These talks are going nowhere…just a big Obama show…
Peace, Territory and Jerusalem
By Dr. Tim Ball and Judi McLeod Full Story
It doesn’t require being at the head of the class in Politics 101 to know that meetings in Washington to establish a peace between Israel and Palestine is a desperate and cynical attempt by the Obama administration to divert attention from his collapsing political fortunes at home.
Establishment Republicans vs. Tea Party
It appears that mounting incumbent losses are bringing out the establishment “Elephant’s” true colors. The establishment Republicans promised us smaller government, then went on a spending spree that opened the door for the political and economic disaster we are now facing when they had control of Congress. Mounting primary losses has caused the Republican establishment to turn on the grassroots based “tea party” pro-liberty movement. This Newsmax report shows how ugly this situation is becoming.
(From Newsmax)
Wary of Tea Party, GOP Attacks Senate Candidate
Thursday, 02,September 2010 07:18:14
Delaware Republicans call Senate hopeful Christine O’Donnell a liar who “could not be elected dog catcher.”
The fierce attack underscores GOP fears of the tea party-backed candidate knocking off top recruit Rep. Mike Castle and winning the nomination.
The state holds its primary Sept. 14 and the GOP sees Castle as the best candidate for the seat long held by Vice President Joe Biden. Castle has been the state’s lone congressman since 1993.
State Party Chairman Tom Ross said in an interview that O’Donnell is not a viable candidate for any office in Delaware.
The Tea Party Express has announced a six-figure commitment to back O’Donnell.
The Audacity of Failure
In April, while campaigning in Pennsylvania, Vice President Joe Biden promised the American people: “I’m here to tell you, some time in the next couple of months, we’re going to be creating between 250,000 jobs a month and 500,000 jobs a month. … We caught a lot of bad breaks on the way down. We’re going to catch a few good breaks because of good planning on the way up.” And for a while it looked like Biden was a genius. And for a while it looked like Biden was a genius. In May, the Labor Department reported that nonfarm payroll employment rose by 290,000 the previous month and in June they reported that the U.S. economy added another 431,000 jobs. President Barack Obama’s “good planning” was working! But then the next report showed the U.S. economy lost 125,000 jobs in June and then the August report found another 131,000 jobs were lost in July. Today the Labor Department released the September jobs report, showing nonfarm payrolls decreased again by 54,000 and that the nation’s unemployment rate rose to 9.6%.
By every objective measure, President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package has been a complete failure. When President Obama was selling his stimulus plan to the American people, he promised it would save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. At the time, employment stood at about 135.1 million, according to the Labor Department’s most commonly used measure. That established an Obama jobs target for December 2010 at 138.6 million. According to the latest jobs report, total U.S. employment stood at 130.3 million in August, which means the cumulative Obama jobs deficit stands at 7.5 million.
Despite the mounting evidence of failure, the Obama administration is still completely unapologetic. Defending her tenure as chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer told journalists at the National Press Club Wednesday: “The current recession has been fundamentally different from other postwar recessions. … Precisely because such severe financial shocks have been rare, there were no reliable estimates of the likely impact. To this day, economists don’t fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did, and why they cut labor so much more than they normally would, given the decline in output.” But after first admitting that the experts don’t understand the current crisis, she then confidently asserts:
It is clear that the Recovery Act has played a large role in the turnaround in GDP and employment. In a report that Jared Bernstein and I issued during the transition, we estimated that by the end of 2010, a stimulus package like the Recovery Act would raise real GDP by about 3½ percent and employment by about 3½ million jobs, relative to what otherwise would have occurred…. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, CEA’s own estimates, and estimates from a range of respected private sector analysts suggest that the Act has already raised employment by approximately two to three million jobs relative to what it otherwise would have been.
Got that? Romer first admits that her magic Keynesian formulas were completely useless in predicting how bad the recession would be, and then she turns right around and uses those exact same formulas to justify the success of the stimulus. If that bootstrapping weren’t audacious enough, Romer then went on to claim that “the United States still faces a substantial shortfall of aggregate demand” and that “structural changes in the composition of our output or a mismatch between worker skills and jobs” having nothing to do with continued high unemployment. So instead of changing course, Romer wants us to double down with a second round of economic stimulus.
How much more stimulus does the Obama administration want to spend? Romer wouldn’t say, and the White House is desperate to avoid calling any new action “stimulus,” but The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle has crunched the numbers and come up with a ballpark size of how big the original economic stimulus package would have to have been if we take the left’s Keynesian economics as gospel: “Full employment is perhaps 4.5-5%. If we assume that stimulus benefits increase linearly, that means we would have needed a stimulus of, on the low end, $2.5 trillion. On the high end, it would have been in the $4-5 trillion range.”
Even the Obama administration doesn’t want to add another $5 trillion to our $13.5 trillion national debt. That is why the Obama administration is pushing a $921 billion tax hike set to take effect on January 1, 2011. There is only one word for proposing $981 billion in taxes to pay for trillions in failed stimulus spending in the midst of 9.6% unemployment: audacity.
