Jeremayakovka

An American In Israel During The War In Gaza

Fred Siegel of the Progressive Policy Institute and notable contributor to City Journal (whom NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez calls "a prince of a guy") remarks about time he spent in Israel during the Jewish State's offensive against Hamas.

From the TELOSscope Blog:

The (2005) withdrawal from Gaza had produced a new moral clarity. And the Hamas coup against Fatah meant that there was no ambiguity about the options at hand to halt the rocket fire. The BBC, which had usually been taken seriously by Israeli doves, was mocked for talking about how Hamas had come to power democratically.

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Fred btw was never fooled by Barack Obama -- whom he termed "an extraordinary performance artist" -- as this piece from a year ago attests:

(Obama's record) appeals to Ted and Caroline Kennedy and the aging MoveOn.org boomers who have long nursed hopes for a renewal of Camelot. But now as then, a charismatic political personality carries more dangers than benefits. The “politics of meaning,” which emerged from the Kennedy years and has now resurfaced with Obama as its empty vessel of hope, is doomed to disappoint because it asks more from politics than politics can deliver.... The banality of Obama’s campaign is exceeded only by his unwillingness to challenge liberal orthodoxy.... It’s when Obama tries to show that he can also be tough that he most fully reveals his limitations....

"Why We Hear The Muslim World All Too Well"

Not Barry Obama, unfortunately. Instead, Professor Barry Rubin.
(posted with permission)

Why We Hear the Muslim World All Too Well

Message to New York Times: Read your own op-ed page.

The Times and other American media and educational institutions are giving increasing amounts of space to people from the Moslem-majority and Arabic-speaking states in the apparent hope of understanding better their world view. Sometimes, however, they have a hard time hearing what is being said.

Here is what the newspaper’s editorial for February 8 claims and urges:

“We don't know if there is any mixture of incentives or sanctions that can wean Iran of its nuclear ambitions. But we are certain that the Bush administration never tried to find it. This means not only direct talks, but also far more persuasive diplomatic incentives, including a credible offer of improved relations and security guarantees.”

And this, of course, is what the Obama administration is going to do with Iran and Syria. Others urge the same techniques are applies to Hamas, Hizballah, and even—though this is rarer—the Taliban and al-Qaida.

But to understand why this belief is so misguided one merely need read…the Times of February 8, within inches of the above-quoted editorial.

I’m referring here to the truly shocking op-ed by Alaa al Aswany entitled, “Why the Muslim World Can’t Hear Obama.”

A better title would be, “Why the Muslim World Won’t Hear Obama.”

The piece is overlong, convoluted, and not particularly well written. It should be noted that the author, a novelist among other things, is considered a moderate.

Alas, for moderation in the Arab world.

There are two themes: the one against Israel and the one against Arab governments. Because these have not been resolved, the author says, all of President Obama’s apologies and efforts are a big yawn.

So what would the author—and presumably all the Arabs and Muslims—want Obama and America to do? Well, to put it briefly, help overthrow all the Arab governments and help wipe Israel off the map.

I wrote the above sentence in a particularly blunt way but it really does not exaggerate the message here.

First of all, Egypt and other Arab states are dictatorships: “Here in Egypt, we don't have previous or future presidents, only the present head of state who seized power through sham elections and keeps it by force, and who will probably remain in power until the end of his days.”

Wait a minute, though! Remember the last president of the United States, the one who pushed for democracy and criticized the governmental systems? The Arab world didn’t seem too thrilled about him. Egyptian intellectuals screamed this was imperialist interference in internal affairs and so on. So after all those years of bashing Bush for—rightly or wrongly—proposing dictatorships be replaced with democracy are we to believe that they will now bash Obama for proposing to work with the existing regimes?

This, of course, is an unsolvable problem. Whatever the United States does here is going to be wrong. There is no way America can please Iran. Well, I take that back. If America helps it overthrow all those bad Arab dictatorships and replace them with Islamist regimes then Iran will probably be happy.

And Alaa al Aswany will be able to read the Times more easily, as a political refugee living in New York.

Then there’s point two:

“We expected him to address the reports that the Israeli military illegally used white phosphorus against the people of Gaza. We also wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth:
the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation.”

Regarding “essential truth,” isn’t the Times supposed to publish things that are factually correct? Israel has already been cleared of the phony white phosphorus charge. So why is this article allowed to repeat it? Here is indeed a lesson: people in the Arab world often lie about you. No matter what you do, how much aid you give, how many concessions you offer or implement, it will be said: you didn’t do anything. Give more. Pay more. Apologize more. Change more.

But perhaps the most important and chilling sentence of the op-ed is this, and if people were paying attention to such things nowadays they would be thoroughly shocked:

“We also wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation.”

What are the implications of this sentence: that the United States should endorse terrorism and violence in at least three conflicts. According to the terrorist forces, Afghanistan and Iraq are under foreign occupation. If Obama was to do as suggested, he would be backing attacks not only on civilians and governments there but also the killing of American soldiers.

As for the Israel-Palestinian conflict, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip, south Lebanon, and much of the West Bank and still faces attacks. In 2000, Israel proposed to make peace based on a two-state solution with a Palestinian state having its capital in Jerusalem. The Palestinian side turned it down.

Since Hamas and other radical forces assert that Israel is an occupying power, attacking it—which includes firing rockets at civilian targets—is legitimate. Moreover, if there is any occupation left, it is due to the political strategy of the Palestinian Authority in rejecting a political solution.

Yet that is far from the entire problem here. For much or most of the Muslim and Arab world views all of Israel as “occupied territory.” The only way for occupation to end is for Israel to end. The author here does not make clear what land is being discussed, though the op-ed easily could have limited the territory in question to the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and east Jerusalem. Have no doubt how most Muslims and Arabs read the phrase about occupied territory: Obama must abandon Israel altogether.

So how can Obama appease or please the Muslim-majority world? We are told by this moderate: by backing the right of Hamas and Hizballah to attack Israel.

This, then, is the supposed moderate position, the minimum way by which Obama can make friends in the region. Clearly, the author here doesn’t speak for everyone. Certainly the relatively moderate Arab regimes and their supporters want more U.S. support for themselves.

Yet there is much truth in this article’s stance. The only way for America to “win over” this public opinion and the radical groups is to surrender to them or join them. President Obama and editors of the Times, please hear what you are being told here, and despair of ever satisfying such enormous and dangerous demands by some combination of charm and concessions.

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Thank Israeli Soldiers

Click here to say Thank You to the most moral military force in the world. Thank you, Israeli soldiers for doing the hard work most of the rest of the world refuses to do: defending the Jewish people and combating Islamic and Arab aggression head-on.

Hamas In Their Own Words

Grandiloquent inquisitor of the Qatar-based Doha Debates, Tim Sebastian grills a top Hamas official. I think it was Winston Churchill who said that a fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.

Mahmoud al-Zahar, Part I
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Mahmoud al-Zahar, Part II
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 Here, in a 2004 interview, Sebastian goes round and round with another Hamas official, Izzam Al-Tamimi:

TS: And for that, continuing violence – that's what Hamas and your friends in Hamas speaks for?
AT: We don't call it 'violence'.  We call it 'legitimate struggle'; we call it 'jihad'.

TS: You call that 'struggle' – when a suicide bomber goes into a market and kills people indiscriminately, whether it's women or children – you call that 'struggle'?
AT: When you force people to ...
TS: 'Yes' or 'no'?  Please Dr Tamimi answer the question.
AT: Of course it is a struggle; of course it is a struggle ...
TS: It's murder isn't it?
AT: It is a struggle ...
TS: It's murder.

TS: When I asked one of your spokesmen, Mahmoud al-Zahar a couple of years ago in Gaza and I asked him what it would take to stop the fighting he couldn't give me a straight answer and in the end when I asked him a couple of times he said:  I'm telling you frankly the attitude of Islam is not to accept a foreign state in this area.

TS: Does Israel have the right to exist?
AT: No, as far as the Palestinian is concerned ...

TS: You said on an internet chat forum early in 2003: 'For us Moslems martyrdom is not the end of things but the beginning of the most wonderful of things'. If it's so wonderful to go and blow yourself up in a public place in Israel why don't you do it?
AT: Martyrdom is not necessarily suicide bombings as you call them.  Martyrdom is ...
TS: No, please answer my question.  It was a serious question.
AT: I'm trying to answer it ...
TS: Why don't you do it?....
AT: Unless you give me a chance to explain ...
TS: Please ... Please ...
AT: Not a single person of those who bomb themselves, bomb themselves because they are desperate or poor.  It doesn't happen because of this.  They do it because they want to sacrifice themselves for a cause....

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Rewind No Evil, Replay No Evil, Reject No Evil

* UPDATE (11/03) * Link to an audio file of a 1979 interview with Khalidi, with extensive commentary by Martin Kramer

In the closing days of the presidential election, the LA Times sits on 2003 video footage of Barack Obama at a public dinner honoring his longtime friend, staunch Palestinian nationalist Rashid Khalidi.  The Times culled quotes for an article earlier this year, but interest is rife to examine the evening's entire program (which included explicit endorsements of Palestinian terrorism).

Speaking in 2007 at Portland State University, without missing a beat Khalidi compared the politics of Fateh (i.e., Arafat's once-dominant PLO faction) to Chicago, Democratic Party, machine politics. Khalidi needed a frightening, American analogy to the PLO - to make vivid its corruption, patronage, and intimidation (which Khalidi saw firsthand as a PLO spokesman in Lebanon in the 1970s and 80s). So he reached for how things are done in his - and Obama's - city. Describing Fateh, he said, would make your hair turn white.

What, then, about Obama's (and Khalidi's) career would make your hair turn white?

* * *

Meanwhile Israeli news networks, having broadcast excerpts of an interview with Yitzhak Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, are now refusing to air the bulk of their half-hour footage. A pariah to many Israelis, Amir says that he did not regret the murder and that he had more respect for Palestinian terrorists than he did for some Israelis.

What are these media people hiding? What - or Who - are they afraid of?

Strength Through Superior Critical Firepower

As hinted in a recent post, Mahmoud Darwish's dying affected me more than I'd conceived it would have. For any of us outsiders who have ever insisted that recognition of mutual Israeli-Palestinian interests is our best moral compass, he seemed to be the go-to guy among Palestinian writers. His death may be a good occasion to bury also the idea of Darwish as a great, "universal," national voice, as Joseph Klein suggests:

The great poet Barrett Browning once wrote that “Art's the witness of what is behind this show.”  Mahmoud Darwish betrayed his craft and his own people by turning his poems into weapons of war against Israel instead of reflection on the real cause of the Palestinians’ self-inflicted wounds.  He fed the fictional narrative of the Palestinians’ innocent victim status rather than bear witness to what was “behind this show.”

