Eric Hoffer

As our government grows and becomes more and more intrusive, I was reminded by a quote from Eric Hoffer:

"The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails."

An open letter to President Obama from Jon Voight

Actor Jon Voight

June 22, 2010

President Obama:

You will be the first American president that lied to the Jewish people, and the American people as well, when you said that you would defend Israel, the only Democratic state in the Middle East, against all their enemies. You have done just the opposite. You have propagandized Israel, until they look like they are everyone's enemy — and it has resonated throughout the world. You are putting Israel in harm's way, and you have promoted anti-Semitism throughout the world.

You have brought this to a people who have given the world the Ten Commandments and most laws we live by today. The Jewish people have given the world our greatest scientists and philosophers, and the cures for many diseases, and now you play a very dangerous game so you can look like a true martyr to what you see and say are the underdogs. But the underdogs you defend are murderers and criminals who want Israel eradicated.

You have brought to Arizona a civil war, once again defending the criminals and illegals, creating a meltdown for good, loyal, law-abiding citizens. Your destruction of this country may never be remedied, and we may never recover. I pray to God you stop, and I hope the people in this great country realize your agenda is not for the betterment of mankind, but for the betterment of your politics.

With heartfelt and deep concern for America and Israel,

Jon Voight

Open Letter to Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Prime Minister of Spain

Not long ago, in support of the Palestinian cause in the Middle East, Prime Minister Zapatero appeared in public wearing a kafieh.  Furthermore, Spain has been at the forefront of critics of Israel and the "immorality" of the treatment of Palestinians. This inspired Ieoshua Levi from Israel to post the following open letter to the Spanish Prime Minister.  The letter was written in Spanish, and I took the liberty to translate it for publication in http://www.portalofideas.com/.  I took some liberties in translating, since the irony of the author is difficult to convey in English.  All credit for the letter belongs to Mr. Levi.  All mistakes or omissions are mine. 


Open Letter to Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Prime Minister of Spain

In 1492 the Jews were expelled form Spain.  This was one of the "just and moral" decisions of the Spanish people towards the Jews, who had to flee leaving behind all their belongings and material goods.  The Jews were not only expelled, humiliated, and attacked; they were also robbed by the Spanish people.  Who knows what Spanish person resides in the house of my ancestors, or has the belongings of those ancestors.

...yet, we don't hate the Spanish people.

Let us remember that in the same period Spain also created an institution dedicated to "truth and morality."  This institution that remains in the memory of mankind for their promotion of "tolerance and freedom of religion" is none other than the Inquisition.  Those paladins of justice and morality imprisoned, tortured and killed thousands.  Us, the Jews, they burned at the stake just for being Jews.

...and even though my people, the Jewish people, never created such dignified institutions, despite the hatred, abuse, torture and assassinations we don't hate the Spanish people.  Despite the silenced screams of our murdered ancestors; we don't judge Spain's moral fiber.

Spain continued with the belief that they had not finished their spreading of human values.  Spain was so noble and ethical that they had to spread their influence around the world.  So they came to America.  Not only they arrived there, but they "discovered" it.  Nobody, including the natives of America were aware of their own existence.  And in order to control the discovery and to spread the gallant Spanish morality, so noble and proud, they assassinated hundreds of thousand, in one of the largest genocides in history.  They stole tons of silver and gold that they had "discovered."  Not to mention the destruction of the native cultures.

...yet we, the children of the Hebrews, we don't judge the morality of the Spanish people nor investigate the sources of its richness.  We don't hate the Spanish people.

Perhaps this historical review is looking too far into the past.  So far, that some might say, we shouldn't take it into consideration..  Well, I am a a son of the Hebrew people, and I have 5,700 years of memories.  Inclusive, I remember current history.  For example, the period of Franco where the Spanish morality found a friend in Nazi Germany.  The consequence of so much "justice and morality" does not require the memories of 5,700 years.  Six million Jews perished in this period that wearers of kafiahs, and you too Mr. Zapatero, seem to attempt to deny.

And so, the State of Israel was born in 1948.  After centuries without a homeland, persecuted and enclosed in ghettos, we created an independent state.  Spain, so full of morality, so just and against racism, decided not to recognize the new state.  After being so nice to the Jewish people, it took decades for the just and moral Spanish nation to recognize the new state.