Quick Hits:
* Thanks to even more expensive coverage mandated by Obamacare, companies are increasingly passing on higher health care premium costs to workers.
* Thanks to a proposed oil drilling ban, BP says it may not have the money to pay for all the damages caused by its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
* Thanks to a weak job market, far fewer 18 to 29 year olds now identify themselves as Democrats, compared with 2008.
* According to a new poll from Arizona, 64% of Arizona voters still support the state’s new immigration enforcement law.
* The Obama Justice Department is now suing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio for not cooperating with AG Eric Holder’s civil rights probe.
Buy Me Presents
It’s my birthday on Monday, and I’d ask that if you’re feeling generous please click on the United Cerebral Palsy link on my sidebar and make a donation.*
Also, I got a raise here at The Firm. A little less than half the raise I got last year, slightly offset by a much larger bonus. I suppose it’s time to put that bonus away, ask my bosses to write some recommendations, get off my ass and apply to Widener.
*If you really want to get me something and you know my address then go for it.
Following in the footsteps of the first extremist
David Wilder
September 03, 2010
OK. This time of the year, leading up to Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year, and then climaxing with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, it’s customary to repent, to come clean. So the time has come. Of course, the requirement to confess deals not only with personal sin but also with public transgressions. I’ve decided that I cannot continue to leave a false impression among the many I come in contact with. The time has arrived to come out of the closet. I admit….I am….I am…..
I am an………..
Extremist!
Ah, there, I’ve said it, gotten it off my chest, out in the open, once and for all. Thank G-d.
I know I’ve always denied it, said it wasn’t true, I mean, after all, I’ve never shot anyone, never threatened anyone, never condoned physical violence against innocents, even as a deterrent. I’ve always defined extremists as the likes of Badar Meinhof, the Red Brigade, Hamas, Hizballah, Fatah, the Islamic Jihad, and others, who favor blowing up busses and drive-by massacres. And things like that.
However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it makes no difference if I’m like them or not. In no uncertain terms, I am an extremist.
But I’m not to blame. I didn’t do it to myself. No one had to teach me extremism, because I inherited it. It’s in my genes. Because my great-great-great grandfather also was also a fanatic. Perhaps that why I came to live in Hebron, to be closer to him.
He also flowed against the current, rejecting what ‘everyone else said,’ standing on his own, by himself, basically against the entire world. Some tried to convince him, others to cajole, and yet others attempted to kill him. Yet none of them succeeded. He even went so far as to reject his parents’ beliefs and eventually left home, taking with him his wife and a few other family members, for an unknown destination. After all, that’s the way radicals act: doing whatever they want without taking others into consideration. Quite selfish.
My great great great grand-daddy’s name was Abraham. He had this truly revolutionary idea, but no one else agreed with him, expecting a few who he was able to persuade. Who knows what techniques he used? Torture, threats, we can only use our imaginations.
In any case, his world-shattering idea was that there is only one G-d. That people shouldn’t bow down to the sun and the moon, to wooden or stone statues. These gods were phony, without any divine powers. The only authentic Deity is G-d, the One and Only. An entity so sublime, so metaphysical, that nothing we say can really describe Him, because He is totally spiritual, and alas, we are a mixed breed – physical and spiritual. The created cannot describe the Creator as He is much too far above us.
This was Abraham’s idea, his teaching, and he really was an extremist. No one, but no one agreed with him, but he didn’t care. And he had the gall to home-teach his kids and grandkids, instilling them with the same fanaticism, asking them to continue on, in his footsteps. And they did. They too, Isaac, Jacob, and his twelve sons, they were all true fundamentalists, rejected by normal folk, regarded as endangering world culture, tradition, and, in reality, world peace.
Yet, they didn’t care, continued as they believed, despite centuries and centuries, of slavery, torture, expulsions, massacres and even a Holocaust. Leading all the way to me. I too, as they were, am an extremist.
There are those today who continue to reject their primary teaching. That is, many amongst us still practice idol worship. No, you won’t find too many people prostrating themselves to the sun or moon, or any other stars. Idols are old fashioned. But there are, almost 4,000 years after Abraham’s extremism, new-fangled versions of the old product. New divinities. Like, for example, peace.
Don’t misunderstand. Peace certainly has a value. Not even a man-made value, rather a G-dly value, as we repeat the verse: “He will make peace in the heavens, peace on all of us and on Israel, Amen.” But, it must be read carefully: Who will make the peace? Obama, Hillary, Bibi, Ehud, Husni? No, that’s not the way I read it. It says, ‘He will make peace,’ He, being the L-rd, G-d.
Perhaps there are those would like to believe that they are the divinity, and therefore, have the ability to ‘make peace upon all of us.’ But that’s also idol worship, an idol with a super ego.