A Lifetime of "Resistance" Taught Him This

I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.
-- Mahmoud Darwish (1941- August 9, 2008)

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Update (08/11) - Afterthoughts:

According to the translator's introduction to Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish was well aware that he had been regarded as a "resistance" poet. Its reductiveness had annoyed him.

Most of his output, which includes editorial work as well as several poetry volumes, is unavailable in English and likely to remain so for a long time. A precise estimation of him by those of us not proficient in Arabic is out of reach. Still, one can try to be fair.

As a young man Darwish studied (briefly) in the Soviet Union where he began an acquaintance with the poetics of their revolution. Sacrificing his Israeli citizenship to do so, he was on the way to becoming a leading Arab (and foremost Palestinian) man of letters among "non-aligned" and "anti-colonial" trends of the Cold War.

Certain lines from Mayakovsky's poem "Back Home!" recall the bit that I know of Darwish's committed but critical work. One portion I can press effortlessly into service as a farewell. Fittingly, Mayakovsky began the poem on board a ship at sea, in no country at all. Also fittingly (and sadly), these particular lines, the intended ending, were cut from the finished version in favor of a more "ideologically correct" stance:

I want to be understood by my country,
but if I fail to be understood--
what then?
I shall pass through my native land
to one side,
like a shower
of slanting rain.

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Update (08/12):

He ended his life as a sad person, because he felt that what the Palestinians had done to themselves was much worse than all the injustices and pain they had suffered at the hands of others.
-- Hanan Ashrawi (via BBC)

"Terrorists Must Be Treated Inhumanely"

Steven Plaut spits it out.

Update (07/29): Pamela jumps the shark to feed the crocodile: We cannot worry about what the world thinks about us; we have to protect our own people.

Israel, Heart of the Middle East

Golda Meir's famous precis of what fuels the Arabs' war against Israel is vindicated in this current English-language Muslim news article. As Meir once said, Peace will come when Arabs love their children more than they hate Jews.

But until then....

There are eleven Iraqi children being treated in Israel, sponsored by Save a Child's Heart (SACH) [link provided by JMK, not Islam Online - but, of course], a humanitarian organization founded in Israel in 1996 and supported by Christian charity groups.Some parents still fear the stigma of being treated in Israel. Mustafa, 4, has undergone two heart operations in Israel in six months.

"My only fear, which spoils my joy at my son's escape from death, is the revenge my family can expect when we go back to Iraq," says his mother.

Other parents rule out any possibility of getting help from Israel.

"We've been foes of Israel since before we were born," Shatha, whose two-year-old baby Sara needs surgery for a defective heart valve, told The Times. She has turned down an offer to get her baby treated at the Edith Wolfson medical center in Israel.

"We firmly believe that they are our enemies. You can't change this overnight."

She is now planning to have the operation for little Sara performed in Algeria whose government has agreed to pay for 14 Iraqi children to be treated there rather than be sent to Israel.

Shatha's Kurdish friend has also rejected a similar offer of a free heart surgery for her son Ahmed in Israel.

"Now I can sleep with a clear conscience," she told The Times, requesting anonymity. "I'm able to hold my head up high and not be ashamed by having my son treated in Algeria."

One Lifetime Feminist Writer To Another

I will honor and "hear" you even if -- especially if -- we disagree on particular subjects. You believe that Barack Obama can somehow save our country. You are moved by his oratory and character. I am bowed beneath the weight of tribal sorrows and fear for our country and our world no matter who becomes the next American President.

Read the rest of Phyllis Chesler's open letter to Alice Walker (where you can follow the links to Alice's original letter).

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 8) - A Propos Of Bush's Middle East Tour

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Pakistan

Paki "democracy" bears a pall
Devoted hands can scarce recall,
Tilling soil despoiled by th'assassin's brawl
When Reaper Grim made his Bhutto call.
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Israel

J-town's in western Hamastan
Quds Auntie Condi and Uncle Sam
Took a humpty-dumpty in the Holy Land.
Ehud went south, Pa. Understand?
Ain't no more cunning in his right hand.
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A Smiling Airman Foresees His Epitaph

Chanting, Amrikia's days are numbered!
Jihadis think I'm just a dumb bird.
Well, thirty years on I'll be a tombstone under.
It'll read, George W. Bush: One-Term Wonder.
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* * *

Previous "Chillin', Not Trillin" here.
What's "Chillin', Not Trillin"? and Why? here.
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(re #3 cf. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death"; "Globaloney")
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Pamela IS The Candle

Worthy of the first night of Hanukkah is Pamela's editorial "US: State Sponsor of Judeaphobia":

Under the auspices of a global "peace" conference, the White House sanctioned Jew hatred. The Jew is contemptible, inferior, ignorant, politically, socially disenfranchised. Separate entrance ways, service entrances for the Jews, refusal to  touch or shake hands with a Jew by the so called moderate members of the Arab world , refusal of members to wear the translation earphones when Olmert spoke.

Worthy of the entire tradition is Robert's "The Power of Hanukkah."

If It Was True Then....

One of the mistakes of the free world has been to prevent Israel from ridding Beirut of the remnants of terrorism.
-- Ariel Sharon, quoted in the New York Times, October 25, 1983

America Is More Christian Than Israel Is Jewish

When I point out that Jews have enjoyed unprecedented freedom and prosperity in a Christian nation -- namely, the United States -- my friends insist that it's not Christian. At which point, I have to laugh.

The fact that we're not a theocracy does not make their case, no matter how loudly they may insist on it. When we say that Turkey, for instance, is an Islamic nation and that India is Hindu and that Italy is Catholic, although none of them is a theocratic state, how can we deny that America, whose population is overwhelmingly Christian -- and is only 2% Jewish -- is Christian?!

Why Become A Republican?

.Serious.

.Sexy.

.Silly.
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Yet More Historical Footage of Attempted Left-Wing Intimidation of Right-Wing Speakers

From a talk delivered by Rabbi Meir Kahane in Minnesota in 1990 (less than a month before he was assassinated by a future al-Qaeda operative).

It's always a pleasure to see Arabs in Minnesota. And I want to tell you something, with G-d's help, we're going to give you a lot of your cousins to come here, too.

Bear in mind that when they clapped they were clapping for the murder of three Jews.

Previous: "A Pie For A Pie Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb"

The Banality of Evil - Iranian Edition

"Let Jews Move to Europe or Alaska," says Islamic Republic of Iran President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad on "al-Quds Day" (Arabic for "Jerusalem Day" -- that is, "al-Quds Day"). The rallies are massive, the demagoguery on full display, the demand clear: a "full referendum" on the future of the Jewish State, but to be voted on by millions from outside the Jewish State. Ahmedinejad's playing "chicken" with the West and the Arab nations on the issue of democracy. It's rhetoric and it's war at the same time.

Moving to Alaska is a euphemism. It's the same thing as, Pack one suitcase per household, leave everything else, and report to the train station at 700AM. We will be relocating you to recreational work zones in the east.... "Alaska" is a region of Ahmedinejad's mind. The hook for most American listeners is that "Alaska" is a region of the mind, too. A little like the way der Ost (The East) was a region of Hitler's mind, the near but nebulous territories he fantasized, lusted, planned, and attempted to conquer, colonize, and settle. All the way into Asia. The differences (roughly) are that America is a republic, Hitler had a reich, and Islam wants a caliphate.

Meanwhile Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder have their fingerprints on a new movie, Into the Wild, (book version) about a young, privileged, intellectually curious but at the same time completely intellectually lost young man (a recent liberal arts college graduate) who hikes into Alaska this time of the year with almost no supplies, tries to ride out the winter - and dies. (Reminds me a little of Five Easy Pieces, where in the last scene Jack Nicholson gives up his wallet and coat and bums a ride in a truck to Alaska while abandoning his girlfriend and their child she's carrying.) Give that man a Koran and he's John Walker Lindh or Adam Gadahn.

Time to go "into the wild" - but not to Alaska. Into the wilderness of a declining Western Civilization's political and diplomatic rhetoric.

Newt on Gwot

Must see video of Gingrich's remarks at the National Press Club. H/T Mick.

Lee Kaplan's Big Legal Victory

Earlier this week Cinnamon Stillwell kindly introduced me to Lee Kaplan (right). It was an honor to meet Lee who, as national Director of the pro-Israel non-profit DAFKA and a leading activist at Stop the ISM, is one of Israel's most intrepid defenders in America. He routinely attends and, as necessary, infiltrates the rallies and recruitment sessions of the most intransigent "pro-Palestinian" organizations on U.S. soil. (Click here for an extensive online bibliography of Lee's writing.) A significant number of these organization operate or are based on certain multicultural indoctrination facilities, also known as elite American college campuses.

In retaliation for his dedicated reportage, a little over a year ago he became the target of personal harassment and online libel by a UC Berkeley student apologist for Palestinian terror, Yaman Salahi. With the campus administration washing its hands of the affair, Lee pushed back using other levers of the system. Recently he was rewarded for his steadfast and dignified efforts with a court judgment against Salahi, one which includes monetary damages.

Here's an excerpt from Lee's own account of his ordeal, "My Day In Court":

The Cal student at Berkeley took great glee in what he had done. In detail, he explained on his site how he had gone about smearing my reputation, something that would later become evidence in court. He also began interlinking over with other web blogs set up by other students and other people active in the ISM and even began sending out whatever false accusations he could to web sources, citing himself anonymously as a viable news source. Incredibly, many of the other sites printed his calumny. Even worse, one of his affiliates began running pornographic images of homosexual and other sex scenes and cartoons with my head photoshopped onto the bodies. In one, I was a voyeur in a woman’s bathroom with an Israeli flag on the wall. In another, my head was blown off and death threats were included. (It should be noted these are people who declare themselves “peace activists” and lovers of humanity. Of course, such people are also frequent defenders of terrorists and totalitarians overseas.)

Mazal tov, Lee! Your victory is a victory for all of us who care about Israel and about journalistic and academic freedom. We are forever in your debt.

Please go read the whole account of this cutting-edge tale of where freedom-loving journalism confronts the Amerabian jihad.

Related: "My Kampf: The Islamic Mein Kampf And A Mea Culpa"

Hamas's Mahmoud Zahar - The Face of A Fanatic

Here's the one and only video clip I've seen where a Western reporter presses a Hamas representative to stick to questions, to quit invoking "occupation" as an excuse for suicide (homicide (martyrdom)) bombings, to live in reality and not jihad (i.e., war). It dates from 2003 and is made possible by the ballsy, consistent questioning of Tim Sebastian of the BBC. Watch the whole thing.

A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
-- Winston Churchill

Get a clue, Alan!

Edwards Eye For the Straight Guy

* Updated *

The current issue of Barron's shows John Edwards combing his coif most admiringly while gazing into a handheld mirror.