...despite all this, we don't hate the Spanish people.  We ask for nothing.

And when our neighbors attacked and murdered us, we didn't ask Spain to opine or defend us.  And they didn't defend us, but opine they did.  When our roads were mined, and our buses were burned, when our towns were bombed, when we were forced to wage war, Spain gave us opinions based on its history so full of "pacifism and humanism."

When suicide bombers blew themselves up in our restaurants and commercial centers, killing men, women, children, the elderly and the young, Spanish morality was nowhere to be found.  But when we reacted, the Spanish mass media, so objective, so well balanced, so full of morality and justice, so intelligent; did opine.  But as usual, as is the Spanish historical tradition, the reaction was to oppose the Jews.  And it isn't because of racism, or the Inquisition, or tradition or morality.  The reaction was because we the Jews bother them.  And I never understood why. 

...despite all this we felt sorry and identified with the Spanish people when they suffered terrorist attacks.  We felt close to the victims, their families and their suffering.  And we didn't hate the Spanish people.

And when thousands of missiles fall on the towns and cities of Israel, and we have dead and wounded, and when our soldiers are kidnapped, and our synagogues are attacked, and our cemeteries destroyed, and while Satanic theories are impugned on us attempting to dehumanize the Jews, we, Jews, shouldn't respond.  We have to put the other cheek.  We have to allow ourselves to be murdered, just like in the historical period that Mr. Zapatero remembers from the perspective of a Spain that wasn't involved.  This gives him the moral high ground to criticize us.

Put on  a kafiah, Mr. Zapatero, but never a kipah.  Our dead don't count; just like in the fires of the Inquisition. 

Put on Kafiah, while you allow Moroccan Muslims to drown on the Mediterranean when they attempt to reach to Spain.  Mr. Zapatero, they are Muslims and they use a Kafiah.  Don't you identify with their suffering?

Keep on the kafiah.  While you remember the Spanish trains, keep the kafiah on.  It look good on you.  Wear it while you talk to us about morality, truth, justice and humanism.  Don't forget anything.  We won't.  We remember the expulsion from Spain, the Inquisition, the persecution, the behavior of Spain in the "New World."  We won't forget the murders, and the thievery and we will never forget the Spanish "opposition" to Nazism.  We will remember how Spain never spoke of morality while we were being attacked and assassinated.

Keep the kafiaah on, Mr. Zapatero, and keep lecturing on morality, justice and humanism.  Spain has really a lot to lecture about.

Talk, Mr. Zapatero, while we are being butchered.  You are a noble son to the Spanish historical tradition.  The kafiah looks good on you, and it allows you to ally yourself to Islamic fundamentalism, so full of love and so many universal values of freedom, freedom of thought and opinion and divine justice and morality.

And while we talk about morality to us.

...remember, despite everything, we don't hate the Spanish people.  We respect them, read their books, listen to their music, we talk to them, visit them and approach them.  We don't hate Spaniards, or Germans or Arabs.  We only want to live in peace.  But those who placed on you the kafiah, those from Septemeber 11, the Madrid and London bombings, those who teach hatred and lies and barbarism wont let us.

Ieoshua Levi

Israel

Mort Zuckerman: World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur

Mort Zuckerman has just published a scathing indictment of the Obama administration and the way they conduct foreign policy.  His conclusion, as is the conclusion of many observers is that the world views Obama as incompetent and amateur.  Zuckerman writes:

The reviews of Obama’s performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America’s role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world’s leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America’s foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one’s own tribe while in the lands of others.

Even in Britain, for decades our closest ally, the talk in the press—supported by polls—is about the end of the “special relationship” with America. French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the virtual world, a clear reference to Obama’s speech on nuclear weapons. When the French president is seen as tougher than the American president, you have to know that something is awry. Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly scorned a number of Obama’s visions. Relations with the Chinese leadership got off to a bad start with the president’s poorly-organized visit to China, where his hosts treated him disdainfully and prevented him from speaking to a national television audience of the Chinese people. The Chinese behavior was unprecedented when compared to visits by other U.S. presidents.