Peace really is a Divine goal. But only when it’s Divine, when it’s real. Not when it’s man-made, not out of wood and stone, rather from paper and ink and the breath expelled from people’s mouths. Not when it’s a peace that’s wonderful for one side, but is horrific for the other. This has no Divine value whatsoever.
When people get down on their hands and knees, falling on their faces before this ‘peace’ they are no better than Terach, Abraham’s father or Nimrod, Saddam Husseins’ ancient predecessor. This is idol worship, which is today, admittedly, a world-wide epidemic.
But what can I do? I go back to the genuine product, the roots of all extremism, who taught his kids, and them their kids, right up to me and my own children, that idol worship is forbidden, and it’s better to be an extremist, all by yourself, than to worship false gods, even though everyone else does.
That is why, even though I’m labeled as a bad-guy, and there are those who compare me to Hamas mass murderers, and all the world will tell me, ‘you have to leave Hebron and Jerusalem for the sake of world peace,’ I will continue in the footsteps of my great- great-great-grandfather, refusing to transgress the most elementary law of creation. I prefer to be an extremist in Hebron than an idol worshiper in Tel Aviv or New York.
New Poll: Palestinians Do Not Want a State Next to Israel
Arlene Kushner
I cannot find a more appropriate word for my response to what happened in Washington yesterday. Shabbat preparations prevent me from exploring this in any detail now. I will provide here only a broad overview, with more to come in due course.
Still, I believe that Netanyahu believes that these negotiations are going to come to nothing. It’s possible that I’m wrong. There are those who think that he is sincere in his quest for “peace.” Take, for example, JPost editor David Horovitz. He wrote in his column today, “The heart says do anything for peace. The head worries that Netanyahu’s admirable goal of finding, in Abbas, a new Sadat, will prove elusive.”
I had to rub my eyes when I read that, and read it again, so incredible did it seem to me. Horovitz finds it “admirable” that Netanyahu is presumably seeking to find a new Sadat in Abbas? Are we talking about the same Abbas? The one who had to be dragged to the table kicking and screaming? Never mind the idea of doing “anything” for peace.
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There is also a glimmer of “hope” from Kadima, whose members (most notably Mofaz) are just beginning to suggest that if Netanyahu is “sincere” about making peace, they might join the coalition. Heaven help us.
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And yet, I’ll hold tight to what my gut tells me, and, not incidentally, what I’ve learned is the opinion of some genuinely right wing members of Likud.
It’s a game. And the name of the game is “show how much more eager for peace you are than the other side.” That’s so you won’t be blamed when it falls apart and the international community (and particularly the US) will understand. It’s perceived as a way of protecting our interests.
Thus does Netanyahu say, “We’re ready to go a long way, in a short ime, for genuine peace.” And thus does he call Abbas (forgive me for this) his “partner for peace.”
As I said, revolting. The goal of seeming the good guy does not justify groveling and loss of integrity.
And we still have to see what happens when the construction freeze comes to an end on the 26th. Does “going a long way” mean extending that freeze? (The US will be all too involved here.)
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Already, we see finger pointing and subtle accusations. Netanyahu has said, pointedly, that peace requires sacrifices on both sides — setting the scene for blaming Abbas for not making any sacrifices. And he won’t.
That’s what’s going to save us, as always is the case: Palestinian Arab intransigence and backtracking. The talks will fall apart.
Today it was in the news that both Marwan Barghouti and Muhammad Dahlan are citicizing Abbas for going to the table. These are people within Abbas’s own Fatah party, each with stature and a following. Just more evidence that Abbas is close to powerless and cannot pull off a deal.
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Netanyahu and Abbas met privately yesterday and apparently have committed to meeting again in two weeks, somewhere in this region — perhaps Egypt. The deal is that they’ll reach agreement (yea, right) on major issues and allow staff to then flesh out details.
What worries me is not that there’ll be “two states” in a year, but that in the course of these negotiations Netanyahu will concede certain things in principle that will come to haunt us later. Even if nothing is signed, and there is nothing binding about what he says, it will come back at us.
And that he will fail to protect our interests and rights in the land, in the short term. We must start by asking why he’s sitting at a table with the man who heads an administrative authority that produces books that tell their children killing us — for the sake of jihad — is good. Is he saying this doesn’t matter? That it’s OK to give stature to the man who promotes this, to make Obama happy?
These negotiations are not without costs.
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see my website www.ArlenefromIsrael.info
Why Islamic Moderates Are So Scarce
Joshua Gilder
It goes back to a ninth-century theological dispute.
As past statements of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf continue to surface, many Americans have concluded that the would-be builder of a mosque at Ground Zero is lying when he calls himself a “moderate” representative of his faith. The more disturbing possibility, however, is that he’s telling the truth — that Rauf is indeed the voice of mainstream Islam. One indication is the resounding silence from the rest of the Islamic community. If that community were truly moderate — as we in the West understand the term — one might expect it to distance itself from a man who blames the U.S. for the 9/11 attacks, says we have more innocent blood on our hands than al-Qaeda, and refuses to disown the genocidal agenda of Hamas.