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Note, Gentle Reader, that all the presidential candidates on the Barron's cover are looking at you -- except Edwards who is looking at himself. Everyone looks the part of a candidate -- except Edwards who, if anything, is looking at the part in his hair (let alone a part in the election). There's no crescent-and-star bling on Barack (Hussein) Obama, no dour 1984-imagery draped over Big Sister Hillary, no flip-flops making flippy floppy around "Mitt Happens" Romney. More than those flung at any other candidate, the Rightosphere's select epithets for this presidential pretender from North Carolina -- insinuations of "Breck girl" and even "silky pony" -- are gaining traction in the MSM. It's time for the Rightosphere to take a bow.

Also implied in this Barron's cover is the value that remains to be teased out of Ann Coulter's four-month old faggot "rehab" joke. In keeping with my commentary (from day one here and last week here), despite some ugly suggestiveness of the word "faggot," the joke's manifest value has very little to do with whether John Edwards has, ever has had, or ever will have sex with men. Nor should it -- unless, as we learned from Jim McGreevey (scroll down in link), it can compromise something as private as national security. The joke's value has nothing to do with liberals' haste to impute to Coulter status as the GOP's "bigoted id," as if she had a glaring intent to bully gays (scroll through here), nor with conservatives' haste to enumerate an almost sublime sense of their accepting nature -- while repudiating one of their own. As if the force of contemporary conservatism can (or ought) to be reckoned apart from Coulter's sophisticated satire....

Previous: "Boo Frickin' Hoo, Liz"

* * *

As the 2008 primary season gets into high gear (a 2007 fundraising season, mostly), let's recall the first close-up look most of us ever had of John Edwards, as reflected in the comments (and rebuttals) of Dick Cheney. From their 2004 vice-presidential debate:

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EDWARDS: There is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of September 11th -- period....

CHENEY: I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11, but there's clearly an established Iraqi track record with terror. And the point is that that's the place where you're most likely to see the terrorists come together with weapons of mass destruction, the deadly technologies that Saddam Hussein had developed and used over the years.

* * *

EDWARDS (at one point): The president and the vice president have not done the work to build the coalition that we need.

EDWARDS (at another): [If John Kerry and I are elected,] we will not outsource our responsibility to keep this country safe.

* * *

EDWARDS: We've taken 90 percent of the coalition casualties. American taxpayers have borne 90 percent of the costs of the effort in Iraq. And we see the result of there not being a coalition: The first Gulf war cost America $5 billion. We're at $200 billion and counting....

CHENEY: When you include the Iraqi security forces that have suffered casualties, as well as the allies, they've taken almost 50 percent of the casualties in operations in Iraq, which leaves the U.S. with 50 percent, not 90 percent. With respect to the cost, it wasn't $200 billion. You probably weren't there to vote for that. But $120 billion is, in fact, what has been allocated to Iraq. The rest of it's for Afghanistan and the global war on terror. The allies have stepped forward and agreed to reduce and forgive Iraqi debt to the tune of nearly $80 billion by one estimate. That, plus $14 billion they promised in terms of direct aid, puts the overall allied contribution financially at about $95 billion, not to the $120 billion we've got, but, you know, better than 40 percent.

* * *

CHENEY: Senator, frankly, you have a record in the Senate that's not very distinguished. You've missed 33 out of 36 meetings in the Judiciary Committee, almost 70 percent of the meetings of the Intelligence Committee. You've missed a lot of key votes: on tax policy, on energy, on Medicare reform. Your hometown newspaper has taken to calling you "Senator Gone." You've got one of the worst attendance records in the United States Senate. Now, in my capacity as vice president, I am the president of Senate, the presiding officer. I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight.

* * *

MODERATOR: The next question goes to you, Mr. Vice President. I want to read something you said four years ago at this very setting: "Freedom means freedom for everybody." You said it again recently when you were asked about legalizing same-sex unions. And you used your family's experience as a context for your remarks. Can you describe then your administration's support for a constitutional ban on same-sex unions?

CHENEY: Gwen, you're right, four years ago in this debate, the subject came up. And I said then and I believe today that freedom does mean freedom for everybody. People ought to be free to choose any arrangement they want. It's really no one else's business. That's a separate question from the issue of whether or not government should sanction or approve or give some sort of authorization, if you will, to these relationships. Traditionally, that's been an issue for the states. States have regulated marriage, if you will. That would be my preference.

In effect, what's happened is that in recent months, especially in Massachusetts, but also in California, but in Massachusetts we had the Massachusetts Supreme Court direct the state of -- the legislature of Massachusetts to modify their constitution to allow gay marriage. And the fact is that the president felt that it was important to make it clear that that's the wrong way to go, as far as he's concerned. Now, he sets the policy for this administration, and I support the president.

MODERATOR: Senator Edwards, 90 seconds.

EDWARDS: Yes. Let me say first, on an issue that the vice president said in his last answer before we got to this question, talking about tax policy, the country needs to know that under what they have put in place and want to put in place, a millionaire sitting by their swimming pool, collecting their statements to see how much money they're making, make their money from dividends, pays a lower tax rate than the men and women who are receiving paychecks for serving on the ground in Iraq.

Now, they may think that's right. John Kerry and I do not. We don't just value wealth, which they do. We value work in this country. And it is a fundamental value difference between them and us. Now, as to this question, let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter, the fact that they embrace her. It's a wonderful thing. And there are millions of parents like that who love their children, who want their children to be happy.

And I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, and so does John Kerry. I also believe that there should be partnership benefits for gay and lesbian couples in long-term, committed relationships. But we should not use the Constitution to divide this country. No state for the last 200 years has ever had to recognize another state's marriage. This is using the Constitution as a political tool, and it's wrong.

MODERATOR: New question, but same subject. As the vice president mentioned, John Kerry comes from the state of Massachusetts, which has taken as big a step as any state in the union to legalize gay marriage. Yet both you and Senator Kerry say you oppose it. Are you trying to have it both ways?

EDWARDS: No. I think we've both said the same thing all along. We both believe that -- and this goes onto the end of what I just talked about -- we both believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. But we also believe that gay and lesbians and gay and lesbian couples, those who have been in long-term relationships, deserve to be treated respectfully, they deserve to have benefits.

For example, a gay couple now has a very difficult time, one, visiting the other when they're in the hospital, or, for example, if, heaven forbid, one of them were to pass away, they have trouble even arranging the funeral. I mean, those are not the kind of things that John Kerry and I believe in. I suspect the vice president himself does not believe in that. But we don't -- we do believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

And I want to go back, if I can, to the question you just asked, which is this constitutional amendment. I want to make sure people understand that the president is proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that is completely unnecessary. Under the law of this country for the last 200 years, no state has been required to recognize another state's marriage.

Let me just be simple about this. My state of North Carolina would not be required to recognize a marriage from Massachusetts, which you just asked about. There is absolutely no purpose in the law and in reality for this amendment. It's nothing but a political tool. And it's being used in an effort to divide this country on an issue that we should not be dividing America on. We ought to be talking about issues like health care and jobs and what's happening in Iraq, not using an issue to divide this country in a way that's solely for political purposes. It's wrong.

MODERATOR: Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds.

CHENEY: Well, Gwen, let me simply thank the senator for the kind words he said about my family and our daughter. I appreciate that very much.

MODERATOR: That's it?

CHENEY: That's it.

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MODERATOR: [The next question] goes to you, Senator Edwards, and you have two minutes. Ten men and women have been nominees of their parties since 1976 to be vice president. Out of those ten, you have the least governmental experience of any of them. What qualifies you to be a heartbeat away?

EDWARDS: The American people want in their president and in their vice president basically three things: They want to know that their president and their vice president will keep them safe. They want to know that they have good judgment. And they want to know that you'll tell them the truth. John Kerry and I will tell the American people the truth....

MODERATOR: Mr. Vice President, you have 90 seconds.

CHENEY: You want me to answer a question about his qualifications?

MODERATOR: That was the question.

CHENEY: I see. Well, I think the important thing in picking a vice president probably varies from president to president. Different presidents approach it in different ways. When George Bush asked me to sign on, it obviously wasn't because he was worried about carrying Wyoming. We got 70 percent of the vote in Wyoming, although those three electoral votes turned out to be pretty important last time around.

What he said he wanted me to do was to sign on because of my experience to be a member of the team, to help him govern, and that's exactly the way he's used me. And I think from the perspective of the nation, it's worked in our relationship, in this administration. I think it's worked in part because I made it clear that I don't have any further political aspirations myself. And I think that's been an advantage. I think it allows the president to know that my only agenda is his agenda. I'm not worried about what some precinct committeemen in Iowa were thinking of me with respect to the next round of caucuses of 2008.

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MODERATOR: Mr. Vice President, picking up on that, you both just sang the praises of the tops of your ticket. Without mentioning them by name at all, explain to us why you are different from your opponent, starting with you, Mr. Vice President.

CHENEY: Why I am different from John Edwards. Well, in some respects, I think, probably there are more similarities than there are differences in our personal story.

I don't talk about myself very much, but I've heard Senator Edwards, and as I listen to him, I find some similarities. I come from relatively modest circumstances. My grandfather never even went to high school. I'm the first in my family to graduate from college. I carried a ticket in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for six years. I've been laid off, been hospitalized without health insurance. So I have some idea of the problems that people encounter. So I think the personal stories are, in some respects, surprisingly similar.

With respect to how we've spent our careers, I obviously made a choice for public service. And I've been at it for a good long time now, except for those periods when we lost elections. And that goes with the turf, as well, too.

I'm absolutely convinced that the threat we face now, the idea of a terrorist in the middle of one of our cities with a nuclear weapon, is very real and that we have to use extraordinary measures to deal with it. I feel very strongly that the significance of 9/11 cannot be underestimated. It forces us to think in new ways about strategy, about national security, about how we structure our forces and about how we use U.S. military power.

Some people say we should wait until we are attacked before we use force. I would argue we've already been attacked. We lost more people on 9/11 than we lost at Pearl Harbor. And I'm a very strong advocate of a very aggressive policy of going after the terrorists and those who support terror.

MODERATOR: Senator Edwards, you have 90 seconds.

EDWARDS: Mr. Vice President, we were attacked. But we weren't attacked by Saddam Hussein. And one thing that John Kerry and I would agree with you about is that it is....

MODERATOR: You just used John Kerry's name.

EDWARDS: Oh, I'm sorry. I broke the rule.

One thing that we agree about is the need to be offensive in going after terrorists. The reality is that the best defense is a good offense, which means leading -- America returning to its proud tradition of the last 75 years, of once again leading strong coalitions so we can get at these terrorist cells where they are, before they can do damage to us and to the American people. John Kerry made clear on Thursday night that -- I'm sorry, I broke the rules. We made clear -- we made clear on Thursday night that we will do that, and we will do it aggressively.

