Obama to Israel: Drop Dead!

Once again the Obama administration is pursuing a policy that disregards public opinion, and slaps the face of the American Jewish community which voted for him in numbers second only to blacks.  The US in an unprecedented move backed a UN resolution for a nuclear-free Middle East that singles out Israel. This has has both angered and deeply worried the Jewish state although officials are cagey about openly criticising their biggest ally.

What is ironic is that the resolution which calls on Israel to to join the Non Proliferation Treaty and open its facilities for inspection, does not mention Iran.

This is a triumph for the Arabists in the state department and the administration. 

I am not accusing Obama of antisemitism, but of criminal naivete.  The type of naivete that leads to World Wars. 

545 days to go till the next presidential election. 

Exposing the Builder of the Ground Zero Mosque

The debate that is taking place over the building of the Cordoba House, which will include a mosque a few under feet from Ground Zero, has led to many discussions between proponent and opponents of this project. However, in all the reading I did on the topic, none went in great detail into an explanation of why Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has used the name Cordoba House for his project and Cordoba Initiative for his organization.

Let us suppose that a German group called Blitzkrieg Initiative or The Lebensraum Initiative wanted to build a cultural center near the ruins of a concentration camp. Would we be asking why the organization chose the name it did?

Why are we not doing the same with respect to the Cordoba Initiative? Why Cordoba and what is the significance of this name in Muslim History?

Cordoba is a city in Andalusia, Spain that the Moors conquered in the year 711 from the Visigoths, and which five years later was declared an emirate under the rule of the Damascus Caliphate. By 785 the Moors began the construction of the now famous Mezquita mosque on the ruins of a Christian Visigoth Church. As the Muslims have done throughout all the places that they had conquered, their important mosques are built on top or near the great houses of worship or symbols of the conquered civilizations.

Cordoba and Andalusia, are both a symbol of Islam’s expansion and the collapse of Islam in Spain after the Reconquista. In the writings and speeches of Osama bin Laden, he frequently refers to Andalusia and the goal of the reestablishment of the caliphate.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is not interested in establishing a cultural center for the sake of interaction and the promotion of tolerance. This center is designed, just like the great mosque in London that will be located near the Olympic stadium, as an Islamic symbol of the first step taken by radical Muslims to ensure the establishment of Sharia law in the West and the United States.

We cannot continue celebrating the words of tolerance that we hear from Islamic organizations and their leaders without listening and reading the translation of the speeches that the same leaders give in Arabic throughout the Muslim world.

Here is a video presented by PJTV with translations and explanations of statements made by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in the Middle East that sound quite different from the words we hear when he or his wife are interviewed by the mainstream media.

Depends on what the meaning of a "Job Offer" is.

The crisis that has developed into "Sestakgate", has forced us once again, to listen to a barrage of excuses that boil down to variations of “everybody does it,” and “it is no big deal.” Dozens of times I heard pundits and reporters paraphrase Claude Reims in Casablanca, ” I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” when describing the insignificance of offering Rep. Sestak a job to protect Senator Specter.

Well, I agree. Offering someone a job in exchange for political favors is not the worst crime that politicians in Washington are committing. Who would have thought of enacting laws that criminalize political favors and bribery in the first place? How will the United States manage to become a banana republic if we forbid politicians from offering or receiving favors or bribes? How is a politician to repay his intern or secretary for oral sex? How do we get a candidate to withdraw from a race without bribing him or her?

Therefore, the time has arrived to sit down and eliminate all those laws that when violated, will make us ponder why were they enacted in first place. But let the democrats and mainstream media not be hypocrites by clamoring for impeachment or resignations when a Republican commits the violation, and claim that it is no big deal when the violator is Obama.

And yes, Obama has broken the law. Do politicians think that we are so stupid as to believe that a report issued on a Friday afternoon, on the eve of Memorial Day Weekend when everybody is getting ready for the first days of summer is believable?

We find out that former president Clinton was used as a conduit to offer Sestak, a congressman and possible senator, a menial job in exchange for his withdrawal for a race. What was the response to Sestak’s question: “who authorized you to make this offer?” After all, former presidents can’t appoint to presidential commissions. If this was truly the job offered.