A few brave Muslim individuals have indeed come out against the mosque, but they are exceptions. Where are the large numbers of Muslims who find Rauf’s statements offensive? Where are their organizations and institutions? Why aren’t they weighing in to repudiate Rauf and his apparent aims?
It’s a common problem. Each time some new offense is perpetrated in the name of Islam — whether it’s the latest suicide bombing in a public square or a woman’s being beaten and mutilated by her own family — it is mostly Western leaders and the press who voice their disapproval. The more one looks for the larger Muslim community to denounce the violence, the more “moderate Islam” seems to vanish like a mirage in the desert.
Why this is so — what happened to moderate Islam and what sort of hope we may have for it in the future — is the subject of Robert Reilly’s brilliant and groundbreaking new book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind. Reilly is a veteran of the Reagan White House, director of the Voice of America under George W. Bush, a board member of the Middle East Media Research Institute, and a frequent contributor to numerous national publications. He has made a deep dive into Muslim thought and history to discover the sources of the present Islamic condition.
The result is anything but dry. Closing is a page-turner that reads almost like an intellectual detective novel. It is among those few brave books on Islam — others would include Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and Andrew McCarthy’s recent The Grand Jihad — that should be read by anyone who wants to understand one of the most fundamental causes of conflict in the 21st century.
Reilly does in fact locate the elusive moderate Islam — back in the 8th and 9th centuries, when the rationalist Mu’tazilites dominated Islamic thought under Caliph al-Ma’mun. The period is often referred to as the “golden age of Islam,” when that civilization produced some of its highest achievements in philosophy and science. It didn’t last. In 849, the second year of the reign of Caliph Ja’afar al-Mutawakkil, the Mu’tazilites were overthrown. Holding Mu’tazilite beliefs became a crime punishable by death, and the decidedly anti-rationalist Ash’arites soon came to dominate the faith, as they would continue to do, in one form or another, through the modern era.
What makes Closing so compelling is Reilly’s ability to tie seemingly arcane questions of Islamic theology to many of the characteristics of Islamic civilization that we in the West find so hard to fathom. Fundamentally, Ash’arism was a rejection of “natural law” and reason in favor of an all-powerful God of pure will and power. The idea of an ordered universe that behaves according to certain ordained laws — whether moral or physical — would have been understood by the Mu’tazilites. For the Ash’arites, this was blasphemy, an outrage against God’s omnipotence.
In the language of philosophy, this way of looking at the world is known, somewhat confusingly, as “voluntarism.” To quote Reilly, it “holds that God is the primary cause of everything and there are no secondary causes. There is no causal mediation. Therefore, what may seem to be ‘natural laws,’ such as the laws of gravity, physics, etc. are really nothing more than God’s customs or habits, which He is at complete liberty to break or change at any moment.”
While Christianity recognizes the possibility of miracles, when God intervenes to supersede natural law, in Islam every nanosecond is the functional equivalent of a miracle, the result of God’s divine act. Thus there is no law of gravity, only God’s will, determining moment by moment that the apple will fall from the tree. Neither is there any morality, no objective good and evil as we in the West would see it, only the arbitrary decrees of an all-powerful God. There is no “truth that is written in our hearts,” only the truths that are written in the Koran, which could just as well be otherwise if such were the whim of God. As Ibn Hazm pronounced in the 11th century, “He judges as He pleases, and whatever He judges is just. . . . If God the Exalted had informed us that He would punish us for the acts of others . . . all that would have been right and just.”
The problem, one might say, is obvious. In science, the repudiation of natural law meant the explicit denial of cause and effect. No wonder that the rise of the Ash’arites coincided with the decline of a once-vibrant Islamic intellectual culture after the 13th century. And no wonder that societies that exalt the power and arbitrary will of God to the exclusion of reason can hardly understand, let alone embrace, modern democratic institutions, which are founded, as our Declaration of Independence makes clear, in the self-evident and enduring truths of natural law.
Nor can we be surprised that such cultures endorse institutionalized domestic violence or rampant terrorism and the murder of innocents. As hard as it is for the secular Left to accept, Western culture is founded on and steeped in the Judeo-Christian assumption that our innate understanding of what is right is a direct reflection of God’s goodness and justice as reflected in His universal law, to which even He adheres. We make a mistake when we assume other cultures are necessarily speaking the same moral language.
Is there a possibility that Islam can find its way back to the root philosophies of its golden age? There are those within Islam who want to, but — like the voices raised in opposition to the mosque — they are lonely, even threatened, outposts within their faith. One thing Reilly’s account makes clear: Only when we move beyond the common platitudes of our contemporary political discussion and begin to deal with Islam as it really is — rather than the fiction that it is the equivalent of our Western culture dressed up in a burqa — will we be able to help make progress in that direction.
— Josh Gilder is one of the founding directors of the White House Writers Group.
These Talks Are Doomed
Before peace can come, Palestine’s culture must be changed.