But there are things that need to be done to keep this country safe that have not yet been done. For example, three years after 9/11, we find out that the administration still does not have a unified terrorist watch list. It's amazing. Three years. What are we waiting for? You know, we still don't have one list that everyone can work off of to see if terrorists are entering this country. We're screening our passengers going onto airplanes, but we don't screen the cargo. There are so many things that could be done to keep this country safe. You have to be strong, and you have to be aggressive. But we also have to be smart. And there are things that have not been done that need to be done to keep the American people safe.

MODERATOR: Would you like to respond? Thirty seconds.

CHENEY: No.

* * *

MODERATOR: As previously agreed, we'll go to closing statements now, two minutes each. Coin toss, Senator Edwards, you begin.

EDWARDS: Thank you. Thank you, Gwen. Thank you, Mr. Vice President, for being here.

You know, when I was young and growing up, I remember coming down the steps into the kitchen, early in the morning, and I would see the glow of the television. And I'd see my father sitting at a table. He wasn't paying bills, and he wasn't doing paperwork from work. What he was doing was learning math on television. Now, he didn't have a college education, but he was doing what he could do to get a better job in the mill where he worked. I was proud of him. I'm still proud of him. And I was also hopeful, because I knew that I lived in a country where I could get a college education.

Here's the truth: I have grown up in the bright light of America. But that light is flickering today. Now, I know that the vice president and the president don't see it, but you do. You see it when your incomes are going down and the cost of everything -- college tuition, health care -- is going through the roof. You see it when you sit at your table each night and there's an empty chair because a loved one is serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. What they're going to give you is four more years of the same.

John Kerry and I believe that we can do better. We believe in a strong middle-class in this country. That's why we have a plan to create jobs, getting rid of tax cuts for companies outsourcing your jobs; give tax cuts to companies that'll keep jobs here in America. That's why we have a health care plan. That's why we have a plan to keep you safe and to fix this mess in Iraq. The truth is that every four years you get to decide. You have the ability to decide where America's going to go. John Kerry and I are asking you to give us the power to fight for you, to fight to keep that dream in America, that I saw as a young man, alive for every parent sitting at that kitchen table.

MODERATOR: Vice President Cheney?

CHENEY: Gwen, I want to thank you.

It's been a privilege to serve as your vice president these last four years and to work alongside President Bush to put our economy on an upward path. We've cut taxes, added 1.7 million new jobs in the last year, and we'll continue to provide opportunities for business and for workers. We won't be happy until every American who wants to work can find a job. We believe that all Americans ought to have access to available -- to medical care and that they ought to have access to the finest schools in the world. We'll do everything we can to preserve Social Security and to make certain that it's there for future generations.

I've worked for four presidents and watched two others up close, and I know that there's no such thing as a routine day in the Oval Office. We saw on 9/11 that the next president -- next decision a president has to make can affect the lives of all of us. Now we find ourselves in the midst of a conflict unlike any we've ever known, faced with the possibility that terrorists could smuggle a deadly biological agent or a nuclear weapon into the middle of one of our own cities.

That threat -- and the presidential leadership needed to deal with it -- is placing a special responsibility on all of you who will decide on November 2nd who will be our commander in chief. The only viable option for winning the war on terrorism is the one the president has chosen, to use the power of the United States to aggressively go after the terrorists wherever we find them and also to hold to account states that sponsor terror. Now that we've captured or killed thousands of Al Qaida and taken down the regimes of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, it's important that we stand up democratically elected governments as the only guarantee that they'll never again revert to terrorism or the production of deadly weapons.

This is the task of our generation. And I know firsthand the strength the president brings to it. The overall outcome will depend upon the ability of the American people and the strong leadership of the president to meet all the challenges that we'll face in the days and years ahead. I'm confident we can do it.

Israel, The "Peculiar Heart" of Europe

If the Jews, even after Europe so tragically failed them, nonetheless kept faith with that European cosmopolitanism, Israel, their little homeland finally regained, strikes me as the true heart of Europe--a peculiar heart located outside the body.
- Milan Kundera, remarks while accepting the 1985 Jerusalem Prize

David Horowitz Sees What Jorge Luis Borges Saw

The other day David blogged about recent children's television programming in "Palestine" which uses a Mickey Mouse lookalike to preach armed Islamic conquest of Jerusalem and annihilation of Jews:

Saraa: Sanabel, what will you do for the sake of the Al-Aqsa Mosque? How will you sacrifice your soul for the sake of Al-Aqsa? What will you do?
Sanabel: I will shoot.
Farfour (Mickey Mouse lookalike): Sanabel, what should we do if we want to liberate...
Sanabel: We want to fight.
Farfour: We got that. What else?
Saraa: We want to...
Sanabel: We will annihilate the Jews.
Saraa: We are defending Al-Aqsa with our souls and our blood, aren't we, Sanabel?
Sanabel: I will commit martyrdom.

Here's the video clip, #1442 in MEMRI's long, long series on hateful, inaccurate, and otherwise untrustworthy media coming out of the Middle East.

Pamela has more on terrorist Mickey here.
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When such uncompromising and unapologetic, anti-Zionist and antisemitic media gain currency -- and nearly always without a peep of protest from the professional litterateurs -- this is as good an occasion as any to post on the internet an opinion piece Jorge Luis Borges (left) wrote 70 years ago from the relatively calm cultural outpost of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Borges -- "who valued books and solitude above all things" (as opposed to, say, tenure or fame) -- took the time to put his foot down on a life and death cultural matter.

It would still be a few years before Borges, like the mother continent itself, would go completely blind. Still, David blogging now about "Mauschwitz" is like Borges writing then about "A Pedagogy of Hatred": it's not so much the blind leading the blind as a voice trying to speak to the deaf and dumb....
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"A Pedagogy of Hatred"
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Displays of hatred are even more obscene and denigrating than exhibitionism. I defy pornographers to show me a picture more vile than any of the twenty-two illustrations that comprise the children's book Trau keinem Fuchs auf greuner Hied und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid [Don't Trust Any Fox From a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath] whose fourth edition now infests Bavaria. It was first published a year ago, in 1936, and has already sold 51,000 copies. Its goal is to instill in the children of the Third Reich a distrust and animosity toward Jews. Verse (we know the mnemonic virtues of rhyme) and color engravings (we know how effective images are) collaborate in this veritable textbook of hatred.

Take any page, for example, from page 5. Here I find, not without justifiable bewilderment, this didactic poem -- "The German is a proud man who knows how to work and struggle. Jews detest him because he is so handsome and enterprising" -- followed by an equally informative and explicit quatrain: "Here's the Jew, recognizable to all, the biggest scoundrel in the whole kingdom. He thinks he's wonderful, and he's horrible." The engravings are more astute: the German is a Scandinavian, eighteen-year-old athlete, plainly portrayed as a worker; the Jew is a dark Turk, obese and middle-aged. Another sophistic feature is that the German is clean-shaven and the Jew, while bald, is very hairy. (It is well known that German Jews are Ashkenazim, copper-haired Slavs. In this book they are presented as dark half-breeds so that they'll appear to be the exact opposite of the blond beasts. Their attributes also include the permanent use of a fez, a rolled cigar, and ruby rings.

Another engraving shows a lecherous dwarf trying to seduce a young German lady with a necklace. In another, the father reprimands his daughter for accepting the gifts and promises of Solly Rosenfeld, who certainly will not make her his wife. Another depicts the foul body odor and shoddy negligence of Jewish butchers. (How could this be, with all the precautions they take to make meat kosher?) Another, the disadvantages of being swindled by a lawyer, who solicits from his clients a constant flow of flour, fresh eggs, and veal cutlets. After a year of this, the clients have lost their case but the Jewish lawyer "weighs two hundred and forty pounds." Yet another depicts the opportune expulsion of Jewish professors s a relief for the children. "We want a German teacher," shout the enthusiastic pupils, "a joyful teacher who knows how to play with us and maintain order and discipline. We want a German teacher who will teach us common sense." It is difficult not to share such aspiration.

What can one say about such a book? Personally I am outraged, less for Israel's sake than for Germany's, less for the offended community than for the offensive nation. I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime.

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["A Pedagogy of Hatred" was copied verbatim from Borges's Selected Non-Fictions (Eliot Weinberger, ed.), a collection which won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Suzanne Jill Levine translated this piece. The illustrations are copied from the link to Trau keinem Fuchs.]

"The Battle of Algiers" - A Black & White Blueprint For Full-Color Fauxtography

* Updated * (Naomi Ragen emails that Frida Ghitis confirms this post with "How the Media Partnered With Hezbollah: Harvard's Cautionary Report")
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Last night I screened The Battle of Algiers for the first time since last summer's (unfinished) war between Israel and Hezbollah. Gillo Pontecorvo's Academy Award-winning masterpiece is in some ways a great dramatic record of the tragically implacable, anti-colonial war that ravaged Algeria's people and countryside for nearly a decade while leading directly to the downfall of France's Fourth Republic. The definitive English-language history of this 1954-62 conflict, Alistaire Horne's worthwhile A Savage War of Peace, is so titled for good and terrible reason. (Horne, btw, is on record chiding America's forward strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein.)
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Similar to Picasso's Guernica which had become (after the damage was done) lionized as Europe's definitive objet d'art commemorating all victims of fascist aggression, La Battaglia di Algeri became in the succeeding generation something similar: Europe's definitive objet d'art, extolled in the service of (perceived) anti-colonial, (perceived) aspirations.  With still panel and flickering image attempting to refract war's gory horror through prisms of unblinking moral lucidity, it's no surprise that director Gillo Pontecorvo chose to depict his subjects in black & white. Within that, however, are also many shades of gray. Thus we see in The Battle of Algiers artistic expression of necessary aspirations for independence, self-determination, and peaceful coexistence among all peoples. At the same time, it directly inspires the cult of armed revolution which in turn has spawned endless apologias for the exceedingly and unfailingly cruel list of tin-pot genocidal masters -- from Ernesto Guevara to Idi Amin to Pol Pot to Yasser Arafat to Saddam Hussein to Robert Mugabe -- not to mention independent Algeria's road to its own, homegrown, and precarious socialism. Uncritical screenings of this objet d'art , then, screen damage that continues to be done by dictatorial movements, both the aspiring and the realized.
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In terms of the poster art, note how the above image seems handily handspun from otherwise disparate, but equally strident, visual styles of inter-war Social Democratic pacifist Käthe Kollwitz and post-war Marxist-Leninist Huey Newton. Are the politics of The Battle of Algiers marching forward to socialism? Retreating backward from barbarism? Going round and round in the night consumed by fire? Reflecting neoconservative concerns, are its politics somehow now, nearly two generations later, marching backward to barbarism -- which is to say, retreating forward to socialism? The latter-day result is that -- from street agitators to the academiklatura and minds in between -- the Left adores The Battle of Algiers, to the point where it has elevated (that is, reduced) it to cult status. One thing I'll propose is that the West's inability (or refusal) to arrive at clear determinations about its own history -- and the attendant, staggering spiritual uncertainties -- have created an intellectual vacuum which postmodernism now most ponderously, with a kind of diffuse determination, fills.

