. Census Bureau, Steve Murdock, told the Houston Chronicle that in Texas "it's basically over for Anglos." He pointed out that two out of every three children are already "non-Anglo", and that this gap will widen even further in the years ahead. Remember the Alamo? Why bother? America won the war, but Mexico won the peace.

In the Lone Star State, Murdock envisions a future in which millions of people with minimal skills will be competing for ever fewer jobs paying less in actual dollars and cents than they would have earned in the year 2000. That doesn't sound a recipe for social tranquility.

What's south of Europe's border? Why, it's even livelier. In Libya, there are presently one million refugees from sub-Saharan Africa whose ambition is to get in a boat to Italy. There isn't a lot to stop them.

Between now and mid-century, Islam and sub-Saharan Africa will be responsible for almost all the world's population growth — and yet, aside from a few thousand layabout Saudi princes whoring in Mayfair, they will enjoy almost none of the world's wealth.

Niger had 10 million people in 2000, and half-a-million of them were starving children. By 2010, they had 15 million, and more children were starving. By 2100, they're predicted to hit 100 million. But they won't — because it would be unreasonable to expect an extra 90 million people to stay in a country that can't feed a population a tenth that size.

So they will look elsewhere — to countries with great infrastructure, generous welfare, and among the aging natives a kind of civilizational wasting disease so advanced that, as a point of moral virtue, they are incapable of enforcing their borders.

The nations that built the modern world decided to outsource their future. In simple economic terms, the arithmetic is stark: In America, the boomers have condemned their shrunken progeny to the certainty of poorer, meaner lives.

In sociocultural terms, the transformation will be even greater. Bismarck, so shrewd and cynical about the backward Balkans, was also the father of the modern welfare state: When he introduced the old age pension, you had to be 65 to collect and Prussian life expectancy was 45.

Now life expectancy has near doubled, you get your pension a decade earlier, and, in a vain attempt to make that deformed math add up, Bismarck's successors moved the old East/West faultline from the Balkans to the main street of every German city.

Americans sometimes wonder why, two decades after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the U.S. Army still lives in Germany. The day is approaching when they will move out — if only to avoid any more "tragic events" "taking place."