Clinton had lunch with Obama prior to the announcement being made. Could this have been to coordinate a response?

Sestak’s brother was called too. Why?

Let us change the scenario. Imagine a president McCain or Palin using former president George W. Bush to offer a job to Rubio in exchange for his withdrawal from the race against Charlie Crist. Can you see the commentators on MSNBC, or CNN or the New York Times dismissing this as no big deal?

The next time you are stopped by a trooper doing 65 in a 55 mph zone, try and get out of getting a ticket by saying “everybody is driving above the speed limit.” Good Luck!

Not the Brightest Lightbulb in PBS's Chandelier

Here is a video of Ayaan Hirsi Ali being interviewed by Tavis Smiley on PBS.  Ms. Ali, who was born a Muslim, and who has studied Islam and has been a victim of Islam, was explaining the role of Islam in Islamism and terrorism, when Smiley went on to argue that there are more examples in the United States of Christian than Muslim violence.  Of course, he is too ignorant to differentiate between random acts of violence where innocent people die, and targeted terror by Muslim Jihadists.

Well, we the taxpayers will continue to pay the salary of this most incompetent member of the mainstream media who owes his position to affirmative action.

The Road to Becoming Greece

In a recipe for economic disaster, private sector pay shrank to historic lows, while government benefits rose.

One does not have to be an economic genius to realize that this type of economic shift is unsustainable; unless the government prints money, which they are already.  See Germany post WW I, Argentina in the 70's, and Zimbabwe in the last decade to realize the what happens when the printing presses work overtime.

Mark Steyn: Obama's lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl

The more I read Mark Steyn, the more I am in awe of the clarity of thought with which he presents his ideas.  In this article Steyn analyzes the speech given by Obama while signing the Daniel Pearl Freedom Press Act, and the intellectual laziness or neglect with which Obama chose his words of "tribute" to Daniel Pearl's memory.  Actually, I think that Obama is incapable of saying anything critical that might be misconstrued as critical of Islam.  At this point I wonder if this is the result of his new strategy of dealing with Islam, or is it the direct result of his sympathies.  If I had to bet, I would say that it is the latter.

Click here to read the article in The Orange County Register.  I am also placing the article in this entry, so that if the readers are too lazy to click, they can read it in the this blog.

Mark Steyn: Obama's lazy tribute to Daniel Pearl

Barack Obama's remarkable powers of oratory are well known: In support of Chicago's Olympic bid, he flew into Copenhagen to give a heartwarming speech about himself, and they gave the games to Rio. He flew into Boston to support Martha Coakley's bid for the U.S. Senate, and Massachusetts voters gave Ted Kennedy's seat to a Republican. In the first year of his presidency, he gave a gazillion speeches on health care "reform" and drove support for his proposals to basement level, leaving Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Like a lot of guys who've been told they're brilliant one time too often, President Obama gets a little lazy, and doesn't always choose his words with care. And so it was that he came to say a few words about Daniel Pearl, upon signing the "Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act." Pearl was decapitated on video by jihadist Muslims in Karachi on Feb. 1, 2002. That's how I'd put it. This is what the president of the United States said:

"Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world's imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is."

Now Obama's off the prompter, when his silver-tongued rhetoric invariably turns to sludge. But he's talking about a dead man here, a guy murdered in public for all the world to see. Furthermore, the deceased's family is standing all around him. And, even for a busy president, it's the work of moments to come up with a sentence that would be respectful, moving and true. Indeed, for Obama, it's the work of seconds, because he has a taxpayer-funded staff sitting around all day with nothing to do but provide him with that sentence.

Instead, he delivered the one above, which in its clumsiness and insipidness is most revealing. First of all, note the passivity: "The loss of Daniel Pearl." He wasn't "lost." He was kidnapped and beheaded. He was murdered on a snuff video. He was specifically targeted, seized as a trophy, a high-value scalp. And the circumstances of his "loss" merit some vigor in the prose. Yet Obama can muster none.

Even if Americans don't get the message, the rest of the world does. This week's pictures of the leaders of Brazil and Turkey clasping hands with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are also monuments to American passivity.