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In the meantime, a mental note I took during last night's screening. In one of several fauxtography scandals during last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the New York Times published advertised a demonstrably staged photo-op of the devastation effected by Israel's aerial bombardment of southern (i.e., Hezbollah-headquartered) Beirut (below). By a kind of visual verbatim, the pose in the news image seems not just staged but copied from images of a sequence halfway through the The Battle of Algiers. It's right after colonial police, acting under an exacerbated but concentrated authority, have blown up a building in the Arab casbah, and its residents (to paraphrase Jim Morrison) bring out their dead (above). Real warfare, real damage, real suffering, and real reportage aside, the latter-day result is neither drama nor journalism, but melodrama -- and melojournalism!

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See Michelle Malkin's substantive post for in-depth treatment of this and other recent fauxtography scandals.

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The dead speak: Poor mountain folk, poor students, poor young people -- your enemies of tomorrow will be worse than those of today.
-- Mouloud Feraoun (1913-1962)

Bonus: Leonard Lopate's sensitive, informative interview of U. of Nebraska prof James Le Sueur re Mouloud Feraoun. (Prof. Le Sueur has written a methodical and highly readable introduction to the French-Algerian War, which appears within his introduction to Mouloud Feraoun's Journal 1954-1962.)

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Defining the enemy, at home and abroad, that's our first task.

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Previous: "Hezbollah, Mon Amour" "Lesbollah"

Interview with Israeli Knesset Member Dr. Aryeh Eldad

In a breath of blogospheric fresh air, Mad Zionist interviews Dr. Aryeh Eldad of the National Union Party:

MZ: How is your broken arm feeling since you were attacked by Olmert's police in Amona?
Dr. E: It was actually not broken, what they did was grab me by the thumb and twist it back as far as they could until they heard it snap causing serious ligament damage.
 MZ: My God ... I can't even imagine. In America that's like a Senator being beaten at the order of the President.

Liberalism Delenda Est

* Updated and Expanded * (Jump into the Comments section, folks!)

[This post is a follow-up to "When In Sparta Do As A Spartan"; if you like this, you might love that.]

In the comments to the previous post a reader asks what I mean by "destroy an idea." As if there is something untrustworthy or dangerous about refuting -- beyond riposte and beyond reproach, where possible -- an idea. "Destroy an idea" has nothing to do with censoring thought or speech, but everything to do, whether in private discussion or public debate, with exercising thought and speech competently and morally.

For example, in an email a different reader told me he'd attended a lecture on the Roosevelt Administration's policy of not allowing mass immigration of Jews into the United States before World War II. This can be an anxious subject, of course, especially if you have or had (as I did) European Jewish kin who were slaughtered in World War II. He didn't pick my brain, but it turns out the subject is one I've thought about, sometimes been disturbed about, over the years.

The best single source on it I know of is David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. I came across it when I was a very young adult trying to draw conclusions about the United States' general worth or reliability. The "conclusions" I drew then led to anxiety and mistrust toward American power and American purpose. Stuck inside this Jewish refugee issue, I'd refused to weigh more complex and obvious factors: namely, America's subsequent support for the State of Israel. Instead of free thinking I'd settled for fear and trembling. The first is the essence of a confident and truly liberal education; the second, a temperamental foundation of the postmodern mindset. Before too long fear and trembling led precipitously to taking intellectual refuge in the very desperate hope of revolutionary commitment. I went to the extreme Left. Some, disturbed by the very same issues, go to the extreme Right, like former Meir Kahane devotee, the Israeli journalist and New Republic Editor Yossi Klein Halevi. (Today, like me, he is closer to the center.) A minor detail at the time, but one not lost on me, is that one of the lifetime Jewish communist cultists who influenced me was also familiar with Wyman's book. (Similar to the Russian Bolshevik movement, very many of the American communists I knew were Jewish, a fact from which we constantly drew righteous solace for our otherwise stubborn and self-selecting self-righteousness.) As a result, I felt confirmed in my mistrust of America and more confident in the political direction she provided. This may sound trivial, but when you're 20, as I was -- and in the absence of more fully formed, discriminating values -- such a detail can be pivotal.

Back to the reader who'd attended a recent lecture on the subject. He didn't offer me any details of its content nor his reactions to it nor whether there had been a Q&A session. But I do know that the reader is a lifelong Democrat who thinks rather favorably of  Howard Dean. (Howard Dean, who in public has sported a Palestinian keffiyeh and who during his presidential campaign met and was photographed (all smiles) with one of the most prominent politicians of my former Marxist group.) So I felt adequately informed and obligated to set out not just to destroy, but to pre-emptively destroy, any America-doubting anxiety the lecture might have either instilled in or elicited from this reader. This is what I wrote:

Here are the essential points on the subject I would impart to anyone: In a time of widespread antisemitism around the world (including in America), it was a heartbreaking and tragic historical episode. BUT -- had Western European powers, the Soviet Union, and America braved Hitler's rise to power --had they braved it and denied it instead of enabled it [*] -- there would never have been a mass exodus of refugees to worry about. Assimilated liberal Jews were, in fact, among the appeasers (such as Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband). So the moral and political onus is widespread and by no means merely a stain on the reputation of the Roosevelt Administration(s). Further, the three generations since World War II have seen the most far-reaching social, economic, and political (and military) gains ever for American and Israeli Jewry. G-d bless America! and G-d curse the appeasers of evil!

A severe, lazy, and fatal flaw of contemporary liberal culture (including scholarship) is to revisit those tragic historical episodes in a way that generates pseudo-intellectual fodder for those who TODAY despise American values and American power and who TODAY appease America's and Israel's GENOCIDAL enemies (witness, Pelosi's headscarved, near-treasonous trip to Syria). It allows them to believe that because American institutions in the past were less than providential (in an almost Biblical sense) that they do not deserve our proud, fierce, and abiding loyalty. That lady in New York harbor is the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Exodus or of Utopia. Had I attended that lecture I would have lit into the speaker or any commenters who would not have made that point clear. Why? Because for its continuous complicity in the last century's most monstrous historical crimes, modern liberals have conceded whatever moral high ground they possibly ever had.

Liberalism delenda est ("Liberalism must be destroyed"). It's what the Romans said -- and did -- about Carthage.

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[*]: The simplistic, Marxism-derived version of the rivalry between Germany's Nazis and Communist Parties is that Germany's industrial classes cynically, aloofly, and deludedly preferred Nazi ascent in order to purge the nation of "those rabble-rousing (but nonetheless promising)" Communists and thus -- in an archaically conservative sense that would appeal to old money -- restore order. This now is almost conventional American cultural wisdom, as a single line of dialogue in Bob Fosse's "dystopian", (allegedly) anti-escapist Cabaret conveys quite economically (it's Max speaking from his limousine).

That history is more complex. While Communists ended up being among the Nazis' first political victims (among the very first concentration camp inmates, tagged with a red triangle, etc.), the German Communist Party -- under orders from Moscow -- for a time actually allied with the Nazi Party. This is merely the subterfuge routinely practiced by every totalitarian political movement -- the agenda behind the agenda, etc. -- whether Nazi or Communist, Hezbollah or Hamas, or even Democratic. (Fans of The Manchurian Candidate, take note!) See, e.g., the entries here on the Nazi-Communist alliance in Germany's 1931 elections.

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Here is what I mean by "destroy an idea" or, as I wrote yesterday:

Destroy not their persons, of course, but their ideas and their justifications for their ideas. Destroy utterly their concepts and let the people -- if they can, if they have the will -- build new ideas and justifications from their dusty intellectual rubble. But first those ideas and justifications really must be pounded into rubble.

Arab Feminist Soft Sell of Hezbollah

Found this Warholesque portrait of one of Israel's and America's sworn enemies, Hassan Nasrallah, at the San Francisco-based International Museum of Women (under "War and Dialogue").
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The introductory comment reads: [B]y painting him, perhaps I can break past the media pop star, and try to get to know the human being who has come to have such an overwhelming presence in my life.

He's not a pop star -- he's a rock star -- all over the Arab media. And now he's supposed to be some kind of art star in the Western media? Unh-uh. Overwhelming force -- cultural and, when necessary, military -- is the only way to deal with people for whom this "human being" is "an overwhelming presence."
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More about the New York- and Beirut-based painter here.

Related: "Lesbollah", "To Nasrallah, With Love"

Whither Israel?

FrontPage Magazine's "Symposium" series presents some of the best news analysis in the blogosphere. Today's discussion brings together Rael Jean Isaac, Caroline Glick, David Keyes, Kenneth Levin, P. David Hornik, and Jamie Glazov to discuss "Israel's Test."

Benjamin Netanyahu On Bill Maher: On Iranian Threats, On Jewish Power

Judith performed a real mitzvah by posting this one:

We've deviated from that "perfection" of powerlessness into power. And I think there' s a real historical adjustment that has yet to take place in the perception of a large portion of mankind towards the Jews. Well, we refuse to be victims, and we're not going to be annihilated again. And we will defend ourselves with the same moral code that any democratic and normal society would apply to itself. We are just not going back into those gas chambers.

Israeli Journalist: Blogs Get Truth Out

Michael Freund of the Jerusalem Post says what we all know (per Debbie):

In order to better counter the Arab propaganda machine, the Jewish state should actively reach out to its many supporters in cyberspace, and especially in the blogosphere, for help in disseminating the truth.... [The blogs'] reach is enormous, and their influence is growing rapidly. According to a July 2006 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 39 percent of US Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs. This is nearly double the amount of just three years ago.

Rowdy Thoughts For Rainy Days

[While much of the rest of North America is still shoveling out from heaps of snow, I blog from a corner of the continent that has undergone several days of rain.]