Hamas sent a greeting card to the quintet of leaders meeting in Washington, D.C., this week to initiate negotiations about a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In a well-planned ambush, they killed four Israeli civilians near the city of Hebron, two men and two women (one nine months pregnant), creating seven orphans. The murderers escaped, and may perhaps have videotaped the atrocity. In Gaza that evening, 3,000 celebrants clogged the streets, waving flags, setting bonfires, passing out candy, and carrying their children on their shoulders. If there is videotape, it will presumably permit the revelers to relive the pleasure, even as the video of Daniel Pearl’s beheading has circulated on the Internet.
While the Palestinian Authority did condemn the attack, Prime Minister Salam Fayyad did so, he explained, because “the operation went against Palestinian interests.” It would be difficult for a leader of the “moderate” (that word is always attached) PA to condemn such attacks as, say, immoral or despicable, as the Palestinian Authority itself (formerly the PLO or Fatah) was conceived in violence and continues to honor its spirit. In the course of the past few months, the PA has named a square and a children’s summer camp in honor of a terrorist who murdered 37 Israeli civilians on a bus, and provided a hero’s funeral to Amin Al-Hindi, one of the terrorists who kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. The official PA newspaper described Al-Hindi as “one of the stars . . . who sparkled at the sports stadium in Munich.” Both Abbas and Fayyad attended the funeral.
These realities, reflecting as they do the unreadiness of the Palestinian people for peace with Israel, have been and will continue to be ignored by the Obama administration, the so-called international community, and most journalists. Instead, world leaders, very much including President Obama, speak of borders, and confidence-building measures, and opportunities for peace, as if the problem were one of details. This thoroughly misconceives the nature of the dispute. An Israeli saying (now decades old) captured the essence: If the Palestinians were disarmed tomorrow, there would be no conflict. If the Israelis were disarmed tomorrow, there would be no Israel.
With whom would Israel be making binding agreements? Since a bitter civil conflict in 2007, Palestinian society has been divided. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip and the PA controls the West Bank. Just last month, the PA canceled scheduled municipal elections for fear that Hamas might again triumph at the polls as they did in 2006. Hamas and Fatah thugs continue to target and assassinate one another. By standing up the wobbly Abbas and perhaps even signing a treaty with him, the Obama administration may imagine that they can strengthen him. But this is a figure so unsure of his current standing with his people — and this is before making any unpopular concessions — that he canceled elections.
Abbas’s weakness in this regard is not so much a personal failing as an inheritance. The entire Arab world (and Iran) has conspired to embitter and enrage the Palestinian people in perpetuity, encouraging maximalist demands and enshrining bloodshed and frenzied hatred. Though Abbas has shaken hands all around in Washington, D.C., the incitement at home continues. A year ago, at Fatah’s general congress in Bethlehem, the delegates reaffirmed their longstanding commitment to “armed struggle” as “a strategy, not a tactic. . . . This struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.”
Just this week, the PA’s minister for prisoners’ affairs presented an award called the Shield of Resoluteness and Giving to Um Yousuf Abu Hamid. Her accomplishment? Four of her sons are serving long sentences in Israeli prisons for committing terrorist attacks. Handing her the plaque, the minister intoned: “The Palestinian mother is a central partner in the struggle, by virtue of what she has given and continues to give. It is she who gave birth to the fighters, and she deserves that we bow to her in salute and in honor.”
A Palestinian children’s-television program instructs its viewers that all Israeli cities — including Haifa, Lod, Ramle, and Acre — are “occupied Palestinian” cities. Another show aimed at children, which often dispenses advice like “drink your milk” and “obey your parents,” also advised a young viewer named Saraa that “all Jews must be erased from our land. . . . We want to slaughter them, Saraa, so they will be expelled from our land. . . . We’ll have to [do it] by slaughter.”
This latest iteration of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks midwived by the U.S. is doomed just as all of its predecessors were — because it is based on a fallacy and a stubborn refusal to face the truth about Palestinian society.
— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate.
More Peace from the Religion of Peace?
The Arabs in Gaza were wildly cheering with joy at the terrorist killing of an Israeli family of 4 including a pregnant woman. Should we read anything into these outbursts of joy? One third of French Muslims think suicide bombing is acceptable. Does that mean anything? Am I nuts when I say that too many Muslims have missed the “peace” part of the “religion of peace.” Maybe it is a peaceful religion as they claim, but wouldn’t it be nice if that message were delivered to the faithful rather than us? On 9/11 I saw explosions of joy, not just in Arab capitals around the world, but in the Arab sections of western capitals. What should a reasonable person take away from this? Should I believe the liberal press and the practitioners of Islam, or my lying eyes?