But what did the "loss" of Daniel Pearl mean? Well, says the president, it was "one of those moments that captured the world's imagination." Really? Evidently it never captured Obama's imagination because, if it had, he could never have uttered anything so fatuous. He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl's fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: "one of those moments" – you know, like Princess Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever – "that captured the world's imagination."

Notice how reflexively Obama lapses into sentimental one-worldism: Despite our many zip codes, we are one people, with a single imagination. In fact, the murder of Daniel Pearl teaches just the opposite – that we are many worlds, and worlds within worlds. Some of them don't even need an "imagination." Across the planet, the video of an American getting his head sawed off did brisk business in the bazaars and madrassahs and Internet downloads. Excited young men e-mailed it to friends, from cell phone to cell phone, from Karachi to Jakarta to Khartoum to London to Toronto to Falls Church, Virginia. In the old days, you needed an "imagination" to conjure the juicy bits of a distant victory over the Great Satan. But in an age of high-tech barbarism the sight of Pearl's severed head is a mere click away.

And the rest of "the world"? Most gave a shrug of indifference. And far too many found the reality of Pearl's death too uncomfortable, and chose to take refuge in the same kind of delusional pap as Obama. The president is only the latest Western liberal to try to hammer Daniel Pearl's box into a round hole. Before him, it was Michael Winterbottom in his film "A Mighty Heart": As Pearl's longtime colleague Asra Nomani wrote, "Danny himself had been cut from his own story." Or as Paramount's promotional department put it, "Nominate the most inspiring ordinary hero. Win a trip to the Bahamas!" Where you're highly unlikely to be kidnapped and beheaded! (Although, in the event that you are, please check the liability-waiver box at the foot of the entry form.)

The latest appropriation that his "loss" "reminded us of how valuable a free press is." It was nothing to do with "freedom of the press." By the standards of the Muslim world, Pakistan has a free-ish and very lively press. The problem is that some 80 percent of its people wish to live under the most extreme form of Sharia, and many of its youth are exported around the world in advance of that aim. The man convicted of Pearl's murder was Omar Sheikh, a British subject, a London School of Economics student, and, like many jihadists from Osama to the Pantybomber, a monument to the peculiar burdens of a non-deprived childhood in the Muslim world. The man who actually did the deed was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed in March 2007: "I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi." But Obama's not the kind to take "guilty" for an answer, so he's arranging a hugely expensive trial for KSM amid the bright lights of Broadway.

Listen to his killer's words: "The American Jew Daniel Pearl." We hit the jackpot! And then we cut his head off. Before the body was found, The Independent's Robert Fisk offered a familiar argument to Pearl's kidnappers: Killing him would be "a major blunder... the best way of ensuring that the suffering" – of Kashmiris, Afghans, Palestinians – "goes unrecorded." Other journalists peddled a similar line: if you release Danny, he'll be able to tell your story, get your message out, "bridge the misconceptions." But the story did get out; the severed head is the message; the only misconception is that that's a misconception.

Daniel Pearl was the prototype for a new kind of terror. In his wake came other victims from Kenneth Bigley, whose last words were that "Tony Blair has not done enough for me," to Fabrizzio Quattrocchi, who yanked off his hood, yelled "I will show you how an Italian dies!" and ruined the movie for his jihadist videographers. By that time, both men understood what it meant to be in a windowless room with a camera and a man holding a scimitar. But Daniel Pearl was the first, and in his calm, coherent final words understood why he was there:

"My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA ..."

He didn't have a prompter. But he spoke the truth. That's all President Obama owed him – to do the same.

I mentioned last week the attorney general's peculiar insistence that "radical Islam" was nothing to do with the Times Square bomber, the Pantybomber, the Fort Hood killer. Just a lot of moments "capturing the world's imagination." For now, the jihadists seem to have ceased cutting our heads off. Listening to Obama and Eric Holder, perhaps they've figured out there's nothing much up there anyway.

Must Read

If you are scratching your head wondering what all the fuss is about the current crisis in Greece, you must read Mark Steyn's article in Maclean's, the Canadian weekly.  He has a great way of putting complex issues into perspective, and he does so here. 

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