In addition to standing out on its own, almost medicinal, merits, a passage from Christopher Hitchens's Letters to a Young Contrarian will do double-duty today as a shout-out to a reader's recent comment by email on my recent "My Kampf" post. That post had identified some of the mini-epiphanies that, beginning in the late 1990s, swayed my sense of "Palestine" from one of an honorable cause to, at most, a misguided contention of the tragically well-intentioned. For my "secular democratic" dreams dissipated in the face of the phenomenal corruption and oppression on the part of the Palestinian Authority (of the Palestinians, by the Palestinians, and upon the Palestinians), of the ascent (through democratic means, no less) of "Kill Israel!" Hamas, and of a paramilitary pedagogy that would make a Hitler Youth instructor not proud but positively jealous. "Palestine," I admit, appears now as a paltry pawn in the mad, fanatic, two- or three- or four-faced Islamic game. In this game no matter who might prove the winner (Sunni Hamas? Shiite Iran? Wahabi Bin Laden?) the necessary losers would be, imminently, Israel, and ultimately, the United States. Recalling Golda Meir's once inflammatory and now instructive comment, whether or not a Palestinian people exists, what currently exists in "Palestine" is a declared, and obfuscating, enemy. To obfuscate matters even further, Hamas's jefe enjoys a 7,000-word "puff piece" in a major American magazine and a major American newspaper chides the American president for "saber-rattling" because he maintains a military option against nuke tech-importing and guerrilla warfare-exporting Iran. (The phrase "saber-rattling," in this instance, is as antiquated for editorial comment as the saber is for hand-to-hand combat.) A cinematic and emetic satire of all this could be called Dr. Strangefaith: Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Imam. I blaspheme you not.

On to the reader's emailed comment on the January 31 post. She offered this observation of feminist consciousness-raising groups : only the converted spoke, all else were silent or simply weren't there. It hones my critical assessment of the emotional, all-too-emotional, and rhetorically riddled Jewish-Palestinian "dialogue group" I'd attended some years ago in Berkeley, and had referenced in the earlier post. So thank you, Gentle Reader, for that breath of fresh air! For the will to power (or powerlessness -- as some people are "into") operates as handily within a closed circle as it does on an open, square stage. If the adjective weren't of the dumbed-down lexicon which that psycho-political institution has bequeathed the current generation, I'd praise your comment for being "validating." Or should I say, "liberating"? Better yet: clarifying. Thank you, Gentle Reader, for being clarifying.

As if commenting on her comment, Hitchens recalls the advent in the early 1970s of the flimsy ethic that issues from the forced equation of two linguistic variables, those adjectives pressed so unimpressively into service as nouns, "the personal" and "the political":

I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised -- the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs -- but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. (Letters, pp. 113-114)
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No wonder, as the reader emailed, some people quickly learned to play that tune while others, sadly in their grievous silence, only learned to be played.

I wonder, too, whether Hitchens will ever see fit to reappraise the Palestinian cause, that is, to redirect his animus on Palestinians' behalf in a way that runs even a little less against democratic Israel and more against the Palestinian dictatorship. Even Hitchens's good friend Edward Said (the ultimate Palestinian man of letters) couldn't refrain, time to time, from openly castigating Yasser Arafat's domination over "Palestine." Now that Said and Arafat -- or "Chairman Arafat," as Hitchens intoned, more protectively than provocatively, in Tucker Carlson's show when the Palestinian dictator was dying -- have both passed from the scene, JMK hopes that Hitchens will rise to such an occasion. The window of opportunity for calling all the world's Dr. Strangefaiths by their too true name may be closing.

Forget "The Arab Street" Over There, Focus On The Arab Mob Over Here

Daniel Pipes was shouted down the other day (temporarily) by fanatically anti-free-speech, anti-intellectual, anti-Zionist Arab students at the University of California at Irvine. Atlas blogs it here. An attendee blogs it here. Video of it here.

This is the exact same kind of mob tactic that has distinguished the University of California and other American campuses for years now, even decades. The other day I referred to one instance from the 2000 commencement ceremony at Berkeley when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- representing the Clinton, not Bush, Administration -- was shouted down during a mass action instigated by a Palestinian student. To this day the student, who also was delivering the valedictorian address, is featured glowingly on the university's web site with nary a mention of the disgrace she brought on herself, the secretary of state, and the university.

Intimidation. Antisemitism. A university's seal of approval -- that's Arab mob rule in America today.

My Kampf: The Islamic Mein Kampf and A Mea Culpa

* Update (2/18) * Welcome Israpundit readers! Thanks, Ted, for the mention. Your feedback on this, or any "Second Thoughts" post, is welcome.

Arriving in this morning's email from my friend, David Horowitz, was this ten-minute audiovisual primer on the Iranian and Palestinian Holocaust threat, The Islamic Mein Kampf.

I watched it. The didactic advantage of The Islamic Mein Kampf is that it boils down into words and images the precise, deadly, and implacable intentions of radical Islam -- issuing primarily from Iran and Palestine -- vis-à-vis Israel and the United States.

Simply put: They will come for you.

They will come for you.

They will come for you.
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This generation, it won't be a knock on the door or a round up at the train station. Instead it'll be a dirty nuke or a poisoned water supply or more hijacked airplanes or missiles over Tel Aviv.

Learn more about The Terrorism Awareness Project.

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It's been a long intellectual road over the past ten years, and doing my part to inform people about The Islamic Mein Kampf is the latest step in what hopefully will be a long road to come -- a long road in a different direction. Here are a few words that begin to tell how I got from there to here.

Through the 1990s I dragged with me the remnants of the radical fantasies I'd imbibed while suckling, as a political babe, on the sour milk of Marxism. I actually used to believe that the imposition of a "Palestine" over all the territory of what's now Israel and Judea and Samaria was not only possible but the most humane and egalitarian resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I projected my own, American creeds of fairness and republican egalitarianism onto Arabs (without ever travelling in Arab lands or undertaking to learn, seriously, its history and culture). I studied the die-hard American apologists for anti-Zionism of the 1980s and 1990s, Paul Findley and Noam Chomsky -- and of course Edward Said.

In addition I read very closely Jean Genet (left), the most celebrated French partisan of Arab "resistance" to Israel (and also a partisan of black American "resistance" to "Amerika"). In his last productive writing period he attempted to elevate the PLO to the status of ancient Greek warriors. I translated into English "Violence and Brutality," Genet's passionate but intellectually indefensible 1977 essay in which he gave his poetic blessing to terrorism. Not stopping there, I took this sentiment to its logical extreme by writing poetry modeled after Genet's -- and also East German Heiner Müller's (above, right) -- fascination with the subject, poetry that effectively endorsed the left-wing, pro-PLO terrorism of that era.

That was my "revolutionary" intellectual project: 1) enlist my native American progressive populism to building an intellectual bridge between European terrorism of the 1970s and Palestinian terrorism of the 1990s; and thus 2) making and penetrating a breach in liberal Western letters and forcing the reading public to accomodate itself to this new radical reality. I flattered myself that I would be the avant-garde in print while groups like Hamas would be the avant-garde on the ground.

How did I accommodate myself to the murder of Israeli innocents, you might ask? Simple. I would just mull an occasional phrase from Genet, Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man.... or from Müller, When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives, you'll know the truth.... Like some little intellectual lozenge, it would reduce the irritation. For a little while.

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So, what happened? Well, I didn't exactly "go native"; I didn't, for example, join the International Solidarity Movement or start a family with a Palestinian woman (although the opportunities presented themselves). More modestly, I became conversant in a fair amount of Arab literature and film. I subscribed to Al-Jadid magazine. I bought and read the Koran. More practically, I became acquainted with certain Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists here in America.

By coincidence (and later by cultivation) I became chummy with relatives of a former director of the Arab Film Festival, and frequently attended AFF programs. Through a mutual friend I met (and briefly worked for) the radical National Lawyers' Guild and American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee activist Nancy Hormachea. In her practice she often represents asylum seekers fleeing persecution in Iran and Pakistan, although in her political activism she's a staunch opponent of Israeli policies towards Palestinians. By coincidence I was a classmate of Fadia Issam Rafeedie, the author of "An 'Apologia of Radicalism'" who turned her 2000 UC Berkeley valedictorian speech into a most egregious breach of academic decorum when she served as the figurehead of a mass protest, speaking "from her heart" in defiance against the commencement speaker, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
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In case you're wondering, there aren't any terribly racy tales of idealism and disillusionment to confess. I think I grew weary, then wary, then scared. I grew weary of hearing simplistic comparisons of the Israeli occupation to Nazism. Can't you do any better than that? I thought, eventually thinking, You know, you need to do better than that.... I grew wary when one of my Arab buddies "apologized" to me in the aftermath of a Hamas suicide (homicide) bombing. Do I really represent Jewry and Israel? For starters, I never, ever claimed to.... Does he represent Hamas(!)? He never claimed to, but -- beyond this being an obvious instance of a young man's conceit -- it seemed to reveal a continuity of opinion among Arabs. It seemed to reveal that possibly there was a divide (or at minimum, some vital difference) between me and them that I ought to not gloss over ... that I ought to work harder at figuring out ... that he also ought to work harder at figuring out....

Something else that added to my wariness was my attendance at a handful of sessions of a Jewish-Palestinian "dialogue group" that met in the Berkeley Hills. A derivative format of the feminist "consciousness-raising" group of the 1970s (which, as Andrea Dworkin states unapologetically in Heartbreak, was itself inspired by Communist China's Cultural Revolution) this "dialogue group" was overwhelmingly attended by Jews who endlessly professed their good intentions towards Palestinians. Typically a woman would make a somewhat strident speech about men being to blame for the escalation of violence (which, though partly true, is not the whole truth). One time a native-born Israeli woman tried to put into words her dread that Israel would no longer exist. One of the very few Palestinian attendees would affirm the need to understand how hard life under occupation was, and then make a pitch for the rest of us to purchase Palestinian olive oil. No one, however, (including me) dared ask perhaps the most pertinent question, How come so few Palestinians attended the "dialogue group"? The answer, as a Palestinian confidant told me, is that nearly all Palestinians she knew -- for the most part the secular Palestinian Left, the ostensible "partners in peace" -- nearly all of them despise such "dialogue groups." The "dialogue groups" don't accomplish anything. They're much ado about nothing. Or rather, they're very little ado about a whole hell of a lot.

What demonstrated definitively where my anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian sympathy was leading was a telephone conversation I had with Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh (right). Shortly after he founded Al-Awda, "The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition," I contacted him to suggest offering some outside support to his effort to secure for the surviving Palestinian refugees of 1948 and all their living descendants the right to patriate within the State of Israel. After confiding to Qumsiyeh my idealistic hope for a "secular, democratic Palestine" he in turn confided that indeed this one-state, not a two-state, solution was his ultimate aim. Here was a meeting of minds I had long hoped for, but it also served as a real (albeit puny) "little drummer girl" moment. There, clear as a bell, was the looking glass. However, I decided not to go through it, and shied away from any further involvement or contact with Al-Awda.

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Most of what I just described happened before 9/11.

Precisely how that day added to the mix I'm not going to get into in this post. By way of beginning to build an intellectual bridge, however, from Palestinian terrorism of the 1990s to neoconservative counter-jihadism of the 21st Century, here are select readings that have made a difference.