The mayor of NY is either on a different planet or dangerously misinformed. He continues to make bogus and nonsensical arguments about the mosque. After telling us that supporting freedom of religion and opposing the mosque are mutually exclusive (nonsense) and that opposing the mosque is either politically motivated or simple bigotry (slanderous nonsense), he now is warning us against giving the government the right to look into where the mosque funding is coming from. He says we don’t want a precedent of this sort. Wow! Is he kidding? Does he have any idea how many charities and mosques are proved to have served as fundraisers and planning centers for a variety of terrorist groups, from al Qaeda to Hamas to Hezbollah and lesser known radicals? That doesn’t even include all the organizations suspected of doing so, albeit with insufficient evidence to act.
Earth to liberals: You very lives are at stake. Your nonsense can be an amusing indulgence some of the time, but here you are planting the seeds of your own destruction, and far worse, mine.
Several years ago an Israeli garage mechanic who had fought in the ‘67 war there, told me the Americans will never get it right when dealing with Arabs. The problem is, he said, that Americans assume that the Arabs think like them, want the same things as them, and will respond in the same way as them. He continued, nothing can be farther from the truth. Over these past 35 years I have observed Arab Israeli relations in this light, and he had it absolutely right. They don’t think like us, although we keep dealing with them as if they do, and consequently nothing positive ever happens. Substitute Muslim for Arab, and you will make similar observations.
Below is Geert Wilders’ speech given in N.Y. Of course the left brands him a bigot, just as they brand anyone against illegal immigration a racist, or someone in support of heterosexual marriage as homophobic. Of course when the left debates him, they can not contradict one fact he represents, and ultimately make themselves look very foolish.
Read this. Your blood will run cold.
Geert Wilders is a Dutch Member of Parliament.
In a generation or two, the US will ask itself: ‘Who lost Europe?’
Here is the speech by Geert Wilders, Chairman, Party for Freedom, the Netherlands, at the Four Seasons, New York, introducing an Alliance of Patriots and announcing the Facing Jihad Conference in Jerusalem:
Dear friends,
Thank you very much for inviting me.
I come to America with a mission. All is not well in the Old World. There is a tremendous danger looming, and it is very difficult to be optimistic. We might be in the final stages of the Islamization of Europe. This not only is a clear and present danger to the future of Europe itself, it is a threat to America and the sheer survival of the West. The United States as the last bastion of Western civilization, facing an Islamic Europe.
First I will describe the situation on the ground in Europe. Then, I will say a few things about Islam. To close I will tell you about a meeting in Jerusalem.
The Europe you know is changing.
You have probably seen the landmarks. But in all of these cities, sometimes a few blocks away from your tourist destination, there is another world. It is the world of the parallel society created by Muslim mass-migration.
All throughout Europe a new reality is rising: entire Muslim neighborhoods where very few indigenous people reside or are even seen. And if they are, they might regret it. This goes for the police as well. It’s the world of head scarves, where women walk around in figureless tents, with baby strollers and a group of children. Their husbands, or slaveholders if you prefer, walk three steps ahead. With mosques on many street corners. The shops have signs you and I cannot read. You will be hard-pressed to find any economic activity. These are Muslim ghettos controlled by religious fanatics. These are Muslim neighborhoods, and they are mushrooming in every city across Europe . These are the building-blocks for territorial control of increasingly larger portions of Europe , street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, city by city.
There are now thousands of mosques throughout Europe . With larger congregations than there are in churches. And in every European city there are plans to build super-mosques that will dwarf every church in the region. Clearly, the signal is: we rule.
Many European cities are already one-quarter Muslim: just take Amsterdam , Marseille and Malmo in Sweden . In many cities the majority of the under-18 population is Muslim. Paris is now surrounded by a ring of Muslim neighborhoods. Mohammed is the most popular name among boys in many cities.
In some elementary schools in Amsterdam the farm can no longer be mentioned, because that would also mean mentioning the pig, and that would be an insult to Muslims.
Many state schools in Belgium and Denmark only serve halal food to all pupils. In once-tolerant Amsterdam gays are beaten up almost exclusively by Muslims. Non-Muslim women routinely hear ‘whore, whore’. Satellite dishes are not pointed to local TV stations, but to stations in the country of origin.
In France school teachers are advised to avoid authors deemed offensive to Muslims, including Voltaire and Diderot; the same is increasingly true of Darwin . The history of the Holocaust can no longer be taught because of Muslim sensitivity.
In England sharia courts are now officially part of the British legal system. Many neighborhoods in France are no-go areas for women without head scarves. Last week a man almost died after being beaten up by Muslims in Brussels , because he was drinking during the Ramadan.
Jews are fleeing France in record numbers, on the run for the worst wave of anti-Semitism since World War II. French is now commonly spoken on the streets of Tel Aviv and Netanya, Israel . I could go on forever with stories like this. Stories about Islamization.
A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe. San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now. Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.
Now these are just numbers. And the numbers would not be threatening if the Muslim-immigrants had a strong desire to assimilate. But there are few signs of that. The Pew Research Center reported that half of French Muslims see their loyalty to Islam as greater than their loyalty to France. One-third of French Muslims do not object to suicide attacks. The British Centre for Social Cohesion reported that one-third of British Muslim students are in favor of a worldwide caliphate. Muslims demand what they call ‘respect’. And this is how we give them respect. We have Muslim official state holidays.