Obama’s policy on Afghanistan—supporting a surge in troops, but setting a date next year when they will begin to withdraw—not only gave a mixed signal, but provided an incentive for the Taliban just to wait us out. The withdrawal part of the policy was meant to satisfy a domestic constituency, but succeeded in upsetting all of our allies in the region. Further anxiety was provoked by Obama’s severe public criticism of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his coterie of family and friends for their lackluster leadership, followed by a reversal of sorts regarding the same leaders.

Obama clearly wishes to do good and means well. But he is one of those people who believe that the world was born with the word and exists by means of persuasion, such that there is no person or country that you cannot, by means of logical and moral argument, bring around to your side. He speaks as a teacher, as someone imparting values and generalities appropriate for a Sunday morning sermon, not as a tough-minded leader. He urges that things “must be done” and “should be done” and that “it is time” to do them. As the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Les Gelb, put it, there is “the impression that Obama might confuse speeches with policy.” Another journalist put it differently when he described Obama as an “NPR [National Public Radio] president who gives wonderful speeches.” In other words, he talks the talk but doesn’t know how to walk the walk. The Obama presidency has so far been characterized by a well-intentioned but excessive belief in the power of rhetoric with too little appreciation of reality and loyalty.

Zuckerman concludes:

The end result is that a critical mass of influential people in world affairs who once held high hopes for the president have begun to wonder whether they misjudged the man. They are no longer dazzled by his rock star personality and there is a sense that there is something amateurish and even incompetent about how Obama is managing U.S. power. … America right now appears to be unreliable to traditional friends, compliant to rivals, and weak to enemies.

Click here to read the complete article in U.S. News and World Report

Hillel Neuer Rips U.N. Human Rights Council for Double Standards

Israel and the Surrender of the West

One of the world's oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.

By SHELBY STEELE in the Wall Street Journal

The most interesting voice in all the fallout surrounding the Gaza flotilla incident is that sanctimonious and meddling voice known as "world opinion."  At every turn "world opinion," like a school marm, takes offense and condemns Israel for yet another infraction of the world's moral sensibility. And this voice has achieved an international political legitimacy so that even the silliest condemnation of Israel is an opportunity for self-congratulation.

Rock bands now find moral imprimatur in canceling their summer tour stops in Israel (Elvis Costello, the Pixies, the Gorillaz, the Klaxons). A demonstrator at an anti-Israel rally in New York carries a sign depicting
the skull and crossbones drawn over the word "Israel." White House correspondent Helen Thomas, in one of the ugliest incarnations of this voice, calls on Jews to move back to Poland. And of course the United
Nations and other international organizations smugly pass one condemnatory resolution after another against Israel while the Obama administration either joins in or demurs with a wink.

This is something new in the world, this almost complete segregation of Israel in the community of nations. And if Helen Thomas's remarks were pathetic and ugly, didn't they also point to the end game of this isolation
effort: the nullification of Israel's legitimacy as a nation? There is a chilling familiarity in all this. One of the world's oldest stories is playing out before our eyes: The Jews are being scapegoated again.

"World opinion" labors mightily to make Israel look like South Africa looked in its apartheid era-a nation beyond the moral pale. And it projects onto Israel the same sin that made apartheid South Africa so untouchable: white supremacy. Somehow "world opinion" has moved away from the old 20th century view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a complicated territorial dispute between two long-suffering peoples. Today the world puts its thumb on the scale for the Palestinians by demonizing the stronger and whiter Israel as essentially a colonial power committed to the "occupation" of a beleaguered Third World people.

This is now-figuratively in some quarters and literally in others-the moral template through which Israel is seen. It doesn't matter that much of the world may actually know better. This template has become propriety itself, a form of good manners, a political correctness. Thus it is good manners to be outraged at Israel's blockade of Gaza, and it is bad manners to be outraged at Hamas's recent attack on a school because it educated girls, or at the thousands of rockets Hamas has fired into Israeli towns-or even at the fact that Hamas is armed and funded by Iran. The world wants independent investigations of Israel, not of Hamas.