In alphabetical order (and, for that matter, in no particular political order):

Berlinski, Claire. Menace In Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too.
Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism.
Hanson, Victor. An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism.
Hitchens, Christopher. Love, Poverty, and War.
Horowitz, David. Unholy Alliance.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban.
Scheuer, Mark. Imperial Hubris.
Steyn, Mark. America Alone.
Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower.

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So here we are.

If you're already informed on the Iranian and Palestinian threat, then most of what's presented in The Islamic Mein Kampf will already be familiar. No sweat. Please then just take a minute and forward The Islamic Mein Kampf to all your contacts.

And if you believe that Iran, Palestine, and Islamic war against the West are not real, imminent threats, then I hope you watch The Islamic Mein Kampf. Watch it, consider it, and pursue its implications to their logical and moral ends.

May it bring you into a Vast, Classically Liberal Consensus -- which, by dispensing once and for all with left-wing apologies for terrorist tactics and terrorist ideologies -- is the only way the West will ever thwart Palestinian and, as Alexandra reminds, Iranian genocidal designs.

When Ronald Reagan quipped, "We begin bombing in five minutes," he was joking. Ahmedinejad, Nasrallah, Haniyeh -- they're not joking.

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Related: David Gartenstein-Ross's interview today in FrontPage Magazine, "My Year Inside Radical Islam."

Get Psyched About Nuclear War!

Listen to The Sanity Squad discuss a) prospects of nuclear war against Israel, and b) Western leaders' and Western civilization's denial and death wish, in their current podcast, "Walk Softly and Carry a Toothpick." I have very little use for professional psychologists -- but this group of four have earned my respect.

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Some of what you'll hear:

* If anyone believes that this is about Israel and Jews only... they're dead wrong.

* It is not irrational to be afraid of what's happening in the world today.

* I would just love for Bush [in the State of the Union address] to not be conciliatory, to say what needs to be said, and "Screw the Democrats!"

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The Sanity Squad:
Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred
Dr. Sanity
Shrinkwrapped
neo-neocon

Mullah Strangelove: Israeli Historian Anticipates Nuclear Holocaust at Hands of Iran

In the "Dr. Strangelove Would Be Proud -- And Jealous Department":

Our good man Pastorius at Christians United Against Anti-Semitism links to an interview with Israeli historian Benny Morris who envisions a decisive and fatal Iranian nuclear strike against Israel:

One bright morning, in five or ten years' time, perhaps during a regional crisis, perhaps out of the blue, aday or a year or five years after Iran's acquisition of the Bomb, the mullahs in Qom will covoke in secret session, under a portrait of the steely-eyed Ayatollah Khomeini, and give President Ahmedinejad, by then in his second or third term, the go ahead. The orders will go out and the Shihab III and IV missiles willtake off for Tel Aviv, Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem, and probably somemilitary sites, including Israel's half dozen air and (reported) nuclear missilebases. Some of the Shihabs will be nuclear-tipped, perhaps even with multiplewarheads. Others will be dupes, packed merely with biological or chemicalagents, or old newspapers, to draw off or confuse Israel's anti-missile batteries and Home Guard units.


When I read stuff like this, I want to take every Bush = Hitler protestor, bend them over my knee, and spank them. Raw.

Don't You, Please ... Please, Don't You Be My Neighbor

This article linked from Daniel's Herutx. (Good blogs on Israel make me want to improve my Hebrew. Daniel's blog makes me want to improve my Spanish, too.):

38 of the 272 suicide bombings in Israel (roughly 14 percent) were carried out by terrorists that had received Israeli citizenship in the context of family reunification, a Shin Bet official told the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee on Monday.

To mention the unmentionable: a point in favor of expulsion, no?

One or Two Second Thoughts on Anti-Zionism

During JMK's communist and then fellow-travelling decade of the 1990s, one lingering and consoling idea I sustained was a misty-eyed view through rose-colored glasses that a (pardon the expression) "secular, democratic 'Palestine'" was possible. Possible and hence -- with an iron-clad sense that only a Marxist, or former Marxist, can appreciate -- necessary.

Some fanatic naifs get "into" Cuba; I got "into" "Palestine" (or rather, FiluhSTEEN). At least I never wore a keffiyeh! No, I retained a minimum discriminating morality to know that solidarity does not equal identity. I was more solidaire et solitaire. More second thoughts about anti-Zionism later.

In the meantime, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has a recent, straight-shooting post by Canadian journalist, blogger, and Laval U. law student (Québec City - brrr!) Adam Daifallah about the need to support Israel:

First, Israel must be supported. I have no problem saying this as someone who is of partly Palestinian ancestry. Israel is a democratic, pluralistic western outpost in the middle of a cesspool of tyranny and despair. [emphasis added]

Please also check out Mr. Daifallah's site, including the book of which he his co-author, Rescuing Canada's Right. He and Ms. Kheiriddin could be voices of reason in the Canadian wilderness.

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Nice to discover ya, Adam! Ftr, JMK aime Québec!  Jogging along the Plains of Abraham, dancing Chez Dagobert, and dining at this tasty restaurant on Rue Ste. Foy, Café Mille Feuilles: mostly vegetarian cuisine à la française -- it's win-win and yum-yum.

They Want Jihad, We Want Gilad

* Update 12/28: Gilad lives? *

This has everything to do with Christmas.

MEMRI has footage of Hamas reenacting its kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. What you see is what you get: genocidal fanaticism, schoolyard antics, cheap street theater, and mugging for the propaganda mikes and cameras -- all rolled into one. The absurdist, narcissistic mischief of Code Pink, PETA, mouth-tapers, forest-fuckers, and others -- the Babel of a tottering civilization -- is, by comparison, a paper tiger, papier-mâché derivative of the restless natives of Hamastan.

Some say the medium is the message, but in confronting Islamic aggression the medium is the battlefield (one of them, that is). Note, towards the end, one of mock-Shalit's mock-captors adjusting his face mask. It's posture-posture, gesture-gesture with, increasingly, real weapons and real people. (Found at Free Thoughts.)

Hezbollah, Mon Amour

* Update (01/10/2007): see also neo-neocon's reflections on growing up in the shadow of Hiroshima  *

Sometimes we have to avoid thinking about the problems life presents.
- Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour

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Late year tasks will mean patchier posting this and next week.  For now, here's a look back in contempt at the media manipulations and fauxtography that surfaced during Israel's retaliatory war against Hezbollah last summer: Hezbollah, Mon Amour.

The post originally appeared as a comment under Jake Novak's "Top Ten French Middle East Peace Proposals." For more on Hezbollah's calculated, ruthless, and deadly abuse of the mainstream media and on that media's complicity -- not to mention Hezbollah's deadly abuse of non-combatant Lebanese civilians -- please see:

Michelle Malkin's "Reuters Withdraws all [Adnan] Hajj photos"
Russell Berman's "A Critical Theory of Hezbollah"
Honest Reporting's "Dishonest Reporter of the Year"

See also: "Lesbollah"

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Hezbollah, Mon Amour is based loosely on Marguerite Duras's screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour: While Israeli forces drive through southern Lebanon, an alcoholic Frenchwoman -- haunted by memories of her affair, under German occupation, with a soldier of the Wehrmacht (and of her public humiliation after the liberation) -- has a one-night stand with a Shiite Lebanese Hezbollah sympathizer in Beirut....
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Hezbollah, Mon Amour

SCENE ONE - BEIRUT APARTMENT - NIGHT

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SHE
Je t'aime.
[I love you.]

HE
Je t'aime.
(Sound of EXPLOSIONS. Through the window little SMOKE PLUMES rise on the horizon.)

SHE
Je t'aime!
(They embrace. SHE kisses him. They pull apart.)

HE
Je t'aime, mais...
[I love you, but...]
(HE looks down. Close-up of a KORAN and an AK-47.)

HE
... j'aime Allah ... plus!
[I love Allah ... more!]
(HE scoops up the KORAN and the AK-47. SHE grabs his shoulders from behind, presses her head into his back.)

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SHE
(collapsing onto his back, sobbing)
Je comprends.
[I understand.]

HE
(shaking her off)
Non! T'comprends pas.
[No, you don't understand.]
(HE spins around to face HER. SHE stands tall again, her FACE twisted. SHE draws back HER HAND to slap him. HE grabs HER WRISTS, crushes them together, and yanks her towards him.)

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SHE
(shaking her head, exhausted)
Non... comprends pas, mais ...
(entreating his eyes with hers)
je t'aime!
[No, I don't understand, but ... I love you!]

(Close-up of their FACES pressed within an inch of each other - but not kissing - and HER HANDS, pressed together at the wrists, prayer-like, between HIS FISTS.)
HE gazes at her, then shakes her off. SHE TUMBLES into the corner where the KORAN and AK-47 had sat. HE walks out. Sound of another EXPLOSION. Through the window another SMOKE PLUME rises on the horizon.)

SHE
(crouching, shaking)
Sales juifs!
[Dirty Jews!]

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SCENE TWO - DEMOLISHED BUILDING - DAY

(Close-up of HIM lying sprawled out in rubble, HIS HAND clenching his AK-47, the KORAN nearby.)

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(Pull back to ARAB WOMEN beating their chests and ARAB MEN pulling debris away.)

(Pull back further to INTERNATIONAL JOURALISTS photographing the scene.)

(The JOURNALISTS leave.)

(One of the ARAB MEN slaps HIM on the shoulder. HE grabs the AK-47 and KORAN, springs to his feet, and dusts himself off....)

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# # #
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The Emergency Holocaust System

Broadcast on a television network somewhere east of Eden....
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[Long, droning BEEP]

This is a test, this is only a test, of the Emergency Holocaust System. Had there been an actual Holocaust in your area, local mullahs would have instructed you where to go and what to do (as they do habitually) -- and denied that any Holocaust had ever happened.

This has been a test of the Emergency Holocaust System....

Goodbye, Neocon Jeane

Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1926-2006

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What a tower of a woman! One who commanded treacherous landscapes. If Hannah Arendt had lived long enough to mature into a neoconservative, she would have matured into Jeane Kirkpatrick.

From the AP wire story:

During her early academic career she was a Marxist and joined the youth section of the Socialist Party of America....

As with Johnny Cash and Susan Sontag, Jeane Kirkpatrick's a talent a familiarity with whom I'd scrounged countless excuses to put off establishing during her living days. Fruitlessly and again and again I'd put it off. So this latest news now stirs a shiver of remorseful recognition: to have denied acquaintance with Jeane Kirkpatrick was to have denied acquaintance with who I once had been and who, to be, I intend again. It's time to enter her tower, now damper and draftier, and, candle in hand, to ascend its spiraling staircase.