The Christian-Democratic attorney general is willing to accept sharia in the Netherlands if there is a Muslim majority. We have cabinet members with passports from Morocco and Turkey.
Muslim demands are supported by unlawful behavior, ranging from petty crimes and random violence, for example against ambulance workers and bus drivers, to small-scale riots. Paris has seen its uprising in the low-income suburbs, the banlieus. I call the perpetrators ‘settlers’. Because that is what they are. They do not come to integrate into our societies; they come to integrate our society into their Dar-al-Islam. Therefore, they are settlers.
Much of this street violence I mentioned is directed exclusively against non-Muslims, forcing many native people to leave their neighborhoods, their cities, their countries. Moreover, Muslims are now a swing vote not to be ignored.
The second thing you need to know is the importance of Mohammed the prophet. His behavior is an example to all Muslims and cannot be criticized. Now, if Mohammed had been a man of peace, let us say like Ghandi and Mother Theresa wrapped in one, there would be no problem. But Mohammed was a warlord, a mass murderer, a pedophile, and had several marriages – at the same time. Islamic tradition tells us how he fought in battles, how he had his enemies murdered and even had prisoners of war executed. Mohammed himself slaughtered the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza.
If it is good for Islam, it is good. If it is bad for Islam, it is bad.
Let no one fool you about Islam being a religion. Sure, it has a God, and a here-after, and 72 virgins. But in its essence Islam is a political ideology. It is a system that lays down detailed rules for society and the life of every person. Islam wants to dictate every aspect of life.
Islam means ‘submission’. Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy, because what it strives for is sharia. If you want to compare Islam to anything, compare it to communism or national-socialism, these are all totalitarian ideologies.
Now you know why Winston Churchill called Islam ‘the most retrograde force in the world’, and why he compared Mein Kampf to the Quran. The public has wholeheartedly accepted the Palestinian narrative, and sees Israel as the aggressor. I have lived in this country and visited it dozens of times. I support Israel. First, because it is the Jewish homeland after two thousand years of exile up to and including Auschwitz, second because it is a democracy, and third because Israel is our first line of defense.
This tiny country is situated on the fault line of jihad, frustrating Islam’s territorial advance. Israel is facing the front lines of jihad, like Kashmir, Kosovo, the Philippines, Southern Thailand, Darfur in Sudan, Lebanon, and Aceh in Indonesia. Israel is simply in the way. The same way West-Berlin was during the Cold War.
The war against Israel is not a war against Israel . It is a war against the West. It is jihad. Israel is simply receiving the blows that are meant for all of us. If there would have been no Israel , Islamic imperialism would have found other venues to release its energy and its desire for conquest. Thanks to Israeli parents who send their children to the army and lay awake at night, parents in Europe and America can sleep well and dream, unaware of the dangers looming.
Many in Europe argue in favor of abandoning Israel in order to address the grievances of our Muslim minorities. But if Israel were, God forbid, to go down, it would not bring any solace to the West. It would not mean our Muslim minorities would all of a sudden change their behavior, and accept our values. On the contrary, the end of Israel would give enormous encouragement to the forces of Islam. They would, and rightly so, see the demise of Israel as proof that the West is weak, and doomed. The end of Israel would not mean the end of our problems with Islam, but only the beginning. It would mean the start of the final battle for world domination. If they can get Israel , they can get everything. So-called journalists volunteer to label any and all critics of Islamization as a ‘right-wing extremists’ or ‘racists’.
In my country, the Netherlands , 60 percent of the population now sees the mass immigration of Muslims as the number one policy mistake since World War II. And another 60 percent sees Islam as the biggest threat. Yet there is a greater danger than terrorist attacks, the scenario of America as the last man standing. The lights may go out in Europe faster than you can imagine. An Islamic Europe means a Europe without freedom and democracy, an economic wasteland, an intellectual nightmare, and a loss of military might for America – as its allies will turn into enemies, enemies with atomic bombs. With an Islamic Europe, it would be up to America alone to preserve the heritage of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem .
Dear friends, liberty is the most precious of gifts. My generation never had to fight for this freedom, it was offered to us on a silver platter, by people who fought for it with their lives. All throughout Europe , American cemeteries remind us of the young boys who never made it home, and whose memory we cherish. My generation does not own this freedom; we are merely its custodians. We can only hand over this hard won liberty to Europe ‘s children in the same state in which it was offered to us. We cannot strike a deal with mullahs and imams. Future generations would never forgive us. We cannot squander our liberties. We simply do not have the right to do so.
We have to take the necessary action now to stop this Islamic stupidity from destroying the free world that we know.
Please take the time to read and understand what is written here, it is time to wake up America. Please send it to every person that you know, it is important.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michael Sall is a political predator who lives in New York and Pennsylvania, and authors the blog Political Predator.