One reason for this is that the entire Western world has suffered from a deficit of moral authority for decades now. Today we in the West are reluctant to use our full military might in war lest we seem imperialistic;
we hesitate to enforce our borders lest we seem racist; we are reluctant to ask for assimilation from new immigrants lest we seem xenophobic; and we are pained to give Western Civilization primacy in our educational curricula lest we seem supremacist. Today the West lives on the defensive, the very legitimacy of our modern societies requiring constant dissociation from the sins of the Western past-racism, economic exploitation, imperialism and so on.

When the Israeli commandos boarded that last boat in the flotilla and, after being attacked with metal rods, killed nine of their attackers, they were acting in a world without the moral authority to give them the benefit of the doubt. By appearances they were shock troopers from a largely white First World nation willing to slaughter even "peace activists" in order to enforce a blockade against the impoverished brown people of Gaza. Thus the irony: In the eyes of a morally compromised Western world, the Israelis looked like the Gestapo.

This, of course, is not the reality of modern Israel. Israel does not seek to oppress or occupy-and certainly not to annihilate-the Palestinians in the pursuit of some atavistic Jewish supremacy. But the merest echo of the
shameful Western past is enough to chill support for Israel in the West.  The West also lacks the self-assurance to see the Palestinians accurately.  Here again it is safer in the white West to see the Palestinians as they advertise themselves-as an "occupied" people denied sovereignty and simple human dignity by a white Western colonizer. The West is simply too vulnerable to the racist stigma to object to this "neo-colonial"
characterization.

Our problem in the West is understandable. We don't want to lose more moral authority than we already have. So we choose not to see certain things that are right in front of us. For example, we ignore that the Palestinians-and for that matter much of the Middle East-are driven to militancy and war not by legitimate complaints against Israel or the West but by an internalized sense of inferiority. If the Palestinians got everything they want-a sovereign nation and even, let's say, a nuclear weapon-they would wake the
next morning still hounded by a sense of inferiority. For better or for worse, modernity is now the measure of man.

And the quickest cover for inferiority is hatred. The problem is not me; it is them. And in my victimization I enjoy a moral and human grandiosity-no matter how smart and modern my enemy is, I have the innocence that defines victims. I may be poor but my hands are clean. Even my backwardness and poverty only reflect a moral superiority, while my enemy's wealth proves his inhumanity.

In other words, my hatred is my self-esteem. This must have much to do with why Yasser Arafat rejected Ehud Barak's famous Camp David offer of 2000 in which Israel offered more than 90% of what the Palestinians had demanded. To have accepted that offer would have been to forgo hatred as consolation and meaning. Thus it would have plunged the Palestinians-and by implication the broader Muslim world-into a confrontation with their inferiority relative to modernity. Arafat knew that without the Jews to hate an all-defining cohesion would leave the Muslim world. So he said no to peace. And this recalcitrance in the Muslim world, this attraction to the consolations of hatred, is one of the world's great problems today-whether in the suburbs of Paris and London, or in Kabul and Karachi, or in Queens, N.Y., and Gaza. The fervor for hatred as deliverance may not define the Muslim world, but it has become a drug that consoles elements of that world in the larger competition with the West. This is the problem we in the West have no easy solution to, and we scapegoat Israel-admonish it to behave better-so as not to feel helpless. We see our own vulnerability there.

Mr. Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

If Israel goes down, we all go down

Former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, has written an article for The Times of London in support of Israel. 

For those of you who have forgotten, Aznar lost the 2004 election when the cowardly Spanish elected Zapatero after the Madrid bombings.  Zapatero, as most members of the international left, has been a critic of Israel, while anti-Semitism is again becoming quite virulent in the land of Torquemada and the Inquisition.

Here is Aznar's article:

 If Israel goes down, we all go down

For far too long now it has been unfashionable in Europe to speak up for Israel. In the wake of the recent incident on board a ship full of anti-Israeli activists in the Mediterranean, it is hard to think of a more unpopular cause to champion. In an ideal world, the assault by Israeli commandos on the Mavi Marmara would not have ended up with nine dead and a score wounded. In an ideal world, the soldiers would have been peacefully welcomed on to the ship. In an ideal world, no state, let alone a recent ally of Israel such as Turkey, would have sponsored and organised a flotilla whose sole purpose was to create an impossible situation for Israel: making it choose between giving up its security policy and the naval blockade, or risking the wrath of the world.