In her own words (from a truly formidable piece of necessary reading, "How the PLO Was Legitimized," from the July 1989 Commentary:

Traumatized by spectacular instances of violence, and by conventional conceptions of war, Americans -- and a good many Israelis -- have misconstrued the nature of PLO tactics. Both Americans and Israelis have been slow to understand that terrorist attacks are self-consciously political acts, and that the intifada is less an armed uprising than a political melodrama staged daily for credulous Western audiences whose sympathies are quicker than their comprehension. (emphasis added)

The eulogies will be issuing from many corners. Fausta's announced itself first (quoting WaPo):

She was a leftist early in her academic career and later joined the Democratic Party, becoming active in party politics and political campaigns in the 1970s. But she grew disillusioned with the foreign policy of President Jimmy Carter and eventually left the party, aligning herself with the conservative policies of Ronald Reagan.

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Pamela says she died of a broken heart.

Jeane Kirkpatrick on the tyrannous mainstream media.

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From Ambassador Kirkpatrick's 1984 RNC speech, truer now than ever:

This is the first Republican Convention I have ever attended. I am grateful that you should invite me, a lifelong Democrat. On the other hand, I realize that you are inviting many lifelong Democrats to join this common cause ...

When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than like an ostrich - convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand.

Today, foreign policy is central to the security, to the freedom, to the prosperity, even to the survival of the United States. And our strength, for which we make many sacrifices, is essential to the independence and freedom of our allies and our friends ...

The United States cannot remain an open, democratic society if we are left alone -- a garrison state in a hostile world. We need independent nations with whom to trade, to consult and cooperate. We need friends and allies with whom to share the pleasures and the protection of our civilization.

We cannot, therefore, be indifferent to the subversion of others' independence or to the development of new weapons by our adversaries or of new vulnerabilities by our friends.

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Related: "See Jeane Buy A Thesaurus"

Time to Give

It's a time of the year when many of us get around to making a contribution to alleviate the hardships or sufferings of others. The contribution isn't necessarily financial, though that's often the simplest (if not the most rewarding) way to make a little difference. Anyway, I'll spare you the moralistic lecture. If you're in the giving spirit, or if you're open to being in the giving spirit, here are a few suggestions:

* Wounded Warriors - for wounded American veterans (read GM's nod to them!)
* Jewish United Fund - for rebuilding and other assistance in northern Israel
* Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund - for long-term philanthropic planning

And when you hear someone cursing about "corporate greed," please point them to "the only international forum of business CEOs and Chairpersons pursuing a mission focused exclusively on corporate philanthropy," the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy

Kissinger, Israel, and Realpolitik

Yourish posts some chilling candor from Henry Kissinger (candor with the then-Iraqi Foreign Minister, in 1975): 

We don’t need Israel for influence in the Arab world. On the contrary, Israel does us more harm than good in the Arab world.

Should be read in context.

Ahmedinejad Watch - Glenn Beck Reports

Take a half hour out of your day for this. Frankly, a civilization that ignores the threats implied and reported here deserves to die....

One of the few moments of hope in the show is, beginning in minute 33, when Glenn hosts Dr. Aslam Abdullah, Director of the Islamic Society of Nevada.

(This clip, which has been rightfully reproduced on many a blog of late, I found at the smart and snappy Neocon Express blog.)

Netanyahu on Ahmedinejad: "Believe Him and Stop Him."

Benjamin Netanyahu has got to be the only man with a head full of gray hair who looks, speaks, and acts positively virile:

It's 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs, Netanyahu told delegats to the annual United Jewish Communities General Assembly, repeating the line several times, like a chorus, during his address. Believe him and stop him, the opposition leader said of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This is what we must do. Everything else pales before this.

(Click HERE FOR THE ARTICLE.)

His power, obviously, comes from speaking truth to cowardice and complacency-- speaking with conviction, determination, and consistency.

(Click HERE FOR THE VIDEO of the speech itself.)

Selected remarks:

This is the central issue of our time....

The big difference is this: Hitler embarked on a world conflict and then tried to develop atomic weapons. Ahmedinejad is going about it in reverse order. He first wants to develop atomic weapons and then embark on the world crisis....

The missiles they're building, they're intended for us. It's the "single-bomb theory.".... But they're not merely looking at us. They're first looking at us. Just the way Hitler wasn't merely looking at the Jews. He first looked at the Jews, he first attacked the Jews. The Jew-hatred preceded the general hatred of of mankind and the terrible calamities he heaped on the world. First the Jews, but then everybody else....

[In 1996, as Prime Minister of Israel,] I said the greatest single danger facing mankind is the arming of Iran with nuclear weapons. The time is getting short and we must do something now.... It was hard to persuade people of the urgency.... I don't think [world leaders] get it, they really think this a Jewish problem.... [Muslims have] hated the West for hundreds of years before there was an Israel. In fact, it's the other way around: they don't hate the West becaue of Israel, they hate Israel because of the West, because we represent civilization -- free, liberal civilization....

The assumption that if we cut a deal with the Palestinians we somehow neutralize Iran -- it's actually the other way around: it's not so much that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict affects Iran, it's that what happens with Iran affects the Palestinian-Israeli conflict....

Right now Iran is governed by a wide-eyed believer who thinks his cause, his reason for being on Earth, is to destroy Zionism and to advance the march of his Islamic empire, an Iranian global atomic power. It's 1938....

There is time to act in a variety of ways. All ways must be considered, and all ways that work must be employed because we cannot let this thing happen....

It is the responsibility of leaders to tell their people the truth, to alert them to danger.... For us, the Jewish people, too many times in our history we didn't see danger in time, and when we did it was too late.... So people are waking up. But can the world wake up? Can we wake up the world? Can we get the United States to act on its commitment, a commitment made by President Bush who said, "We will not let Iran arm itself with nuclear weapons." Everybody in his right mind should support that position....

We have now an imperative of action. And that action means that we must support and encourage that every responsible nation support the policy of the United States. But we also must understand that the Holocaust taught us something: no one will defend the Jews if the Jews do not defend themselves. So we must, alongside support for the United States, for the American-led effort, do everything in our power to prepare our own defenses. Iran's nuclear ambitions must be stopped. They have to be stopped. We all have to stop it now. That's the one message I have for you today. Thank you.

Keep John Bolton in the U.N.!

* Updated: 1) Bush will stick by his nominee; 2) The beginnings of a thread... *

Word has it that the White House, in another capitulation to the incoming Democratic Congressional leadership, will withdraw John Bolton's nomination from consideration for Senate confirmation as U.N. Ambassador (via Atlas Shrugs). To keep him nominated and to get him confirmed would be one hell of a fight, but a fight worth every ounce of sweat.  For starters, you can email the White House and tell them to keep John Bolton in the U.N.! Send your message to comments@whitehouse.gov. Here's what I sent earlier today:

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Dear Mr. President,

  I am alarmed to hear that you may withdraw John Bolton's nomination from consideration before the Senate. Ambassador Bolton is one of the most effective and persuasive proponents of the "Bush Doctrine" your administration has presented - a foreign policy principle which is now under heavy assault by the new Democratic Congressional leadership. He is irreplaceable. My confidence in your leadership - and the confidence of many, many Americans - will suffer a blow if you let the threat of Democratic opposition deter you from standing up for your choice.

  During the pivotal weeks leading up the commencement of the 110th Congress, please take to heart the moderate but also forceful and principled words of Senator Tom Coburn:

We do not need to govern from the center as much as we need to govern from conscience. When politicians have the courage to argue their convictions and lose their political lives in an honest battle of ideas the best policies will prevail.
(from a statement the Senator issued yesterday)

  Mr. President, I urge you to do everything in your power to see that Ambassador Bolton's nomination prevails.

Truly Yours,
JMK

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The 110th Congress is going to be the longest two years of the Bush presidency. Beat the 11/7 blues by getting a head start on those Congressional battles now!

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Update: Fellow "9/11 Neocon" Dave told the White House what he thinks of John Bolton, and with eloquence (below). Isn't it time you did, too? Email the White Hosue now, then tell your friends to do so:  comments@whitehouse.gov

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President Bush and Vice President Cheney:

 

I've had a hard time the last several years as a Republican in liberal San Francisco. Our Ambassador at the United Nations has been a silver lining in a sky often filled with bad news or inarticulate but well-intentioned blunders.

 

I believe the Administration's appointment and support of John Bolton has been among its finest hours-- and allowing Bolton to leave the United Nations without a fight is an humiliating defeat for both this presidency and America.

 

His presence in those halls of corruption is a daily victory for both the Free World and the much maligned voices of neoconservatism. He has been the staunchest ally of the special US-Israel relationship and a bulwark against poisonous anti-Zionism. As a voice of clarity against today's totalitarianism and its duplicitous enablers, Bolton's words sting from the bully pulpit like Churchill's.

 

Please bring yourselves to support John Bolton with even half as much vigor as he brings to his office every day.

 

David Reaboi

San Francisco, CA

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So, who's next?

Workers of the Word, Unite (Against Terrorism)!

British blog Harry's Place offers videos by Leftist David Aaronovitch which isolate and excoriate the "We are all Hizbullah" and related memes that have thoroughly degraded, corrupted, and discredited ab ovo the so-called antiwar movement. To borrow the bloated, humanist-universalist-speak of Leftists, JMK says: that's one great leap for a man, one small step for mankind.

Rabbi Ginsburg Goes to Washington During the Days of Awe

Power Line's Scott Johnson performs a mitzvah by reposting a detailed account of a meeting of 16 leading rabbis with President Bush during the Days of Awe in the first weeks after the September 11 attacks.

I was just stunned to be sitting across the table from the most powerful person in the world, a man of true humility and belief in one God, who spent much of this hour and a quarter, speaking from the depth of his heart about his concern about anti-Semitism and his understanding of Israel's predicament. I know many disagree with policies of his. I'm sure every rabbi there had some disagreements. But there was no denying the moment, the genuineness, the power of the experience. It felt surreal.
-- Rabbi Jonathan Ginsburg

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May G-d continue to bless America ...
and to damn the blinker-blinded Bush-bashers and Israel-bashers, of whatever religion, party, nationality, stripe, or brand.

(H/T: Cinnamon Stillwell)

A Murdered Rabbi Speaks from Beyond the Grave

Israelis Rate Prez Pols

Rosner's Domain, an Israel-based think tank, has launched a project to rank potential American presidential candidates in terms of their support for Israel.  It has the appearance of a beauty contest, but so far Rosner's eight-member panel of "experts" indicate some discriminatory powers: Sir Rudy and Newt top the list, with a marked lead over McCain and NY's junior senator.

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I can hear the paleocons' teeth gnashing already.

(H/T: Asher)

Update 9/6: Matt Brooks's "Democrats Increasingly Turn Their Backs on Israel" at Seraphic Secret, my site for great inspiration.