The Six Day War, the West Bank and Gaza, Fairy Tales and the Media
The failure by editors of supposedly impartial and respected newspapers to correct inaccuracies in media articles regarding the West Bank and Gaza prior to their publication, gives continuing credence to total Arab denial of any Jewish rights in those areas – and also seriously misleads and misinforms their trusting readers as to the nature of the conflict that is taking place. Letters written to the editors requesting corrections are usually consigned to the waste paper basket and even if printed, are too late to undo the damage – allowing gross distortion of facts to be perpetuated and in many cases repeated by the same and other journalists.
A classic case in point is the article – “War over, but the fight goes on” – written by Ed O’Loughlin, which appeared in two of Australia’s most respected newspapers – the Sydney Morning Herald and the Brisbane Times – on 2 June 2007 to mark the 40th Anniversary of the Six Day War in 1967. http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/war-over-but-fight-goes-on/2007/06/01/1180205513190.html
Consider these five gems (and there are many more) in Mr O’Loughlin’s article:
1. “ A native of New Jersey, he is one of several hundred Jews who live under heavy military protection in the first and most extreme of all Jewish settlements on the West Bank, carved out of the historic heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron.”
The author fails to mention that “the historic heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron” happens to include the ancient Jewish Quarter of Hebron built on land purchased by Jews in 1540.
Jews lived there until 24 August 1929 when 67 Jewish men women and children were slaughtered by a crowd of rampaging Arabs . The remaining Jewish population of 750 were forced to flee. Some returned in 1931 but were forced to leave when the Arabs rioted again in 1936. Jews returned to the Jewish Quarter after the Six Day War to a very hostile welcome from the Arab residents.
Hebron contains the traditional burial place of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Leah and Rebecca – one of Jewry’s holiest sites – which the Bible records was purchased by Abraham in 1753BC.
Hebron is therefore more than just a Palestinian city. It has a far longer Jewish history – one of great religious significance for Jews.
Any editor worth his salt should have taken steps to have the author correct this statement.
2. “Of all the territories captured by Israel in the Six-Day war, only the Sinai Peninsula has been returned to its former owner, Egypt, thanks to the 1978 Camp David Accords of the then US president Jimmy Carter.”
The inference is that the Sinai Peninsula is only a small part of all the territories captured by Israel.
In fact the Sinai Peninsula comprised 90% of all the territories captured by Israel. It was returned to Egypt as part of the historic Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt along with the Alma oil field discovered and developed there by Israel and reportedly worth $100 billion as well as strategic military airfields and early warning installations built by Israel. 7000 Jews were also expelled from Sinai as part of the agreement.
Why this misleading statement was allowed to go to print beggars belief.
3. “In the West Bank and East Jerusalem tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers and paramilitary police are needed to control 2.5 million indigenous Palestinians and to protect the 450000 Jewish settlers planted in their midst since the war”
Describing the Palestinians as “indigenous” is very disingenuous.
Weren’t the Jews given the right by the League of Nations under the Mandate for Palestine to “reconstitute” their former national home in these very areas after 2000 years of dispersal throughout the world. Has this right not been preserved to this very day by Article 80 of the United Nations Charter?
Who are the indigenous people then – the descendants of Jews who were driven from their country 2000 years ago or the descendants of Arabs who occupied it by conquest seven centuries later?
Mr O’Loughlin’s use of the word “indigenous” is inflammatory, judgemental, totally irrelevant in relation to the context and should have been simply edited out.
4. “Gaza’s air space, sea access and border crossings are all under tight Israeli military control …”
The Rafah border crossing is under Egypt’s control – not Israel’s.
Why was this incorrect statement let through?
5. ”The Six-Day War might have appeared to be a decisive victory for Israel but its outcome was never transformed into a workable political peace settlement”
Aren’t Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt (1979) and Jordan (1994) workable political peace settlements ?
If Mr O’Loughlin intended this statement to only refer to the West Bank and Gaza, then he should have made that clear in his article. However that would have created a little problem for him.
Both Gaza and the West Bank had been continuously occupied by Egypt and Jordan respectively from 1948 until 1967. Not one Jew lived there during all that time – although many had been driven out by six invading Arab armies in the 1948 War.
The Arab League could have created another Arab State in those areas at the drop of a hat at any time during those 19 years. What they demand now in the Arab League Peace Initiative was theirs for the creating until 1967.
Israel is now being pressured to make this happen 40 years later and remove 450000 Jews who have, since 1967, gone to live in the West Bank – an area that is part of their ancestral homeland and has been internationally designated and sanctioned for the Jewish National Home.
Perhaps Mr O’Loughlin should use his privileged access to these prestigious newspapers to canvas why another Arab State in the West Bank and Gaza is now thought necessary, why all the Jews must move out and how this will end the conflict between Jews and Arabs.
It might just give the editors the chance to rectify the damage caused to the reputation of their papers by allowing the publication of this article in its present form.
Fairy tales are no substitute for truth and accuracy – especially when it relates to the Arab-Jewish conflict.
Post Published: 03 September 2010