In our dealings with Israel, we must blow away the red mists of anger that too often cloud our judgment. A reasonable and balanced approach should encapsulate the following realities: first, the state of Israel was created by a decision of the UN. Its legitimacy, therefore, should not be in question. Israel is a nation with deeply rooted democratic institutions. It is a dynamic and open society that has repeatedly excelled in culture, science and technology.

Second, owing to its roots, history, and values, Israel is a fully fledged Western nation. Indeed, it is a normal Western nation, but one confronted by abnormal circumstances.

Uniquely in the West, it is the only democracy whose very existence has been questioned since its inception. In the first instance, it was attacked by its neighbours using the conventional weapons of war. Then it faced terrorism culminating in wave after wave of suicide attacks. Now, at the behest of radical Islamists and their sympathisers, it faces a campaign of delegitimisation through international law and diplomacy.

Sixty-two years after its creation, Israel is still fighting for its very survival. Punished with missiles raining from north and south, threatened with destruction by an Iran aiming to acquire nuclear weapons and pressed upon by friend and foe, Israel, it seems, is never to have a moment’s peace.

For years, the focus of Western attention has understandably been on the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians. But if Israel is in danger today and the whole region is slipping towards a worryingly problematic future, it is not due to the lack of understanding between the parties on how to solve this conflict. The parameters of any prospective peace agreement are clear, however difficult it may seem for the two sides to make the final push for a settlement.

The real threats to regional stability, however, are to be found in the rise of a radical Islamism which sees Israel’s destruction as the fulfilment of its religious destiny and, simultaneously in the case of Iran, as an expression of its ambitions for regional hegemony. Both phenomena are threats that affect not only Israel, but also the wider West and the world at large.

The core of the problem lies in the ambiguous and often erroneous manner in which too many Western countries are now reacting to this situation. It is easy to blame Israel for all the evils in the Middle East. Some even act and talk as if a new understanding with the Muslim world could be achieved if only we were prepared to sacrifice the Jewish state on the altar. This would be folly.

Israel is our first line of defence in a turbulent region that is constantly at risk of descending into chaos; a region vital to our energy security owing to our overdependence on Middle Eastern oil; a region that forms the front line in the fight against extremism. If Israel goes down, we all go down. To defend Israel’s right to exist in peace, within secure borders, requires a degree of moral and strategic clarity that too often seems to have disappeared in Europe. The United States shows worrying signs of heading in the same direction.

The West is going through a period of confusion over the shape of the world’s future. To a great extent, this confusion is caused by a kind of masochistic self-doubt over our own identity; by the rule of political correctness; by a multiculturalism that forces us to our knees before others; and by a secularism which, irony of ironies, blinds us even when we are confronted by jihadis promoting the most fanatical incarnation of their faith. To abandon Israel to its fate, at this moment of all moments, would merely serve to illustrate how far we have sunk and how inexorable our decline now appears.

This cannot be allowed to happen. Motivated by the need to rebuild our own Western values, expressing deep concern about the wave of aggression against Israel, and mindful that Israel’s strength is our strength and Israel’s weakness is our weakness, I have decided to promote a new Friends of Israel initiative with the help of some prominent people, including David Trimble, Andrew Roberts, John Bolton, Alejandro Toledo (the former President of Peru), Marcello Pera (philosopher and former President of the Italian Senate), Fiamma Nirenstein (the Italian author and politician), the financier Robert Agostinelli and the Catholic intellectual George Weigel.

It is not our intention to defend any specific policy or any particular Israeli government. The sponsors of this initiative are certain to disagree at times with decisions taken by Jerusalem. We are democrats, and we believe in diversity.

What binds us, however, is our unyielding support for Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. For Western countries to side with those who question Israel’s legitimacy, for them to play games in international bodies with Israel’s vital security issues, for them to appease those who oppose Western values rather than robustly to stand up in defence of those values, is not only a grave moral mistake, but a strategic error of the first magnitude.

Israel is a fundamental part of the West. The West is what it is thanks to its Judeo-Christian roots. If the Jewish element of those roots is upturned and Israel is lost, then we are lost too. Whether we like it or not, our fate is inextricably intertwined.